> We can also go to a progressive BI, which may better be describe as a negative income tax, where the poor get more than the rich.
That's called a "means-tested social benefit program", and is one of the thing BI advocates see it as replacing (we have plenty of those now) -- one of the main problems they see is that such programs create perverse incentives, since they reduce the marginal value of additional income to the poor, since the additional income reduces the benefit from the social benefit program. That perverse incentive is one of the things BI is proposed to cure.
That is the same problem we have with a progressive income tax. The major problem I have with current programs is not that they increase the marginal tax rate, but that, at certain points, they increase the marginal taxrate to over 100%. Having a single program, that is also denoted entirely in dollars, will let us explicitly control the effective marginal tax rate.
That's called a "means-tested social benefit program", and is one of the thing BI advocates see it as replacing (we have plenty of those now) -- one of the main problems they see is that such programs create perverse incentives, since they reduce the marginal value of additional income to the poor, since the additional income reduces the benefit from the social benefit program. That perverse incentive is one of the things BI is proposed to cure.