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Finland Begins To Shape Basic Income Proposal (yle.fi)
jones_supa writes: The Finnish social insurance institution is to begin drawing up plans for a citizens' basic income model. If eventually deployed after an experimental phase, the model could revolutionize the Finnish social welfare system. Under basic income all citizens would be paid a taxless benefit sum free of charge by the government. The proposal's director Olli Kangas says that the model would see Finns being paid some 800 euros a month in its full form, 550 euros monthly in the model's pilot phase. The full-fledged form of the model would make some earnings-based benefits obsolete, but in the partial pilot format benefits would not be affected, and housing and income support would remain as separate packages. We first mentioned this plan a few months ago, and at the start of the year touched on a program that tied a basic income program with the Fimkrypto cryptocurrency.
This is really the difference between capitalism as a means to exploit the weak, and capitalism as a means to voluntarily exchange for mutual benefit.
Most people want to work - I have enough money to never need to work another day in my life, yet I still enjoy being productive. Those who say they don't, and that they only work because they have to - those who project their negative image of themselves on the whole of humanity - those who, surprisingly enough, nevertheless seem keen with the idea of earning more than the minimum - are welcome to retire. And to see how it goes for them. Technology doesn't require everyone to be employed 40+ hours/week to keep everyone fed, clothed and housed.
I'm curious how inflation will not eat up most/all of this. I'm also curious how many people will simply decide to do nothing and live on the dole.
I think the intentions are good but I'm pretty dubious this will actually work and be net beneficial to society. Hope I'm wrong but doubt I am...
The problem with all these basic income schemes is that they will cause (or speed up) a gradual, but eventually overwhelming, shift in power from regular people to the super rich.
If you draw a simple diagram of how money must flow in the economy you will see that the only long-term sustainable way to fund a basic income scheme without creating massive inflation is by taxing the rich and/or the corporations that they own. This sounds great, until you realize that once the rich pay all the taxes and the rest of us pay virtually no taxes, the rich will effectively own the government. It will no longer seem corrupt when the government does their bidding. Kids will learn in school that the big corporation and their glorious and intelligent owners own the government fair and square and are the source of all of our wealth.
And of course, once the rich literally own the government the rest of us will pretty much have to settle for whatever they care to give us.
The current system is far from perfect, but it is a system where the government gets its money from the hands of regular people and therefore has to at the very least make believe that it is serving regular people.
I totally support something like this, and believe in the future, a basic income system will be inevitable in most modern societies. The current welfare systems are too complex, shaped by special interests, people exploiting loopholes, or gaming the system for benefit. There is too much abuse, wastage and a large chunk of the population feels a sense of resentment.
Shift to a basic income for all, and you now have a level playing field. It is more efficient, it is harder (or impossible?) to abuse, and no one can argue that laziness or poor health decisions or poor financial decisions are being rewarded. All, from CEOs to Rockstars to unemployed alcoholics are being given a basic income.
The two downsides to something like this :
1) It will be much harder to find individuals willing to do certain categories of high risk or menial labor. You would end up having to pay a LOT more.
2) Inflation for certain goods and services could eat away any gains that a system like this could bring. It is similar to how lowering interest rates does not increase house affordability or put more people in homes, instead it just causes house prices to go up and affordability to remain the same.
- Tempestdata
"all citizens would be paid a taxless benefit sum free of charge by the government"
But gee, where does the government get that money from? Of course, the citizens would pay, on average, multiple times that "benefit sum" to the government.
No, it's to have more than some lazy bum, or some disabled individual, or just to get that fancy new car you couldn't afford on a basic allotment. Why is that some people think if the basics are covered, nobody will strive for more, for luxuries, or whatever.
The 20 century model of paper work and bureaucracy to get welfare is inhumane, degrading and a waste of money.
If you remove the burden of the worry of income from people you open them up to turning their attention to working on things that they are interested in doing.
This is, in the long term, is a better economic model as it encourages growth in areas untouched or ignored due to fear of failure and hardship.
The capitalistic model is to ask for funding from investors to try something new and innovative.
The problem there is that you need to convince them they can get a return on their money.
Not all good ideas and great work should necessarily be locked down by investors or the need for monetary return/gain.
Where would we be without the free, and open source, software movements?
How much more productive, creative and efficient would our technology be if more of it was written for free?
B-b-but Reagan said it would trickle down!
If you don't want to pay taxes then go somewhere with no taxes (Somalia?)
Otherwise you have to accept that the majority where you live decided that taxes would be mandatory, and just like they decided that murder will be illegal the law will be enforced. With force if necessary.
Work to change it (good luck) or leave.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
If you don't want to pay taxes then go somewhere with no taxes (Somalia?)
You misspelled Greece . . .
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
>> would be paid a taxless benefit sum free of charge by the government
By the _government_? Really? Or by Finnish taxpayers?
Your selfishness does not offend me as much as your stupidity. "Your money"? What makes you think its entirely your money? You belong in, and benefit from, a society that gives you a foundation on which you can make "your money." Unless you handle your own water, sewage, transportation, security, etc. etc. you are directly and indirectly benefiting from having an organized society and government.
It appears stupidity and selfishness is a deadly combination, leading to idiots like you.
So, according to you, if the majority decides that slavery should be legal, we should just "have to accept that"? According to you, if the majority decides that Jews should be deprived of their property, liberty, and/or life, we should just "have to accept that"? That's the way fasicst think; it reveals a lot about you.
Somalia is such a rotten place due to European colonialism followed by socialism. Since the fall of socialism in Somalia, conditions have actually been improving a bit. Of course, Somalia still has taxes and government, it simply doesn't have a national government within the arbitrary borders drawn by Europeans.
you left off the sarcasm tag
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
You're never going to be the top of the food chain. There will always be someone above you who uses a part of your income or whatever to support the community as a whole. This can be done fairly well or poorly, but you're kidding yourself if you think that a libertarian wonderland is going to end up becoming anything other than a fucking nightmare.
You think you're self sufficient. You are not. You think that you don't need government. You do.
Libertarianism is fucking retarded.
And now to make your metaphor more realistic, let's count the loaves of bread that you acquire and those that the Finnish government takes:
1 loaf of bread is 1.77 euros.
In the fiscal year 2011 your first 8813 loaves of bread were tax free.
Of the next 4293 loaves of bread that year the government only took 279 (6.5%).
Of the next 8248 loaves of bread that year the government took 1443 (17.5%).
Of the next 17175 loaves of bread that year the government took 3692 (21.5%).
And every third loaf of bread from there.
Now, I don't know how much bread you eat, but I wouldn't go hungry because of those taxes. But I understand that whining about being able to get 1 yacht instead of 2 doesn't get the same sympathy...
There is a huge difference between "winning the lottery" and "basic income".
Some people would be happy to sit at home and do nothing except watch TV all day. So?
Other people would keep working in order to afford more options.
Some would keep working because they enjoy the job they do.
Some would keep working because they were not happy sitting at home watching TV all day.
The question is, is the group of people who are happy-not-working large enough to bankrupt the group of people who would keep working?
By your logic, you should never have to pay rent either. You have entered into a contract and in return from certain state-provided services you pay taxes. In case you didn't know, you can enter into contracts through conduct even though I'm sure you have done it many times - e.g. by parking your car in a certain lot. In the case of taxes the conduct is that you choose completely freely to reside in a certain area in which you indeed do benefit from what is funded through taxes. Your example further fails for you as an individual because the history in your case is that you received a shitload of services and benefits before you were even able to defecate on your own - let alone wipe your own ass. You got protection from foreign military threats, criminal threats and had e.g. emergency services were you to have needed them. All that was set up before you were born so you cannot argue as if a bunch of people got together and set it up now against your will. And before you were able to produce any value whatsoever yourself, you had received a lot more. But unlike a typical landlord, you're perfectly free to leave (any Western democracy) without paying anything back of what you have received. You only need to pay whilst you choose to stay and benefit from the state (and if you cannot pay because you don't earn anyhing, you don't even get "evicted" - you don't even have to pay then!). Now, on a more general level it's obvious to any rational person that your system (anarchism/libertardianism) fails because no such society has survived as is evident by looking at the world. If you wish to prove me wrong you can go to the handful of unclaimed areas in the world and do whatever you like there. Attract like-minded people perhaps? If your system is as good as you imagine, it should turn any such area into an appealing place for many. Personally, I suspect, though, that you'd at best reach a Somalia level of society. If there's no enforcement mechanism of your precious property rights, it's indistinguishable from a situation in which you don't have property rights. Then whoever has a bigger gun than you, gets whatever they want from you. And I suspect that that would be a lot more than current taxes.
This is the next step for a modern post-scarcity economy and society - the ultimate consolidation of wealth transfer into one basic package. I wish Germany would be this close to conditionless basic income.
But with Pegida, the ongoing Greece bailouts and the conservative right crawling out of their holes and popularising conspiracy theory bullshit and fascism once again, I'm afraid Germany is moving away from this sort of thing again.
It's a shame actually.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Murder and taxation are quite different things.
The Economist once quipped that taxation is like plucking a live goose for feathers for a pillow: You want to get the maximum amount of feathers, with the minimal amount of fuss. This is why there is no point in taxing the rich . . . they will just park their cash in the Cayman Islands or wherever. When I read the story about Cassini's Dive Through the Geyser of Enceladus, I actually thought that this was a scene from rich international corporations to hide their profits there.
Anyway, I think the "Monty Python" crew summed it up best with their sketch that suggested, "I think that we should tax foreigners living abroad!"
Everyone loves a tax that the think someone else is going to end up paying for.
And they all love "free" benefits and entitlements that they think cost nothing to nobody.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Murder and taxes are not so different. If one person, or a small group of people, control all the resources everyone else starves to death. Taxation and more generally limits on what an individual or group of individuals can down and control prevent that.
You also have to remember that you are not entitled to monetary wealth by some kind of natural law. Money only has useful value because society recognizes it. You were only able to enjoy your wealth because society enabled you to. Even if you live self-sufficiently off the land in your remote cabin somewhere, society provided an army and legal system to protect you. In exchange for this, you are required to pay taxes.
As I said before, you want to opt out then you need to get out. Otherwise, no matter how self sufficient you are, you are still ultimately leeching off society without holding up your end of the deal.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
At some point, those that are doing a disproportionately greater amount of work than the rest will say "to hell with this" and stop producing
At some point, those doing the work will all be machines. If they go on strike, we'll have bigger problems. :)
There has to be incentive to work.
Fear of homelessness or starvation is not the best incentive to work. It's only enough to keep someone showing up; it's not going to produce much inspired output. At some point mankind needs to advance beyond the slave "he who does not work does not eat" mentality and find more meaningful reasons for working.
Things that are given without being earned have no value.
I'm sure you'll keep that truism in mind if you're ever starving and someone offers you some food.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
Except in this case it's really more like:
10 Government takes money from me at the point of a gun
20 An army of bureaucrats takes out their cut in exchange for processing the paperwork at $100,000/year plus pension
30 Whatever's left goes to some people who may or may not be starving, it comes with strings attached in the form of EBT vouchers that can be exchanged fraudulently for cash, piss tests, a requirement to waste employers' time by showing the umemployment they've filled out job applications for jobs they don't actually want, etc. etc. etc.
40 Goto 10
And what's on the table involves cutting out the middlemen, like this:
10 Government takes money from me at the point of a gun
20 An army of bureaucrats is summarily fired and gets $800/month the same as everyone else
30 I also get $800/month of it back, which is better than tne $0 I get back now
40 Goto 10
If you have a libertarian objection to UBI, might I remind you that none other than Milton Friedman endorsed something very similar in the form of a negative income tax.
The money you have earned probably came from either a business you own, or a job you were hired to do. Both exist *at all* because of the stability and safety of the place in which you live. You owe all of that to the taxes paid by people who came before you, and by your neighbors.
You sound ridiculous, reaping all these benefits and then insisting that it is morally wrong for you to pay for them at the same rate everyone else does.
Taxation is the price we pay for civilization. If you don't like it, too damn bad, because the rest of us do.
There is no such thing as 'natural law' in the first place. Money is store of value, medium of exchange and unit of account, the question is not about money, the question is about the time of a singular individual on this planet and why should any amount of time of that singular individual be stolen from him by the collective to supply some other individual or individuals with the fruits of labour that the time of the first (taxed, robbed) individual has produced?
The answer is obvious: because the mob can gang up and kidnap and kill any singular individual.
When you say 'society' you mean the mob, because except for the mob and its violent representative government there is no such thing as 'society'.
'Go to Somalia' is a silly proposition, people do go where they can to avoid taxation, it doesn't have to be Somalia, all that it has to be is a place where the taxes on production and thus robbery of life by the mob is lower.
You think that it is not happening? USA has no productive capacity left because of that happening over the last 40 years, as the mob votes in government that promises to steal and redistribute, especially after defaulting on the gold dollar in 1971. The tax of inflation is what drove business out of USA, not just other income and wealth related taxes. At least originally those insured that people spent everything instead of saving. The lavish business offices, expensive buildings, expensive furniture, whatever business expenses - so much of those are a complete waste and would not happen if the tax system did not make it totally worth while just to spend money instead of saving it for the rainy day.
The mob has destroyed the ability of individuals and businesses to save and destroyed the very concept of sound money with all that taxation. Eventually the only tax that could be applied in that system is the tax of Inflation, but for people with means this is the tax that can be avoided fairly easily. It is the poor who suffer the most from inflation, not the wealthy.
This Finnish experiment is going to speed up the eventual (and inevitable) collapse of their economy, there is no question about it, it's just a matter of time. Given the current movement of various African and Middle Eastern immigrants around the world, it is the exactly wrong time to start experimenting with more socialism, because even the most staunch socialists understood that international socialism and Marxism is completely and utterly unsustainable in a very short term even, which is why those were replaced with national democratic socialism in Germany just after Keiser and we all are aware of the path that the world took after that...
You can't handle the truth.
Conservative Canadian here, and I support the idea of minimum income to a point. The reason I do is because we are already wasting money on salaries for case workers who decide who is needy enough to warrant welfare payments. We also pay money to process and jail people who commit crimes of necessity. By cutting out the bureaucracy of wealth redistribution we could implement a system where people are paid a minimum income.
Also our current system introduces a perverse incentive for people to not look for work while taking welfare or employment insurance. If you do get a job then you are kicked off the program right away. If you loose your job again after 3 or 6 months then you have to go through the application process all over again. This means that people don't want to take the risk of loosing their benefits so they don't look for work. If everyone was given a basic amount we wouldn't have that problem so people would be free to look for ways to increase their incomes.
Also we could do away with the idea of minimum wage. Since everyone would already be getting a basic amount then employers could pay people what they thought the work was worth. This could then open up opportunities for people with disabilities or other issues that prevented them from holding regular jobs.
Because there are lots and lots of bits of work that people do, that do not involve taking collective resources.
No, there aren't. Because every adult in the country has benefitted (and continues to benefit) from the services that are automatically provided to every resident: military and police protection, fire prevention and suppression, the legal system, public schools and universities, roadways, bridges, airports, curbs on pollution, water and sewage systems, enforcement of property rights, regulations and inspections that keep the food supply safe and affordable, building codes, communications infrastructure, air traffic control, automotive safety regulations, public libraries, the Internet, etc etc etc. All of those things require collective resources to implement and maintain. It's just that they work so well that many people have forgotten that without taxes they would not exist, and now take them for granted because they can't imagine life without them. Hence the emergence of entitled libertarians whining about the government "stealing" their work because they are too comfortable to notice all the benefits that they are receiving in return.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
The Fore people of Papua New Guinea subscribe to your principle. They share nothing outside their closely knit extended family clan. Absolutely no taxes and no sharing with anyone. No rules either, they will kill each other. That is why they remain small undeveloped brutal tribe in some land. They will never build a city. You are worse than Fore. You don't even understand how the mere existence of government and peaceful conflict resolution benefits you. Please leave America to civilized people like us and go live with the Fore.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Your money is actually the property of the US government, it is supposed to represent hard work, but there is no correlation whatsoever with hard work and there never has been. This is about equity, in Scandinavian countries equity is enforced via tax, the richest people earn ~10X the poorest. it's a kinder capitalism where the phrase "working poor" doesn't make sense - in other words hard work is rewarded by the tax system, luck and greed get you nowhere near as far as they do in the US.
Of course this idea would never fly in a nation where taxation is widely perceived as a form of armed robbery.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Except it's true? Every cent a person makes relies on society to function for its value. Money is a artificial construct that is used to signify an entities value to society. Government contributes to society (and can also be a detriment, mind) and allows a working person to function within it so it gets a cut. Don't wanna share your cut? Well fuck you buddy, if you aren't gonna play ball with society, make a raft and head out into the ocean because society ain't gonna play ball with you.
I tend to think of it a bit differently.
In my view of things, in any democratic society governed by the rule of law, people can only become as wealthy as the masses are willing to tolerate.
Maybe some of those who are rich managed to get there by hard work and talent, or maybe they were born into it. Either way, the only reason that the rich are able to stay rich, at a fundamental level, is that every other person in that society is willing to tolerate it. If the poor become angry enough, they will basically either steal all the shit that the rich person has by force, or just outright murder the fucker by forming an angry mob and going after them.
The basic income scheme can be viewed as the rich and powerful having enough foresight to see this possibility and trying to placate the mob sharing the wealth.
Besides, it also helps to keep in mind that those who are truly wealthy are in a position that which country they chose to live in is a near trivial matter of choice. If you have a billion dollars in the bank, and do not like the taxes in one place, you can afford to move to another place with a more hospitable tax regime.
END COMMUNICATION
Haven't we already played this game?
After WWII the West and the Soviets split Germany. East Germany has socialism, where everyone's needs were provided for. West Germany had a capitalist system, where people got what they worked for. Well it didn't take long for people working in the East to figure out that they could do much better in the West, so they left. Yes, some of it was politics, yes some of it was about freedom. But the Berlin Wall wasn't built to stop political activists, pensioners, university students, or those in need of longterm care from fleeing. It was to stop professionals: engineers, technicians, physicians, teachers, lawyers and skilled workers. The drain of those with the largest net contribution to society was crippling the East German economy. So they built a wall to stop them. It's not an accident that most socialist countries enforce(d) exit visas.
Here in Canada we already enjoy a brain drain of our medical professionals. Why stay in Canada with lower incomes and higher taxes, when you can jump across the boarder and make out so much better. And I predict that Finland will see the same thing. Many Fins already speak Swedish and English so the barrier to exit is low. If you are a high paid professional why lose a huge chunk of your income to those who don't work when you can leave via the Schengen agreement.
Now might say that it won't cost extra because we will cut funding in other programs. Well that's bullshit. But don't take my word for it, or the media's word for it, sit down and do the math yourself. Basic income that provides any meaningful level of income is crazy expensive, well beyond what a few cuts here and there is going to cover.
You might say that only a few people care enough about higher taxes to leave. And you would be right. The problem is that it is the people who pay the most taxes who are going to leave. And when they leave the tax burden on those who stay goes up. Which creates more incentive for people to leave. It's a vicious cycle where the highest taxed leave and the next highest tax bare the burden.
I'll leave you with a thought experiment. Let say a nice liberal state like Vermont decided it's going to implement basic income, but no other state in the union follows suite. What do you think would happen?
Most people I know would MUCH rather not work even if it is good for them.
I think it would be more accurate to say that most people would much rather not work at shitty, tedious, mind-numbing, soul-destroying, low-paying jobs that they hate.
I suspect that most people would happily work at a job that fit their interests, and that they found psychologically rewarding; the problem, of course, is that most jobs (and especially the kinds of jobs that are available to untrained/uneducated people) are of the tedious and mind-numbing variety.
On the optimistic side, computers and automation provide us with the opportunity to let machines to the tedious necessary work, freeing up people to find jobs that are more compatible with their own tastes. Of course, it's likely that many of the jobs that people would choose for themselves would not be particularly economically productive -- in a previous era, they would be referred to as "hobbies" -- but that is not a problem in a society where machines provide a surplus of wealth so that humans no longer need to be dragooned into service on threat of starvation.
If nothing else, being able to quit a job you hate without fear of starvation and/or homelessness frees people up to look for a different kind of employment that they would like better, and it frees people to get the education necessary to do that job competently. The endgame is a society with more people doing jobs they want to do rather than jobs that they are forced to do, and therefore a society where more people are enthusiastic and therefore good at their jobs.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
Wow, where do you get such a negative attitude toward taxes?
Look the best way to look at it is the following: just by existing, you require stuff. Food, clothing, shelter, and then the slightly more luxurious things such as heating your home in winter (unless you use lumber you chopped yourself exclusively), or using internet to leave the comment. Unless you don't use the internet or electricity and don't have a job and feed yourself exclusively through farming, then you use or require something provided by the public.
Oh, but "I pay for my own internet/electricity/whatever", right? Something like $1 of every internet bill I get is a "Universal Access Fee", which gives people in the middle of nowhere access. Why? because business decided that it's not worthwhile to support you, and we as a society decided it was worthwhile to do. So, we pay a fee (tax, really) that subsidizes costs. Electricity is generated from things dug up from the ground, and that may have caused environmental issues to another region. To be fair to them, we help them clean it up. Goods are trucked in via roads that were paid for by the public. Your healthcare, even if you paid totally out of pocket for doctor and medicine, largely came about due to the US government guaranteeing student loans for doctors (otherwise, banks would not provide such a large amount of money with no collateral) and the fact that public tax money helps subsidize medical research (even if that research ends up owned by a private company, but that's an ethical issue for another day...).
Essentially, by existing, you require stuff, and some of that stuff is not something a free market will support. Too much risk, not enough reward, whatever. So, we as a society get together every once and while and say "Well this needs done anyway, so if business won't do it, how do we pay for it?". We negotiate a small amount every citizen pays into the pool to do these things, and send everyone a bill for the services. This bill from the government is called "taxes".. What, you expect everything to be for free?
Taxes is the bill you get for society to provide you with a modern lifestyle. Now the nice thing about it is that this bill is somewhat negotiable; through voting and our system of representatives, you are more than welcome to be part of the process and haggle for cost and even which services we consider important enough to do/offer. If all you do is complain online and never be involved in government affairs, you're kind of missing the point of living in a democratic society.
So, stop complaining and pay your damn bills. If you're not happy with the service/cost, feel free to get involved in government and change it. At least you have a chance with government... if you're unhappy with your private sector service, they just tell you to get lost.
because the mob can gang up and kidnap and kill any singular individual.
Welcome to reality. The only morality that exists in any meaningful way is the morality shared by those with enough power to enforce it. In our society, neither you nor I have that power.
In which case, your only hope is to influence enough people by persuasion to make your morality the dominant one.
Given the way of government growth, you've failed in that task.
Persuade harder.
When the gang of 7 show up at your house, you stand aghast as they explain that you need to give them some wood you have in the back. Wood you chopped, dried, and wanted to use for firewood that winter. And when you fight them?
Why is it your wood? Did you call the land on which the trees grew into existence with the sheer force of your will? Did you design the DNA of the trees? No. Somewhere many generations ago someone came along and said "This is mine." And then some earlier "Gang of 7" started enforcing some artificial notion of "property ownership" because they thought it was in the collective interest.
True freedom would be anarchy - law of the jungle - the strong take from the weak simply because they can. In a world of true freedom, anyone who was stronger than you could come along and take your wood simply because they were stronger.
Property ownership is not freedom: it is actually a limit on freedom - not that that's bad - we do need to place limits on freedom. But, fundamentally, the point is to set up a society where most (ordinary) people can live out simple comfortable lives. And limiting freedom through things like property ownership is a necessary evil. But so are taxes.
At the end of the day, it's all just random chance and the laws of physics. But we can impose artificial "laws" that make things better for most people. But these are not natural laws: they are artificial laws for our collective convenience.
Someone clearly has no concept of how modern society works, or what a social contract is.
The government and you have an agreement. The government provides basic services, like roads (to deliver your things to the stores you shop at), schools to provide education up to grade 12 for not just you but for the people around you so those people can get good jobs and afford the things you make or the services you provide at your job, writes laws which set the rules by which all those living around you should abide by so you don't have to kill each other when a disagreement happens, and neutral law enforcement to administer said rules. In return you pay a portion of your income. The more you gain from society the more you pay. This is called a social contract.
If you don't want to pay your taxes you are welcome to not do so, and the government will not take it from you by force. However you are then canceling the social contract with the government and therefore must leave the territory it governs. If you want to stay but not pay taxes, well then the government is upholding their end of the deal and you are not; they are entitled to take what is due per the agreement by force.
But to build a park bench? Buy art? Take money and give it to everyone, even if they don't need it? Give money to warlords, overthrow foreign governments and put puppets in place of them? Build, create, and do all sorts of non-essential things?
You're acting like you don't get anything in return for that taxation. Not only do you get a nice park (which you may or may not use) but you end up living in a nicer area (which you may or may not care about) but at the end of a day there's every likelihood that close proximity to that now nice park with benches has increased property value which is something that has a direct impact on your financial base.
You give people basic income, that can have a benefit as well in the form of them not trying to sleep on your front lawn or breaking into your house overnight and stealing your food for survival. As for overthrowing foreign governments come back and cry to me when you pay a proper price for your resources. America doesn't overthrow governments for shits and giggles, the running joke is the only government safe from America is one without oil.
Hard work and money are unrelated (in a US style economy).
That's not just a common-sense interpretation of the world around me, it's a mathematical fact. Somewhere on the internet is an economics paper written by a physicists. In it there is a thought experiment where every time anyone leaves the house in the US they take all their money with them. Whenever they meet another person they throw a random amount of money at them, and the catch all the money thrown at them. The resulting income distribution curve within this hypothetical economy very neatly mirrors the income distribution in the US, the smoking gun is that the size of an individual's pile is unrelated to the time spent outside the home.
On a common-sense level, if wealth was related to effort there would be no such thing as the "working poor" - who (in my experience as a past member) actually work a hell of a lot harder than you and I.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
...and, again, that "94%" wasn't really 94%.
You really, REALLY need to learn the difference between "marginal" and "effective" tax rates.
"Marginal" would be the "94%" you think they paid. "Effective" would be the much, much lower number they actually paid (30% or less), because they could deduct pretty much EVERYTHING, including that company-supplied summer house (with full staff), the nice apartment in the office building (along with staff), chauffered limo, et cetera - and those benefits weren't taxable, like they are now.
Right now, the marginal rate for someone making a million dollars a year is about 39%. The effective rate is about 29%. Yeah, you might note that rich people are paying about the same percentage on their incomes. You could also notice that middle class and below is paying less (while the bottom quartile or so is getting, effectively, a ten percent bonus from negative taxes).
Capital gains taxes were also much lower than marginal rates - half or less, and in many years, there was NO taxation on many long-term capital gains. There were a lot of (perfectly legitimate and acceptable) ways to avoid paying taxes on what we would call "income" now, but wasn't considered such back then.
I don't understand the concept that if I have a loaf of bread, that I worked all day for...
I may be able to help there...
Money isn't something tangible, like bread. Money is a game token. It's like D&D hit points. It has value in the context of game, because other players are playing by the same rules. My dwarven cleric has 43 hit points, and my American corporation has three million dollars. Same principle.
If you just bake a loaf of bread, nobody cares. But if you convert your bread into game tokens, then other players will expect you to play by the game rules. If the local game rules include a tax on your tokens, and you hide tokens under the table, then the other players might accuse you of cheating.
Now, I'm not saying our local game rules are perfect. Maybe they'd benefit from a revision. But if you start thinking of money as something real, rather than as a game token, you're going to get confused. You're speaking in terms of "stealing," when you should be speaking in terms of revising rules to improve the game.
On the separate question of whether our game rules should include tax, I'm not an expert. But I found a list on of countries by taxes as a percentage of gdp. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
For the most part, countries on top half of the list seem like nicer places than countries on the bottom half. There are exceptions, but overall it's hard to deny the trend. So I'm not sure lower taxes actually lead to a better-functioning game system.
Right now, I pay a lot of taxes. If I moved to Hati or Guatemala, house rules would allow me to accumulate tokens faster. But I'd rather stay here. Our local rules seem to make fo a better game, despite the annual drain on my tokens.
"The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries." - Churchill.
Imagine restricting financial misery via the tax system so that the least financially miserable people can only ever aspire to having (say) 10x the (personal) income of the most miserable, is that too much sacrifice for the least financially miserable to bear in the US? The people in Finland/Norway/etc don't seem to think so, they already have that kind of system, and they have consistently topped "standard of living" charts for decades.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
The US Supreme Court would likely still rule slavery to be illegal and in violation of equal protection and other clauses.
Majorities are insufficient for passing laws that deprive citizens of fundamental rights.
No, sorry, utterly wrong. In fact, no major democracy would allow slavery to be reinstituted simply because a majority wants that to happen.
Funny how some parts of the inelastic demand can still move up in value...
That's because housing has extremely inelastic supply in many areas, especially in areas where people want to live.
Most other things that poor people pay for tend to have elastic supply, so those prices are not going to increase by any noticeable amount.
Taxation is the price I pay for civilization. I live in Texas, where it may be a crime to have more than four dildos... but barring a statistical anomaly, I am not going to get shot up or robbed when I leave my residence to go somewhere. My car rides on a well maintained road, and driving to another city doesn't mean worry about bandits or roadblocks.
Contrary to the local Libertarians, who actually want the state to stop maintaining roads unless the people using them pay for the trucks... government has its uses. Paying for a security patrol, treaded vehicles to go down unpaved roads (Max Max style), electric fences, water, waste water, power (especially the heavy amperage A/Cs require) would be extremely tough for an individual. I don't mind a relatively small chunk of my taxes (under Reagan, more than half your income went to Uncle Sugar) going to keeping the violent guys well away from me.
I pay my taxes happily. Sure a lot cheaper than carrying an AR-15 around just to make it from the house to a store without getting robbed or killed.
Read your Constitution, all it takes is 3/4ths of the States to amend it and those amendments can do anything including removing all the other amendments including first 10 that make up the Bill of Rights and the 13th, 14th and whichever other ones made slavery illegal. Once the Constitution has been changed, the Supreme Court has to make rulings in line with it.
In a democracy all it takes is a strong enough majority to change things, 3/4s in the case of America I believe.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
Unless you're willing to live on the South or West side of Sacramento, your one bedroom is gonna cost you about $800/mo. You gonna eat and have electricity, hot water and be able to buy soap for $200/mo?
It's cutting it pretty close.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Even if you live self-sufficiently off the land in your remote cabin somewhere, society provided an army and legal system to protect you. In exchange for this, you are required to pay taxes. As I said before, you want to opt out then you need to get out.
Get out to where? There's no free land left where you can plant a flag and declare your own independent nation, not even in Somalia. And in any foreign country you wouldn't even be a citizen, if they'll even permit you to come. Surely the strongest claim is to your birthplace and homestead. Let's face it, every country has a strong hypocrisy when it comes to its own existence. The US seceded from the British Empire. The US refused to let the Confederation secede from the union. The only way you "get out" is with enough military force to stop those trying to keep you in. Or to use a classic analogy, it's two wolves and a sheep where the sheep wants to declare independence and create its own laws to protect it from becoming dinner. But the wolves have democratically decided the sheep can't secede. It's the tyranny of the majority, where the majority has also decided who gets to be counted.
You got an alternative?
A Libertarian Utopia is untenable in the long term, because with no government to enforce contracts businesses have very little idea what they've agreed to do, employees have very little idea what their employer has agreed to provide for them, etc. And if somebody is screwing someone else there's virtually no recourse.
Especially if the screwer is wealthy (say, your cable company), because they can just pay a couple goons to beat the shit out of the screwee (say: you) until you stop whining about the bill. Now you can band together with your friends to beat up the Cable Company goons, but you've just recreated the tyranny of the majority.
And soon enough you'll have a real welfare state, as the majority does not like it when Grandma starves while the Cable Company heirs eat Dodo eggs from the flock they spent $157,000,000 recreating with advanced genetic engineering techniques.
You ever heard that old entomologist joke that Communism is the perfect system for ants? Libertarianism would also be great. For domestic cats.
For us big, hairless, empathetic apes the options are pretty much a) Democracy with some sort of Mixed Market economy and b) Dystopian hellscape. Any option c) will turn into a) or b).
You can be self-sufficient without growing your own food, shooting your own burglars, and building your own roads.
Okay, I'll bite... how?
One can make the argument that any time a group of people come together and pool resources to achieve a goal like a road or like collective security it's a form of government. A Homeowners Association is a form of self-imposed government. A town is a form of self-imposed government, at least at its initial charter by the people that lived in an unincorporated area and chose to incorporate it.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
So? The GDP of Finland is .3 trillion dollars. The GDP of the USA is 16.77 trillion.
It is redistribution of wealth. When people hear that they freak the fuck out. It's an uneven distribution of wealth. Your six or seven or however large income isn't going to be split evenly.
In America wages have stagnated and productivity has skyrocketed.
Quite frankly as long as being poor doesn't suck and isn't humiliating, I don't care how bad the gap between the wealthy and poor gets. If the economy grows, everyone wins in that model. Granted, if the economy shrinks, everyone loses but people hit the ground in less critical ways.
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
Given $x, large number (fortunately, not a majority, but a disappointingly large number) of people seem to be unable to budget for a place to live or food to eat. They will spend their money on things like gambling, booze, drugs, get-rich-quick schemes, fortune tellers, and other scam artists (or perhaps shady financial advisers), and we will still have to bail them out.
The real question is it better to give people raw money (e.g. basic income) or vouchers that they can only spend a certain way (e.g., the current bureaucratic welfare system). The answer will depend on where you are in the political spectrum. If you want to bail these people out anyhow after they fritted away the basic income money, you are a liberal, if you resent that basic income was wasted and want to control what they spend you are a conservative, if you don't think the government should be in that business in the first place, you are a libertarian.
FWIW, in my opinion, I think the real problem is giving people "basic-income" money w/o teaching them about money. You can see this problem in 5-year olds, and 21-year olds and sadly 50-year olds. Giving out basic income w/o teaching people about money would be like giving your 15-yo the keys to a car w/o driving lessons. Sure, some of them might know enough to drive already (and have been driving since they were 12), but odds are, most still would need practice as they still make mistakes and then there's always the question of what do you do with the small percentage of them should never be behind a wheel?
IMHO, there should be a benefits licence for basic-income. If you can't pass the test, you get state-welfare instead. Also, like a driver's licence, there should be a learners-permit time where someone has to "drive" with you before you are allowed to go on your own. In addition, even when you are on your own, if you "crash" too many times (e.g., need supplemental welfare because of poor budgeting), your licence for basic income should be revocable. It should be a "privilege" to get basic income, not a right. The right is to simply survive.
However, I'm sure that's not how this is going to work anywhere. It will simply be organized as a "block-grant" welfare program because the liberal politics behind it.
I don't disagree, but what constitutes "the basics"? To my way of thinking the basics are
1) Food - simple staples like flour, root vegetables, legumes, inexpensive proteins, milk, and seasonal fruit. No chips, soda, factory-made pastries, etc. The WIC program is a good starting basis for this.
2) Clothing - no luxury brands, just the basics.
3) Climate-controlled shelter (heat in the winter, A/C in the summer)
4) Transportation appropriate to the area - a mass-transit pass for cities with functioning mass-transit, a bicycle, or fuel-coupons to help off-set the expenses of gasoline.
5) Healthcare - preventative medicine, yearly check-ups, emergency surgeries.
6) Landline phone - for calling employers about jobs when you've decided you want a better standard of living.
Payment for this should be in the form of vouchers, rather than cash to the individuals. If the taxpayers are footing the bill, then the taxpayers have a right to know their money is being spent on the things they approved it to be spent on.
The problem I foresee is people continuing to stretch the definition of "basic" to include things like cable/satellite TV packages, or high-speed Internet access, or smartphones. To be clear, I'm not saying everyone on welfare has an entitlement mentality, nor am I saying entitlement mentality exclusively applies to those on welfare. However, unless we, as a society, figure out a way to either curb the entitlement mentality or have the backbone to say "no" to folks who continually attempt to stretch the definition of "basics", the minimum income is always going to get stuck in the craw of those who work.
Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not entirely sure about the universe - Einstein
Actually a faster road to the downfall of society is having an ever growing part of your society hating the other part. That over time feels more and more distanced and disenfranchised. That over time attacks the included part of your society, cause increases in wasted expenditure such as security, police forces, incarceration and insurances. That over time causes a net economic drag on your society that far exceeds the cost of the welfare in the first place.
Think of welfare as societies insurance. If you insure your car and your house you should insure your society with welfare.
There's no free land left where you can plant a flag and declare your own independent nation, not even in Somalia.
You can plant your flag anywhere. Even Somalia. The issue is that if the area you can defend is 10 square feet in a back alley in Somalia, it won't be considered a nation by the UN. That's never been the case. The first 10 people in the US couldn't have declared themselves to be an independent nation. They first had to have enough people to defend the area. If you bought a large army and were the largest warlord in Somalia, then you would be able to plant a flag and be independent. Military coups have happened pretty much just like that.
There hasn't been open land like you describe for thousands of years. Even when England claimed Singapore, an uninhabited island at the time aside from migratory fishermen and such, Malaysia and China instantly claimed it when someone was interested. England defended the claim and held it until they surrendered it to Japan, who showed up with more guns, and England never took it back. It followed the path to independence after the Japanese relinquished the claim at the hands of the American military.
What you are wanting never really existed. If you could get there to claim it, someone else had already claimed it in almost every case. Or, as happened with many small uninhabited pacific islands, the moment you claim it, someone else asserts a claim, so any way you cut it, you have to be able to defend it to have sovereignty. And even those established for a long time require a military to defend it, or someone else would claim it.
Though, if you buy land in the middle of nowhere Alaska, there'll be no tax on it, so you are "sovereign" in that if you can live off the land, it's likely nobody would ever bother you. That's about as close to sovereign that you can get in this day and age.
Learn to love Alaska
If you don't want to pay taxes then go somewhere with no taxes (Somalia?)
You misspelled Greece . . .
Greece has taxes. They were just not very good at collecting them...
Somalia is such a rotten place due to European colonialism followed by socialism.
Just because dictators love calling their party "Democratic People's Republic" or "Socialist party" doesn't mean it is. Yes, the military dictatorship called itself "socialist party" but it was never socialist. That was never tried. And the fact that you have no idea of the basic government or economic system there speaks for itself.
Of course, Somalia still has taxes and government, it simply doesn't have a national government within the arbitrary borders drawn by Europeans.
Yeah, it has warlords and theft. Though this is in a thread about taxes being theft, so that may be appropriate.
Learn to love Alaska
Yeah, and North Korea is a Democratic People's Republic. They say so, so it must be true.
Learn to love Alaska
Greece's problem is more that rich assholes think they needn't pay the existing taxes and government siding with them.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Yeah, Anarchy is the only real way! With a tough and mighty Anarch on top...
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Saskatoon just a few years ago spent about $120k/year/homeless person in medical and policing costs.
A single bedroom unit in an apartment complex goes for about $600-$1200 depending what building you rent in. A half decent unit would be about $800 - only $9600/year. That is peanuts compared to the medical/policing costs and would provide opportunity to have a place to shower and sleep, take whatever medication they need and find work. I do think this could exacerbate the cost of living and some amount of inflation if large droves of people fall onto government assistance with no capability to work.
The alternative is pretty much the equivalent of killing the poor in some odd sociopolitical passive aggressive manner.
It's ironic that the blue collar guys I've worked with in the past who keep berating people on welfare or social assistance will likely need medical care past retirement that could easily surpass 10 years of working full time. The economic burden isn't your local homeless drunk - the baby boomers in long term care are.
Stop it. The OP doesn't have a problem with taxes in general (nor do i, i like roads and fire departments), he specify doesn't like working to provide from himself then being forced to give it to someone that could but chooses not to.
I don't disagree, but what constitutes "the basics"? To my way of thinking the basics are ...
Payment for this should be in the form of vouchers, rather than cash to the individuals.
You are completely and totally missing the point of a universal basic income. We have already tried it your way.
The current system is a hodgepodge of EBT cards, Obamaphones, bus passes, Medicare, low-income housing, and ten thousand other independent, dependent, and partially dependent systems which require a massive army of government workers to administer, because people like you demand that each and every nickel be tagged and tracked and audited and squeezed until Thomas Jefferson shrieks, resulting in endless cycles of stupidity of waiting in government offices to prove for the 14th time eligibility for some benefit or other that is worth so little that we're basically paying the beneficiary minimum wage to stand in line. Forever.
It's ridiculous.
A universal basic income, done right, dispenses with ALL of that. Nearly all of those government workers are laid off, the remainder doing the job of administering the new system, which consists of four questions: Are you a citizen? Are you alive? Have you reached the age of majority or are you an emancipated minor? What are your bank account details?
That's it. And every single person in the country, poor or rich, employed or not, including you, who can answer those three questions in the affirmative and provide their details, gets money every single month. Verify the questions once per year, and if somebody dies in the middle of the year, we don't care. Their heirs get to keep the extra payouts, because it's more trouble than it's worth to us to try to get it back.
And the laid off government workers? Instead of becoming homeless because they're jobless, they become beneficiaries of the plan, and most of them will go find a different job anyway, one that's actually productive. The people being paid to wait in line can now get jobs too, without endangering their benefits. Many of them will. Many marginal part time jobs will get filled that previously went begging, because they needed work done, but not enough work to live on. Now people can perform those jobs, and never miss work because of an appointment with some bureaucrat who wants to quibble over $12/week in EBT that they might not be eligible for anymore because they moved in with their significant other who has an Obamaphone, but might get to keep because of subsection d) of part 3) of rule e) of this year's new rules but it can only be backdated 3 months unless they've been beneficiaries for 6 months or less in which case it's 4 months blah blah blah...
There are two major questions to answer in the design of such a system. Should the minimum wage be eliminated? And should the benefit accrue to every natural person regardless of age, the benefits of minors being administered by their guardians?
Both answers depend quite heavily on the amount being considered. If the amount is inflation-indexed, using an honest valuation of inflation, and really does cover living expenses, then it's not just reasonable but actively desirable to eliminate minimum wage laws entirely. Marginal jobs can be filled by labor working for a mutually agreed price, with actual mutual agreement, instead of the one offering wielding the whip hand over the one accepting. I suspect this will drive a generational sea change in the attitudes of management to labor, where the flaming dickheads who enjoy being tinpot dictators will discover that no one at all wants to do the work they want done. Actual effective managers (not necessarily nice, but effective) will be able to get the workers they need, from the niche to the massive, and overall societal happiness will probably be measurably better.
If the amount being considered is enough to support minor dependents, only people who can answer the three questions