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I'm not sure that it is.
I think the left-wing position needs to reckon with the fact that some percentage of people have problems that can't easily be solved and, even worse, risk becoming disproportionate consumers (of welfare or police resources or park space, etc. ) whenever you liberalize controls on them or make systems more generous and less skeptical.
And perhaps worse than that, that you can move people on the bubble into that category.
Funny, I just saw a new left-wing outlet wrestling with research that hinted at weak results when people are given money.
Yes, there are some people who are bad targets for the policy. That's the exact argument for making these programs less conditional-- ideally, not conditional whatsoever. ubi pilots consistently show improvements in welfare, and while GiveDirectly wastes effort trying to pick specifically extra-disadvantaged villages, it redeems itself by distributing payments to everyone within those villages.
Consider this simplified model of the economy:
After a decade, semi-random economic events will have sorted people into "poor" and "rich". The "rich" group is mostly composed of people form Group A, and the "poor" group is mostly composed of people from Group B. But you know in principle that there are still poor people who might improve their lives with more money, and that, meanwhile, the rich people have mostly hit diminishing utilitarian returns for improvement-by-money. Your first instinct-- well, not your first instinct, because you're a conservative, but the first instinct of someone further left than you-- will be to take money from the rich people and give it to the poor people. At first, you see the lives of people of the poor people rapidly improve-- because they're improvers, and using that money to take all the low-hanging-fruit they were previously unable to. But soon, most of the improvers move into the rich group, and now you're just giving money that the improvers could be using to improve things to wasters instead, and the program fails. The better option would have been to take more money from the rich, but pay it to everyone. The richest of the rich would suffer a little as they're paying disproportionately more, but they're far at the reducing-rate-of-utilitarian-returns section of the scale. So given that they're also recieving the UBI, the only way they move from rich to poor is if they're wasters... and if they are, then society should want them to be poor, to discourage waster behavior. Meanwhile, the improver poor become improver rich, and the improver rich maintain their position, while the waster poor get to control a proportionately smaller share of the economy than they would if they were receiving direct welfare and also aren't facing any incentive to remain poor.
The funny thing is, I've also seen that same article, and I consider it direct proof of my point-- even though the leftist writing it doesn't seem to understand that. For example, they say,
but then turn around and say,
completely ignoring the obvious conclusion that if all these targeted giving schemes are failing, they should stop advocating for targeted giving schemes. Just give the money to everyone. The pregnant women/domestic violence victims that will use the money productively will still get it-- and so will everyone else that actually needs the money, and would use it to improve their lives. Sure, plenty of people who won't use the money to improve their lives will also get it-- but at least they're not directly incentivized to not improve their lives, and also they're probably going to be paying their money to people who can make better use of it.
Using the meme definition of insanity, this "transfer money to particular poor households" scheme is definitely it. Wealth-transfer research has promising results. Wealth-transfer-to-poor-people research has less promising results. Why do these leftists keep insisting that we trying to find even worse-off people to give the money too? That's just going to result in even worse results. Just give the money to everyone! The trump stimmy checks were the right idea, only held back by the fact that they were unfunded and increased the deficit (because deficit-mediated inflation is effectively a regressive tax on poorer people, who hold more cash wealth and suffer more from sticky salaries.)
To sketch out an ideal tax + welfare system...
Revenue:
LVT used almost exclusively as a revenue-generating tax
Pigouvian taxes applied in conditions of high economic certainty
Service charges for excludable use of sensibly government-provided services (e.g., getting your passport renewed, driving on a toll road)
Spending
Pigouvian subsidies applied in conditions of high economic certainty
security (including military)
contract enforcement (the courts, plus the parts of the regulatory state that do stuff like fine people for lying about the efficacy of medical treatments)
the strictly necessary parts of the administrative state (e.g., salaries for judges, lawmakers)
the parts of the regulatory state that exist to solve multipolar traps/tragedies of the commons/failure states of capitalism/etc. (e.g., climate change, national parks, trustbusting)
the parts of the regulatory state necessary for auditing the other parts
A UBI calculated to be the higher of {[enough so that almost* no one starves, dies of exposure, dies of easily treatable disease*, or otherwise lives considered strictly unacceptable for a citizen*], [Whatever figure maximizes the equation: RISE IN(MINIMUM OF(aggregate GDP, aggregate population utility*)) DUE TO PAYMENTS - FALL IN (MINIMUM OF(aggregate GDP, aggregate population utility*)) due to taxes]}
A service designed to care for people who are strictly unable to make economic choices (the mentally challenged, the insane, and the senile)
* I'm using fuzzy language in a few cases because some of these concepts/thresholds are strictly subjective... I concede that even in my "ideal" economic system there would be plenty for people to fight over and disagree about
Part of the reason progressives don't seem to win with this argument in practice is that it depends on assumptions that prove dubious in practice: that only the richest of the rich will suffer (when social democracies as we know them today tax more across the board) or that taxing to create such broad benefits is costless.
Yes, UBI avoids the problem of means-tested systems that still end up giving disproportionate money to dubious cases. But it does so by simply ducking the problem of the bill that makes them want to discriminate in the first place.
Maybe because leftists share the impulse that you categorized as conservative? That if the government is going to take a lot of your money out of your hands it should be some sort of emergency or going to a case so self-evidently worse off that it justifies the effort and isn't either a gain at the margins or an active loss to people seemingly incapable of making good use of it.
That isn't it solely - some seem deeply skeptical of UBI as a suggested welfare replacement, presumably because they're skeptical that you'll get a high enough UBI for unfortunates - but worth considering.
I actually think it's better without the concession to fuzziness. After all, what your UBI proposal has going for it here is that we theoretically know what everyone is going to get and so the spending is predictable. If we start adding new expectations you risk ending up with the very problem of throwing good money after bad to raise some people to a standard they seem incapable of in addition to the big bill.
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The Trump Stimmy checks were in fact not universal.
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The left's answer is to keep taking from those better off and giving to those worse off without even trying to grapple with that. And the right's answer is to institute an authoritarian system which governs everyone as if they are those people. A better answer -- discrimination -- is anathema to both.
Huh, seems like the traditional failure mode the right wing is accused of facing is the opposite. Just throwing out the baby with the bathwater. Fewer/no services, let people (even those who might prudently use any additional help) fend for themselves.
That's another thing the right is accused of, yes, but since I support it I wouldn't call it a failure mode. The kinds of things I'm talking about are bans on vice: drugs, gambling, fast cars and loose women. The sorts of things many of those who are a bit more put together can either handle or recover from a bad experience, but result in some people going into a downward spiral. The right wouldn't let anyone do them, the left subsidizes the spiral.
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