6 ms·
While I was a proponent of UBI several months ago, I have found some irreconcilable flaws and would urge everyone to consider Progressive Guaranteed Income, a b
by stazz1 7y ago
While I was a proponent of UBI several months ago, I have found some irreconcilable flaws and would urge everyone to consider Progressive Guaranteed Income, a basic income for people below a certain "climb-out bound."
Reasons:
+UBI Robs from the rich to give to the poor... and give back to the rich a little bit. "Billionaires will die without UBI." It's simply not good nor true to the intent of BI to give money to people who already have plenty. "But means testing will cost so much!" Actually means testing if you earn less than C.O.B is not very expensive, and giving UBI to everyone is very very expensive. Something like 6-12x more expensive. (PGI with C.O.B. of 24k would cost $800B annually, UBI would cost 3.6T)
+aside from giving to the rich for no good reason, UBI causes an increase in commodity prices anytime the fund is issued. This is like having a highway turn at 340* and being very incensed when people crash because they are going too fast. There is no way to avoid a spike in commodity prices when giving UBI out and especially when you give it out to everyone, why? because everyone getting more money devalues money (for a brief while). See: Supply of Money (M0, M1, M2...) and the Kuwait attempt at UBI from 2011. They blamed their ministers of commerce for the crashes on the 340* turn, of course.
+ Value Added Tax is not good to fund B.I. of any kind because it's likely that this "luxury tax" will hit a lot of the recipients of the B.I. The Roosevelt Institute did a study on a potential UBI to "grow the economy / gdp by 12% annually" which is cool to consider, but one of the key assumptions is that a funding method like a VAT would not hit the households getting UBI. Plus, their study does not do UBI, just B.I. of different tiers. If the VAT hits the consumers who get the B.I. then it's taking with the left hand what was just given with the right.
+ In short: Don't give back to the rich. Don't make a VAT that taxes the poor inadvertently (B2B vat is the only vat we could support then it seems). UBI would cause commodity spikes during currency issuance and that's unavoidable, but the amount of issuance is proportional to spikes so: Only give B.I. to people below a Climb-Out-Bound. Give them ( C-Earnings )/ 2 to incentivize their working out of poverty.
Example: Climb-out Bound 24,000. You earn 12k, the government gives you 24-12 = 6k, and now you're at 18k.
The closer you climb out of poverty, the less you get, but you cannot get more than 12k, and if you work you'll make more than someone not working. Make sense?
Because what people fail to remember is the Federal reserve act of 1913 and its FEDERAL mandate that employment be kept at a running maximum (keep them ponies movin' raw hide).
+Progressive Guaranteed Income does not violate the 1913 Federal Reserve Act, but actually works with it.
- rcpt 7y ago> Progressive Guaranteed Income Doesn't progressive income tax make UBI progressive? But yes we should fund this with a LVT not VAT.
- marcosdumay 7y agoVAT is a highly efficient tax, very hard to game. But it's regressive. If you couple it with an UBI, you can fix the regressivity, and keep all the good parts. It's a way to make VAT good, not a way to make UBI good.
- stazz1 7y agoRight on. What does "regressive" mean in this context?
- marcosdumay 7y agoPoor people pay a higher share of their income than rich people.
- stazz1 7y agoAh, yes that is 100% true and likely to be true of any VAT implementation that hits consumer goods. If a VAT could hit B2B transactions only, it could be possible to "tax the tech companies"
- marcosdumay 7y agoThe beauty of a VAT is that there is nobody determining the difference between consumers and business, it's just transactions all the way down, with later ones verifying the earlier ones. If you start adding rules, it will stop working.
- stazz1 7y agoProgressive Income Tax on UBI != Progressive Guaranteed Income. For one, think about China back in the day when people all gave blood to the same vat, and then some contaminated blood caused some otherwise healthy people to get ungood diseases. Why collect first + distribute when there is cost in collection and cost in distribution? Just because I can move the fridge around my house all day does not mean it will not tire me out for other tasks. Same deal, money dries up in converting between "types" so it's not smart to Collect + Progressively Tax. Minimize motion, that's how you close the inequality gap, not by adding more oxygen-exposed piping that can be funneled, embezzled, exploited, and ridiculed. Compare: PGI means only some people get a monthly check for Basic Income, and its based on how much you earned (this year, last year) and you can future-withdraw from what you would get next year, take too much and you owe it. It's even smaller than the social security office and would actually close the inequality gap. If you consider the most naive argument: the absolute amount of paper is minimized, that might be a simpler way to approach how collect+distribute techniques lose a lot of velocity to friction. Trying UBI with Progressive Tax is also not the same because one is multiplication and one is linear addition. $1000 to someone wealthy is not going to move the needle, but for someone at the bottom of the barrel it will move the needle a great deal, maybe even multiple indicators will move for them at that point. Thus, money is not linearly equal, its value depends largely on how much you have already.