4 ms·

We already have the EITC, which is frankly a better version of UBI (it incentivizes working more and literally goes up as you increase your earnings). Expand t

by SR2Z 1y ago

We already have the EITC, which is frankly a better version of UBI (it incentivizes working more and literally goes up as you increase your earnings). Expand the EITC and tax capital gains as regular, inflation-adjusted income to pay for it and we've basically done it - a single Democratic administration could. In fact, during COVID, an increase to the child tax portion of the EITC reduced childhood poverty by _70%_ at a relatively low cost. Guess why we don't do that anymore? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earned_income_tax_credit#/media/File:Crs_eitc_2020.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earned_income_tax_credit#/medi... https://www.cbpp.org/research/poverty-and-inequality/expiration-of-pandemic-relief-led-to-record-increases-in-poverty https://www.cbpp.org/research/poverty-and-inequality/expirat... (US focused even though the article is Canada lol)

AnthonyMouse 1y ago
A large EITC is trivially converted into a UBI. Otherwise-unemployed people pay each other a salary to do whatever they were each going to do anyway and then the salaries cancel but they both get the EITC. Attempts to prevent this largely don't work against people who want to do the scam and just find a different way to structure it, but tend to be used as an excuse to e.g. screw legitimate self-employed workers out of the credit. The only reason this doesn't happen at scale right now is that the existing EITC is smaller than the amount of payroll tax you'd pay by making a given amount of money, i.e. it's not a negative income tax at all. If you're going to make it larger than that you might as well make it a UBI.