UBI is just a refundable tax cut. It should be taxable. Just add $12,000 to your gross income at the top of your return and take out $12,000 from the tax due at the bottom. If the result is negative, you get a refund. Think what this will do for tax compliance alone.

All of the tangible benefits mentioned in the article are real, but there’s a really important intangible benefit: national profit-sharing. Andrew Yang rightly styles his UBI as a “dividend,” a reward for participating in making this the greatest nation on earth. (Felons should lose their UBI while in prison. They are not good citizens, and they don’t deserve a dividend.)

People don’t recognize the value they add simply by respecting others’ rights. It is a national achievement that we are not a kleptocracy like Russia or a family business like Saudi Arabia. We have flaws, but we are working on them, and it might even be good if the UBI were gently indexed to the crime rate or voter turn-out or some other measure of aggregate good behavior. If it were possible, I’d index the payment to Congress’s approval rating. That can’t be done, because people would lie to boost the pay-out, but you get the idea.

They say that if you subsidize something, you get more of it. How about we subsidize good citizenship? Not via the Big Brother method of the Chinese thugs, but by aggregate rewards for aggregate behavior. You can tell if enough people join the team simply by looking at what the team achieves. Just a little bit of inflation encourages spending that keeps the economic balls in the air, a UBI may encourage the sort of citizenship that keeps the ship of state afloat.

Sign me up.