Rich people promote UBI because they realize that it is a publicly-funded subsidy that allows them to pay starvation wages.

They get a cheap workforce that is not paid enough to live on and the people who pay income taxes (not them) pay to subsidize their workers' inadequate wages.

Remember that really rich people get a majority of their income from sources that are taxed as capital gains not ordinary income so income-tax funded programs are fine with them. Let the masses fund it our of their paychecks.

Here's an idea: take the wages of a company's bottom 20% of employees, multiply it by some factor, say 35, and subtract it from the total compensation, including the value of stock options, of the company's top 20% of employees.

Tax that excess at 100%. In short, make a company cap the salaries of their top 20% at some multiplier of the salaries of their bottom 20%.

Imagine how quickly the company execs would increase the compensation of the people at the bottom so that they could get more money at the top.

Just a thought.

--David Grace