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For a sovereign currency issuer, taxation and spending are not operationally connected. Taxation serves to regulate inflation and unemployment. Too much taxat
by 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 agoEven without central planning, social security requires administration, auditing etc. The Social Security Administration alone has 57,000 employees.
- kaonashi 14y agoThe point was that they're not planning or interfering with production and consumption, merely passing along financing.
- argumentum 14y agoBut they exist, and take a salary and benefits, do they not?
- kaonashi 14y agoYes, 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 agoThat'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 agoIf 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 agoThe 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 agoSometimes the virtues of consolidating purposes are outdone by the virtues of redundancy. A single program is a single point of failure.