People do like to find tax loopholes it is true. The top marginal rate in the US is quite an outlier though – the very wealthiest of people are the ones with the most resources to avoid tax, so I don’t think the 90% top rate ever really netted the government much – that’s got to be a long way past the peak of the laffer curve. An ordinary middle-class worker can’t quite as easily run their income through a loan to a Panamanian company. It’s a tricky one to give any sort of conclusive answer to either way.

According to https://migrationobservatory.ox.ac.uk/resources/briefings/the-fiscal-impact-of-immigration-in-the-uk/ the net impact on the UK’s public finances of migrants from the EU was positive, and from non-EU sources was negative. This is quite convenient really, as it is the non-EU immigration that we can exercise greater control over. If a UBI were found to have too significant an impact on the levels of non-EU immigration, we could always up the selectiveness of our immigration system.

I think for all three of these points, the best that we can really accomplish with the amount and quality of data at hand is fairly rough estimation. The real key is not implementing any huge sweeping changes too rapidly – for all that I am in favour of UBI, if the government announced that they were planning on introducing a full £8,000 UBI next month, I would be pretty wary. Any large systematic change is a big risk, so it is better to break it down into manageable and reversible changes if possible, so that issues can be spotted and remedied, or changes can be rolled back entirely if unexpected negative outcomes start occurring.

This is actually what the Conclusion post is going to be about (planned for 27/5) – how to break down the shift to UBI into small manageable steps that are workable from a public choice perspective, and don’t leave the government in a position that it can’t roll them back if unexpected consequences arise.