Failure to dramatically increase taxes guts the safety net – the plan is an upward redistribution of wealth
Doar 18, served as a co-chair of the National Commission on Hunger and as a lead member of the AEI-Brookings Working Group on Poverty and Opportunity, Fellow in Poverty Studies at the American Enterprise Institute (Robert, “Universal Basic Income Would Undermine the Success of Our Safety Net,” Bush Center, https://www.bushcenter.org/catalyst/are-we-ready/doar-universal-basic-income)//BB
Universal Basic Income (UBI) would be an unaffordable way to undermine our social safety net’s successes. UBI would transfer money away from those who need it most, change the distinctly American relationship between citizen and government, and sharply raise taxes or the national debt (or both). And critically, it would fail to improve upon our current safety net’s biggest weakness: UBI would destroy – not improve – incentives to work.
The first problem is the money. A truly universal payment of $10,000 to every citizen every year adds up to a new expense of about $3 trillion, well more than we spend on our social safety net now, and close to the entirety of the tax revenue currently collected by the federal government.
If any element of the current safety net is going to be preserved, taxes will have to be raised dramatically, beyond what is politically plausible or economically desirable, or the U.S. would have to borrow even more money than we already do. Proponents of UBI should have to answer: what social programs will be cut to make room for their proposal?
Some of the money needed to pay for UBI would have to come from the middle- and lower-middle classes, either in reduced benefits or increased taxes, and they would then see some of their money transferred up to wealthier recipients of UBI. Money that would have been spent on programs for people in the lowest income quintiles would now be distributed universally, including to the uppermost income quintiles. This does not sound much like an anti-poverty program.