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Negative income tax is a good idea only if it replaces all the other forms of redistribution. Otherwise you are just adding another middleman bureaucrat who mov

Negative income tax is a good idea only if it replaces all the other forms of redistribution. Otherwise you are just adding another middleman bureaucrat who moves wealth around rather than creates it. It's main benefit is that it could cut out a lot of the bloat in government, while keeping a floor for the least fortunate amongst us.

FD3SA 14y ago
Agreed. Ideally, government services would be completely self serve (via web apps), and all current government employees would be laid off and put on Negative Income Tax benefits. Law would be non-profit, as would healthcare, and there would be severe limits on legal complexity. In a nutshell, the government must be engineered such that form follows function. Currently, it has become a malignant tumor that grows for the sake of growth itself. Until we agree that government must be leanest of all institutions, we will continue to fall into this ever deepening quagmire of bureaucratic impotency.
kaonashi 14y ago
For a sovereign currency issuer, taxation and spending are not operationally connected. Taxation serves to regulate inflation and unemployment. Too much taxation, you get high unemployment and idle output capacity, too little, you get inflation. In a situation with a general lack of aggregate demand and high unemployment, adding a minimum income would work similarly to a tax decrease on the extreme low end of the income scale. I'm not sure what the windging about middleman bureaucrats is about. Look at something like Social Security, it's direct payouts to beneficiaries, so the decision making is left to the beneficiaries as to what to buy. No central planning, just let demand and markets do their work.
- argumentum 14y ago
  Even without central planning, social security requires administration, auditing etc. The Social Security Administration alone has 57,000 employees.
  - kaonashi 14y ago
    The point was that they're not planning or interfering with production and consumption, merely passing along financing.
    - argumentum 14y ago
      But they exist, and take a salary and benefits, do they not?
      - kaonashi 14y ago
        Yes, there is going to be some overhead in administering most anything, I'm not sure I see the point you are trying to make.
        argumentum 14y ago
        That's exactly the point. Since there is always going to be overhead to administer anything, does it not make sense to have less things to be administered?
        kaonashi 14y ago
        If you're making an efficiency argument, then it really depends on the details. You could conceivably have 10 programs that are horribly mismanaged, and 100 that are well-run.
        argumentum 14y ago
        The more programs you have, the more you have to manage the managing of programs, making it less likely that any one program will be well-managed.
        kaonashi 14y ago
        Sometimes the virtues of consolidating purposes are outdone by the virtues of redundancy. A single program is a single point of failure.

FD3SA 14y ago

Agreed. Ideally, government services would be completely self serve (via web apps), and all current government employees would be laid off and put on Negative Income Tax benefits. Law would be non-profit, as would healthcare, and there would be severe limits on legal complexity. In a nutshell, the government must be engineered such that form follows function. Currently, it has become a malignant tumor that grows for the sake of growth itself. Until we agree that government must be leanest of all institutions, we will continue to fall into this ever deepening quagmire of bureaucratic impotency.

kaonashi 14y ago

For a sovereign currency issuer, taxation and spending are not operationally connected. Taxation serves to regulate inflation and unemployment. Too much taxation, you get high unemployment and idle output capacity, too little, you get inflation. In a situation with a general lack of aggregate demand and high unemployment, adding a minimum income would work similarly to a tax decrease on the extreme low end of the income scale. I'm not sure what the windging about middleman bureaucrats is about. Look at something like Social Security, it's direct payouts to beneficiaries, so the decision making is left to the beneficiaries as to what to buy. No central planning, just let demand and markets do their work.

argumentum 14y ago
Even without central planning, social security requires administration, auditing etc. The Social Security Administration alone has 57,000 employees.
- kaonashi 14y ago
  The point was that they're not planning or interfering with production and consumption, merely passing along financing.
  - argumentum 14y ago
    But they exist, and take a salary and benefits, do they not?
    - kaonashi 14y ago
      Yes, there is going to be some overhead in administering most anything, I'm not sure I see the point you are trying to make.
      - argumentum 14y ago
        That's exactly the point. Since there is always going to be overhead to administer anything, does it not make sense to have less things to be administered?
        kaonashi 14y ago
        If you're making an efficiency argument, then it really depends on the details. You could conceivably have 10 programs that are horribly mismanaged, and 100 that are well-run.
        argumentum 14y ago
        The more programs you have, the more you have to manage the managing of programs, making it less likely that any one program will be well-managed.
        kaonashi 14y ago
        Sometimes the virtues of consolidating purposes are outdone by the virtues of redundancy. A single program is a single point of failure.