Thank you for this argument! The "invert the sign" thing feels like it must be wrong somehow (even to someone who likes the argument for a basic income) but it does actually seem correct.
Wow yes, smart thread. Very interesting to read. Some info-rich comments, thanks to AnthonyMouse especially!
So some people here aren't completely against basic income. Some more good arguments in favor.
The problem is that poor people spend all (or almost all) their income. Flat taxes impact the poor negatively.
What you can do instead is just tax net worth as a flat tax (or a slightly graded tax), instead of taxing income. This impacts only those with a large positive net worth, and that makes more sense.
That solves the estate tax problem as well.
Of course. But weird taxes are very hard to get right.
You can basically order taxes by how progressive they are. The least progressive is a head tax; everybody pays a fixed dollar amount every year, income and consumption irrelevant. Next is a flat tax; some universally fixed percentage of total income or consumption. After that it isn't really a straight line: Luxury taxes, property tax, graduated income tax, etc.
The problem with everything more progressive than the flat tax is they heavily induce tax avoidance and often hit the wrong target. If you tax cars with big engines then wealthy people start buying trucks with big engines. If you tax trucks with big engines you end up hitting working class people. If you tax real estate then rich people invest in the stock market and working class people can't afford a home. If making more than $250K/year brings you into a very high tax bracket then people find all kinds of deductions and tax losses to take, or arrange for their $1M/year compensation to be paid as $200K each to yourself, your spouse and your three children. And so it goes.
The trick is to stop trying to outsmart people. The problem is the least avoidable tax, collecting the same dollar amount from everyone, is very, very regressive. But all we have to do to make a very, very progressive tax is invert the sign. Have the government pay everybody a fixed dollar amount every year. Basic income. If you pay for it with a flat consumption tax, which is the next least avoidable, the flat tax is more progressive than the head tax that the basic income is the inverse of, so you can make it however progressive you want just by changing the amount of the basic income. Then there is no tax avoidance to be had anywhere, no argument about what should be taxed or not, and everyone pays their share.
> Are you also suggesting a high estate tax, so that you're encouraged to spend or invest it instead of building up wealth for your family?
"Invest" and "building up wealth for your family" are synonyms. Estate taxes are silly. It's the same problem with separating owners from their businesses. Then the companies become incorporeal diffusely-owned soulless sociopathic conglomerates. Who cares if the family that started some chain of stores continues to own it forever? Care instead if people in the middle are better off than their parents were.