There's no poverty trap with UBI because it's universal. You don't end up losing UBI if you get a job, or a higher paying job, or inherit a billion dollars.

@David Rice Not all proposed UBI schemes have that feature. Some proposals suggest that the money be distributed in the form of a negative income tax.

yes, all universal basic income schemes are, by definition, universal. That's kind of a key point of them. There are other non-universal basic income schemes that aren't universal, of course.

A negative income tax is still universal even if it results in some people not getting checks.

Joe - getting a check isn't a necessary part of UBI. If the government gives you a 10k tax credit and you owe 20k in taxes, you still got the full 10k benefit, and that doesn't change if your income is too low to owe any taxes, or high enough to owe millions.

"The solutions that politicians come up with are often not actually the best ones, because they don’t know what problems poor people have." Or perhaps because the solutions politicians come up with are the ones suggested to them by their campaign donors who, by pure coincidence, just so happen to provide those solutions. Or because they sound nice and simple when the politician proposes them while campaigning to people who don't understand economics, even though they don't actually work well in practice (which the politician may know, but counts on their electorate not to know.)

@reirab I think all of those boil down to "they don't actually know what the problems are".

@DavidRice If your income is too low for you to pay any taxes, then a tax credit it's going to benefit you; you're describing a system explicitly tailored to benefit the wealthy and pretending it's "universal".

@RossThompson Maybe that's true in some countries, but not in the U.S. Tons of people here who don't pay taxes benefit from tax credits anyway, as many of them are what are known as refundable credits (i.e. you can get them 'refunded' to you even if your tax liability would otherwise have been zero or negative.) It just makes your tax liability more negative than it already may have been. You get said negative taxes deposited into your bank account (or else get a check.)

@immibis There's a difference between not understanding the problem and understanding it, but doing something that doesn't help it anyway because it benefits you politically. The entire U.S. Social Security system is a perfect example. The vast majority of politicians in Washington fully understand how broken it is, but they don't do anything about because none of the possible solutions are politically popular (because they all necessarily involve either higher taxes, lower benefits, or, most likely, both.)

Sigh. Charles Murray? Really? The government is not "really bad" at providing G&S compared to the mkt. The free mkt resulted in rampant poverty in the first place.

@JWT Extreme poverty is the natural state - it was not invented by markets. Markets allow us to specialize and trade so we can create the astounding wealth of humanity. We specialize and trade that wealth so we are expanding the productive capacity instead of all living in subsistence agriculture. Markets are the collective distributed decision-making with local knowledge of ability and preferences, while central planning is disastrous precisely because no amount of hubris in a politician substitutes for the countless decisions made by every individual.

@JWT because the market is not a person - it is not an entity to blame but simply voluntary exchange in the absence of oppression. Government, on the other hand, is a collection of people who quite intentionally control others to prevent consensual activity. From Mao's Great Leap Forward to Chavez's Bolivarian Socialism, governments have proven themselves disastrous when trying to control everyone, why do you celebrate such mass-suffering and death in the name of preventing voluntary exchange?

We now have many examples of economies that are far bigger than the USSR was at its height and that are tightly centrally controlled (Amazon, Microsoft, Disney, etc). They seem to be doing fine, in general. By contrast, the ones that leave financial control up to internal markets (Sears, most famously) crash and burn very quickly. There's probably a message in there somewhere.

@JWT I only mention Charles Murray for historical context; he was one of the first academics in America to propose UBI if not the first. Incidentally, you are wrong about markets causing poverty, but that's an extended discussion.

@Ross Thompson A company is not an economy. Planning within a single company is not equivalent at all to centrally planning the provision of goods and services for everyone in a nation state, even if the dollar amounts involved are somehow larger on paper.

@RossThompson That's not true - are you thinking of a tax deduction? A tax credit will be paid to you by the government if you owe less taxes than the credit covers.

@pluckedkiwi That's rich. You have basically said that systems can never be blamed - all this while blaming gov't (not a person) for causing problems. Again you nigh-religious biases have blinded you from fundamental truths. Just saying "free market" does not actually solve problems. And if we are brining straw men into it, why don't you go ahead and defend Somalia's no govt system?

@joe Charles Murray is not an economist. He doesn't understand why UBI is a good thing.

@JWT Charles Murray is a proponent of UBI. He thinks it's a good thing. Why exactly do you think he doesn't?

This is why this StackExchange will not work. Using this as an Ur-Example we get a bunch of economic free market radicals stating disproven hypotheses as facts, and elevating gadflys, pundits, and propagandists as experts. They overwhelm with their sheer numbers and gish gallops. Pretty soon, there will be posts elsewhere pointing to this as "fact", and people get more misinformed.

@joe I know he supports UBI. It's his reasoning for supporting UBI that is steeped in woo, like literally phrenology. Just because he got to the right place doesn't mean he didn't plow through other people's yards to get there.