Which is a bit ironic because the infrastructure of basic income will require tracking of US citizens on a scale never before seen in the US. I'm not for or against basic income at this point, but it does make me chuckle a bit about idealists and their inability to see what their ideas will look like in practice.
You could very easily argue a UBI dramatically reduces the amount of information the government has on current welfare dependents. Besides, it can't possibly be any more "tracking" than what the IRS already does
Considering the population involved in taxation is ~48% I feel like 100% is a bit higher. There is certainly additional tracking based upon the listing of dependents ect. but I'm confident it's less then every single US citizen.
Nearly the entire population, at least those of working age, are involved in taxation to some extent.
Everyone pays, directly or indirectly, sales and property taxes. Every employed person ,that isn't paid under the table, pays payroll (ok, a few legal exceptions to this) and income taxes (if they make enough money). Those who don't make enough money to pay income tax are still involved with the IRS because they need to file for refunds or other programs they may qualify for.
My assumption was that Social Security typically only effects most US citizens after 65 and/or working(paying income tax). For example, while debated and likely not highly accurate, ~10% of the US citizen population doesn't have a valid id. Also, the amount of those with identification with the valid current address is even lower. When you are talking about the bottom 1/3rd of the population especially there are a lot of people outside the system who are actually US citizens. One can definitely argue that these people will receive a net benefit for entering back into it, but they will also be back into the system as opposed to now. Like I said before, I'm not against it, I just chuckle about the fact that it creates a larger percentage of the population tracked by the government.
> My assumption was that Social Security typically only effects most US citizens after 65 and/or working(paying income tax).
Social Security, because eligibility is contribution based, effects people (from a tracking perspective) from the time they start working in a Social Security covered job (pretty much all legal jobs other than the subset of non-federal public sector jobs that don't participate in social security.)
Please elaborate. I would think that all the government would need to know is whether each citizen exists, is still alive, and what's their bank account. With no in-depth knowledge of US government, I think it knows on average much more about each citizen.
The government already, in theory, has a means of making payments to nearly every citizen (social security). So drop every welfare system but the Social Security Administration, and expand its payments to everyone, rather than just those currently qualifying (survivors and retirees, primarily). (Easier said than done)
My apologies if my original comment appeared to be about it being unrealistic. It was about expansion of government involvement which personally I'm not particularly against(or for). I was talking about it being larger than it is now as opposed to being practical.
