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Oh goodness, this thing has only been up for 40 minutes and it's already got 20 comments... I will say that the basic thrust of the article seems to resonate f

Oh goodness, this thing has only been up for 40 minutes and it's already got 20 comments... I will say that the basic thrust of the article seems to resonate for me, in that I did come to hear of UBI first because of a utopian ideal. In my case, it was tax policy. I was very interested in what sort of tax policy would be agnostic about your family structure, imagining a utopia where the government does not need to know about weddings and divorces in theory. If you still want to judge a household by its total income, as well as the number of people living in it, then the only option is to use a flat tax with a universal standard deduction being the only way to add any sort of progressive taxation structure to it. But with a little bit more insight, that deduction turns out to be significant if it creates a negative output: if you don't give people back this money, then your system is not actually family-structure agnostic. And with a little bit more insight, when you pair that deduction with that flat rate, you are giving everybody a universal basic income. One detail in the article also kindles some remembrance... The criticism “An affordable UBI is inadequate, while an adequate UBI is unaffordable.” I do remember trying to work out the numbers so that the IRS could still collect the same tax amounts on a flat-tax-plus-UBI model and indeed that was... underwhelming. You can just download their info split out by tax bracket and muck around in Excel, but yeah, I remember that if you cap the flat tax at 30% or so the UBI that this equal-IRS-income-tax-revenue assumption generated was... well, it seemed like not very much, heh. I don't think it would have improved the financial state of the bottom, say, 50% compared to progressive taxation; it helps out the bottom 10% way way more than progressive taxation does, and we either have to go to very high tax rates (shifting tax burdens more onto the rich) or just eat the cost at that middle-class level.

iso947 7y ago
Tax in the Uk pays no attention to your marriage or other domestic situation* A house with a £55k earner and a £5k earner will pay more in tax than a house with two £30k earners (about £2400 a year more, even without student loan repayments) *(There is an odd £200 tax break for people on lower tax brackets who can apply for a transfer from one person to another, but I think it’s going away)
PaulDavisThe1st 7y ago
I do not see how a flat tax is any more or less agnostic about family structure. Unless by "flat tax" all you mean "no deductions/credits for particular aspects of family life", which is not even close to what is usually meant by a "flat tax". "Flat tax" generally means that any income above whatever the standard deduction is (even if that is zero) is taxed at the same rate. That removes progressivity from the tax, which in turns is a reflection of the fundamental observation about the marginal value of income - the notion that an extra $1000 to someone who earns $20k a year means something very different than an extra $1000 does to someone who makes $20M a year. So if you're just arguing for "let's stop using the tax code to promote and inhibit certain kinds of behavior", then you should probably say that. If you're actually arguing for a conventional "flat tax", then I don't see what that has to with either UBI or "family structure".
dragonwriter 7y ago
> If you still want to judge a household by its total income, as well as the number of people living in it, then the only option is to use a flat tax with a universal standard deduction being the only way to add any sort of progressive taxation structure to it. No, you can just have a normal progressive tax, with the tax assessment unit being the household, and then distribute the taxes so assessed among taxed members of the household by some method (e.g., proportional to income.)

iso947 7y ago

Tax in the Uk pays no attention to your marriage or other domestic situation* A house with a £55k earner and a £5k earner will pay more in tax than a house with two £30k earners (about £2400 a year more, even without student loan repayments) *(There is an odd £200 tax break for people on lower tax brackets who can apply for a transfer from one person to another, but I think it’s going away)

PaulDavisThe1st 7y ago

I do not see how a flat tax is any more or less agnostic about family structure. Unless by "flat tax" all you mean "no deductions/credits for particular aspects of family life", which is not even close to what is usually meant by a "flat tax". "Flat tax" generally means that any income above whatever the standard deduction is (even if that is zero) is taxed at the same rate. That removes progressivity from the tax, which in turns is a reflection of the fundamental observation about the marginal value of income - the notion that an extra $1000 to someone who earns $20k a year means something very different than an extra $1000 does to someone who makes $20M a year. So if you're just arguing for "let's stop using the tax code to promote and inhibit certain kinds of behavior", then you should probably say that. If you're actually arguing for a conventional "flat tax", then I don't see what that has to with either UBI or "family structure".

dragonwriter 7y ago

> If you still want to judge a household by its total income, as well as the number of people living in it, then the only option is to use a flat tax with a universal standard deduction being the only way to add any sort of progressive taxation structure to it. No, you can just have a normal progressive tax, with the tax assessment unit being the household, and then distribute the taxes so assessed among taxed members of the household by some method (e.g., proportional to income.)