First, you seem overly concerned about semantics. "Universal basic income that is not universal is not Universal" is a tautology. There's no reason you assume you couldn't have UBI plus other government programs of some kind. The "universal" is that everyone gets it, universally, not that it's all you ever get for any reason.
Second, you bring up arguments against UBI that equally apply against current systems. "People are starving" and "10k isn't enough" might be true, that doesn't mean UBI isn't an improvement over the current situation.
Third - you bring up disabled people and children as if this couldn't possibly be addressed within UBI. Two ideas off the top of my head: include children in UBI (maybe at reduced rate?), and support disabled people with socialized medicine and other care (home care aids, whatever). You again seem to be assuming that UBI would be the only thing government would give to citizens.
Fourth - taxes/money. One thing is the cost savings may be greater than they seem, if UBI ends up reducing poverty and associated crime. We'll table that for now though. Corporate and VAT are hardly the only taxes you can tweak. Income tax is key, and yes, the "average" taxpayer will have to pay more, similar to the amount of UBI he receives. Maybe his tax rate will be 44%, or 40%, or 50% (I'm not going to check all your math, also you'd probably bump up corporate and VAT at the same time). Whether that is demotivating or not is a valid question, it's worth testing to see what the impact would be. As for "a hard working person will have barely more than a freeloader" - as long as you use marginal tax rates (and maybe you'd improve this with a continuous rather than discrete function), higher gross income always means higher net income. Will someone making 25k be really angry that someone lying at home makes 10k? Maybe. But in tests that have been done so far, there don't seem to be that many freeloaders. The people that worked less than they did before were new parents, people in school, and disabled people.
A lot of your arguments seem to be "UBI wouldn't be perfect" and I don't think that's a great argument against something. If you're against UBI, argue why UBI is worse than what we have currently.
Comments
Lots of things here.
First, you seem overly concerned about semantics. "Universal basic income that is not universal is not Universal" is a tautology. There's no reason you assume you couldn't have UBI plus other government programs of some kind. The "universal" is that everyone gets it, universally, not that it's all you ever get for any reason.
Second, you bring up arguments against UBI that equally apply against current systems. "People are starving" and "10k isn't enough" might be true, that doesn't mean UBI isn't an improvement over the current situation.
Third - you bring up disabled people and children as if this couldn't possibly be addressed within UBI. Two ideas off the top of my head: include children in UBI (maybe at reduced rate?), and support disabled people with socialized medicine and other care (home care aids, whatever). You again seem to be assuming that UBI would be the only thing government would give to citizens.
Fourth - taxes/money. One thing is the cost savings may be greater than they seem, if UBI ends up reducing poverty and associated crime. We'll table that for now though. Corporate and VAT are hardly the only taxes you can tweak. Income tax is key, and yes, the "average" taxpayer will have to pay more, similar to the amount of UBI he receives. Maybe his tax rate will be 44%, or 40%, or 50% (I'm not going to check all your math, also you'd probably bump up corporate and VAT at the same time). Whether that is demotivating or not is a valid question, it's worth testing to see what the impact would be. As for "a hard working person will have barely more than a freeloader" - as long as you use marginal tax rates (and maybe you'd improve this with a continuous rather than discrete function), higher gross income always means higher net income. Will someone making 25k be really angry that someone lying at home makes 10k? Maybe. But in tests that have been done so far, there don't seem to be that many freeloaders. The people that worked less than they did before were new parents, people in school, and disabled people.
A lot of your arguments seem to be "UBI wouldn't be perfect" and I don't think that's a great argument against something. If you're against UBI, argue why UBI is worse than what we have currently.