Whether you call the way of paying a "claw-back", "flat-tax", or just straight up higher marginal rates, you need to pay for it somehow. In the end someone is getting less of each additional dollar they earn. All these need to add up to BI * the population.

BI makes a lot of implicit subsides explicit. If someone gets a tax break that adds up to 1k/month and you replace that with a check for 1k/month and do away with their tax break it's no net change in there cash flow. All that you’re doing is acknowledging a tax break is equivalent to a cash handout.

If we decide that 12,000$ is enough to live on then it calls into question why people get a larger payout from SS on top of a large tax break from low incomes.

Add it all up and a 12k BI costs less than SS + all other tax breaks and subsides. But, people rarely think of tax breaks as a subsidy so there is a lot of cognitive dissonance on this topic.

PS: Another way of looking at it is to consider the Canadian government spends less per person on healthcare than the US government while covering their entire population. Presumably the US government could do the exact same thing which makes it a worthwhile thing to consider.

I am agreeing with you that there's really no difference between a tax break and a subsidy.

However, I don't understand your next point. If you're saying a $12K BI wouldn't cost anything extra after getting rid of social security and all tax breaks in our tax system, well then maybe. But then you've made SS pensioners much poorer. And increased taxes on all the rest of the population. Also keep in mind the standard deduction is sort of like a BI for people who earn above a small threshold so if you get rid of it the net benefit of implementing a BI for low income people is even less than $12K.

BI sounds attractive in theory, but the math around it seems hand wavey. When you try to add up the numbers, there's no way around increasing taxes massively, or leaving large groups like the retired/disabled/unemployed worse off.

It might be impossible to make significant change without making some group worse off. My point is the net cost of BI is simply the added benifits to very low income people as long as your also removing other subsidies. And we are already handing out a lot of subsidies.

Which subsides to remove becomes an open question. EX: With BI do we still pay post doc's a small amount for living expences?

PS: If nothing else BI is an interesting comparison point for the current system. EX: You get more from SS as a married couple than an unmarried couple.

> Now if you continue this you find a medean income gets a bigger tax break than 12,000$ per year from the graduated tax rates.

You're going to struggle to sell BI on the basis that the person with a median income should make higher net tax contributions to subsidise those that won't work as well as those the present system determines "can't" work at the moment...

Basic Income does not imply a flat tax rate.