In the current system, yes, properly implemented, UBI would end poverty in America while still allowing for massive inequality. It sets a floor, not a ceiling.
I'm not sure that inequality is necessarily the thing to be fixed.
I suspect that when most people talk about inequality, what they mean is, "a few people are doing really good and a lot of people are doing really bad". If you can lessen or remove the "doing really bad" part, whether through UBI or some other means (progressive taxation to fund other programs, whatever your ideology prefers), then statements of inequality start to mean just "a few people are doing really good" and I think there are far fewer people that are bothered by that.
I also think these conversations tend to get stuck on the definition of poverty. Some people say, "well, it can't be poverty because they all have smartphones", and other people say, "well, it's poverty because they lack any opportunity". I think that if these discussions are going to get anywhere we have to start by convincing people that the definition of poverty is allowed to change and that we shouldn't in the 21st century be defining poverty in 19th-century terms.
>I suspect that when most people talk about inequality, what they mean is, "a few people are doing really good and a lot of people are doing really bad". If you can lessen or remove the "doing really bad" part, whether through UBI or some other means (progressive taxation to fund other programs, whatever your ideology prefers), then statements of inequality start to mean just "a few people are doing really good" and I think there are far fewer people that are bothered by that.
I'd say the problem with inequality is something else entirely than "some people doing really good" vs "lots of people doing really bad".
It's that there are resources in the world, and some people have way more access to them.
This can hold even when all people are out of poverty: of the potential and resources of the world, still some people could take the lion's share to the exclusion of others, regardless of whether everybody has a house and food on their table.
And this inequality (with the true sense of the word, not mere poverty vs richness) is also related to opportunities and squandered potential (as in: yeah, we all have UBI, but this dumb mega-rich person could pay his way to Harvard, whereas some other with much larger potential -- e.g. smarts, inventiveness, etc-- had to settle for some lesser school, and didn't get as far in their career).
There's a scale of ideology here from, "everyone should be guaranteed to get exactly the same as everyone else regardless of luck and effort" to "life should come with no guarantees and everything is down to luck and effort".
It sounds like you're further to the left of that scale than I am, which is fine, except that it's harder to convince people to the right of me on that scale to move that far left.
Poverty is a problem, obviously, but inequality is a problem in itself.
* inequality subverts the democratic process
* inequality subverts the rule of law
* I'd argue it even threatens human dignity
* in economics, my utility function typically only takes my well-being/wealth/consumption/circumstances into consideration, not my neighbour's. That's a simplification, so that one can do economics. It's pragmatic and expedient - it is certainly neither descriptive nor normative. Although there is a tendency in libertarian/"economism" circles (google James Kwak "economism" if you don't know what it means) and even others (skeptic Michael Shermer, for example) to consider it the rational thing to do.
I don't see why. Yes, if I get 10$ more, and all my neighbours get $10000 more, I will be cranky and unsatisfied, utility function bla bla my ass.
Inequality also depresses human happiness.
TL;DR: excessive inequality jeopardizes democracy, the rule of law, human dignity, peace, and happiness.
Assuming you implemented UBI, and changed nothing else, what would prevent the market from adjusting overall price levels (upwards) until those living only on an UBI again end up below the (now increased) poverty line?
In other words, I believe that without penalizing the upper end, too, things will just "adapt" to define a new lower end, if only the only change is to give everybody a little bit of money. To some extent, Germany has been doing something close to UBI for quite a while now ("Grundsicherung", "Harz IV", etc.). It certainly helped prevent that a few people fall into some nasty global minimum with zero income, so its probably better than not having it. But I don't think that only clamping the lower income end alone had a society-transforming impact in Germany.
