And my point is that certain beliefs may be conducive to radicalism while others just aren't; rather than radical-some-religions being a problem and radical-other-religions not. Even if you just say "radicalism" means "violent fundamentalism" (and I'd argue that that's a subset of the broader sense of "seeking rapid change" -- they're pushing so hard to change things they'll use any means to achieve it, even violence), if you're saying that Jains don't get violently fundamentalist, then what you're saying is that there aren't radical Jains. Not that Jain radicals aren't so bad. Just that they don't exist.
Which maybe makes Jainism not so bad, compared to religions like Islam that are prone to radicalism, which I get is your point. I'm just nitpicking that saying "radical Jainism isn't a problem" is only true if you mean "there aren't radical Jains", where the person you were replying to was saying "anything, if radicalized, becomes a problem", so saying that something like Jainism doesn't tend to become radicalized doesn't refute that. If there were radical Jains, they would be a problem.
Yeah, same here, I leave my phone on do not disturb basically all the time and check my voicemail when I feel like it, and if someone doesn't leave a voicemail, they obviously didn't really need to talk to me that much.
But we're in the minority, and the default behavior is that your phone screams "HEY! HEY PAY ATTENTION TO ME! HEY! SOMEONE WANT TO TALK TO YOU! HEY! STOP WHAT YOU'RE DOING RIGHT NOW AND PAY ATTENTION TO ME!" when a voice call comes in, while a text just says "hey, when you got a sec...?"
Radicalism in general means the promotion of drastic, sudden, intemperate change. That's always a problem; big changes to society, where they should be made at all, need to be made slowly, carefully, cautiously, conservatively. If Jains are not advocating such drastic, sudden, intemperate change, then there just aren't radical Jains to begin with. But if there were, they would be bad.
There's no such thing as "good religion", there's just mostly-harmless religion and worse religion. The defining characteristic of religion is faith, which is tantamount to appeal to authority -- if nothing else (perhaps sometimes at worst), one's own authority -- and appeal to authority is always wrong, because it shuts down reasonable discussion and so inhibits the finding of real solutions to problems.
Now, there's are a lot of religious people and religious groups who do a lot of good things and have a lot of good qualities, sure. But those things are not dependent on their religiosity, and if you removed the religion from those people and groups and left the good parts, they would be even better.
Still no excuse to ban religion though. That would itself be authoritarian and so just as bad as -- quite worse than, in many cases -- religion itself.
I'm not anti-gun -- I don't own any, I don't especially feel comfortable around them, but I don't let my feelings get in the way of my intellectual commitment to a broadly liberal/libertarian stance -- but I find the argument you're attempting to rebut compelling and don't see anything in your rebuttal that actually assuages the concerns it raises.
I imagine myself, if I were the type to carry a gun, being in that club and hearing a shot, scanning the room looking for its source, finding a person with a gun drawn and pointing across the room, and across the room somewhere in that general direction is a dying person on the floor. And I ask myself now, before I draw my gun, is this person with their gun drawn the one who just shot that person on the floor over there, or are they another good guy who's already spotted the actual shooter? Should I draw my gun on them? They look like they're about to shoot; does that make them the bad guy, or does that make them about to shoot the bad guy? Should I draw and fire? Seconds are passing, someone is probably about to die, if I don't act right now it might be the wrong person, but if I do act then that might make it the wrong person who dies and then it's my fault, what do I do?
Note that I'm assuming here, contrary to the first impression of the original version of this argument, that the good guys with guns are sensible enough not to immediately draw and start waving their guns around when they hear a "bang", but to first wait, like I am in this scenario, to identify a target they're about to draw on. I'm not drawing my gun yet specifically because I'm aware that it might make me a target to the next-slowest armed good guy to react. But I've still got the quandary before me of whether the target I've identified who appears to be about to shoot someone is a bad guy, or just someone like me about to shoot the bad guy, and I don't know what to do in this situation to neither escalate the very problem vexing me by drawing my own weapon, and possibly kill an innocent myself, or to instead let a possible innocent get shot in fear of that.
Which is only an issue if you live in a swing state where there's any uncertainty in the election. If you live in, say, California, it doesn't matter how you vote, the Democratic candidate is getting all your state's electors no matter what. So given that, what do you have to lose voting third party, if you actually prefer a third party? Nothing. What you have to gain, on the other hand, is the major parties looking at how their votes stack up compared to previous years and, if they lost some, who gained those votes instead; and if, say, the Democrats lose a (insignificant in the election but notable to their analysts) chunk of votes to the Greens, they will start adopting Green policies to court those Green voters.
If you live in a non-swing state, not voting for a third party is throwing your vote away, because you neither change the outcome of the election (which you weren't going to do anyway) nor do you influence policy at all, you just confirm for the major parties that they're on the right track as they are.
I agree this sounds like bullshit overall, but with a salary like that, the savings he claims are not absurd boatloads, especially given the amount of time in question. He has about two years' pay saved up, over six years. Since I last hit rock bottom three years ago, I've accumulated about a year's pay in savings. And he's making significantly more than me, so probably can afford to save away a larger fraction of his income than I could.
...is making five times the threshold for counting as the 1%, which is already eight times the mean income, which is already twice the median. I'm not too worried about the tiniest fraction of a percent of people who are the absolute richest of the richest of the rich, when even the richest of the rich, not to mention the rich, not to mention the middle class, aren't getting hit nearly that hard. (See below).
Taxation can and does serve many purposes, and is traditionally justified by spending on infrastructure and public goods like defense.
Funding public goods by income taxes is redistribution, of exactly the same structure as a basic income is: you give everyone the same, equal benefit, and put the burden of paying for it on those who can most easily bear it. The public benefit of a basic income is the elimination of poverty, and with it loads of crime that comes from poverty, and the expense of that crime and of fighting it, as well as the increased economic activity that comes with a public that's able to consume more, as well as produce more because they can afford to take risks, as well as the economic benefits to small business of being able to eliminate a minimum wage, and the increased productivity from the increased number of jobs that come with the elimination of minimum wage, and the elimination of lots of government spending from the reduced overhead of all the other programs that the basic income can supplant. The public benefit of a basic income is a better society in many, many ways, ways that everyone benefits from, just like everyone benefits from highways and the coast guard.
But you aren't just taxing "billionaires" an extra 25%, you are taxing everybody an extra 25% on their earned income, which is going to start hurting them when the extra $1000 you give them amounts to the 25% they will have to pay, or about $4000/month ($48000/year of earned income). So, your promise that your taxes are only going to hurt Scroogy McScroogeface are wrong.
Because the 25% we're talking about is of the mean income, that threshold is exactly at the mean income by definition, which is currently a bit over $50k. However, because the distribution of incomes is far from normal (in the statistical sense), that mean is way above the median, around the 75th percentile. So the middle class that you say you're so concerned about, the middle half of Americans, fall entirely below that threshold; as do the bottom quarter of course.
Furthermore, because of how this works, you get or lose more depending on your distance from the mean, and because we have such a skewed distribution of incomes, even most of the people above the mean aren't making much above it. I thought I already posted these figures earlier but maybe that was a different subthread: the next doubling above that 75th percentile, people making between the mean and twice it (between around $50k and $100k), are the next 20%, meaning that even someone at the 95th percentile would only see their taxes go up (minus the UBI they receive) by 12.5%, on top of about 21% they're paying now for a whopping 33.5% tax on the top 5% of people only. Of those 20 percentage points above the mean, 15 percentage points make under $75k, and would pay (in extra taxes minus UBI) between 0 and 8.4%, with even the ones at the top, paying that 8.4%, doing so on top of their existing 19.4% for a whole ~28% taxed. On only the second-highest twentieth of the population.
The bottom line is, way more than a supermajority of Americans altogether are below the threshold where this would cost them anything rather than help them, and even of the minority who are above that threshold, most of them are barely above that threshold and so would still pay very little, and it's only when you get to the tiny single-digit percentages that it becomes anything of note, and only the even tinier fractions of a percen
You missed my follow posts correcting some errors, but you're making an even bigger error here, in not multiplying by the number of people in each category.
From the point of view of the state, you have:
1) A cost of 10,200 * 10 = 102,000 2) A cost of 3,286.67 * 170 = 558,733.90 3) A gain of 220,244.45 * 3 = 660,733.35
660,733.33 - 558,733.90 - 102,000 = 0.57, which is a rounding error.
And also of note: that 220,244.45*3 is only about 13.5% of the 4,860,000 GDP of this hypothetical country. So you effectively taxed and redistributed only 13.5% of the country's money.
Also also of note, your hypothetical country has way worse income inequality than even the real present United States does. All of your 1% each make 33 times the median income, or 22 times as the mean. In contrast, someone just inside the 1% of American incomes makes only 8 times the median or 4 times the mean. If we applied this same 38.4% figure from your hypothetical country to America, someone just inside the 1% wouldn't end up losing 36.7% of their income like your hypothetical 1%ers do; they'd only lose about 29%. Median earners on the other hand would gain an additional 38.4% of their incomes, and the destitute would get about 75% of the median income to live off of.
Wait, I forgot to multiple the rich guys' monthly income by 12 to get their yearly figures, and there's some small rounding errors that add up, so let's do that again.
You charge all of those 10 bums 38.4% of their income, or 0, and after the UBI and taxes they each gained 10,200 - 0 = 10,200. You charge each of those median earners 38.4% of their income, or about 6,913.33, and after UBI and taxes they each gained 10,200 - 6,913.33 = 3,286.67. You charge each of those rich guys 38.4% of their income, or about 230,444.45, and after UBI and taxes they each gained 10,200 - 230,444.45 = -220,244.45 (i.e. lost 220,244.45).
Those 3 rich people, after UBI and taxes, each ended up with a loss of (220244.45/(50000*12)) = about 36.7% of their incomes. Those 170 median workers, after UBI and taxes, each ended up with a gain of (3286.67/(1500*12)) = over 18% of their incomes. And those ten bums were supported on a little over a third of the mean income, or a little over half the median.
And to double-check the math to show you how it all adds up: (220,244.45 * 3) - (3,286.67 * 170) - (10,200 * 10) = -0.55, so there's still 55 cents of rounding error, whatever.
As long as you don't keep wording it wrongly, that is. Because now you say: "most of them easily paying for it out of the UBI itself".
I don't get how this is so hard for you to understand.
Let's say you're a median American making around $25k/year.
We institute the new UBI program, paying you, like everyone, $12.5k/year.
Then tax time comes, and you owe 25% of your income, like everyone, to fund that program.
But 25% of your income is only $6,250. So that's easy to pay, no burden at all, because you just got twice as much for nothing, $12.5k of UBI! So you pay that $6,250 and still have another $6,250 left over to spend as you please.
As for the rest of your math, I don't see how you can fail to see how simply this math works out. Let's take your example country. They make (1500*170+50000*3)*12 = 4.86M/year altogether, so the mean income is 4.86M/183 = 26557/year. 850/mo is about 38.4% of that. So you need to collect 38.4% of everyone's money to pay for that.
So you charge all of those 10 bums 38.4% of their income, or 0, and after the UBI and taxes they each gained 10,200 - 0 = 10,200. You charge each of those median earners 38.4% of their income, or about 6,912, and after UBI and taxes they each gained 10,200 - 6,912 = 3,288. And you change each of those rich guys 38.4% of their income, or about 19,200, and after UBI and taxed they each gained 10,200 - 19,200 = -9000 (i.e. lost 9000).
Those 3 rich people, after UBI and taxes, each ended up with a loss of (9000/(50000*12)) = about 1.5% of their incomes. Those 170 median workers, after UBI and taxes, each ended up with a gain of (3288/(1500*12)) = over 18% of their incomes. And those ten bums were supported on a little over a third of the mean income, or a little over half the median.
Well, then you end up with 70% taxes on high income earners, QED.
With current tax brackets plus a 25% flat tax it would be impossible for someone even making infinite money to be taxed even at 65%. Even someone in the 99th percentile would still only be taxed around 44%. The vast majority of people even in the top 25% who actually pay something would see less than an additional 10% on their taxes.
The "super rich" don't have "ridiculously high incomes", they often don't have incomes at all, they simply are rich.
Only if you discount unearned income from incomes (which apparently you do), when if anything you should be counting that more. (In the long term, I would rather see only income from rents and interest taxed at all, because that's where the real injustice happens).
find other ways of making money that avoid these high income taxes
See, there's the real underlying problem. "Ways of making money" that don't count as income. If you make money, that is income, period.
And, seriously, even forgetting about the injustice of randomly taking away people's money and giving it to other people, what's the point of all of this? Why do you want to punish older upper-middle-class professionals?
Ignoring your leading-question language: because given that taxation is wrong, but given that we're going to be doing it at all anyway (which is, at least at present, a prerequisite for having a government at all, which is a prerequisite for not ending up with an even worse, warlord's government in lieu of this ostensibly democratic one), the least bad way to tax and spend is to tax those who it hurts the least (due to diminishing marginal utility), and spend it on those who it helps the most (due to that same marginal utility). If you take someone's billionth dollar and make it someone else's second dollar, you've barely even bothered the billionaire while you maybe made the beggar's day.
Probably because you said: "Only people making nothing at all would get to keep 100% of their UBI, as they have no income to tax." while you're now saying everyone gets to keep 100% of their UBI, only the ones that earn more get taxed more.
Yes, and that additional taxation will eat into any gains they make from the UBI. They get the same UBI, but they end up having to put some of what they get toward paying their increased taxes, so they don't get to keep 100% of it.
I'll repeat my question: who is going to pay for it, when, obviously, that top 25% doesn't want to be taxed at 75%-99%
And I'll repeat my answer, which is what I gave in that first post before you woefully misunderstood everything about it and lead us down this tangent: the taxpayers pay for it, most of them easily paying for it out of the UBI itself (with plenty left over for most of them), most of the rest paying a small percentage of their large incomes to cover the rest, and only the ludicrously wealthy paying anything worth sneezing at, and still nowhere near your figures: someone in the 99th percentile, on the threshold of the 1%, would pay about 19% more on top of their existing taxes, which are presently about 25% (of their income that actually gets taxed at all), for even the richest of the rich paying not even 44%. With the current tax brackets as they are plus this 25% additional tax, someone making infinite money could not be taxed even to the 65% level; there is no way of making enough money to get taxed that much. Nobody is proposing that anyone be taxed nearly at the levels you're freaking out about.
No, it would amount to taxing every American nearly 25% of their income on top of what they are already spending in income tax, and on top of social security, Medicare/Medicaid, etc., since the UBI only really replaces some welfare spending, which amounts to maybe $250 billion dollars out of a nearly $7 trillion of government spending. All the remaining government functions still need to be paid for as before.
Yes, that's what I mean. Leaving all other taxation and programs as they are, you could fund an UBI of x% the mean income (as in GDP per capita) by taxing every person (whether they have an income or not) an additional x% of their income. Because for all but the extreme ends of the population, what they get paid and what they get taxed extra cancel out to some degree, you don't actually end up taking x% more of the GDP to do this. Notably, people who are exactly middle class, exactly at the mean income, neither gain nor lose anything in this scheme, because do the simple math. Which means this...
If there is one thing the UBI analyses and arguments show is that you can only pay for significant social spending by massively increasing taxes on the middle class.
...is nonsense. The super-rich would sure like to make sure that any taxes raised are raised on the middle class only, and that their ludicrously high incomes are left untouched, but that doesn't mean that the only way to do it is to concede to their ridiculous demands.
And if 25% isn't high enough, and I agree it's not, then we make it higher. I'd personally go for 50% myself, and have been advocating for exactly that for decades, but people are talking about $1000/mo figures (and that's closer to what programs like SSI actually pay out today), which is closer to 25%, so I'm using that as an example.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd listen to this WHO guy if I were you all. He's a Doctor, after all.
And my point is that certain beliefs may be conducive to radicalism while others just aren't; rather than radical-some-religions being a problem and radical-other-religions not. Even if you just say "radicalism" means "violent fundamentalism" (and I'd argue that that's a subset of the broader sense of "seeking rapid change" -- they're pushing so hard to change things they'll use any means to achieve it, even violence), if you're saying that Jains don't get violently fundamentalist, then what you're saying is that there aren't radical Jains. Not that Jain radicals aren't so bad. Just that they don't exist.
Which maybe makes Jainism not so bad, compared to religions like Islam that are prone to radicalism, which I get is your point. I'm just nitpicking that saying "radical Jainism isn't a problem" is only true if you mean "there aren't radical Jains", where the person you were replying to was saying "anything, if radicalized, becomes a problem", so saying that something like Jainism doesn't tend to become radicalized doesn't refute that. If there were radical Jains, they would be a problem.
Yeah, same here, I leave my phone on do not disturb basically all the time and check my voicemail when I feel like it, and if someone doesn't leave a voicemail, they obviously didn't really need to talk to me that much.
But we're in the minority, and the default behavior is that your phone screams "HEY! HEY PAY ATTENTION TO ME! HEY! SOMEONE WANT TO TALK TO YOU! HEY! STOP WHAT YOU'RE DOING RIGHT NOW AND PAY ATTENTION TO ME!" when a voice call comes in, while a text just says "hey, when you got a sec...?"
The asynchronous nature is a part of why it is unobtrusive. A phone call demands your attention right now. A text you can get back to whenever.
Clarus?
Does your gas smell like a cross between dog farts and cow farts?
That sounds like a suitable punishment for Godwinners.
That's the joke.
Radicalism in general means the promotion of drastic, sudden, intemperate change. That's always a problem; big changes to society, where they should be made at all, need to be made slowly, carefully, cautiously, conservatively. If Jains are not advocating such drastic, sudden, intemperate change, then there just aren't radical Jains to begin with. But if there were, they would be bad.
There's no such thing as "good religion", there's just mostly-harmless religion and worse religion. The defining characteristic of religion is faith, which is tantamount to appeal to authority -- if nothing else (perhaps sometimes at worst), one's own authority -- and appeal to authority is always wrong, because it shuts down reasonable discussion and so inhibits the finding of real solutions to problems.
Now, there's are a lot of religious people and religious groups who do a lot of good things and have a lot of good qualities, sure. But those things are not dependent on their religiosity, and if you removed the religion from those people and groups and left the good parts, they would be even better.
Still no excuse to ban religion though. That would itself be authoritarian and so just as bad as -- quite worse than, in many cases -- religion itself.
I'm not anti-gun -- I don't own any, I don't especially feel comfortable around them, but I don't let my feelings get in the way of my intellectual commitment to a broadly liberal/libertarian stance -- but I find the argument you're attempting to rebut compelling and don't see anything in your rebuttal that actually assuages the concerns it raises.
I imagine myself, if I were the type to carry a gun, being in that club and hearing a shot, scanning the room looking for its source, finding a person with a gun drawn and pointing across the room, and across the room somewhere in that general direction is a dying person on the floor. And I ask myself now, before I draw my gun, is this person with their gun drawn the one who just shot that person on the floor over there, or are they another good guy who's already spotted the actual shooter? Should I draw my gun on them? They look like they're about to shoot; does that make them the bad guy, or does that make them about to shoot the bad guy? Should I draw and fire? Seconds are passing, someone is probably about to die, if I don't act right now it might be the wrong person, but if I do act then that might make it the wrong person who dies and then it's my fault, what do I do?
Note that I'm assuming here, contrary to the first impression of the original version of this argument, that the good guys with guns are sensible enough not to immediately draw and start waving their guns around when they hear a "bang", but to first wait, like I am in this scenario, to identify a target they're about to draw on. I'm not drawing my gun yet specifically because I'm aware that it might make me a target to the next-slowest armed good guy to react. But I've still got the quandary before me of whether the target I've identified who appears to be about to shoot someone is a bad guy, or just someone like me about to shoot the bad guy, and I don't know what to do in this situation to neither escalate the very problem vexing me by drawing my own weapon, and possibly kill an innocent myself, or to instead let a possible innocent get shot in fear of that.
Which is only an issue if you live in a swing state where there's any uncertainty in the election. If you live in, say, California, it doesn't matter how you vote, the Democratic candidate is getting all your state's electors no matter what. So given that, what do you have to lose voting third party, if you actually prefer a third party? Nothing. What you have to gain, on the other hand, is the major parties looking at how their votes stack up compared to previous years and, if they lost some, who gained those votes instead; and if, say, the Democrats lose a (insignificant in the election but notable to their analysts) chunk of votes to the Greens, they will start adopting Green policies to court those Green voters.
If you live in a non-swing state, not voting for a third party is throwing your vote away, because you neither change the outcome of the election (which you weren't going to do anyway) nor do you influence policy at all, you just confirm for the major parties that they're on the right track as they are.
I agree this sounds like bullshit overall, but with a salary like that, the savings he claims are not absurd boatloads, especially given the amount of time in question. He has about two years' pay saved up, over six years. Since I last hit rock bottom three years ago, I've accumulated about a year's pay in savings. And he's making significantly more than me, so probably can afford to save away a larger fraction of his income than I could.
Personal force fields.
Make everyone immune to all attacks.
Problem solved.
Still quite a ways off though...
Not on "real red blooded Americans" maybe, but on blacks, gays, Muslims, transgender people, atheists, Mexicans...?
So long as the fucking is truly done well, I think I can live with that.
How do you feel about have you always been mostly silly like talking with an Eliza program?
Someone making $1 million / year
...is making five times the threshold for counting as the 1%, which is already eight times the mean income, which is already twice the median. I'm not too worried about the tiniest fraction of a percent of people who are the absolute richest of the richest of the rich, when even the richest of the rich, not to mention the rich, not to mention the middle class, aren't getting hit nearly that hard. (See below).
Taxation can and does serve many purposes, and is traditionally justified by spending on infrastructure and public goods like defense.
Funding public goods by income taxes is redistribution, of exactly the same structure as a basic income is: you give everyone the same, equal benefit, and put the burden of paying for it on those who can most easily bear it. The public benefit of a basic income is the elimination of poverty, and with it loads of crime that comes from poverty, and the expense of that crime and of fighting it, as well as the increased economic activity that comes with a public that's able to consume more, as well as produce more because they can afford to take risks, as well as the economic benefits to small business of being able to eliminate a minimum wage, and the increased productivity from the increased number of jobs that come with the elimination of minimum wage, and the elimination of lots of government spending from the reduced overhead of all the other programs that the basic income can supplant. The public benefit of a basic income is a better society in many, many ways, ways that everyone benefits from, just like everyone benefits from highways and the coast guard.
But you aren't just taxing "billionaires" an extra 25%, you are taxing everybody an extra 25% on their earned income, which is going to start hurting them when the extra $1000 you give them amounts to the 25% they will have to pay, or about $4000/month ($48000/year of earned income). So, your promise that your taxes are only going to hurt Scroogy McScroogeface are wrong.
Because the 25% we're talking about is of the mean income, that threshold is exactly at the mean income by definition, which is currently a bit over $50k. However, because the distribution of incomes is far from normal (in the statistical sense), that mean is way above the median, around the 75th percentile. So the middle class that you say you're so concerned about, the middle half of Americans, fall entirely below that threshold; as do the bottom quarter of course.
Furthermore, because of how this works, you get or lose more depending on your distance from the mean, and because we have such a skewed distribution of incomes, even most of the people above the mean aren't making much above it. I thought I already posted these figures earlier but maybe that was a different subthread: the next doubling above that 75th percentile, people making between the mean and twice it (between around $50k and $100k), are the next 20%, meaning that even someone at the 95th percentile would only see their taxes go up (minus the UBI they receive) by 12.5%, on top of about 21% they're paying now for a whopping 33.5% tax on the top 5% of people only. Of those 20 percentage points above the mean, 15 percentage points make under $75k, and would pay (in extra taxes minus UBI) between 0 and 8.4%, with even the ones at the top, paying that 8.4%, doing so on top of their existing 19.4% for a whole ~28% taxed. On only the second-highest twentieth of the population.
The bottom line is, way more than a supermajority of Americans altogether are below the threshold where this would cost them anything rather than help them, and even of the minority who are above that threshold, most of them are barely above that threshold and so would still pay very little, and it's only when you get to the tiny single-digit percentages that it becomes anything of note, and only the even tinier fractions of a percen
We're talking about your hypothetical scenario where people get 850/mo. 850*12 = 10200.
You missed my follow posts correcting some errors, but you're making an even bigger error here, in not multiplying by the number of people in each category.
From the point of view of the state, you have:
1) A cost of 10,200 * 10 = 102,000
2) A cost of 3,286.67 * 170 = 558,733.90
3) A gain of 220,244.45 * 3 = 660,733.35
660,733.33 - 558,733.90 - 102,000 = 0.57, which is a rounding error.
In fact, screw the FreeBSD.
And also of note: that 220,244.45*3 is only about 13.5% of the 4,860,000 GDP of this hypothetical country. So you effectively taxed and redistributed only 13.5% of the country's money.
Also also of note, your hypothetical country has way worse income inequality than even the real present United States does. All of your 1% each make 33 times the median income, or 22 times as the mean. In contrast, someone just inside the 1% of American incomes makes only 8 times the median or 4 times the mean. If we applied this same 38.4% figure from your hypothetical country to America, someone just inside the 1% wouldn't end up losing 36.7% of their income like your hypothetical 1%ers do; they'd only lose about 29%. Median earners on the other hand would gain an additional 38.4% of their incomes, and the destitute would get about 75% of the median income to live off of.
Wait, I forgot to multiple the rich guys' monthly income by 12 to get their yearly figures, and there's some small rounding errors that add up, so let's do that again.
You charge all of those 10 bums 38.4% of their income, or 0, and after the UBI and taxes they each gained 10,200 - 0 = 10,200.
You charge each of those median earners 38.4% of their income, or about 6,913.33, and after UBI and taxes they each gained 10,200 - 6,913.33 = 3,286.67.
You charge each of those rich guys 38.4% of their income, or about 230,444.45, and after UBI and taxes they each gained 10,200 - 230,444.45 = -220,244.45 (i.e. lost 220,244.45).
Those 3 rich people, after UBI and taxes, each ended up with a loss of (220244.45/(50000*12)) = about 36.7% of their incomes.
Those 170 median workers, after UBI and taxes, each ended up with a gain of (3286.67/(1500*12)) = over 18% of their incomes.
And those ten bums were supported on a little over a third of the mean income, or a little over half the median.
And to double-check the math to show you how it all adds up:
(220,244.45 * 3) - (3,286.67 * 170) - (10,200 * 10) = -0.55, so there's still 55 cents of rounding error, whatever.
As long as you don't keep wording it wrongly, that is. Because now you say: "most of them easily paying for it out of the UBI itself".
I don't get how this is so hard for you to understand.
Let's say you're a median American making around $25k/year.
We institute the new UBI program, paying you, like everyone, $12.5k/year.
Then tax time comes, and you owe 25% of your income, like everyone, to fund that program.
But 25% of your income is only $6,250. So that's easy to pay, no burden at all, because you just got twice as much for nothing, $12.5k of UBI! So you pay that $6,250 and still have another $6,250 left over to spend as you please.
As for the rest of your math, I don't see how you can fail to see how simply this math works out. Let's take your example country. They make (1500*170+50000*3)*12 = 4.86M/year altogether, so the mean income is 4.86M/183 = 26557/year. 850/mo is about 38.4% of that. So you need to collect 38.4% of everyone's money to pay for that.
So you charge all of those 10 bums 38.4% of their income, or 0, and after the UBI and taxes they each gained 10,200 - 0 = 10,200.
You charge each of those median earners 38.4% of their income, or about 6,912, and after UBI and taxes they each gained 10,200 - 6,912 = 3,288.
And you change each of those rich guys 38.4% of their income, or about 19,200, and after UBI and taxed they each gained 10,200 - 19,200 = -9000 (i.e. lost 9000).
Those 3 rich people, after UBI and taxes, each ended up with a loss of (9000/(50000*12)) = about 1.5% of their incomes.
Those 170 median workers, after UBI and taxes, each ended up with a gain of (3288/(1500*12)) = over 18% of their incomes.
And those ten bums were supported on a little over a third of the mean income, or a little over half the median.
Simple math, dude.
Well, then you end up with 70% taxes on high income earners, QED.
With current tax brackets plus a 25% flat tax it would be impossible for someone even making infinite money to be taxed even at 65%. Even someone in the 99th percentile would still only be taxed around 44%. The vast majority of people even in the top 25% who actually pay something would see less than an additional 10% on their taxes.
The "super rich" don't have "ridiculously high incomes", they often don't have incomes at all, they simply are rich.
Only if you discount unearned income from incomes (which apparently you do), when if anything you should be counting that more. (In the long term, I would rather see only income from rents and interest taxed at all, because that's where the real injustice happens).
find other ways of making money that avoid these high income taxes
See, there's the real underlying problem. "Ways of making money" that don't count as income. If you make money, that is income, period.
And, seriously, even forgetting about the injustice of randomly taking away people's money and giving it to other people, what's the point of all of this? Why do you want to punish older upper-middle-class professionals?
Ignoring your leading-question language: because given that taxation is wrong, but given that we're going to be doing it at all anyway (which is, at least at present, a prerequisite for having a government at all, which is a prerequisite for not ending up with an even worse, warlord's government in lieu of this ostensibly democratic one), the least bad way to tax and spend is to tax those who it hurts the least (due to diminishing marginal utility), and spend it on those who it helps the most (due to that same marginal utility). If you take someone's billionth dollar and make it someone else's second dollar, you've barely even bothered the billionaire while you maybe made the beggar's day.
Probably because you said: "Only people making nothing at all would get to keep 100% of their UBI, as they have no income to tax." while you're now saying everyone gets to keep 100% of their UBI, only the ones that earn more get taxed more.
Yes, and that additional taxation will eat into any gains they make from the UBI. They get the same UBI, but they end up having to put some of what they get toward paying their increased taxes, so they don't get to keep 100% of it.
I'll repeat my question: who is going to pay for it, when, obviously, that top 25% doesn't want to be taxed at 75%-99%
And I'll repeat my answer, which is what I gave in that first post before you woefully misunderstood everything about it and lead us down this tangent: the taxpayers pay for it, most of them easily paying for it out of the UBI itself (with plenty left over for most of them), most of the rest paying a small percentage of their large incomes to cover the rest, and only the ludicrously wealthy paying anything worth sneezing at, and still nowhere near your figures: someone in the 99th percentile, on the threshold of the 1%, would pay about 19% more on top of their existing taxes, which are presently about 25% (of their income that actually gets taxed at all), for even the richest of the rich paying not even 44%. With the current tax brackets as they are plus this 25% additional tax, someone making infinite money could not be taxed even to the 65% level; there is no way of making enough money to get taxed that much. Nobody is proposing that anyone be taxed nearly at the levels you're freaking out about.
No, it would amount to taxing every American nearly 25% of their income on top of what they are already spending in income tax, and on top of social security, Medicare/Medicaid, etc., since the UBI only really replaces some welfare spending, which amounts to maybe $250 billion dollars out of a nearly $7 trillion of government spending. All the remaining government functions still need to be paid for as before.
Yes, that's what I mean. Leaving all other taxation and programs as they are, you could fund an UBI of x% the mean income (as in GDP per capita) by taxing every person (whether they have an income or not) an additional x% of their income. Because for all but the extreme ends of the population, what they get paid and what they get taxed extra cancel out to some degree, you don't actually end up taking x% more of the GDP to do this. Notably, people who are exactly middle class, exactly at the mean income, neither gain nor lose anything in this scheme, because do the simple math. Which means this...
If there is one thing the UBI analyses and arguments show is that you can only pay for significant social spending by massively increasing taxes on the middle class.
...is nonsense. The super-rich would sure like to make sure that any taxes raised are raised on the middle class only, and that their ludicrously high incomes are left untouched, but that doesn't mean that the only way to do it is to concede to their ridiculous demands.
And if 25% isn't high enough, and I agree it's not, then we make it higher. I'd personally go for 50% myself, and have been advocating for exactly that for decades, but people are talking about $1000/mo figures (and that's closer to what programs like SSI actually pay out today), which is closer to 25%, so I'm using that as an example.