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A negative income tax requires the same sort of bureaucracy from our current means-tested welfare systems, whereas a simple UBI paid to all does not.

balfirevic 9y ago
It requires whatever bureaucracy you already have for managing taxes. If you are going to have taxes in your country, there should be no additional bureaucratic requirements. With UBI, it is possible to have it paid by entity other than government, but that's a different story.
- gremlinsinc 9y ago
  That's part of the problem. Bureaucracy. If we can streamline all handouts to UBI, replace the IRS and income taxes with a flat sales tax on all money out including business expenses, groceries, investments, etc. Replace ACA with single-payer or something similar, with government bidding on drugs and forcing drug companies to lower their prices. We could save a shit ton of money. We need to run government like a lean business, and we need some framework for bills that make them more like git branches, where you can't just push everything to master (i.e. an omnibus) but you need to break everything out into smaller removable parts. No more grouping things together. Make Congress work 40 hours per week ON voting and writing new bills, make them so busy doing their job they don't have time to go out and work on getting re-elected, the people will vote on them because they do a good job and like their voting history. Government is broken and bleeds money. $8 per ounce for a cup of coffee and $15 bagels from a caterer at a DoD outing is insane. How about we just make it bring your own coffee, or use a Keurig?
- PeterisP 9y ago
  In quite a few countries, the bureaucracy for managing taxes collects the income and social tax from employers, requiring and processing tax declarations from every (non-)worker would be a major change and increase. It also requires processing taxes much more frequently - an annual negative income tax payment isn't going to work, you'd need to split that to 2-4 weeks at most, so you'd need to process 12-24 "requests for negative income tax" every year for each person based on whatever income they had in the previous period; that obviously also can't be done without additional bureaucratic requirements.
dsfyu404ed 9y ago
>whereas a simple UBI paid to all does not. Well in that case before I die I will appear sufficiently senile/disabled to allow someone else to collect UBI on my behalf and tell my next of kin to dump me in a hole without telling anyone. I have plenty of time to iron out the details. See the problem. You'll still need a bureaucracy. It might be smaller depending on the implementation details of UBI. I expect the amount of welfare fraud to remain constant. Given X opportunity, Y risk and Z reward there's always some subset of the population that will have no problem stealing from the government.

balfirevic 9y ago

It requires whatever bureaucracy you already have for managing taxes. If you are going to have taxes in your country, there should be no additional bureaucratic requirements. With UBI, it is possible to have it paid by entity other than government, but that's a different story.

gremlinsinc 9y ago
That's part of the problem. Bureaucracy. If we can streamline all handouts to UBI, replace the IRS and income taxes with a flat sales tax on all money out including business expenses, groceries, investments, etc. Replace ACA with single-payer or something similar, with government bidding on drugs and forcing drug companies to lower their prices. We could save a shit ton of money. We need to run government like a lean business, and we need some framework for bills that make them more like git branches, where you can't just push everything to master (i.e. an omnibus) but you need to break everything out into smaller removable parts. No more grouping things together. Make Congress work 40 hours per week ON voting and writing new bills, make them so busy doing their job they don't have time to go out and work on getting re-elected, the people will vote on them because they do a good job and like their voting history. Government is broken and bleeds money. $8 per ounce for a cup of coffee and $15 bagels from a caterer at a DoD outing is insane. How about we just make it bring your own coffee, or use a Keurig?
PeterisP 9y ago
In quite a few countries, the bureaucracy for managing taxes collects the income and social tax from employers, requiring and processing tax declarations from every (non-)worker would be a major change and increase. It also requires processing taxes much more frequently - an annual negative income tax payment isn't going to work, you'd need to split that to 2-4 weeks at most, so you'd need to process 12-24 "requests for negative income tax" every year for each person based on whatever income they had in the previous period; that obviously also can't be done without additional bureaucratic requirements.

dsfyu404ed 9y ago

>whereas a simple UBI paid to all does not. Well in that case before I die I will appear sufficiently senile/disabled to allow someone else to collect UBI on my behalf and tell my next of kin to dump me in a hole without telling anyone. I have plenty of time to iron out the details. See the problem. You'll still need a bureaucracy. It might be smaller depending on the implementation details of UBI. I expect the amount of welfare fraud to remain constant. Given X opportunity, Y risk and Z reward there's always some subset of the population that will have no problem stealing from the government.