You can give out welfare without id or means testing: just require people to hang out in a specific place, and give them eg five dollars each hour.
It's a terrible wast of people's time, but it solves the specific problem.
> The sensible thing to do is replace all of said mess with a UBI, which doesn't require means testing and so doesn't require all of that paperwork.
Yes, though instead of saying that UBI doesn't require means testing, I would say that a UBI folds the means testing of the tax system and the welfare system into one, and then decides on the net payment (constant UBI - taxes) that you get.
At least that point of view makes sense for something like personal income taxes. If most of your tax take comes from VAT or land value taxes, this framing is less useful.
> You can give out welfare without id or means testing: just require people to hang out in a specific place, and give them eg five dollars each hour.
You can do this, but is that supposed to be less burdensome than requiring ID?
> Yes, though instead of saying that UBI doesn't require means testing, I would say that a UBI folds the means testing of the tax system and the welfare system into one, and then decides on the net payment (constant UBI - taxes) that you get.
That's fine from a theoretical perspective, but the practical point is that it doesn't require separate means testing paperwork for the transfer payment.
> At least that point of view makes sense for something like personal income taxes. If most of your tax take comes from VAT or land value taxes, this framing is less useful.
Only in the sense that it would remove the means testing whatsoever.
If you look at the effective rate curve of a flat tax - UBI, it's quite progressive and can be made arbitrarily so by adjusting the tax rate and the amount of the UBI. And this is in fact the preferred way to do it, because phase outs for existing benefits programs are often higher than tax rates paid in higher tax brackets, especially when combined with a lower but still non-zero tax rate at low to middle income levels.
Switching to a flat combined tax-and-phase-out rate would be no less and possibly more progressive than the existing system, while also being vastly simpler and require no means testing paperwork or privacy-invasive income tracking of any kind.
It's a terrible wast of people's time, but it solves the specific problem.
> The sensible thing to do is replace all of said mess with a UBI, which doesn't require means testing and so doesn't require all of that paperwork.
Yes, though instead of saying that UBI doesn't require means testing, I would say that a UBI folds the means testing of the tax system and the welfare system into one, and then decides on the net payment (constant UBI - taxes) that you get.
At least that point of view makes sense for something like personal income taxes. If most of your tax take comes from VAT or land value taxes, this framing is less useful.