Basic income alternatives. NIT is mutually exclusive.

Numerous alternatives to Basic Income have been proposed by both supporters and opponents of Basic Income. Te current means-tested and social insurance benefts systems are deeply embedded existing systems which are frequently argued for as viable alternatives to Basic Income. Tis chapter studies four additional alternatives. Benjamin Lef describes one of the most substantial existing alternatives to Basic Income: the United States’ Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC). He argues that the EITC could never be a true substitute for a Basic Income because it is work-tested, but that it could be reformed to achieve some of the benefts of a Basic Income by removing its family-status conditional aspects and making it individual, increasing its regularity of distribution, and removing its means-testing. Of the wide variety of currently unimplemented but possible future alternatives to Basic Income, Michael Story discusses Negative Income Tax and fnds that it would be difcult to administer; Andrew Percy discusses Universal Basic Services—an expansion of existing public services into additional policy felds—and fnds Universal Basic Services to be compatible with Basic Income; and Maciej Szlinder fnds a job guarantee to be a generally unsatisfactory alternative.

In the context of this chapter, ‘alternative’ does not necessarily mean that Basic Income and the alternative provision exclude each other as possibilities, and it might mean that Basic Income and the alternative could complement each other. It would be perfectly possible for Basic Income to work well alongside existing means-tested and contribution-based benefts, as in the illustrative Basic Income schemes discussed in Chapter 11. If a Basic Income were to be implemented in the US, then the EITC would be somewhat redundant. Negative Income Tax really is an alternative in the sense that no government would ever implement both of them. Basic Income and Negative Income Tax deliver the same relationship between earned income and net income, so no government that had implemented one of them would then implement the other as well—although if they had implemented a Negative Income Tax and discovered its administrative complexity they might decide to replace it with a Basic Income scheme. A job guarantee and Basic Income could both be implemented at the same time, and similarly additional universal services could complement a Basic Income scheme, particularly if the Basic Income scheme were revenue neutral and did not raise income tax rates by more than one or two percentage points.