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A comment on Germany begins 3-year universal-basic-income trial. Parent comment

Re:Germany begins 3-year universal-basic-income trial by JoshuaDavid on Wednesday August 19, 2020 @05:02PM (#24216420)
One possible trial that would interest me is a UBI, implemented on a county-wide basis somewhere. It might be possible to find a county containing a single city, somewhere near the center so people can't easily just move immediately outside the border of where the UBI applies, where a high enough fraction of the people in that town are in favor of a UBI to pass some resolution to create a county-wide income or property tax that funds a county-wide basic income.

The issue with that is that I suspect higher-level governments (state, federal) would decide that

a. An individual county imposing taxes that high is illegal b. UBI benefits must be paid out immediately to all residents of the city upon moving there (and now every poor person everywhere wants to move to your city).

Still, maybe there's a clever way to try it out in a fairly self-contained system?

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Re:Germany begins 3-year universal-basic-income trial by luckylion on Wednesday August 19, 2020 @05:39PM (#24216944)
That would certainly be a good start. People moving there because of UBI is expected in general, so it would also yield valuable results in that regard. There's the ethical issue of forcing people to be part of the experiment that really don't want to, even if you give them the option to move.

I don't know whether there are upper limits on local taxes. One of Germany's local funding is business tax ("Gewerbesteuer"), which communities regulate by setting their multiplier, the lower limit is 200% (of the taxation base), with most between 350% and 450%. The highest I know of is 900%.

Property tax also varies between 200% (minimum) and 1800% (according to Wikipedia), so there's some room as well.

Combined with an initial donation, that may be possibl. If it's somewhere where people don't naturally move to (e.g. not a major population center), the moving-effect might be very welcome as well, repopulating the area.

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