this clearly demonstrates that replacing existing welfare with straight up cash, and changing how that cash scales down as people approach a “normal minimum” income, is vastly superior to our current system
These experiments aren't even trying to demonstrate that. And they don't.
I still don't see how literally looking at how much money you earned to determine your UBI benefit isn't means testing, but it's not really central to my point. Yes, the IRS could plausibly do this, but where is the money actually coming from?
These experiments are always small groups within a much larger economic system and the money comes from that larger system. It seems obvious to me that the recipients in such an experiment will thrive more. And even if it wasn't, there have been a number of these experiments around the world and they all proved people thrived more already anyway.
What's not obvious to me is what replaces the larger system if UBI becomes the system. Can UBI be a self-sustained system?
As you go up in tax brackets y amount is subtracted at tax time until you get high enough that the entirety of x is reclaimed
You're describing a means tested welfare program.
"Means testing" is to check the recipients income (their "means") against a schedule of benefits. Higher income=lower benefit. This is how most existing and historic welfare systems have operated. In what sense is your suggestion an improvement?
Asking to test that is a bad faith argument used by the GOP because it’s literally impossible to do without actually implementing the program.
I am no Republican. The comparison is downright insulting.
We can't meaningfully advocate or plan for its implementation unless we have some idea how it would work. And that it can work.
The sorts of experiments in the OP get us no closer to that. They prove nothing that wasn't already pretty uncontroversial and obvious, and offer no insights about how these programs might be implemented universally.
Pointing this out does not hold back UBI. Ignoring it, however, does.
Yes. But not the "main" jaw muscle that gives up/down biting force. It's the ones that let you move your jaw side-to-side and forward/back. Especially the forward/back ones.
Other figures on the monument include a Black woman depicted as a “Mammy,” carrying an infant of a White officer, and a Black man following his owner to war, according to the cemetery.
It's not "BI" that needs to be demonstrated. It's "U".
Plus, these experiments do in fact ask questions about recipients' income. Just like regular welfare programs.