In a system with so many failing institutions, universal basic income would not only fail to achieve the desired results but would be an economic disaster. You can't fix what ails the US by generically throwing money at it.

If the people are being poorly educated, poorly trained, poorly policed, and the culture is rotting, and then you dump an enormous amount of loose money on that garbage fire, what do you expect to get as a return result? It's exceptionally obvious what would happen.

For example the biggest problem the US has in healthcare (and education) is cost, not lack of spending. If our costs were more in line with other affluent nations, you could expand Medicaid to cover 40-45% of the population with little additional expenditure. Nobody with a prominent position is brave enough to say it much less attempt to do anything about it (which would involve smashing incomes and jobs in the healthcare field). Some pretend we can spend our way to universal healthcare, ignoring the $1.2+ trillion in costs that have to be slashed before it can be implemented (which is why California can't implement it, they can't come close to affording it without cutting healthcare costs first). That's typical of what goes on in the US, it's a hyper irrational nation, incapable of even basic reasoning + action when it comes to solving big problems.

Start by fixing the broken, corrupt institutions. But that's a super hard problem that will take two generations of grinding persistent effort, whereas printing money is easy, which is why so many people love the fantasy of universal basic income.

I never said UBI was the only thing that needed to be fixed. But it this basic effort to show we actually care about other people's suffering. Next Universal Healthcare (get rid of the insurers to lower costs)...etc etc...

Artificial barriers to entry are the problem 100%.

I don't think so. It was once thought that student loans would be some panacea lifting poor people out of poverty by giving them access to education and the end result is lots of people overburdened by debt while waiting tables because so many people have degrees that a degree isn't remotely some kind of reasonable assurance that you can get a job in a particular field.

UBI is not a loan. Student loans have to be paid back and they also only resulted sun universities rising tuition. Education does not fix poverty. Money fixes poverty.

> UBI is not a loan

Right: UBI together with any reasonable funding mechanism is a structural force working against economic inequality.

In other words: a large-scale income redistribution that has no realistic probability of adoption in the American political landscape.

There are lots of large-scale income redistributions that have been adopted in the US (including EITC, which, while not a UBI, was directly inspired by Negative Income Tax, and earlier name for a policy exactly equivalent to UBI), and the American political landscape changes over time, largely through activism; civil rights, or even abolition, were once things with “no realistic probability of adoption in the American political landscape”, too.

The EITC is a $70-75bn program in the context of a $1.5tn income tax - it is not, as such, the kind of large-scale redistribution that we're talking about for a UBI.

I also would characterize it as the absolute opposite of a UBI: it is paid only to people who are working; and is more rooted in the history of offsetting increasing FICA taxes for low-income households than in the NIT experiments.

Obviously it's hard to prognosticate about the future, but right now the "more left" of the parties with credible possibilities of election success in the U.S. has chosen $400,000 as the income level above which taxes can increase. There's simply no way you can create a UBI on that basis.

> Obviously it's hard to prognosticate about the future, but right now the "more left" of the parties with credible possibilities of election success in the U.S. has chosen $400,000 as the income level above which taxes can increase. There's simply no way you can create a UBI on that basis.

$200/month UBI, while obviously not a full, mature UBI, would approximately equal the maximum benefit of general assistance (means tested welfare for adults without dependents) in most of the US, and could probably be done with net tax increases in only that range (though the increases would need to go beyond just “regular” income tax and also include things like ending the favorable tax treatment of capital over labor income.)

But, in any case, there is very likely a sea change coming in the Democratic Party, which is currently led by Boomers (and some Silents) who came into their political prime during and before the 1990s neoliberal consensus; the Boomer demographic wave is crashing and the Millennials (Gen X is both smaller and more Republican than the Millenials, so less relevant to the future direction of the Democrats) have a rather different understanding of political possibility not grounded in nostalgia for a bipartisan era that has long passed.

"Education does not fix poverty."

What the OP said was that education was once thought to be the magic bullet against poverty, much like UBI is now.

People always dream of solving complicated problems with "one weird trick". If it fails, another one will appear.

There is no evidence that student loans led to colleges raising tuition, as opposed to other causes.

No evidence?

https://www.newyorkfed.org/medialibrary/media/research/staff...

We find that increases in institution-specific subsidized (unsubsidized) loan maximums lead to a sticker- price increase of about 60 (40) cents on the dollar.

---

It is basic supply and demand. How could universities charge so much if no one could pay for it? They would have to lower prices.

Correlation does not mean causation. Tuition prices were already on their way up before 2007 (as the paper targets). I suspect that this is because in the 80s and 90s the data showed that a 4-year degrees increased income substantially, and tons of people applied for colleges.

Student loans and grants existed before 2007.

Did tons of people apply for colleges because they heard about the data?

I swear, the "facts" that are flatly asserted on this site, with zero questioning or critical thought, seem roughly equivalent to the "election was stolen!" facts that you find in other echo chambers.

The problem is Clinton making student loans undischargeable via bankruptcy. That meant it was risk free for lenders to give student loans. That meant institutions could double or triple tuition without any fears because everyone could get an easy loan.

The entire system is predatory and cancelling student debt is not the solution because it just means the lenders make all their profits off the backs of taxpayers. The real solution is to make student loans dischargable and for lenders to bear the risk of debt again. Then the markets will return back to normal.

I’m seeing 1976 as the date student loans became non-dischargeable [0] via amendments to the Higher Education Act of 1965. I think I know why you’re confused though because the Wikipedia entry on the Higher Education Act doesn’t include a section on the ‘76 amendments and instead skips straight to the ‘92 amendments (which would have been HW, not Clinton). Still, it looks like the parent poster is right that Clinton did make some questionable additions to the Act during his tenure in 1998 [1].

[0] https://www.tateesq.com/learn/student-loan-bankruptcy-law-hi....

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higher_Education_Act_of_1965

So unsecured personal loans? Those depend on your credit which most students don't have much/any and your debt-to-income which is normally infinite for students because they don't work. You would massively screw over kids whose parents cannot pay/co-sign a normal loan as it would force them to work and study.

Also, you normally cannot get very much with such low income and cherry on top, they have awful interest rates which range from about 6% to 36%. The APR on loans for borrowers with excellent credit is around 12%; it's about 29% for bad credit borrowers which students with no credit are likely to be.

Edit: If you work at target for 2 8 hour days on the weekend making 15 an hour and with a 36% debt-to-income ratio limit, you could afford a payment of $374.4 a month. $15,000 punched in a 30 year repayment at 29% interest rate equals a $362.57 payment with $0.07 interest. So you might be able to do it but it would hate to be working every single day between weekend work and weekly school.

> The problem is Clinton making student loans undischargeable via bankruptcy.

Bill Clinton’s first federal office was the Presidency, and he was sworn in in 1993.

The federal law that made student loans non- (well, actually, less) dischargeable was passed in 1976, 17 years before that, while he was running what would become his first successful electoral campaign, for Attorney-General of Arkansas.

That because you don’t understand the law. What Clinton did was make it practically impossible to discharge the debt. You can still discharge the debt today but it’s incredibly difficult and very rare. What Bill Clinton did was turn it practically impossible which is the problem.

> undischargeable via bankruptcy

What I don't get is why more people trapped by student loans don't just leave the country and set up life elsewhere. Debt is country specific. If you're in debt in country A, you can move to country B and start anew.

Undischargeable debt is only an encumbrance on income earned in the country in which you owe the debt.

First, it’s a lot to ask of someone to leave the country where their friends and family live. Many aren’t interested in doing that.

Immigrating elsewhere is also not easy if you’re in a less in demand profession. Of course these are the ones where it’s most likely to have unsupportable amounts of debt.

If you’re a US citizen, you are still required to pay taxes on your global income no matter where you live in the world. If you ever get a tax refund, it can be garnished for federal student loans that are in default.

"If you’re a US citizen, you are still required to pay taxes on your global income no matter where you live in the world."

The first 108 000 dollars that you make elsewhere are exempt. You can live quite comfortably in most of Europe on 108 000 dollars brutto.

A vast majority of people are simply not "trapped" to that extent. They're better off staying and paying down their debt with the increased incomes they can earn in the U.S. The unavailability of bankruptcy is only ever an issue for a small fraction of basically non-traditional students, either at for-profit colleges or pursuing some sort of professional education that ends up not recouping the expenses involved.

A significant, maybe half, Ill have to look of student loan debt is held by people who didn't graduate and thus gained no economical advantage from the debt.

And then the top 20 schools will only end up taking rich kids whose parents can pay/co-sign as I highly doubt they would massively cut costs and perceptibly decrease their rankings to make it cheap enough that lenders would risk giving loans to poor kids.

So I calculate da possible total cost that could be done in [0]. University of Chicago has an average cost of tuition after aid at $27,315 and that does not even include housing or food! 1-(15000/(27,315*4)) = a 86% reduction in costs and then you have to use the $665.6 of your weekend target money for food and shelter. They wouldn't even try.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30403200

[1]: https://www.google.com/search?q=average+cost+university+of+c...

Agreed. This is what is called "Socialism for the Rich".

Giving people money earmarked for education doesn't lift them out of poverty, because education is just a relative advantage in the job market.* A rising tide does not lift any boat's level relative to the water.

[*] In theory, education makes a society produce more on an absolute level -- but only in theory.

Giving people UBI is completely different. UBI is in itself a direct cure to poverty. The people receiving UBI are no longer poor at all. UBI abolishes poverty. You no longer have the issue of "the poor" anymore, as it's a category that does not exist.

UBI is like giving food to a starving person. It directly cures the starvation. It reverses the very condition of starvation itself.

Unlike the indirect approach to addressing poverty, there's no question about whether it would work. The remaining question is whether our economy depends on poverty as a negative incentive much like it depends on prison.

You explained why UBI wouldn't work in your own answer!

"Money is just a relative advantage in the market."

If everybody has $x, then competitive products/services will increase by $x in cost! (By "competitive" I mean those than cannot be easily scaled, like housing, education, medicine.)

All of those can be easily scaled though. They are all simply protected industries with entrenched incumbents weilding political power to maintain their status quo at the expense of everyone else. We could easily have 10x more doctors, houses, and quality educators if the artificial barriers to entry were lowered or removed.

That's irrelevant to the matter at hand. Scaling them has nothing to do with implementing UBI, and would be a good idea whether or not UBI is implemented. UBI simply does not solve the problem of poverty, or the poor having access to those goods and services.

Scaling them does have to do with UBI, because the argument above is that UBI would not work because the price of some goods and services will rise to compensate because they don't scale. If supply for these critical goods and services is instead increased alongside a progressive UBI deployment, then this wouldn't happen and we'd presumably in a better position afterwards.

When those are scaled, I'll gladly support UBI.

But then UBI won't be needed, as all these will be dirt cheap, like phones ($50 Motorola, not $1500 iPhone).

That doesn't make any sense at all. You need to do some thinking.

> Giving people money earmarked for education doesn't lift them out of poverty, because education is just a relative advantage in the job market.* A rising tide does not lift any boat's level relative to the water.

Not true. Every single software team I have worked on wanted to hire more workers but when they are paying me $350K a year, it limits how many people they can hire. If you doubled the supply of SWEs, you'd probably have 2 175k jobs instead of the one.

You can't double the supply by giving people more money for education. You still have the same number of people being bid for, no matter how many people get educational funding.

But there are poor people who work and have money already, most of them in fact. I am for UBI, but it's nothing like food to the starving. It's a safety net.

Poverty is literally defined as a lack of (low level of) income. You don't ever have poor people who have above-poverty income. That would be like having short people who have above-average height.

Only if price levels stay the same. If they don't, now you have 1000 dollars every month of UBI, but perhaps rent has jumped to 3000 dollars.

UBI would work ceteris paribus, but I am with Georgism on this one: the entire UBI would be eaten by landlords.

Not if you have a land-value tax, where landlords are literally paying for UBI, and even tying UBI amounts paid out to the amount of LVT raised, the higher the rent the more they pay in taxes, therefore the less they charge for rent the more they keep and it balances out...

This is literally part of Georgism philosophy.

True, but I rarely see UBI proposals coupled with land value tax. This combo could work.

I see it quite often but anyone against Ubi for reasons... usually stops responding when it does actually come up because it's an actual solution that might work and they don't want to even entertain the thought that it could be done... it they're rent seekers and would be hurt by it themselves...

It might. I am generally skeptical towards UBI being touted as a social panacea [0] [1], but I would be open towards trying to pull it off in combination with Georgist LTV.

[0] My main reason: there are countries such as Persian Gulf oil sheikhdoms where the citizens get free money or a least well paid jobs-just-in-name that someone else is actually doing, but there wasn't any explosion of personal freedom, social progress or artistic creativity there; a lot of the free money is sunk into drugs and conspicuous consumption.

[1] My next reason: you would have to exclude freshly arrived people, because if any place in the world becomes known for giving significant money to anyone for free, it will become a target of worldwide UBI tourism on an unsustainable scale. Already the people smugglers in Libya etc. are very good at presenting themselves as the "bridges" towards life in the richest parts of Europe.

one other idea I had was making a total new currency where citizens could only have one account, think - one bank account, that account then has a limit on how much total it could hold, therefore billionaires can't even exist in the system.

The coin would use smart contracts to tax all transactions but the tax rate is less for those who hodl less money (have less in savings) and for those who spend more per month (basically giving a leg up to those who spend like the poor, i.e. spend most of their money monthly...

if you combined this w/ govt georgist LVTs I think a fair system could be devised that still has people who are wealthy, but maybe 50 million is the cap, and maybe it goes up to 60 million when the average amount of monthly carryover in accounts is 10k, or something...encouraging more money to flow down, so the caps can go up... Something like this would need to figure out something else for business accounts to get ecommerce flowing and moving in/out of the system, since businesses can easily spend a billion a day or bring more than that in...

Haven't thought that far ahead. I'm also not a blockchain dev...so outside my wheelhouse..

Such poor thinking. Really disturbing when you think about the idea of democracy and requirements for informed public etc.

Absolutely. We'd be so much better off by semi copying Germany's culture of vocational training. And it wouldn't be expensive to do compared to the rather crazy sums we presently throw at higher education. Plus we very much need the skilled labor in a vast array of fields.

Fix K12 education first - that's where the highest plausible effects are. Vocational education can be a part of the picture, but it's actually really hard to do well.

You also have to fix the vocations themselves with better workplace safety laws, non-discrimination, health care, retirement, safety net, unions. A trades person is exposed to high risk if something happens to their bodies and prevents them from working a full career, or there's a cyclic downturn in something like construction.

It doesn't help that we are sending to college a lot of people who don't actually need it and won't profit by it.

The obsession with sending everyone to college was based on a correlation/causation mistake with college degrees and income levels.

I think it starts with a return to a progressive tax system with higher tax rates on upper incomes. In today's political climate, UBI would be dead on arrival.

Unpopular opinion: what the U.S. tax system needs is more progressivity at the middle class level. The U.S. has married couples with joint income over $100,000 per year paying a marginal Federal tax rate of at most 12%.

That's unfortunately the only solution. The wealth gap between poor and billionaires is irrelevant. What actually creates inequality is the difference between $150k and 60k.

I pay enough tax. I should not have to continue to pay more to make up for the frivolous government spending on "social justice programs", wars, more police, and bailouts for campaign donating companies.

More tax doesn't fix widespread, rampant, government corruption. The US takes in enough tax to have plenty of nice things. For citizens to see any benefit the military industrial complex needs to be defanged with prejudice, the US needs to pull out of all foreign police actions, etc.

The highways and roads I drive on are terrible. Let's start there. Why is that in such a poor state with me paying 35% marginal tax? Where is my money going? Yep that's right, "social justice consultants" and the military industrial complex.

On the UBI note it would never work out anyway. Yang's numbers were several order of magnitudes off similar to Bernie's healthcare numbers. We'd have to collect far more money than we could even with a progressive tax system and that's if we only offered it to actual naturalized citizens. If we offered to everyone who exists in America there's absolutely no way it would work simply by the numbers. These programs work in countries with defined borders, strong citizenship laws, homogenous cultures, and populations 1/10th the size of America. We are different. We need different solutions.

Absolutely agree about the tremendous amount of money wasted on the military and policing, but not sure why you’re putting “social justice consultants” in that same category, when they have many orders of magnitude less impact on the budget.

It's kind of insane how hung up you are on social justice consultants. How much of the budget do you think they take up?

People here love using buzzwords lately like "woke" as a nonsensical bogeyman for anything they don't like.

If we raised separate tax on land (that isn't a primary residence) and luxury property (aircraft, yachts, - anything exceeding 500k)...

Say you have a home you live in that's 300k. You also have a guest house you airbnb and make 50k/year on. There's considered 0 'value' in a primary residence, however you're making 50k/year value off your additional rent. So you'd pay tax on that, above and beyond any other tax.

If you have commercial or other real estate rentals you'd pay as well. The key is that you'd need to somehow peg the tax rate with inflation, and housing prices, etc...to basically make it a self-organized check-system to keep rents from rising, because rising rents means higher taxes.

Perhaps you actually tie the LVT to census data on homeless in a region, less homeless = less taxes, therefore creating solutions to that problem actually is a win:win...

> If we offered to everyone who exists in America there's absolutely no way it would work simply by the numbers.

I don't see why. You just appropriately set the amount paid out and the tax tier at which you cross into the red and are paying back into it. Are you suggesting that this threshold is barely above the poverty line? Because that's the only way it wouldn't actually work.

My marginal tax rate is already 50%. Why in God’s name do people think that the government deserves more of my earnings than I do? Every additional dollar I make busting my ass results in the government taking more than me. That’s sick.

I’m all for a flat tax with no tax loopholes but to increase my taxes more than I’m already paying is something I will never vote for.

Most people busting their ass working are the poor. Despite how they often present themselves, no CEO is working as hard as an Amazon delivery worker or warehouse supplier by any meaningful metric. The working poor of America are almost universally working more than 9-5 jobs to try to eke out a living, usually in high-stress critical work that is chronically undervalued (warehousing, delivery, EMT, nurses and orderlies, food preparation and serving, etc).

Not to mention, there is no way in which a worker can make a contribution to society that is literally billions of times greater than another. So, the fact the someone like Jeff Bezos can literally earn billions while others make pennies needs to be corrected theough a progressive tax rate - probably close to 95 cents on the dollar for every dollar over a few tens of million per year, like it used to be in America's golden age.

> there is no way in which a worker can make a contribution to society that is literally billions of times greater than another.

First of all, nobody makes billions of times more than anybody else. Bezos doesn’t even make a million times more than the average earner.

Second, sure it’s possible for one person’s impact to be thousands or tens of thousands of times higher than someone else’s.

Third, the point of taxes is not to change people’s income to better match the magnitude of their contribution to society.

> Third, the point of taxes is not to change people’s income to better match the magnitude of their contribution to society.

The point of taxes is to provide a society where the guillotine doesn't come out. When it does it won't be the Musks and Bezos' of the world that the masses stop at.

This is a popular idea, but guillotine-heavy revolutions were pretty rare in the Western world, and modern revolutions in general, successful or not, were often a consequence of a lost war, not of usual misery in peace. Losing a war is dangerous for survival of any regime.

Peasants' revolts are another story, but too far back in history to be an useful analogy for today. They were also beaten to bloody pulp most of the time.

The reason you are paying such high taxes is because the taxes on the ultra wealthy are so low. They have been constantly decreasing since the 70s.

No flat tax, but a simplified progressive tax would do great things for the country.

This person is ultra high income if their marginal tax rates are 50%. They didnt give numbers but using an online calculator [0] and assuming a high tax state (CA), you need to be above $500k a year income to hit 50% marginal rates. That is also assuming you are single, a married person would need a combined income nearly twice that to hit 50%.

[0] https://smartasset.com/taxes/income-taxes

Nobody who claims this ever gives concrete numbers.

How much do you think we could reduce taxes on middle and upper middle earners by increasing taxes on the ultra-rich?

I'm not the guy you're responding to, but I thought I had a reasonable strategy to simply calculate it. I can't do it for America, because I'm not sufficiently familiar with what data you have available and am instead going to do the analysis for Sweden.

In Sweden the labour share of GDP is 55%, however taxes on wages are 60% of the total government income, and a large remaining fraction of the taxes on work income. Another 30% is from VAT. Let's assume arbitrarily that half the VAT is paid by workers and not with income from capital.

Under this assumption, workers receive 55% of GDP in compensation before taxes, but pay 70% of all taxes.

If taxes on income were the same for workers as for capital then workers would pay 55% instead of 70%, so taxes would be 18% lower than they are now.

Its difficult to define terms like ultra rich and middle income earner, but my guess is that if you increased the top marginal tax rates such that rate on the "ultra rich" was something like 70% (including capital gains, etc), you could completely eliminate taxes for the bottom 50%.

The top 1% earners earned 21% of all U.S. income while paying 40% of all federal income taxes [0]. I would guess going from 50% to 70% would increase that share to would increase that percentage to 58%.

[0]: https://www.heritage.org/taxes/commentary/1-chart-how-much-t...

Old comment here, but I was assuming not just income tax to increase, but also to have capital gains, dividends, etc to be taxed at 70%. Current cap there is 20%, per my understanding, and a substantial amount of wealthy person's income is taxed at these favorable rates.

Can you show how you calculated that?

There was no such thing as income taxes until world war 1. So taxes increased ridiculously for 50 years and have been decreasing, as it should, ever since. I believe in paying taxes but not to my own detriment. I pay more than my fair share.

> There was no such thing as income taxes until world war 1

Federal income tax goes back at least as far as 1861: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revenue_Act_of_1861

> Every additional dollar I make busting my ass results in the government taking more than me

Maybe don't think of it as "the government" getting your money, rather that you're investing into a fund of your nation's future. The key is making sure that investment is well utilized, and that requires us to all be properly invested.

Much government spending is transfer payments and by definition consumption, not investment of any kind. UBI would be more (much more) of the same.

Where the government does investment activity it does a shockingly poor job, education being the clearest example.

Even assuming you live in a very high tax State like California, 50% marginal tax rate put you in, or close to the highest possible tax bracket. I live in a high tax state and earned above median income and my taxes (federal, state, medicare, and SS combined) was about 25% last year.

A flat tax with no loopholes hurts the poor more than it would hurt you, so I think advocating for it is antithetical to the goal of helping the poor.

I think most people who advocate for flat tax advocate for a single bracket: a flat percentage with a single income deduction, which is asymptotically flat. So e.g. take 15% of (your income - 40k). This would not hurt the poor.

> This would not hurt the poor.

I am always amazed by such statements. Are you sure you have thought this through? What do mean with “asymptotically flat”?

As with the poorly understood correlation/causation relationship in statistics, there are many common misconceptions about how absolute and relative amounts influence the result of mathematical calculations.

The following example may highlight this: Let’s say a person’s minimum financial need to simply stay alive and sane is $X. Now, take two almost identical people that only differ in their income: A’s income is bigger than B’s.

If you tax them both at a flat 15% (or any other rate), the richer will always benefit more from this than the poorer! The reason is because living, eating, and taking part in a society do not come for free.

Surprisingly, this is commonly not well understood and it also seems there are proclivities by some fellow rich and comfortable folk to intentionally avoid understanding this.

Proof by example: Let’s see what their effective tax is after all the cost to stay alive has been deducted.

Excess Income = Income * (1 - 15%) - X

Let’s say A’s income is $150k and B’s is $40k, and the minimum amount X required to simply stay alive (not being homeless and having health insurance included) would be $25k. These figures are obviously simplified but anyone can feel free to use their own numbers and repeat the calculation. The general result will remain similar.

Then, A’s excess income will be $102.5k and B’s $9k. Relatively speaking, A will have made almost 11.5 times the amount of excess income than B, despite making not even four times as much as B (3.75 to be exact).

Excess income will be the only thing both of them can use to save and invest, purchase a house, or use it for all kinds of safety-net building and stress-reducing things.

What about a flat tax, where everyone is required to pay 15%...however everyone is guaranteed a minimum of 50k per year income, so if you earned 40k, you'd get a 10k credit.... which would likely offset all the taxes you did pay.

I think CEO pay should be pegged to average salaries too, and their tax bracket pegged to the differential between average salary in their company and some universally accepted "happiness" wage ...(like 70k I heard a few years back, but is probably closer to 80k now)..

If the average salary in your company is 50k, then you need to pay 30% extra in taxes. There also should be some sort of conversion from stocks to assumed 'income', so that the rich can't just use stocks to subvert paying taxes...

I think securities-based lending should be subject to income tax too.

Everything you wrote is mathematically true no matter how you arrange your tax brackets unless you want brackets with negative marginal post tax income. So what is your point?

The point is (also mathematically speaking) that a flat tax is less fair to the poor than having a progressive tax with a zero marginal tax for incomes below what’s required for merely surviving (i.e. no tax for people without any excess income that can be saved). So there would be room for improvement but, as well-intended as it might be, a flat tax is not making things better for the poor.

You're changing the statement and also using bad logic. The statement was "does not hurt the poor [relative to the current situation]", not "make things better for the poor", or any standard of fairness you've arbitrarily picked. Moreover your logic is flawed, because, doing things one way or the other with taxation of the rich a priori has no effect on the poor, unless you are taking into account secondary effects like price inflation, but if you are I got news for you the government is fucking the poor in those sorts of metrics in far far worse ways than marginal effects downstream of tax policy.

If you're advocating a policy of "screw the rich to help the poor", you've probably never been poor. I have and let me tell you the least of my concerns was what rich people in general were up to with their money (except for the specific rich people that were keeping me employed)

> This would not hurt the poor.

Not sure I follow. I get the first order effects, but I'm hesitant to agree without an explanation of the second-order and systemic-level effects of such a policy.

There are other first order effects that government does (e.g Inflation, arraignments for infractions, vehicle infraction revenue cutting) that drown out those second order effects. Fix those first.

> that drown out those second order effects

What are those?

You suggested them. The only real one I can think of is price inflation, and that's like nothing next to the destructiveness of the fed.

If you don't understand why arraignments for minor violations are awful for the working poor, you've probably never been poor. When I was poor I was lucky enough to not be hurt by arraignments (flexible work hours), but boy did I have sympathy for those people who were relentlessly fucked by that system. There was always at least one of them whenever I had to show up at court, and it wasn't hard to figure out how they got into those situations.

Only for those so poor that they aren't really paying any taxes. It's been estimated that if there were a flat tax that it would only need to be 10% of all corporate and personal income to be effective. Most working class folks pay well over that in the US.

I think "all corporate income" is doing some heavy lifting in that description. It would be a hell of a trick to pass a bill that made business expenses taxable.

Expenses aren't income... But a VAT is basically a tax on business revenue.

You mean like the US? The top 1% earn 21% of all income and pay around 40% of all taxes. Or do do you mean it should be even more "progressive"? Might higher income people change behavior e.g. work less at the margins if that happens? Does that affect the total amount of tax income generated?

https://www.heritage.org/taxes/commentary/1-chart-how-much-t...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laffer_curve

The top 1% don't work for income. They aren't going to do an extra 10 hours this week because they need to save for a new boiler, so why would restoring tax rates to Reagan era rates result in less work being done?

The poster means the top 1% of income tax payers. Also: you pay income tax on income whether you work for it or not. Try leaving your 1099-DIVs out of your income tax return and see how that works out.

LOL "earn"

The top 1% take out of the economy a LOT more than they put in. Anything that limits their ability to "earn" is benefiting the rest of society. It is also benefiting the environment & future generations' resource availability.

No it would be better to have cities employ these people as gardeners in the park department. Or have them plant trees or work to restore habitat.

doubtful, it would just capture more surplus from those who are fortunate enough to have jobs and redirect it to people who could not find work, thereby making them dependent on UBI, worsening the problem.

People keep talking about UBI, but I've never seen a) who will pay for it and b) who will do the work if you don't need to.

Are you able to point to some sources for both answers? From an economics PoV I'm genuinely interested, yet haven't seen any resources take those two problems together seriously.

e.g. "our oil industry will pay for it", but then who would work the oil rigs?

a) Who would pay for it? We just spent TRILLIONS of dollars propping up businesses during COVID. No one asked "who will pay for it". We have the money and should think of it as an investment. So who would pay for it? We all would. Why? Because it is worth it and it is compassionate and it will make this country (U.S.) a better, happier place.

https://www.covidmoneytracker.org

b) Who will do the work? All the automation will do the work. They have kiosks up in McDonalds right now that mean they only need one person needs to be at a register. But as far as it disincentivizes work..nit has been show it does not, but still people cannot believe this.

https://rooseveltinstitute.org/publications/no-strings-attac...

"Overall, the programs analyzed suggest either no effect on labor market supply or a slight reduction in work and earnings. The evidence does not suggest an average worker will drop out of the labor force when provided with unconditional cash, even when the transfer is large."

>We just spent TRILLIONS of dollars propping up businesses during COVID. No one asked "who will pay for it". We have the money and should think of it as an investment.

We did that on a one-off basis responding to an unprecedented-within-generations public health emergency. No-one is seriously talking about that as investment; most every source that I have read suggests that the spending was poorly and indiscriminately targeted because it was done in such a headlong rush.

Nor do we "have the money". Deficit spending tripled from 2019 to 2020 and was only down from that level by 12% into 2021. This is the definition of "not having the money".

>The evidence does not suggest an average worker will drop out of the labor force when provided with unconditional cash, even when the transfer is large.

Even a "large" transfer in this s context is not nearly as much as UBI. The Alaska oil dividend was less than $1000 last year. The Gulf oil nations are the only ones that give enough free money for citizens to live off of, and in these countries are extremely dependent on cheap foreign labor.

> these countries are extremely dependent on cheap foreign labor

They are not "dependent" on cheap labor. They can afford to buy cheap labor with no sacrifice to their own people. This is a benefit of UBI in a world that does not have universal UBI.

They have slavery conditions worse than the American south, more similar to Guano mine slaves. They are entirely expendable, undocumented, locked into the worksites and subjugated by a state supported market. They are viewed as religious subhumans and treated as such, should they attempt anything by way of escape or complaining that can be cast into a religious based debtors prison for an indefinite amount of time with no trial.

Saudi Arabia literally butchered a major journalist. They have frequent public beatings and executions if actual citizens for minor infractions.

The modern Arab world's treatment of their imported SE Asian workforce is absolutely horrendous.

The official figure is that 6500 workers have died building the Qatar world cup stadiums. Applying a 10x multiple to that may still be low balling.

The sacrifice is that their people's livelyhoods completely depend on the price of the sludge beneath their feet.

> The evidence does not suggest an average worker will drop out of the labor force when provided with unconditional cash

Ok, that's fair. So the average income earner won't stop working. But what about the bottom end of the spectrum i.e someone just above UBI but who has to get up early and travel two hours each way to get to work, or who is just working to put food on the table - with UBI they now have a great reason to stay home.

So... what happens if a good chunk of people earning just above UBI rates just stops working because it's just not worth the ROI. You've ended up creating a vacuum which has to be filled. And how do you fill it? Traditionally you either import cheap labor or raise pay to incentivise applicants. Congratulations, you've just started the inflation engine.

There's no such thing as "just above" with UBI; the whole point is that you get to keep a non-negligible fraction of whatever you earn, no matter what. It only makes it easier for folks to join and stay in the workforce, even if all they can get is a marginal job.

> the whole point is that you get to keep a non-negligible fraction of whatever you earn

Australia already has this - you can earn up to (somewhere around) $18k per year and you won't get taxed. This applies to everyone. Is this what you're talking about? Because as far as I can see, there are still people under the poverty line here.

But if you're not talking about that, and you're saying that ALL should get $18k (for example) no questions asked, when someone earned $19k before UBI, do they now do the same hours for $1k, or do they keep their whole $19k? If the former, why bother working, but if the latter, you've now just given them $36k not $18k.

Perhaps the person who has to travel 2 hours to get to work would be able to afford to earn lower wages at a closer job. And then perhaps someone that lives closer to the job site would take the other persons original job.

Where is your evidence for all of this? I showed you mine. Your turn.

These are all just talking points.

I showed you mine

> The evidence does not suggest an average worker will drop out of the labor force

That's for the average worker. Show me what happens at the lower scale. Sorry, I'm not going to read a 25 page report right now, but as this does interest me, I am going to put this in my TOREAD list - genuinely, thanks for the link.

Edit: if you want evidence of disincentivising workers when there's no-questions-asked government handouts, look at food aid programs in Africa. There's no point to be a farmer when Free is your competition.

https://cals.arizona.edu/classes/arec514/groupproject/does%2...

The COVID spending was deficit-financed and certainly not paid for.

a) Who pays for the unnecessary structural costs that add friction to the economic system today?

b) Who pays for the jobs that are entirely parasitic and remove value - and add friction - today?

I don't think UBI implements a particularly good safety net without other measures - at the very least open education at all levels, open healthcare, open culture, open media, and open democracy.

But if you're implying that money exists to force people to work I'd consider the possibility that you're describing what is essentially a form of slavery. Or at least extreme political control.

It stops being slavery when people are free to choose what to do with their talents, abilities, ambitions, and interests, and when job markets value that contribution instead of - quite literally - attempting to minimise its value.

The fundamental difference is between finding and promoting people who are good at inventing and organising the future, and finding and promoting people who are good at controlling everyone else's time for their own personal benefit.

The latter is what we have now, and it's showing very clear signs of making far less sense as a stable system with a future than some UBI-adjacent scheme would be.

> But if you're implying that money exists to force people to work I'd consider the possibility that you're describing what is essentially a form of slavery. Or at least extreme political control.

Bingo. Many people do =not realize that calling money for labor "wage slavery" was a term used in the 1700's and was common even into the 1940's. It was even uttered by Hiddy in the 1940's movie "His Girl Friday".

-- Hildy Johnson : The next time you see me, I shall be riding in a Rolls Royce giving interviews on success.

Murphy , McCue, reporter , Wilson, reporter , Bensinger , Endicott : Goodbye.

Hildy Johnson : So long, you wage slaves.

Murphy , McCue, reporter , Wilson, reporter , Bensinger , Endicott : Bye.

Hildy Johnson : Well, when you're climbing up fire escapes and getting kicked out of front doors and eating Christmas dinners at one-arm joints - don't forget your pal, Hildy Johnson. --

So are people who do not want UBI are pro slavery? That is a good question. If you think about the one common complaint that UBI will mean people will not work, just this about that in the terms of a plantation owner talking about his slaves.

https://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/disp_textbook.cfm?smtid=2&...

"Because slaves had no direct incentive to work hard, slaveowners combined harsh penalties with positive incentives. Some masters denied passes to disobedient slaves. Others confined recalcitrant slaves to private jails."

They even tried instilling a "positive mindset" in the slave!

https://www.jstor.org/stable/2716797

How is this that much different than our current system?

Every action that I'm denied due to the inability to pay represents a curtailment of my freedom to take that action. I mean this in the most radical and all-encompassing way as possible.

A system is a function of its output. If the the enforcement of law represent the denial of physical access under threat of violence, markets represent the denial of economic access under threat of labor. In some ways this is more insidious, but less overtly violent and many parallel constructions hold. The simultaneous creation of race, and the theological justification for chattel slavery mirrors the creation of capital and the economic justification for wage slavery. The supporters of each alienate their involvement and perpetuation as "the natural order" when in fact it is a social system constantly recreated and socially reproduced.

You can start to see the same patterns play out in the digital space. Human agency is exported to computers in a way that builds systems that re-enforce this dynamic. "Computer says, 'No'"[1], is a perfect summation of this disavowment of human agency and human empaty from the systems we build.

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zFl6p4D59AA

I used to believe that UBI was a solution and even donated to Andrew Yang. After seeing the results of the pandemic and all the free money, I have changed my mind. I think UBI did everything that the critics thought it would, namely massive inflation because no one wanted to work and prices had to rise and now everyone is suffering from out of control inflation.

UBI is dead in the water.

The current rise of inflation is unlikely to be caused by the meager 2k checks that people got during the pandemic. It is much more likely to be a product of the supply chain crisis, which in turn was caused to a great extent by the known failure mode of just-in-time inventory management.

Also, the massive death toll of the pandemic, combined with singinificant behavior changes caused by fear of the same death toll, have left many industries reeling and redistributed wealth allocations in many people's budgets (away from dining out and tourism and into other places like gaming or real-estate), which had hard to measure outcomes.

Not to mention, prices for most goods are currently controlled by a handful of companies like Amazon and Walmart, who are in a perfect position to silently collaborate on increasing prices instead of taking a hit on profits like they would normally be forced to if they were in tight competition.

It was more than 2K. States tapped into the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance program, which added up to 600/week to existing unemployment rates, as long as your job loss was 'covid related'. In PA, for example, many were receiving over $1000/week. While that certainly doesn't make you rich, it's a strong incentive to not seek out other employment if your regular job only pays around that amount or less.