One of my English professors once said something that’s stuck with me through the years. He said “I ignore anything that’s written in an undergraduate paper until the first ‘however'”. In Dylan Mathews’s post at Vox on a study that finds enormous economic benefits resulting from a universal basic income here’s the first however:
These are extremely contentious estimates, borne of controversial assumptions about the way the economy works and the effects that a basic income would have on it. Many, if not most, economic modelers would come to very different conclusions: that a basic income discourages work, that raising taxes to pay for it could have profound negative economic impacts, and that not paying for it and exploding the deficit is a recipe for fiscal and economic ruin.
which essentially negates the thrust of the post itself. BTW for those of you who are interested here are the assumptions made by the “study”:
Specifically, the Levy model assumes that the economy is not currently operating near potential output (Mason 2017) and makes two related microeconomic assumptions: (1) unconditional cash transfers do not reduce household labor supply; and (2) increasing government revenue by increasing taxes levied on households does not change household behavior. Other macroeconomic models would make different, likely less optimistic forecasts, because they would disagree with these assumptions
which I find problematic. You need to read the entire paper to figure it out but it also ignores several empirically-supported factors like the effect of debt on GDP growth and the price effects their plan would have. Additionally, it never says it outright but the plan is what’s referred to as an “add-on” plan, something which would presently not even make it to the floor of the Senate. No Republican would accept an “add-on” plan and no Democrat would accept a “carve-out” plan which is one of the many reasons that a UBI is politically impossible in the U. S. Eligibility is another.
