2) If UBI were HALF of that level, but taxes on your earnings kept increasing, what level of income loss to taxes would bring you to the breaking point? Would you be willing to do your current job, with all of its requirements, if you took home 50% of your current salary + UBI at half of question 1? What if you only took home 25% of your current salary? At what percentage would it no longer be worth the time and effort involved?
Yup. It comes down to what is the marginal result of additional work. Low income + high taxes = low marginal returns and few people in such positions will continue to do so because they like doing it. That's the realm of people in high skill jobs.
Low skill jobs fucking well
should be automated. Nobody should have to do that shit.
The history of employment is the history of a painfully slow removal of vicious coercion by employers of low skill workers.
Take sugar cane farming as an example. It's truly awful work - Hot, labourious, dangerous, and unpleasant. Literally nobody wants to do it. So cane farmers enslaved people to do it. And when it was suggested that enslaving people was unacceptable, the cane farmers forecast calamity if slaves were freed, and a complete collapse of the economy.
But what actually happened was that people were coerced into working for tiny wages, and deliberately and violently prevented from any kind of collective action to demand better pay, or from leaving to go find better work elsewhere.
Then it was suggested that paying people in company tokens that could only be spent at company stores was unacceptable. The cane farmers forecast calamity if their workforce was empowered to go elsewhere for employment, and a complete collapse of the economy.
Eventually, people got the freedom to stop wielding machetes in snake-infested canefields under the blazing sun, and they left the cane farms in droves.
Today, sugar cane is harvested by one of these:
The operator sits in an airconditioned cab, in comfort and safety.
The people who used to do that work don't rampage around the countryside as a starving and homeless mob; They just went and found other jobs. The economy didn't collapse.
And those who couldn't or wouldn't find other work are living on government handouts. Which may not be lucrative, but it beats the crap out of slavery, or of coerced (poorly) paid work.
If your job could be done by a machine, for less than the wages you would need to make ends meet (plus a little for luxuries), then it
should be done by a machine.
And if there's no other work you can do, you should be paid to do nothing - which society can easily afford, because most stuff is incredibly cheap to produce, as a consequence of its being done by machines.
It takes a special kind of stupid to create an economy in which being replaced by a machine that can do the same work at a tenth of the cost is somehow a
bad thing for any of the people involved.
But that's what we've got, because the slave owner mentality - people must work or they don't eat, and people won't work unless forced to do so (neither of which seems to apply if you're of the wealthy class; They are only rules for the poor) - is all pervasive amongst the people who have all the money (which they largely got by being decendants of slavers and/or exploiters of cheap labour).
Being cruel isn't a prerequisite for a productive economy, in the post industrial era. It's time we stopped assuming that it is.
