Re:Universal Basic Income Is Not Feasible
by 1123581321 on Thursday April 26, 2018 @07:17PM
(#16936873)
This is part of the circle of miscommunication when discussing UBI. It goes like this:
Q. The tax rate would be too high.
A. Not if UBI is small.
Q. Small amounts won’t make a difference.
A. That’s why it needs to be enough to live on.
Q. Then the tax rate...
Re:Universal Basic Income Is Not Feasible
by keithnz on Thursday April 26, 2018 @07:45PM
(#16937092)
the problem is people talk about paying for it through income tax and not a wealth tax.
If you look at wealth distribution, you look at how to slice enough off the top end to cover the bottom end.
Re:Universal Basic Income Is Not Feasible
by 1123581321 on Thursday April 26, 2018 @11:42PM
(#16938308)
I assume you are looking at the $50-100 trillion of theoretically seizable wealth in the United States. Unfortunately, not much of that is fungible due to the lack of buyers in that scenario.
Re:Universal Basic Income Is Not Feasible
by akvadrako on Thursday April 26, 2018 @07:26PM
(#16936951)
UBI and Negative Income Tax are two terms for the same thing. Well, according to Wikipedia, NIT is one implementation of UBI (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_income_tax). I suppose that's fair, but it's the most obvious implementation.
Either can be large or small; that's not part of the definition.
Intuitively I had thought of the UBI and NIT as very similar except that the UBI seeks to be large enough to be a workable living income, whereas a NIT can be any positive amount (or negative, depending on which way you look at it). So conversely the tax change required to fund it need not be large -- it just depends on how ambitious you want to be.