If you give everyone a certain, universal, amount of money, that money then has to come from somewhere; it ultimately comes back from some people, somewhere, in the form of taxes, unless you have a magic money pit to pull money from to pay for it.
For each person, you can then ask, how much did they end up with in the end, after they got that same universal income, and then paid whatever their share of the tax funding for that they had to shoulder.
If you distribute the burden of paying for it equally across all people, then the answer for everyone is "nothing"; you paid them something, then took it right back to pay for it. So nobody would do that, because that accomplishes nothing at all and is a colossal waste of time. An UBI is going to be paid out of people's taxes, and those taxes differ from person to person, proportional to income mostly.
So when you ask, how much did each person end up with, after they got THE SAME UBI and then PAID TAXES, the answer each person is different.
But everyone still got the same UBI! But people pay different taxes. So the UBI-minus-taxes calculation for each person is the different. Even though the UBI they get is the same. Because their taxes are different.
There is no other way an UBI could possible be, unless you pulled the money out of a magic hole somewhere instead of collecting it in taxes.
When you add a variable to a constant, the sum is variable. That doesn't mean that the constant wasn't constant. Just that you added a variable to it. We've already got the variable, the way we're doing things now. UBI proposals are talking about adding a constant to it. The sum of that will still be a variable. That doesn't make the UBI not constant.
"Not at all. I'm proposing that everyone gets the same, uniform, amount (set to some fraction of the average income)"
I think you fail to see the contradiction of the first part with the last part of your sentence there. If your amount is dependent on your income, than, by it's very nature, the amount you get is not the same for everyone anymore.
I guess you can't read, so I don't know why I'm bothering to continue this. "Some fraction of the average income" does not mean it depends on your income. It means, for example, 25% of the current mean income of around $50k = $12.5k per year. EVERY PERSON GETS THAT SAME $12.5K PER YEAR, SO IT IS A UNIVERSAL INCOME. You can do it backward instead if that gets it through your thick skull better: you want to give everyone $1000/mo, the SAME $1000/mo for everyone so it is a UNIVERSAL INCOME. How much money will that cost? $12000 per person. How much will we have to raise taxes to fund that? That amount divided by the average amount of money people make, which is around $50000. 12000/50000 = 24%. So we need to collect 24% from each person, in order to give everyone that SAME 24% of the mean = $1000/mo.
Jesus fucking christ, if you're this goddamn thick I'm not even going to bother reading the rest, goodbye.
So you pay out based on GDP, but tax based on income?
GDP per capita, which is the same thing as mean income.
And if 66% of the populace have no income and are somehow surviving anyway, the burden of supporting them is obviously already on the other 33% somehow, UBI or not. That is not currently the case, however, and it would not become the case with an UBI, because nobody is going to quit a job paying $40k/year (close to the 66th percentile income) to live for free on less than a third of that, if they could instead keep working that $40k/year job and still also keep an additional ~$3000/yr of UBI on top of it. The median person making $25k/yr isn't going to quit their job to live on half of that if they could instead keep working that job and also get half of that again to keep of their UBI on top of it, either. It always remains in everyone's self-interest to work for more if they can, even with an UBI.
Number of Americans vs number of taxpayers is irrelevant when what you're paying out is a fraction of GDP per capita; it doesn't matter if there's a bunch of people who would pay no taxes because they have no income, they're already accounted for in the GDP per capita (and thus the UBI payment) and the math still works out.
Pay every American 25% of GDP per capita (the mean income), and tax every American 25% of their income, even if for a lot of people that income (and thus tax) is 0, and it balances out perfectly, because that's how averages work.
NB that nobody ends up actually PAYING 25% higher taxes; you would have to make literally infinite money to do so. Because at higher incomes the amount you're paying out cancels with the amount you're collecting (exactly cancelling at the mean income, around the 75th percentile), you're not actually needing to raise $4T/year in the end. You could do both steps at once, and that would be the easiest way to do so in fact: every year, after tax season is over, have the IRS start sending people a monthly check for (25% of last year's mean income [their UBI] - 25% of that person's last year's income [their portion of the UBI tax])/12; if that's a negative number, make it a bill instead. Done and done.
Preferably, you integrate UBI with the tax system so that most of UBI money never changes hands.
My personal UBI proposal does this, and it makes the whole thing really simple:
After each tax season, the IRS calculates the mean income for the previous year, and begins sending every tax filer a monthly check for a twelfth of [some percentage of that minus that same percentage of that tax filer's last income]; if that amount is negative, they send a bill instead of a check.
The percentage of the mean income is the UBI, and the percentage of their own income is the tax to fund it, pre-deducted. Because the UBI is set to a percentage of the mean income and everyone is being taxed that same percentage to fund it, the taxes raised are automatically enough to fund it, because that's how averages work.
If that percentage were about 25%, that would give everyone an UBI of about $1105/mo at present; 75% of Americans would pay less than nothing for it (getting at least something out of the deal), the next 20% above them would still only pay under 10% more, and even the 1%ers effective tax rate would only go up about 18%.
Nations !=governments != states != countries, for that matter. A nation is a people. A country is a land. A state is a monopoly on the use of force, and a government is a political administration.
Point being, the "wealth of nations" means the "wealth of peoples". The wealth of America is not the wealth of the United States federal government, but the wealth of Americans, altogether.
Only if the funding for the system is done in some kind of completely retarded manner. For a counterexample, here's a non-retarded manner you could do it in: Say we want to give everyone an UBI of about 25% the mean income of about $50k/yr, or in other words a little over $1000/mo. If we fund that by a 25% flat tax, then the effective additional UBI tax rate of people at different income levels at or above the mean (because anyone below the mean would have a net gain):
$50k/yr (75th percentile): 0%.
$75k/yr (95th percentile): 8.3%
$100k/yr (97th percentile): 12.5%
$150k/yr (98th percentile): 16.7%
$200k/yr (99th percentile): 18.8%
So unless that $200k/yr income is already paying over a 50% effective rate in income taxes —which they're not, because the top marginal tax rate isn't even 40%, so effective tax rates would be much less than that, closer to 25% according to my calculations — then the addition of the UBI is not going to bring their tax burden anywhere damn near to 70%. Even someone making literally infinite money, with current regular tax rates plus this 25% flat UBI tax, wouldn't pay even up to 65%.
That's why the right approach is to tax people, not corporations. A tax on corporations, like you say, just gets passed on to its customers uniformly, thus impacting the poorer of them at a disproportionate, regressive rate. If you tax people directly, you can tax them proportional to their income and make sure that those who can best bear the burden are the ones who pay.
It's also why basic income is better than minimum wage. A minimum wage increases costs for all businesses uniformly, thus impacting the poorer of them (the small businesses, mom and pop shops) at a disproportionate, regressive rate.
Minimum wage and corporate tax put the burden on small business and poor people. A universal income funded by a personal tax helps small businesses and poor people.
Computers are exceedingly good at endurance. They can just keep cranking along at a problem forever if need be. How many humans would bother brute-forcing an eight-digit hexadecimal passcode by trying each of the several million possibilities by hand? There's no computer that would so much as flinch at that task.
As for imagination, that's really nothing more than visiting uncommon areas of the possibility space. Humans are actually bad at that because we are creatures of habit, and only visit the same possibilities and close relatives most of the time. Imagination is something humans prize because it takes an uncommon human to break that kind of habit. A computer might just consider completely random possibilities until it finds one that works, brute-forcing the entire possibility space if it has to.
And loads of people anticipated 9/11. The WTC was designed with aircraft collision in mind many decades ago (aircraft just got bigger in the meantime), and there was a TV show episode six months before the event with the plot of the US government crashing planes into the WTC and blaming Islamic terrorists for it as a pretense to war. Nobody ever anticipated an attack like that... except the millions of viewers of that show half a year earlier. Not to mention the intelligence analysts who were concerned about something like that happening... who were ignored by other humans who didn't have enough imagination to give them due credence.
A true flat rate tax is a system of taxation where one tax rate is applied to all personal income with no deductions. The reduction of overhead there, thus, is that you do not try to have it progressively increase or reduce according to your income.
A tax rate is a percentage of income taxed. A flat tax means everyone pays the same percent on their income. You still need to know how much they made.
Deductions is an entirely separate question of how to count how much someone made. That's the topic of that "I have proposals for simplifying the tax code too" that I briefly mentioned at the end of one of my earlier posts. I agree that there could be a lot of overhead saved on simplifying how we count someone's income, but that's a separate issue entirely. Whether or not who can deduct what has nothing to do with whether the rate, the percent, taxed on however much they made, is flat or not. And whether there are complicated deductions or not, whether the rate is flat or not, you still need to know how much people made.
That is, because in essence, you're making exemptions for it; one says 'this group with this income gets this much', 'this group gets only so much', etc.
Not at all. I'm proposing that everyone gets the same, uniform, amount (set to some fraction of the average income); and everyone pay the same, flat, tax rate to fund it (of the same fraction, so the funding equals the cost, because that's how averages work). I listed, for illustration only, what that would end up meaning for people in certain income brackets, but the rule underlying it is ridiculously simple. I literally gave the formula in simple math last post. Everyone is taxed r(i-m), where r = the rate, i = their income, and m = the mean income. For most people, that comes out to be a negative number, so they get some money back. And that formula is just a simplification of the formula ri - rm, which means everyone is taxed at the same rate, r, on their income, i, and also everyone gets the same uniform credit (or if you will, universal income) back, rm.
The rest of your post is ranting under that misconception, so let me state more clearly what my proposal is:
- Everyone in the whole country gets the same $X per month. (What that "X" is is precalculated as some percentage Y of the average income).
- Everyone in the whole country pays the same Y% of their income to fund it. (Because of how averages work, this exactly funds that Y% of the average income basic income).
Only when you do the math on those two steps does there emerge something that looks like progressive taxation and welfare. Let me show you in pictures exactly why, assuming we have about $50k mean income and want to give people around 25% of that as a universal basic income:
Here is a graph showing how much basic income people get per income: y=0.25*50. You'll note that it's a straight horizontal line. That means everyone gets the same, universal, basic income.
Here is a graph showing how much taxes to fund it people pay per income: y=0.25x. You'll note that it's a straight diagonal line. That means everyone pays the same, flat, tax rate.
Here's a graph showing the second minus the first, or the net cost per income: y=0.25x-0.25*50. You'll note that it's still a straight diagonal line, but now it starts below zero for incomes below the mean, meaning those people get money out of the deal in the end.
And here's a graph showing that, divided by income, to show you the effective tax rate per income that emerges from this: y=(0.25x-0.25*50)/x. You'll note that it
You're not replacing one kind of overhead with another kind of overhead. We currently have two kinds of overhead: the overhead of figuring out how much money people made and collecting some of it from them / sending something back to them; and separately, the overhead of many different programs each figuring out who deserves some kind of help in some specific area, selecting people to provide that help, and paying them to help the people you've figured deserve it. An UBI eliminates the second kind of overhead. It still depends on the first, sure, but you're still getting rid of a ton of overhead in the switch.
And any UBI is going to have to collect more to fund itself from the people who have more, otherwise it ends up doing nothing at all (if you take and give the same amount from each person you may as well have not taken and not given to begin with). So while everyone gets the same basic income, universally, the burden of paying for is always going to be proportional to other forms of income, so the net effect of it is that you're giving more to those who have less.
Also, I think you don't know what a flat tax is. It's not "everyone pays the same $X in tax". It's "everyone pays the same X% of their income". (In contrast to a progressive tax, where at higher incomes you pay a higher percent of your income; although a flat tax combined with a universal income in the way I've proposed still produces the same effect of a progressive tax in the end; graph y=25(x-50)/x to see percent of income taxed per income, for a 25% mean UBI and a $50k median). With a flat tax, any flat tax, you still need to know how much everyone made.
If you're instead thinking of some kind of uniform tax, where everyone is charged the same amount rather than the same percent, that's nuts, because (to remain revenue-neutral) that would be the majority (over 70%) of the income of the majority (over 50%) of people, and over a quarter of people not even making enough money to pay that if they were taxed at 100%. A uniform tax is absolutely untenable, and any non-uniform tax, be it flat or progressive, will require that you know how much money people are making.
I guess you can't read more than half a sentence, because I already said that's not where the reduction comes from. It's from eliminating all of the different programs that spend that money and decide who to spend it on.
You're not doing any more income-checking than you already are just in the process of collecting taxes. In fact the whole process could be handled really easily through the existing IRS infrastructure. After each year, after all the taxes are done and filed, so they know how much money everyone made individually and in total (and thus on average too), just start sending each person a monthly check for (x% the mean income minus x% their income)/12; if that's negative, send them a bill instead. The IRS already has all of that information and the infrastructure for sending out checks and bills (and collecting on those bills) so it would be completely routine for them, no additional overhead.
And then other programs that that program begins to supplant can begin to be phased out, and that is where you save on overhead; you don't need food stamps, SSI, disability, social security, medicare/medicaid, etc. Those programs already have systems in place to check the incomes of people for eligibility, and as they start counting the UBI that the IRS is sending people amongst that income, fewer and fewer people will be eligible, and those programs will shrink until they can be eliminated entirely.
I also have proposals for greatly simplifying the tax code and so reducing IRS overhead too, but that's a different topic than anything to do with UBI.
Having had to manage a family member's money for them to keep them from spending themselves into a hole, I find that increasing the frequency at which the money is handed out decreases the ability to waste it, as the small frequent amounts must be spent on whatever is most urgent, and then there's nothing left to waste until the next payment, by which time there will be another something most urgent that eats it up right away.
If the UBI is funded by income taxes then the working force only nominally gets it as it is paid out of their own (pre-UBI) incomes. Say an UBI of 25% the mean income (which would give around $1k/mo) were funded by a nominal 25% flat income tax (bear with me, because nobody actually ends up paying that much, most nowhere near it).
Only people making nothing at all would get to keep 100% of their UBI, as they have no income to tax.
People making the median income, of around half the mean income, would only get to keep half of their UBI (about $500/mo) after taxes; the rest would go right back into funding the UBI program.
People around the 75th income percentile, who make about the mean income, would neither get nor pay anything in net, obviously.
Only around the top 25% of incomes would actually come out at a loss for this, and most of them would still pay only a nominal percentage of their income as the higher income brackets get smaller and smaller very quickly (i.e. most of the top 25% still don't make much more than the mean income themselves).
Only the absolute richest of the rich would end up paying even close to the nominal tax rate, and you would have to make literally infinite money to actually pay the nominal tax rate.
As you can see, the math here works out really simply, and end up costing most people nothing on the whole, so you can hardly argue that every poor workingman is going to bear the burden of all the lazy bum leeches, as those literally average working people either pay nothing at all (if average means mean) or themselves actually profit from this (if average means median).
But they could generate a profit on it, by selling it off. Less profit than they could by lending it out, but still more than by hoarding it. Which is the point, to make selling off things (on terms that the people who really need them can pay) the most profitable option, by removing the ability to profit directly off of owning it (just to lend it out at interest), or off of selling it at artificially high prices to other rich people who would do so (who wouldn't pay those prices if they couldn't do so).
Stock is just trading ownership. It's the only kind of investment that's not morally problematic. The real underlying problem is profiting inperpetuitity just for owning things, via interest and more broadly, rent.
Wealth is already being redistributed. UBI is about distributing it BETTER, including more efficiently. Good luck arguing for no redistribution against all those medicare/social security beneficiaries.
Change that to "income from capital" rather than "capital itself" and you have the real solution. Tax rent and interest income increasingly until it is impossible to actually profit just from owning things, and watch those worthless investment properties be sold off for cheap to whoever actually needs them for their intrinsic usefulness, and bam, you have a society of all owners.
Rather than paying it out of corporate taxes, you could vastly simplify both the calculation of the amount paid out and the collection of taxes to pay for it by taxing everyone some percent of their income, and paying everyone that percent of the mean income. That way the income and expense automatically balance, the payout scales automatically with growth of the economy, nobody makes less than that percent of the mean income, everyone below the mean income gets something, mean income people are completely unaffected, and the fewer and fewer people further and further above the mean shoulder most of the burden. All that's left to argue then is what that percentage should be.
Someone making ~$25k (the 50th percentile of income) cannot afford $200k of house (the 50th percentile of real estate). TWO people making that much together could BARELY afford that much house.
Now consider a toothbrush, in both cases it is discarded. In the case of the ultra-economic society the waste product of the tooth brush becomes the input for some other production process. This is because the ultra-economic society is trying to conserve as much energy and transmute all waste into resource streams that satisfy production demands for something else.
Even in our modern economy, no resources are actually discarded completely out of the economic cycle: all the post-consumer "waste" is still here, sitting in big commingled piles where it's difficult to separate out the specific things you want from the rest of the stuff you don't want (but someone else might). So it's just more efficient (in many senses: energy, labor, money, etc) to make new things out of non-post-consumer materials, for lots of things, at the moment, than to collect and sort and reprocess discarded materials, or spend the time and energy to fix things. (I remember the point in time, when I was working as a computer tech, when it became economically inadvisable to bother paying me to repair your monitor; someone else could build you a new one for less than the value of my labor and the parts necessary to fix the old one). When it becomes more efficient to recycle materials, we do that, and at some point, as non-post-consumer materials grow increasingly scarce, it will become more efficient to mine landfills for those old toothbrushes and broken cameras, than it will be to build toothbrushes and cameras out of rare, expensive, freshly-mined materials. And at some point, if materials become scarce (and thus costly) enough altogether, it'll be more economical to fix existing things than to make new ones again.
Don't get me wrong, I hate the disposable culture myself and wish everything was still built to last, but if it's going to cost an arm and a leg more to have built-to-last things (or cost an arm and a leg more constantly repairing more cheaply-built things), I'll bite the bullet like everyone else and just replace things. Super cheap robot labor could shift the equation here considerably, make it cheaper to tell my robot to fix my broken camera than to buy a new one, and that would be a pretty cool development.
I have not read a more eloquently written paragraph describing the state of our world, thank you.
Party A: Wants more government control except for what conflicts with their special interests group. Party B: Wants more government control except for what conflicts with their special interests group.
FTFY.
Both major parties want more government control, it's just what they want control of and what they could care less about that differs.
The boundaries of that person get very fuzzy once you start thinking of everything in the simulated universe as just information. Sure, you could just simulate a brain and feed it false sensory signals, but then how are you generating the signals to send it? You could simulate a human body for that brain to be in, but then you need to apply simulated forces to that human body to get it to send signals to the simulated brain, which you could do just by simulating the force-carrying bosons immediately impinging upon it that body... but then how do you derive the pattern in which those bosons impinge? In reality those bosons are basically carrying the signals from the rest of the universe to that human body, and in the simulation you still have to generate those signals for the for simulated bosons to impose on the simulated body, so you still need to simulate a universe.
So ok, maybe you just simulate the immediate physical surroundings of that physical body, and in those physically simulated surroundings the right bosons are simulated to impinge upon the simulated body to send the right signals to the simulated brain... but then how are you deciding when and how to change those simulated physical surroundings? Changes to those surroundings (other than those originating with in) are, in reality, signals from the larger universe; you still need to generate those signals, the pattern of external changes to the simulated immediate surroundings of the simulated body in which the simulated brain is situated, and in doing so you are simulating the broader universe beyond those immediate physical surroundings.
And so on outward through every link in the chain of interaction. Wherever you stop simulating, there appears to the simulated person the boundary of the universe: a void from which no more signals come. We actually do have one of those in reality, the cosmological horizon, the furthest away and longest ago events we can receive signals from, but literally the entire known universe is included within that (by definition), so to simulate just a brain and the things it experiences, if those things it experiences are of a world like the one we experience, you end up having to simulate an entire world like ours.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know how you don't understand this.
If you give everyone a certain, universal, amount of money, that money then has to come from somewhere; it ultimately comes back from some people, somewhere, in the form of taxes, unless you have a magic money pit to pull money from to pay for it.
For each person, you can then ask, how much did they end up with in the end, after they got that same universal income, and then paid whatever their share of the tax funding for that they had to shoulder.
If you distribute the burden of paying for it equally across all people, then the answer for everyone is "nothing"; you paid them something, then took it right back to pay for it. So nobody would do that, because that accomplishes nothing at all and is a colossal waste of time. An UBI is going to be paid out of people's taxes, and those taxes differ from person to person, proportional to income mostly.
So when you ask, how much did each person end up with, after they got THE SAME UBI and then PAID TAXES, the answer each person is different.
But everyone still got the same UBI! But people pay different taxes. So the UBI-minus-taxes calculation for each person is the different. Even though the UBI they get is the same. Because their taxes are different.
There is no other way an UBI could possible be, unless you pulled the money out of a magic hole somewhere instead of collecting it in taxes.
When you add a variable to a constant, the sum is variable. That doesn't mean that the constant wasn't constant. Just that you added a variable to it. We've already got the variable, the way we're doing things now. UBI proposals are talking about adding a constant to it. The sum of that will still be a variable. That doesn't make the UBI not constant.
"Not at all. I'm proposing that everyone gets the same, uniform, amount (set to some fraction of the average income)"
I think you fail to see the contradiction of the first part with the last part of your sentence there. If your amount is dependent on your income, than, by it's very nature, the amount you get is not the same for everyone anymore.
I guess you can't read, so I don't know why I'm bothering to continue this. "Some fraction of the average income" does not mean it depends on your income. It means, for example, 25% of the current mean income of around $50k = $12.5k per year. EVERY PERSON GETS THAT SAME $12.5K PER YEAR, SO IT IS A UNIVERSAL INCOME. You can do it backward instead if that gets it through your thick skull better: you want to give everyone $1000/mo, the SAME $1000/mo for everyone so it is a UNIVERSAL INCOME. How much money will that cost? $12000 per person. How much will we have to raise taxes to fund that? That amount divided by the average amount of money people make, which is around $50000. 12000/50000 = 24%. So we need to collect 24% from each person, in order to give everyone that SAME 24% of the mean = $1000/mo.
Jesus fucking christ, if you're this goddamn thick I'm not even going to bother reading the rest, goodbye.
So you pay out based on GDP, but tax based on income?
GDP per capita, which is the same thing as mean income.
And if 66% of the populace have no income and are somehow surviving anyway, the burden of supporting them is obviously already on the other 33% somehow, UBI or not. That is not currently the case, however, and it would not become the case with an UBI, because nobody is going to quit a job paying $40k/year (close to the 66th percentile income) to live for free on less than a third of that, if they could instead keep working that $40k/year job and still also keep an additional ~$3000/yr of UBI on top of it. The median person making $25k/yr isn't going to quit their job to live on half of that if they could instead keep working that job and also get half of that again to keep of their UBI on top of it, either. It always remains in everyone's self-interest to work for more if they can, even with an UBI.
Number of Americans vs number of taxpayers is irrelevant when what you're paying out is a fraction of GDP per capita; it doesn't matter if there's a bunch of people who would pay no taxes because they have no income, they're already accounted for in the GDP per capita (and thus the UBI payment) and the math still works out.
Pay every American 25% of GDP per capita (the mean income), and tax every American 25% of their income, even if for a lot of people that income (and thus tax) is 0, and it balances out perfectly, because that's how averages work.
NB that nobody ends up actually PAYING 25% higher taxes; you would have to make literally infinite money to do so. Because at higher incomes the amount you're paying out cancels with the amount you're collecting (exactly cancelling at the mean income, around the 75th percentile), you're not actually needing to raise $4T/year in the end. You could do both steps at once, and that would be the easiest way to do so in fact: every year, after tax season is over, have the IRS start sending people a monthly check for (25% of last year's mean income [their UBI] - 25% of that person's last year's income [their portion of the UBI tax])/12; if that's a negative number, make it a bill instead. Done and done.
Preferably, you integrate UBI with the tax system so that most of UBI money never changes hands.
My personal UBI proposal does this, and it makes the whole thing really simple:
After each tax season, the IRS calculates the mean income for the previous year, and begins sending every tax filer a monthly check for a twelfth of [some percentage of that minus that same percentage of that tax filer's last income]; if that amount is negative, they send a bill instead of a check.
The percentage of the mean income is the UBI, and the percentage of their own income is the tax to fund it, pre-deducted. Because the UBI is set to a percentage of the mean income and everyone is being taxed that same percentage to fund it, the taxes raised are automatically enough to fund it, because that's how averages work.
If that percentage were about 25%, that would give everyone an UBI of about $1105/mo at present; 75% of Americans would pay less than nothing for it (getting at least something out of the deal), the next 20% above them would still only pay under 10% more, and even the 1%ers effective tax rate would only go up about 18%.
Nations !=governments != states != countries, for that matter. A nation is a people. A country is a land. A state is a monopoly on the use of force, and a government is a political administration.
Point being, the "wealth of nations" means the "wealth of peoples". The wealth of America is not the wealth of the United States federal government, but the wealth of Americans, altogether.
Only if the funding for the system is done in some kind of completely retarded manner. For a counterexample, here's a non-retarded manner you could do it in: Say we want to give everyone an UBI of about 25% the mean income of about $50k/yr, or in other words a little over $1000/mo. If we fund that by a 25% flat tax, then the effective additional UBI tax rate of people at different income levels at or above the mean (because anyone below the mean would have a net gain):
$50k/yr (75th percentile): 0%.
$75k/yr (95th percentile): 8.3%
$100k/yr (97th percentile): 12.5%
$150k/yr (98th percentile): 16.7%
$200k/yr (99th percentile): 18.8%
So unless that $200k/yr income is already paying over a 50% effective rate in income taxes —which they're not, because the top marginal tax rate isn't even 40%, so effective tax rates would be much less than that, closer to 25% according to my calculations — then the addition of the UBI is not going to bring their tax burden anywhere damn near to 70%. Even someone making literally infinite money, with current regular tax rates plus this 25% flat UBI tax, wouldn't pay even up to 65%.
That's why the right approach is to tax people, not corporations. A tax on corporations, like you say, just gets passed on to its customers uniformly, thus impacting the poorer of them at a disproportionate, regressive rate. If you tax people directly, you can tax them proportional to their income and make sure that those who can best bear the burden are the ones who pay.
It's also why basic income is better than minimum wage. A minimum wage increases costs for all businesses uniformly, thus impacting the poorer of them (the small businesses, mom and pop shops) at a disproportionate, regressive rate.
Minimum wage and corporate tax put the burden on small business and poor people. A universal income funded by a personal tax helps small businesses and poor people.
Computers are exceedingly good at endurance. They can just keep cranking along at a problem forever if need be. How many humans would bother brute-forcing an eight-digit hexadecimal passcode by trying each of the several million possibilities by hand? There's no computer that would so much as flinch at that task.
As for imagination, that's really nothing more than visiting uncommon areas of the possibility space. Humans are actually bad at that because we are creatures of habit, and only visit the same possibilities and close relatives most of the time. Imagination is something humans prize because it takes an uncommon human to break that kind of habit. A computer might just consider completely random possibilities until it finds one that works, brute-forcing the entire possibility space if it has to.
And loads of people anticipated 9/11. The WTC was designed with aircraft collision in mind many decades ago (aircraft just got bigger in the meantime), and there was a TV show episode six months before the event with the plot of the US government crashing planes into the WTC and blaming Islamic terrorists for it as a pretense to war. Nobody ever anticipated an attack like that... except the millions of viewers of that show half a year earlier. Not to mention the intelligence analysts who were concerned about something like that happening... who were ignored by other humans who didn't have enough imagination to give them due credence.
A true flat rate tax is a system of taxation where one tax rate is applied to all personal income with no deductions. The reduction of overhead there, thus, is that you do not try to have it progressively increase or reduce according to your income.
A tax rate is a percentage of income taxed. A flat tax means everyone pays the same percent on their income. You still need to know how much they made.
Deductions is an entirely separate question of how to count how much someone made. That's the topic of that "I have proposals for simplifying the tax code too" that I briefly mentioned at the end of one of my earlier posts. I agree that there could be a lot of overhead saved on simplifying how we count someone's income, but that's a separate issue entirely. Whether or not who can deduct what has nothing to do with whether the rate, the percent, taxed on however much they made, is flat or not. And whether there are complicated deductions or not, whether the rate is flat or not, you still need to know how much people made.
That is, because in essence, you're making exemptions for it; one says 'this group with this income gets this much', 'this group gets only so much', etc.
Not at all. I'm proposing that everyone gets the same, uniform, amount (set to some fraction of the average income); and everyone pay the same, flat, tax rate to fund it (of the same fraction, so the funding equals the cost, because that's how averages work). I listed, for illustration only, what that would end up meaning for people in certain income brackets, but the rule underlying it is ridiculously simple. I literally gave the formula in simple math last post. Everyone is taxed r(i-m), where r = the rate, i = their income, and m = the mean income. For most people, that comes out to be a negative number, so they get some money back. And that formula is just a simplification of the formula ri - rm, which means everyone is taxed at the same rate, r, on their income, i, and also everyone gets the same uniform credit (or if you will, universal income) back, rm.
The rest of your post is ranting under that misconception, so let me state more clearly what my proposal is:
- Everyone in the whole country gets the same $X per month.
(What that "X" is is precalculated as some percentage Y of the average income).
- Everyone in the whole country pays the same Y% of their income to fund it.
(Because of how averages work, this exactly funds that Y% of the average income basic income).
Only when you do the math on those two steps does there emerge something that looks like progressive taxation and welfare. Let me show you in pictures exactly why, assuming we have about $50k mean income and want to give people around 25% of that as a universal basic income:
Here is a graph showing how much basic income people get per income: y=0.25*50.
You'll note that it's a straight horizontal line. That means everyone gets the same, universal, basic income.
Here is a graph showing how much taxes to fund it people pay per income: y=0.25x.
You'll note that it's a straight diagonal line. That means everyone pays the same, flat, tax rate.
Here's a graph showing the second minus the first, or the net cost per income: y=0.25x-0.25*50.
You'll note that it's still a straight diagonal line, but now it starts below zero for incomes below the mean, meaning those people get money out of the deal in the end.
And here's a graph showing that, divided by income, to show you the effective tax rate per income that emerges from this: y=(0.25x-0.25*50)/x.
You'll note that it
You're not replacing one kind of overhead with another kind of overhead. We currently have two kinds of overhead: the overhead of figuring out how much money people made and collecting some of it from them / sending something back to them; and separately, the overhead of many different programs each figuring out who deserves some kind of help in some specific area, selecting people to provide that help, and paying them to help the people you've figured deserve it. An UBI eliminates the second kind of overhead. It still depends on the first, sure, but you're still getting rid of a ton of overhead in the switch.
And any UBI is going to have to collect more to fund itself from the people who have more, otherwise it ends up doing nothing at all (if you take and give the same amount from each person you may as well have not taken and not given to begin with). So while everyone gets the same basic income, universally, the burden of paying for is always going to be proportional to other forms of income, so the net effect of it is that you're giving more to those who have less.
Also, I think you don't know what a flat tax is. It's not "everyone pays the same $X in tax". It's "everyone pays the same X% of their income". (In contrast to a progressive tax, where at higher incomes you pay a higher percent of your income; although a flat tax combined with a universal income in the way I've proposed still produces the same effect of a progressive tax in the end; graph y=25(x-50)/x to see percent of income taxed per income, for a 25% mean UBI and a $50k median). With a flat tax, any flat tax, you still need to know how much everyone made.
If you're instead thinking of some kind of uniform tax, where everyone is charged the same amount rather than the same percent, that's nuts, because (to remain revenue-neutral) that would be the majority (over 70%) of the income of the majority (over 50%) of people, and over a quarter of people not even making enough money to pay that if they were taxed at 100%. A uniform tax is absolutely untenable, and any non-uniform tax, be it flat or progressive, will require that you know how much money people are making.
I guess you can't read more than half a sentence, because I already said that's not where the reduction comes from. It's from eliminating all of the different programs that spend that money and decide who to spend it on.
You're not doing any more income-checking than you already are just in the process of collecting taxes. In fact the whole process could be handled really easily through the existing IRS infrastructure. After each year, after all the taxes are done and filed, so they know how much money everyone made individually and in total (and thus on average too), just start sending each person a monthly check for (x% the mean income minus x% their income)/12; if that's negative, send them a bill instead. The IRS already has all of that information and the infrastructure for sending out checks and bills (and collecting on those bills) so it would be completely routine for them, no additional overhead.
And then other programs that that program begins to supplant can begin to be phased out, and that is where you save on overhead; you don't need food stamps, SSI, disability, social security, medicare/medicaid, etc. Those programs already have systems in place to check the incomes of people for eligibility, and as they start counting the UBI that the IRS is sending people amongst that income, fewer and fewer people will be eligible, and those programs will shrink until they can be eliminated entirely.
I also have proposals for greatly simplifying the tax code and so reducing IRS overhead too, but that's a different topic than anything to do with UBI.
Having had to manage a family member's money for them to keep them from spending themselves into a hole, I find that increasing the frequency at which the money is handed out decreases the ability to waste it, as the small frequent amounts must be spent on whatever is most urgent, and then there's nothing left to waste until the next payment, by which time there will be another something most urgent that eats it up right away.
If the UBI is funded by income taxes then the working force only nominally gets it as it is paid out of their own (pre-UBI) incomes. Say an UBI of 25% the mean income (which would give around $1k/mo) were funded by a nominal 25% flat income tax (bear with me, because nobody actually ends up paying that much, most nowhere near it).
Only people making nothing at all would get to keep 100% of their UBI, as they have no income to tax.
People making the median income, of around half the mean income, would only get to keep half of their UBI (about $500/mo) after taxes; the rest would go right back into funding the UBI program.
People around the 75th income percentile, who make about the mean income, would neither get nor pay anything in net, obviously.
Only around the top 25% of incomes would actually come out at a loss for this, and most of them would still pay only a nominal percentage of their income as the higher income brackets get smaller and smaller very quickly (i.e. most of the top 25% still don't make much more than the mean income themselves).
Only the absolute richest of the rich would end up paying even close to the nominal tax rate, and you would have to make literally infinite money to actually pay the nominal tax rate.
As you can see, the math here works out really simply, and end up costing most people nothing on the whole, so you can hardly argue that every poor workingman is going to bear the burden of all the lazy bum leeches, as those literally average working people either pay nothing at all (if average means mean) or themselves actually profit from this (if average means median).
But they could generate a profit on it, by selling it off. Less profit than they could by lending it out, but still more than by hoarding it. Which is the point, to make selling off things (on terms that the people who really need them can pay) the most profitable option, by removing the ability to profit directly off of owning it (just to lend it out at interest), or off of selling it at artificially high prices to other rich people who would do so (who wouldn't pay those prices if they couldn't do so).
Stock is just trading ownership. It's the only kind of investment that's not morally problematic. The real underlying problem is profiting inperpetuitity just for owning things, via interest and more broadly, rent.
Wealth is already being redistributed. UBI is about distributing it BETTER, including more efficiently. Good luck arguing for no redistribution against all those medicare/social security beneficiaries.
Change that to "income from capital" rather than "capital itself" and you have the real solution. Tax rent and interest income increasingly until it is impossible to actually profit just from owning things, and watch those worthless investment properties be sold off for cheap to whoever actually needs them for their intrinsic usefulness, and bam, you have a society of all owners.
Rather than paying it out of corporate taxes, you could vastly simplify both the calculation of the amount paid out and the collection of taxes to pay for it by taxing everyone some percent of their income, and paying everyone that percent of the mean income. That way the income and expense automatically balance, the payout scales automatically with growth of the economy, nobody makes less than that percent of the mean income, everyone below the mean income gets something, mean income people are completely unaffected, and the fewer and fewer people further and further above the mean shoulder most of the burden. All that's left to argue then is what that percentage should be.
Someone making ~$25k (the 50th percentile of income) cannot afford $200k of house (the 50th percentile of real estate). TWO people making that much together could BARELY afford that much house.
Now consider a toothbrush, in both cases it is discarded. In the case of the ultra-economic society the waste product of the tooth brush becomes the input for some other production process. This is because the ultra-economic society is trying to conserve as much energy and transmute all waste into resource streams that satisfy production demands for something else.
Even in our modern economy, no resources are actually discarded completely out of the economic cycle: all the post-consumer "waste" is still here, sitting in big commingled piles where it's difficult to separate out the specific things you want from the rest of the stuff you don't want (but someone else might). So it's just more efficient (in many senses: energy, labor, money, etc) to make new things out of non-post-consumer materials, for lots of things, at the moment, than to collect and sort and reprocess discarded materials, or spend the time and energy to fix things. (I remember the point in time, when I was working as a computer tech, when it became economically inadvisable to bother paying me to repair your monitor; someone else could build you a new one for less than the value of my labor and the parts necessary to fix the old one). When it becomes more efficient to recycle materials, we do that, and at some point, as non-post-consumer materials grow increasingly scarce, it will become more efficient to mine landfills for those old toothbrushes and broken cameras, than it will be to build toothbrushes and cameras out of rare, expensive, freshly-mined materials. And at some point, if materials become scarce (and thus costly) enough altogether, it'll be more economical to fix existing things than to make new ones again.
Don't get me wrong, I hate the disposable culture myself and wish everything was still built to last, but if it's going to cost an arm and a leg more to have built-to-last things (or cost an arm and a leg more constantly repairing more cheaply-built things), I'll bite the bullet like everyone else and just replace things. Super cheap robot labor could shift the equation here considerably, make it cheaper to tell my robot to fix my broken camera than to buy a new one, and that would be a pretty cool development.
I have not read a more eloquently written paragraph describing the state of our world, thank you.
Thanks!
Party A: Wants more government control except for what conflicts with their special interests group.
Party B: Wants more government control except for what conflicts with their special interests group.
FTFY.
Both major parties want more government control, it's just what they want control of and what they could care less about that differs.
You only have to simulate one person.
The boundaries of that person get very fuzzy once you start thinking of everything in the simulated universe as just information. Sure, you could just simulate a brain and feed it false sensory signals, but then how are you generating the signals to send it? You could simulate a human body for that brain to be in, but then you need to apply simulated forces to that human body to get it to send signals to the simulated brain, which you could do just by simulating the force-carrying bosons immediately impinging upon it that body... but then how do you derive the pattern in which those bosons impinge? In reality those bosons are basically carrying the signals from the rest of the universe to that human body, and in the simulation you still have to generate those signals for the for simulated bosons to impose on the simulated body, so you still need to simulate a universe.
So ok, maybe you just simulate the immediate physical surroundings of that physical body, and in those physically simulated surroundings the right bosons are simulated to impinge upon the simulated body to send the right signals to the simulated brain... but then how are you deciding when and how to change those simulated physical surroundings? Changes to those surroundings (other than those originating with in) are, in reality, signals from the larger universe; you still need to generate those signals, the pattern of external changes to the simulated immediate surroundings of the simulated body in which the simulated brain is situated, and in doing so you are simulating the broader universe beyond those immediate physical surroundings.
And so on outward through every link in the chain of interaction. Wherever you stop simulating, there appears to the simulated person the boundary of the universe: a void from which no more signals come. We actually do have one of those in reality, the cosmological horizon, the furthest away and longest ago events we can receive signals from, but literally the entire known universe is included within that (by definition), so to simulate just a brain and the things it experiences, if those things it experiences are of a world like the one we experience, you end up having to simulate an entire world like ours.
So we're in the fiftieth "version" of the Matrix, and the previous chosen one was Neo XLIX, commonly known as Exlixon?