This concern is largely not applicable to a common-sense program that I describe, such as a negative income tax, as there is no threshold where you suddenly lose most of your benefits.
First, the reduction of benefits would not begin until one is already making a fairly decent salary (e.g., $60K). Second, the benefits would only reduce gradually over a span of, say, $60K, which means that every dollar you earn only costs a fraction of a dollar of benefits. To repaste one of my responses from elsewhere (with minor edits):
To make the math easier, let’s just say the income range points were actually $60K to $110K. Even if one assumes a linear progression (rather than a more nuanced, super-linear system which I would recommend but won’t bother discussing here), then this means that for every extra dollar one makes after $60K, their benefits are only reduced by 20 cents ($0.20), thus meaning that they still make $0.80 with every extra dollar of income. (There is an added question of how this would be designed to interact with tax brackets, but the bottom line is that one can still be incentivized to make more money.)
If one thinks that the incentive reduction described above is too steep, you can expand the window of eligibility (e.g., $60K to $160K) to reduce the slope and still likely save tens of billions of dollars.
This concern is largely not applicable to a common-sense program that I describe, such as a negative income tax, as there is no threshold where you suddenly lose most of your benefits.
First, the reduction of benefits would not begin until one is already making a fairly decent salary (e.g., $60K). Second, the benefits would only reduce gradually over a span of, say, $60K, which means that every dollar you earn only costs a fraction of a dollar of benefits. To repaste one of my responses from elsewhere (with minor edits):