Actually, one of the major effects of basic income is that it would decrease marginal income tax rates (although it would undoubtedly raise taxes overall). This is counter-intuitive, so let me explain.

Marginal tax rates are the taxes that you pay on additional income. Eg., if I make (rounding numbers recklessly) £9k per year, I am taxed nothing. However every pound I make over £9k is taxed at 15% -- that's my marginal tax rate at the £10k income level -- then there is another step at £20k-something, etc.

For the poor, however, effective marginal tax rate include not only escalations in progressive tax rates, but the withdrawal of social support. Eg., let's say I am unemployed and receiving £700/month worth of benefits. Then I get a job which pays me £800/month. The first £750 is tax free, and I'll have to pay £8 of income tax on the remaining £50, so my total take-home pay is £792. Fair enough, so far...

Except now that I'm earning an income, all my benefits are withdrawn. This means that although I'm now doing £800 per month worth of work that I wasn't doing previously, at the end of the day I'm only receiving (£792 - £700 = ) £92 pounds of additional income. Hence my effective marginal tax rate on the extra income is a whopping 88.5%.

I'd have to think very hard about whether I wanted to keep that job, or stay on benefits. In fact, this is a fairly generous example: many benefits programmes are structured in such a way that they impose an effective marginal tax rate of more than 100% upon people who increase their incomes -- in other words, you can end up with less money by getting a job than by staying on benefits.

This is the mechanism which turns benefits programmes into poverty traps -- by de-incentivising people to work via astronomical marginal tax rates. Unfortunately, people have a very difficult time understanding this mechanism, and their intuitive reaction is often to "fix" benefits programs by increasing conditionalities and means-testing. The problem is that the more conditionalities and means-testing you impose, the more you increase the marginal tax rates for people trying to get out of poverty -- so such programmes are inevitably counter-productive.

A Unconditional Basic Income, however, is never withdrawn. This means that it imposes no penalties for increasing your earnings -- meaning that it actually minimises the effective marginal tax rates.

In fact a very fair basic income could be funded via a flat tax: tax every income at 50%, and then redistribute the earnings as a flat Universal Basic Income. Mean income earners, in this scenario, would pay exactly as much taxes as they receive back from the UBI -- so their tax rate would be zero. Non-income earners would earn 50% of the mean (which is roughly the level that Switzerland is proposing). Billionaires would see their income reduced by nearly 50%. However the marginal tax rate would be identical at every level of income. No matter what your standing in the economy, you would always receive the same UBI, and you would always pay the same rate of tax. It would seem almost fair.

"Plain English" is the legal equivalent of pseudocode. (By similar reasoning, the courts are analogous to CPUs.)

The TOS isn't in plain English for the same reason that Android isn't written in pseudocode: the CPUs won't run it.

Also -- pseudocode ignores edge cases, boundary conditions, etc. to make it readable. Production code (and legal documents) can't escape these requirements.

In an environment where innovation has been strictly regulated against (better engine management software? NOPE. better foil design? NOPE), the fine art of sticking to the letter of the law but totally bending the spirit of it is naturally where the bleeding edge of F1 design is going to lie.

It's not widely known but the United States was the first developed country to promote a basic income, in the form of the Alaska Permanent Fund. Each year, every US citizen resident in Alaska receives a dividend payment from this fund. The amount varies based on market returns but it has hovered around $120/month ($1400/yr) over the last decade. Children are eligible, so a family of 4, for example, would receive $480/month.

Economists who want to study the effect of a basic income can travel to Alaska and see the impact for themselves.

It always struck me as ironic because Alaska is one of the most conservative states, and conservatives are not usually in favor of handouts. In this case, however, the inflows to the fund come not from personal income taxes but from taxes and lease-revenue on the state's natural resources, notably oil and gas. Because of this, people view it as a birthright, similar to an inheritance, rather than a handout, like welfare.

In 1976 Alaska's citizens just banded together and determined that (1) all of these natural resources are shared, and the benefits from them should be shared also; and (2) none of us trust the Government to spend this money for us, better than we could spend it ourselves. Today, it is the most popular Government program in the state with near absolute bi-partisan support.

So there seems to be precedent that this can work, if you have a massive sovereign wealth fund that is fed by revenues from shared resources. There are other countries, like Saudi Arabia or Norway, who will probably be the first to try this on a nation-wide scale before Switzerland.

Welcome to America, where we read your private mail, track all your movements online, shoot your dogs, abuse you at the borders, put antibiotics in your food, bankrupt you when you get sick, throw you in jail with hardened criminals if you smoke a spliff, and drone-execute you with no warrant if the president doesn't like you. Would you like fries with that?