There is a much better way to do this, because the way we do it is entirely asinine.
On the one hand we say that people who make more money should pay higher marginal tax rates, and set marginal rates on lower income people to low or zero rates. On the other hand we demand means testing at lower income rates, which is equivalent to a tax on marginal income.
We should just let these things cancel out, using a flat tax that funds unconditional cash benefits (i.e. UBI) and delete an epic amount of unnecessarily complexity.
Isn't this already the case? It's true that you need to means testing to get access to additional benefits, but the tax rate itself is already progressive even if you don't any means testing.
Another way of saying this is that a flat marginal tax rate combined with a fixed-amount universal tax credit (UBI) is a progressive tax system. But it's a much simpler progressive tax system which is harder to game and doesn't result in unintended nonsense like phase out cliffs or higher marginal rates on lower income people than higher income people.
Meanwhile you don't really want low marginal rates when you're providing benefits, because then the benefits phase out too slowly. Suppose you were providing $12,000 in benefits and the phase out rate was only 10%. Then someone making $100,000/year would still be a net recipient of benefits, which would bankrupt the government. In practice the phase out rates we currently impose on the poor are higher than the marginal rates in the highest formal tax brackets, which is probably bad, but making them uniformly the same is certainly not going to result in something less progressive than we have now.
It's the same exact load as tracking everyone's income source to impose a flat tax. Taxing income is the same "tracking load" whether the tax system is progressive, flat, or regressive.
>That's a progressive tax system.
No it's a flat system with a $12k UBI. The effective tax rate of a millionaire and a billionaire is the same in your system because it's flat.
>but making them uniformly the same is certainly not going to result in something less progressive than we have now.
A million of income would pay 29.64%, a billion of income 29.99%. That's literally less progressive than those incomes would pay today.
It is not. If you go and work for a corporation and they pay you a salary without a flat tax, they don't know what your tax rate will be. It depends on whether you do any work for someone else, or sell any property with a taxable gain, or have any tax deductions, all of which change your taxable income and therefore your tax rate, so now you have to keep track of all of them.
With a flat tax the rate is always the same, so your employer withholds the tax from your paycheck, the seller of some deductible product simply doesn't pay tax on it to begin with, and there is no individualized calculation to do because the rate for each thing is always the same and known ahead of time.
> No it's a flat system with a $12k UBI. The effective tax rate of a millionaire and a billionaire is the same in your system because it's flat.
The effective tax rate of a millionaire and a billionaire are as much the same in the existing system. Someone who makes $5 million currently pays ~36% compared to someone who makes $5 billion who pays ~37% (because the highest bracket is 37%).
> A million of income would pay 29.64%, a billion of income 29.99%. That's literally less progressive than those incomes would pay today.
That has nothing to do with the mechanism, it's just because the example rate was 30% instead of 37%. You can make it arbitrarily more or less progressive by changing the flat rate and the amount of the UBI.
But also notice that you wouldn't need tax rates to be as high, because in a simpler system less of the money would be wasted on administrative overhead or arbitrary constraints on what the poor can do with the money which causes it not to go as far for them. And they would spend less time doing benefits paperwork which they could instead spend doing work that earns money, or use the time for DIY instead of paying someone else to do things they didn't have time to do. Allowing everyone -- including them -- to pay lower tax rates from the increase in efficiency.
Not saying it can't be solved, tie it to inflation or CPI, but I doubt that could pass.
If anything it's a reason to use it, because raising the amount that everybody universally gets would be easier to pass when there are more beneficiaries. Nobody cares about the minimum wage because hardly anybody actually makes minimum wage, whereas around half (and plausibly a slight majority) of the population would be a net beneficiary with a UBI.
I think UBI would need some sort of scaling factor but you can't just hand wave it away to some other corruptible government group.
This is not informative. The correct comparison would be of the marginal cost of eligibility testing (both in terms of false positives and false negatives) vs the marginal cost of fraud. In other words, whether the current cost of means/asset testing is more than the current total fraud is irrelevant to the economic case for reducing or increasing funding for eligibility screening.