let's take this to the logical extreme: - everyone gets a flat payment - in order to support this, taxes are raised on income - ... however, ostensibly this

let's take this to the logical extreme: - everyone gets a flat payment - in order to support this, taxes are raised on income - ... however, ostensibly this is progressive (read: not flat and scales up with income) insofar as we don't want to tax those who just received necessary payments so, the best we can end up with in a theoretical world is a negative income tax by another name, with the 0% tax rate exactly at whatever the "living wage" is for NYC. this seems largely like means testing by another route (what is a "living wage?"), but i guess it's simpler than bolting on another welfare matrix with cliffs, rules and such. pragmatically: good luck getting there.