Social security, fire departments, medicare, primary education etc are all available broadly, and are broadly liked by people. People using these government handouts aren't considered lesser for it.

I've got this funny feeling that Congress likes legalistic solutions to problems because they are mostly lawyers. (All lawyers when it comes to Democrats) The pain of filling out paperwork for means testing seems less painful to them than it does to the general population.

The 'swiss cheese' approach to social services is one of the major reasons why U.S. health care is so FUBAR and so hard to fix. Old people have Medicare and they vote -- they don't see there is a problem. Many people get insurance from their employer and might have no idea what their employer pays or how stressful it is for employers to negotiate benefits every year. Veterans have a program, there is Medicaid for really poor people, Medicaid expansion for somewhat poor people, Obamacare exchanges for people who are almost poor, etc.

When you add it all up there is a small pool of people "left behind" and most of those people are transiently uninsured because they'll wind up in some covered category. Balance that against a larger population afraid of losing what they have, and you have gridlock.

[1] https://mitsloan.mit.edu/ideas-made-to-matter/negative-incom...

I'm not sure if you're speaking approving or not (or neither). It seems like a reasonable thing to do though. Amazon is bigger than any library, it avoids the use of physical space in city centres and the need to manage loan systems/handle stolen books.

I think the difference between then and now is that IT happened, so it's much easier to do things like calculate complex per-item tax rates than it would once have been.

Your idea of a possible better world is so bad that you should feel bad! /s

It's really hard to defend libraries though. They're not just an inefficient use of space. They're bad for the environment too, as people have to travel back and forth all the time to swap books, discover the book they want isn't returned yet, etc. They're often badly maintained. Their books get damaged, lost or stolen. Their selection is really, really limited.

Buying a book online is a great replacement except for the buying part. For most people books aren't a big part of their expenditure. For people for whom it is it'd be reasonable to effectively give them the money back instead. Especially now the marginal cost of the "book" is near zero, like with software. If the admin systems were good enough you'd never have to think about it: it could be integrated with the booksellers checkout system so the cost is literally zero. Of course that's not how tax credits really work today, but it could be done that way.

I work remotely, sometimes from a library. I can request a space to work with others, and even hold large seminars if I wanted. There are dozens of free programs for kids to meet and learn, and there are opportunities for for working adults and the elderly, as well. My local library will even do interview prep for those who want it, which includes mock interviews from people in industry who donate their time. There's also 3D printers there, too.

Librarians are more than just people who can find books on shelves. They can help you research, and have access to a multitude of databases that you might not know about. As an example, I wanted to contact the owners of a business and had trouble finding that information. That info existed in a database I didn't know about, and a librarian helped me retrieve it.

I think your local libraries are very different to the sorts of libraries I used to use as a child. What you're describing there sounds more like a community centre of some sort.

Libraries are traditionally silent for example. You don't collaborate in them or else you get shushed. You definitely don't run 3D printers in them!

But I can see that if that's what you associate with modern libraries then replacing them with book purchase credits would seem a poor trade.

My local library has a 3D printer.

2. Why do we call our smartphones phones at all? I mean, sure, they can make phone calls. But most people use them mostly for things that are not phone calls or phone-related at all.

That's how language works. Look at the etymology of any word you like. More likely than not, the literal meaning refers to something historical that may or may not apply or exist anymore. For example, software developers are called engineers. Does that mean they are experts when it comes to engines? And not just software. Civil engineers don't know much about engines either. Yet for hundreds of years, they have been called engineers and for thousands to come, they will be. This is not a bug. This is the natural life of words in human languages.

In general, I see libraries promoting their services via web sites and Facebook online, and physical bulletin boards in-house and around town.

My childhood, ~45 years ago rural Georgia (USA), had a great selection of proto-nerd books, even production facilities for the local-access cable TV channel.

Not strictly related to public library, but we also had a great time with after-school and summer maker programs sponsored by the County Extension office. In agriculture, everyone has to be a "maker".

(I don't know what urban regions were like. And as this was only about ten years after state-mandated apartheid, no doubt lots of kids were living in medieval conditions.)

It’s “not”

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-41487126

>Under the old system many faced a "cliff edge", where people on a low income would lose a big chunk of their benefits in one go as soon as they started working more than 16 hours.

>In the new system, benefit payments are reduced at a consistent rate as income and earnings increase - for every extra £1 you earn after tax, you will lose 63p in benefits.

In other words, after fixing the cliffs of the system, you would "only" face a 63% effective tax rate for working more. So whatever system they have no is even more discouraging. (That understates it because it's phrased post-tax; including a positive income tax, the total effective tax is even more!)

Under the old system, it was possible to take a job, and then have less actual income than you did before.

Under the new system, _every_ extra hour of work you do causes you to have more money in your pocket, and you are always incentivized to do more work, or start a job that pays less now but might pay more as your experience grows.

I'm not sure how else you'd want this to be designed.

So, concrete proposal on how you'd structure this?

Edit: Why are people downvoting this?

I don't understand what's so confusing about SilasX's argument.

Removing cliffs and changing it to a smooth dropoff is good.

But that dropoff doesn't have to be £.63 in benefits per £1 earned. That's a pretty big effective marginal tax rate! Why not £.50 or £.30?

It should be extremely easy to understand how this proposal works, right?

It would technically bring more people into the system, but they'd be at the top end, and therefore only be receiving a small fraction of the current levels of benefits. It's totally doable.

If it's less than 63%, you "unilaterally extend benefits to a whole bunch of people who don't currently get them".

Let's say benefits for the unemployed are £1,000 a month (chosen to be an easy number to work with). You lose 63p of benefits per extra pound you earn. The government gives you (some) benefits up to the first £1,587 you earn. If you go to 50%, the government gives people earning up to £2,000 a month benefits, and so on, which probably includes a bunch of people who don't currently get any.

You can't change 63% without either paying much more in the way of benefits overall, or without reducing the benefits of those who can't do any work.

> It would technically bring more people into the system, but they'd be at the top end, and therefore only be receiving a small fraction of the current levels of benefits

That's not how the maths works. Assuming an even distribution of people at each wage level, changing this to 30% effectively doubles overall spend.

So your solution is "spend a lot of extra money on social security", which is fine, but it doesn't satisfy the constraints.

But even so, smoothing out the curve some might be better overall even if the max amount drops.

Also you could extend the curve so that 'benefits' go negative at the high end. Now your budget is fine...

> Also you could extend the curve so that 'benefits' go negative at the high end

You've just invented tax, congratulations.

You have a very different definition of 'massively' than I do.

> You've just invented tax, congratulations.

Positive taxes can balance out negative taxes, ~tada~.

The original constraint was not a $0 increase. I did not violate the original constraint.

And even if you did take it to be $0, it said you can't "just afford to" increase. Proposing a tax to make up the difference meets that critera.

But even inside a hard "no more spending" constraint, it's not nearly as unsolvable as you make it out to be. It's quite possible that giving less money to people mildly below the old cliff edge, while giving more money to people mildly above it, is a net positive. That doesn't screw over people at the bottom, and it doesn't increase total cost.

Going from a hard cliff to a 90% marginal rate was obviously better, right? And going from 90% marginal rate to 85% was obviously better, right? They decided to stop at 63%. It doesn't mean that going further is a priori wrong.

And on top of all of that, smoothing out the curve to 50% very likely motivates more people in the range to work, reducing the amount of benefits they use.

I surveyed opinions on tax brackets a while back, and it seemed like there was a big psychological barrier at the 50% rate.

Most high earners would be willing to pay a 50% marginal tax rate (albeit some very grudgingly) but almost nobody was willing to go over 50%.

What’s good enough for the rich should do for the poor as well. The benefit drop off rate (effectively a marginal tax rate) should be 50% at the very most.

“For each dollar earned, I get to keep more than I give away in tax/benefits” is a cliff edge, but I think a reasonably justifiable one.

Some people want higher taxes and some want lower; what I’m saying is, 50% stood out as an arbitrary threshold that many people seemed possibly willing to agree on.

Some complained that rich people shouldn’t be expected to prop up the rest of society, but conceded that progressive tax bands might be okay as long as the top rate was no more than 50%. Others felt that highly progressive taxes were essential; they wanted at least 50% as the top rate.

Fiscal policy comprises both borrowing and taxing; the two are fungible as far as spending is concerned.

What are you replying to?

To be clear, I easily understand how a high marginal rate is demoralizing and unfair at the low end. I'm not convinced it's a problem if tax brackets at the high end go to some number above 50%.

Edit to clarify: if your salary is £100K and you get a £10K raise, you see almost none of it in your payslip. But if you’re on £120K and get the same raise you get to take a good chunk of it home. That’s what seems silly to me.

This 63% thing is the replacement for "working tax credits" -- it's a top-up of wages for people on low paid work. People get their wages, and then on top of that they get extra money.

In the past this would have been working tax credits.

The advantages are that claimants do not need to ask for permission before starting work. They can just do the work and then declare it. The disadvantages are that the system can't cope well with zero-hour contracts or self-employment, and this is leaving people in severe financial hardship.

As an example, you can reword this just as accurately to say that for every dollar less the person makes, they actually only make $0.27 less because benefits kick in for $0.63 of it. You can reduce that 63%, but when phrased that way, do you want to?

> You need $30,000 / year to live at a minimum in our society. We will make sure everyone that makes less than that gets enough in benefits to make up the difference.

That's not a 100% tax rate for any money earned under $30,000 / year. It's reduced benefits because the definitions of the system (the minimum amount needed to survive) indicate the system only needs to make sure everyone is at a specific minimum level.

You can argue that working costs money (transportation, child care, clothing, etc), and that's a valid argument against working if the amount you make would mean you wind up with less money available for other things.

However, it's still not a tax. It's a limitation in the analysis of cost of living requirements. Calling it a tax is disingenuous.

(I mean, if you don’t like the framing, fine, but you specifically said you have a “hard time following” the argument.)

My problem is that I don't see it as capturing less of the wage, I see it as being granted less of the benefit / social safety net.

When you don't make enough money to support yourself, society kicks and and gives you enough so that you're ok (you meet some defined minimum). As you earn more, you need less support from society to be meet that minimum, so you're given less.

Eventually, you get to the point where you meet the minimum without assistance from society. At that point, the benefit is no longer needed (by the definition of the program).

At no point are the benefits your earnings, and at no point are your earnings being taken away by the less of the benefit. Rather, you're just not being assisted by society anymore because you don't need that assistance.

If the recipient of those benefits can't see that and, instead, sees them as "this is mine and you're taking it away", then I argue that's a problem with recipient. They are wrong. They should be happy the benefit was there for them when they did need it... and that it will be there some someone else when they need it. That is the point of social safety nets.

Now, I get that there's some "emotional attachment" to getting the money and then not getting because (as the recipient sees it) they're working (which is wrong; as noted, they're getting less because they need less, period). As such, reducing the benefits amount by a percentage less than 100% of earned ways helps mitigate those feelings. But at some point, the benefit must go away; it's not UBI. The rate at which it goes away is not going to make everyone happy, no matter what is done (that's the nature of compromise).

In the same way that any benefit program being cancelled (eg. movies for kids for free every Friday on the town green, etc) are stealing.

It's a benefit that had some or all of it taken away.

This prevents situations where it's better to stay under a cutoff of X in income until you can jump straight to an income of X income + Y in benefits, while staying on benefits until then.

This is fascinating.

There is an entirely separate debate about tax rates and incentives for high income tax payers wherein it is suggested that marginal income tax rates almost identical to the 63% you are speaking of are fair, equitable, common-sensible and could not possibly deter earners from pursuing extra marginal dollars.

I have no comment to make about either debate.

I simply find it fascinating that an exactly opposite conclusion is made depending on the subject involved ...

The world makes a lot more sense when you realise that laws and regulations are primarily conceived and constructed to keep incumbents in power. Maybe we should vote in our representatives for life then they'd actually have to focus on making things better.

It's both.

The idea of Universal Credit is a good one - it rationalised dozens of benefits into one programme.

Unfortunately the implementation is - because Tories - a terrible system that causes more problems than it solves.

Should "the system" really push capable people into valueless jobs at the cost of meaningful jobs that have no monetary value?

But I don't think the UK's or US's systems are like that; they just got hobbled together by being pushed in different directions by various groups with conflicting desiderata that combined to produce ridiculous incentives, and those incentives should be corrected.

Moreover, to the extent that valueless jobs and valuable non-monetary jobs exist and can be identified, the proper response is to explicitly target them (either with penalties or subsidies), not just allow anti-market-labor incentives to exist because "hey, not every job is worth doing, you know?"

And beyond that you're letting perfect be the enemy of good here. Eliminating the cliffs and capping the marginal tax rate of the poor at 63% is valuable progress. If you want things to get better you should celebrate the small victories, not treat them as an opportunity to complain more.

To lay it out in numbers:

BEFORE £1 pay increase: £X earnings, £Y benefits

AFTER £1 pay increase: £X + 1 earnings, £Y - 0.63 benefits

DIFFERENCE: £0.37

So a pay increase of £1 leaves you with an actual total increase of £0.37. This corresponds to an effective tax rate of £0.63.

Universal credit replaces a wide range of legacy benefits. One of the legacy benefits it replaces is "working tax credits". These were payments made to people who were working and on a low income.

This part of Universal Credit "tops up" your earnings from work. They are in addition to your earnings. is.

When someone on UC starts working they get their pay from work, and on top of that they get their their universal credit minus 63 pence per pound that they earn from work.

In the past if you did more than 16 hours of work in a week all your benefit would stop, but under UC you can work over 16 hours in a week and keep the money.

Universal Credit work allowances: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/universal-credit-...

What the earnings taper is and how this affects Universal Credit: https://www.entitledto.co.uk/help/Earnings-taper-Universal-C...

How your earnings affect payments: https://www.gov.uk/universal-credit/how-your-earnings-affect...

Yes, it's 'valuable progress'.

That doesn't mean complaints are invalid, or "letting perfect be the enemy of good". What a rubbish accusation. You're only letting perfect be the enemy of good when you use a problem as a reason to impede the weaker solution. This is a comment hoping for better. Don't shame that!

If your response to the weak solution is to talk about how bad it is, you're setting the wrong incentives.

The intent was to cut the funding to benefits disguised as a new system.

This is a key motivation for replacing many of those programs with UBI funded by progressive taxes.

The wonderful thing about cash (UBI, NIT, EITC) is that it's easy to divide up and low-cost to distribute.

Apart from whether linear actually makes sense or not in the real world.

1. They tend to be more resilient to budget cuts since everyone is bought in.

2. They don't have the discontinuities mentioned in the article.

Regarding UBI, studies I've seen show that people tend to spend their money on "responsible" things (as opposed to drugs and lotto tickets): https://www.businessinsider.com/stockton-basic-income-trial-...

As for housing, I think that this would be standard econ, really. More money means more demand, which in the absence of more supply, means higher prices. Things like housing are harder to increase the supply of than say, TVs, so yeah, they'd probably go up more than the rest. But I suspect that everyone would still be better off.

I don't think rent-controls are a good idea. On the other hand, I do think that in the long run rich people gobbling up finite land is a problem;

What people want to purchase is not simply housing - it's housing in their preferred location.

I think a big part of what makes housing desirable, for the bulk of the population, is ability to earn enough of an income nearby. If that's the case, UBI might actually directly create desirable housing (out of almost desirable housing) and increase supply.

I don't expect this effect would be large enough that UBI would put downward pressure on housing prices overall, but I don't really know.

A UBI makes the pay matter a little less, and so makes places like that more attractive.

It doesn't, first order, cause more units to be built. But that is not the only way to increase supply.

Longer term, that kind of calculation about potential units, in places where it's easy to build, might lead to more units built. But that gets more complicated.

So bad to be treated like a child for their entire life. They're really suffering not having a mortgage to pay every month. Instead they're saving up for their kids college.

It's not government paternalism that's terrifying, but cultural demonisation and paternalistic contempt for the poor, combined with unthinking adulation of the extremely rich.

Children also get to suffer for policymakers poor choices of what the stamps should be spent on, and taxpayers get to suffer the cost of every benefit program duplicating income verification functions and other eligibility functions rather than having universal programs where the tax system takes care of the better off not getting unfair share of benefit.

People in the US who live in a comfortable six-figure-middle-class bubble really have no idea how precarious their position is.

All it takes is one expensive long-lasting serious illness and they'll be out on the street with the other people who "made poor choices."

You declare bankruptcy, your assets are divided up among your creditors and you start over again. That's why bankruptcy exists. Several (most?) states even let one keep one's home. Maybe we need a law to prevent landlords from refusing to let based on prior bankruptcy — would have to think that through. Bankruptcy is not (or at least should not be) the end of the world.

I don't understand. How was she eligible for food stamps, if she already had a job that paid more?

The equation was worse job + food stamps > better job without food stamps. The better job in the long run might have lead to better still. But she couldn't afford it in the short run.

This was a single mom with three children. She needs to arrange for child care while she's working and it's a good idea to set aside money for medical emergencies. I'm going to guess this job probably pays a few dollars above minimum wage.

Someone in this situation is absolutely eligible for food stamps. But if we get another four years of MAGA, then who knows, maybe not.

The salary was lower but would somehow remove her eligibility for food stamps?

A for tax brackets, why do they exist. I think our mathematics is advanced enough that things like tax brackets could be replaced by continuous functions. So its either by design or by lack of imagination that these discontinuities exist.

I've a friend from Finland who is vehemently opposed to any sort of means testing for any social program or aid. I see his point. Means testing creates all of the problems mentioned above ... and encourages those not eligible for them to view them as some burden that other people get but they pay for--fostering resentment.

it’s other benefits, tax credits, social programs, etc. that sometimes end up being designed with perverse incentives.

Progressive tax brackets do not have discontinuities such that your income net of income tax becomes lower as a result of moving up a bracket.

I ran for the Federal Parliament for a libertarian party in 2007 largely because I supported their policy plan to reform taxation and welfare jointly. The concept was called "30/30": a 30% flat income tax, with negative income tax at 30% below $30,000 income. Capital gains and company tax would also be set at a flat 30%. The gist was to remove all distortions from different tax and welfare settings, so that any taxpayer was always facing the same deal: each additional dollar earned is taxed at 30%.

There were a lot of policies I didn't agree with, and naturally, those were the ones I got the most questions about. Running for a microparty that grabs anyone who puts their hand up is an ... interesting ... experience.

(I came second last with a whopping 0.7% of the primary vote, for those who were wondering)

The variety and complexity of "enough to feed their families" is crazy.