Most Basic Income proposals have a sort of disconnected funding source: you declare that each person will receive $10,000/year or whatever number, and then you find a way to fund that (levy taxes). This produces either a bunch of budgeting to take from the General Fund or something like Social Security's FICA system, meaning you're making adjustments all the time to get funding.
The Universal Dividend instead is a consequence of its funding source: you declare a 12.5% FICA tax (like the 6.2% Social Security you pay on your paycheck), then disburse that. There is no promise of some dollars and cost-of-living adjustment, but rather there is a system which disburses part of the income as a level baseline ("Fair Share"). Nobody asks where we're going to get the money this year or if the system will be solvent in 2034.
It's a bit more complex than that. The construction involves rolling Social Security OASDI payroll FICAs into income tax brackets, rolling OASDI into a pile of restructuring targets, and then cutting that restructuring (as a proportion of income taxes taken) off both corporate and individual income. Then, you levy a 12.5% tax on top the remaining tax brackets and disburse the result by dividing it among all Census-measured adults (it's really just resident American citizens). From there, you rebuild OASDI on top of the Dividend such that retirement and disability benefits total up to the same for any recipient when including the Dividend (shifts part of Social Security's load to this more-stable funding source), which only requires about a 6% payroll FICA (rather than 6.2% payroll and 6.2% income).
This rough construction gives you a 33.5% corporate income tax rate (down from 35%) and a 36.2% top individual tax rate (down from 39.6%). From there, you ask the CBO to do whatever magic is needed to adjust the income tax system to be more-progressive while bringing in the same amount of Federal revenue (you need to know precise distributions of income across all income levels to work this out; that's not generally available, or at least it's only available as an approximation). Mind you, the overall tax rate--counting the Dividend as a rolling tax refund (paid twice monthly)--is heavily-progressive in this system, seeing as the beginning point is deeply negative.
Of course, you lag behind naturally, so you have to keep e.g. 1% of the money taken to build a Trust fund--from which you disburse any excess whenever the fund is too big--so that when you're working on 2017 GNI and 2018 experiences an economic recession mid-year (assuming that's still possible) you have the reserves to make it to 2019 and re-adjust. Quarterly adjustment might make more sense tbh.
I've had a few years to work on this. To his credit, Sam Altman came up with the idea himself a few months ago; I think we're the only two yet to have independently suggested this direction.
Because it takes in a fixed FICA tax and pays it out flat, no promised benefit level.
I can assure you, that eventually you'll run out of other people's money.
Mathematically impossible.
Taxes slowly rise to cover Universal Income increases
The tax rate is permanently-fixed and never increases. The benefit increases faster than inflation because of this.
People slowly figure out "why work", and quit
The person working a menial job is living at a pretty decent middle-class level. The person with no income is basically going paycheck-to-paycheck, without the paycheck, and can't afford all those nice luxuries the guy across the street is getting.
The productive people leave due to increasing taxes, less opportunity
The taxes end up going down over time: the Dividend increases faster than inflation and so tends to reduce the overall effective tax rate.
As well, if productivity per person decreases, so does the Dividend's purchasing power, putting poverty pressure on those recipients without jobs. The Dividend ultimately only reflects a portion of what is produced (money isn't magical: you can't eat it).
You seem to have built an assumption based on an ideal of yours, but not contexted it against the real world.
Those kind of social experiments have a bad history of negative outcomes, something that educated people know.
You mean like popular sovereignty?
What about unemployment insurance? Old-age pensions? National medical care?
How about minimum standards for treatment of prisoners?
There's a distinct history of phenomenally-positive outcomes that educated people seem to know about.
Plus you pull out something completely new, that is also untested and unknown? Huh?
Kind of. It's engineering.
The Universal Dividend is mainly the result of an interesting financial exercise, so the fiscal impact is well-understood in the same way that the fiscal impact of buying or leasing a car is well-understood (you look at the numbers and do the math).
The Dividend behaves as a tax cut (by being a rolling tax refund) and a Keynesian economic stimulus, both of which are well-understood. A Keynesian stimulus generally involves deficit spending to create consumer spending so as to kickstart a downed economy (e.g. 2008 Great Recession, halted by a stimulus refund and a bunch of infrastructure spending); the Dividend doesn't create deficit compared to 2016 (the new 2017 tax law is broken), so essentially has the upside without the downside.
The rough fiscal model ends up cutting the corporate tax rate from 35% to 33.5%, and the top tax rate from 39.6% to 36.2%. That's adjustable, but actually adjusting it requires fiscal data most people shouldn't have: the CBO has to get involved.
Because the Dividend makes people less-poor--especially the poorest--it eases the pressure on the welfare system. This in turn allows welfare to reach farther and keep everyone stable: no homeless, no food insecure. The greatest proportional impact is in the poorest households, and thusly in the poorest local economies, and so consumer spending increases and corresponding employment opportunities appear most-significantly in these areas, creating jobs where there is most likely higher unemployment.
That sort of creates a runaway effect: people start moving up out of poverty and, thus, off welfare, lowering the cost of welfare. Because there's less welfare coming to any given household and the Dividend cannot be revoked, getting a job is less-risky and has lower direct cost, so this effect is stronger. We can improve welfare, lower deficit, or do other things.
The increase in employment and work translates to higher GDP-per-capita and GNI-per-capita, causing the Dividend to increase, creating a feedback loop. That causes a temporary runaway effect of economic growth as well. Without sufficient labor force, this growth creates an employment shortage, wage pressure, and inflation.
To control this runaway economic growth, we must shorten working hours, thus reducing the amount of productivity (per-capita, not per-hour) and spendable income, thus labor demand. People will have to work fewer hours and take home only a moderate amount of additional wealth instead of an enormous and unmanageable amount.
After that tuning, economic stability sets in: the Dividend is a permanent stimulus and thus rebuffs economic damage, so is constantly and continuously reversing transitional unemployment and any recessions which begin to form. This results in a permanent high rate of productivity growth.
All basic, known economic devices, just plugged together in strange ways (i.e. engineering). We know what an engine does, we know what gears do, we know what wheels do; let's build a go-kart.
It has to be universal and permanent to really reflect the outcome expected.
I support a Universal Dividend, anyway, which is self-funding and doesn't have concerning fiscal issues presented by UBIs. The whole UBI thing is a clunky proto-ideal that I regard as old technology.
Putting gang members in jail is what fills jails with gangs, not how well or poorly you treat the gang members while they are there.
Empirical evidence has shown this is false, although you can continue to claim that consuming alcohol in high quantities over sufficiently short time spans doesn't cause drunkenness if you like.
There shouldn't be prison gangs. Prison should reflect society--the community we want to create--so that people come out of prison ready to thrive in society, to go on to be productive individuals. Prisons that create insecurity and fail to treat people with basic human dignity fill with gangs and violence, and emit violent and damaged criminals to terrorize our communities.
By creating an environment in which the prisoners are secure, treated humanely, and given attention to their individual needs, we develop a better community within the prison, and release into society those well-adapted individuals who are brought up and made whole by the support of such a community.
Prisons such as we see in many areas of the United States are cruel and unusual punishment.
Unacceptable. Solitary confinement shall not be used except in extreme cases, due to specific need, with the signature of the Prison Director, and never for a period longer than 15 days, for up to 22 hours per day, with council from a physician and psychiatrist that confinement will not exacerbate any physical or psychological illness, and a physician and psychiatrist visit each day. Should medical council instruct the removal of the prisoner from solitary confinement, it shall be carried out immediately. All matters on when confinement began, all medical council visits, and any harm to or removal of the prisoner due to confinement shall be documented in the prisoner's file.
Prisoners are to be provided contact with society to the greatest degree reasonable without creating a public safety hazard. This includes phone calls and access to current news and media.
Owning a home, even if a creditor forces its sale, provides a financial advantage over renting
They put a $1,200 tax lien on your house and then sell it for $1,200--or less. You get $0.
income tax is only progressive for the folks that get most of their income from actually working
Corporate bonuses, executive perks, any gains from stock sales within 1 year of acquisition, any newly-acquired stock (at its market value upon acquisition) that you don't pay for (executive equity compensation), any physical assets you didn't pay for...
Dividends first get taxed as profits (35%--stupid 21% now), then capital gains (15%), leaving you $55.25 for every $100 of corporate profits disbursed as capital gains.
Of course, owning a house or equity for a few years and then selling it gets you taxed at the capital gains rate of 15%, too. You do have to sell it.
Nor your defense of such a system, which keeps the working classes just getting by and destroys real opportunities for mobility
Actually, my system ensures that nobody can lose economic upwards mobility by being too poor. The immediate, short-term result is an end to homelessness and hunger; the more continuous result is the creation of employment opportunity and the attached upwards mobility in the greatest proportion directly around the poorest.
Further, the base support--the dividend and minimum wage--increase in direct proportion to the per-capita (per-adult, really) income, thus in practical lockstep with productivity; and the effective income tax rate is set by the taxpayer's income in proportion to per-capita (all population) income, with their income adjusted by an OECD Equivalence Scale based on the number of equivalent adult dependents in the household.
A fair share, fair compensation, and fair taxation.
You seem disinterested in understanding how any such thing would possibly work, however, having already made up your mind without exploration.
Should also be abolished. My city has used property tax and water bill hikes as a means to drive the poor out of homes so they can try to sell them to developers, landlords, and more middle-class individuals (gentrification). I've spoken with my State Senator about a full homestead act: a person's home may not be the subject of a forced tax sale. Note that your summer home isn't your home; you only have one.
provides funding for most of the educational system
That's called the "general fund" and claiming you didn't get casino money or that all the expensive waterfront property became cheaper and so schools deteriorated is negligence and grounds for removal from office in the immediate next election cycle. Stop earmarking funds and you lose the excuse that "the money's not there" while standing in front of a giant pile of money.
Luxury taxes are the same thing.
A luxury tax is a sales tax on a non-essential good. A property tax comes back and says, "Oh, you still have that million-dollar thing you bought, that we taxed you on last year? You owe us another 1% of a million dollars. Actually, it's worth $1,050,000 now, so you owe us 1% of that."
Taxing labor is the most regressive taxation of all. It transfers wealth from wage earners to the wealthy.
Also I'm suggesting that laws against non-violently resisting arrest persuade some people at the margins to avoid resisting in ways that might escalate to violence
You don't seem to understand the concepts of jurisprudence and reasonable persons.
False Trichotomy. Wrong on so many levels. I took college while working at a University, so I got a hella discount.
Good to know there are millions of jobs at university so every student can get a near-free education by also being a university employee.
There are scholarships, full and partial
Good to know that every single student entering college is qualified for a full scholership.
You have it stuck in your mind that this is some manner of sex trafficking existence
It's not sex trafficking; it's desperation--like when a man who cannot feed his children shoplifts food, and we call him a terrible person and a criminal when really he and his family are only those whom we have failed.
Actually, earnings are calculated pre-tax. Corporate dividends must come out of taxable profits, as they get taxed, and then forwarded as capital gains to shareholders (capital gains collected in this manner are taxed at 55.25% in total). At least, that's my understanding.
Some corporations retain a 20% or 30% profit margin on which they pay 35% taxes (pre-2017); others retain just 2%. That's long-running average; year-to-year is a red herring. Those corporations aren't investing that or passing those taxes onto consumers; they're reaping the profits. A corporation's necessary profit margin covers the threats of loss and the opportunities of gain: at the bare minimum, their long-running profit will be zero. It is fair for corporations to have a reasonable profit such that there is something to disburse to the shareholders and so forth, something not strictly necessary; it is unfair for corporations to drain the economy into a private bucket so they can marvel at just how much they retain, or to pay out dividends amounting to a huge proportion of their total revenue.
A wealth tax is nonsense. First you work to buy a thing; then you work to buy it back from the Government. Everybody knows this is stupid; that's why wealth tax proposals always come with a proposal to exempt people without a lot of money: you'd make it harder as you go up toward middle-class with that kind of thing if it wasn't just taxing the rich.
The wealth of a nation--its capacity to provide a standard-of-living--isn't idle assets that would get sucked down in months or, in extreme imbalances, a few short years; its the nation's capacity to produce, continuously, to meet that standard-of-living per person.
Hayek is long-proven a fool, but conservatives still love him.
Dancing naked or nearly so in an establishment designed for that purpose is not against the law, nor should it be.
The argument is not whether it is against the law; it's whether free will is involved when you have a choice: you can forego a college degree and be poor forever; you can take a student loan and be crushed by debt, and poor forever; or you can become an exotic dancer because you have no other marketable skills due to that whole "everyone wants you to have a degree" thing.
Poverty, debt, or humiliation. Choose.
As I have noted: there are many who do not see the last option as humiliation, as they enjoy that sort of thing anyway, and the pay is just a bonus. That does not excuse the existence of those who do not and feel it is their least-terrible option any more than the existence of the BDSM community excuses the existence of domestic violence.
You resolve this by eliminating the terrible choice: you ensure economic equity such that nobody is forced into this sort of degrading situation by sheer need, and then only those who see it as an expression of their own free choice will take up the practice.
Violence used against police would be criminal assault. It's kind of like how you don't get arrested for shoving someone away from you, but you do get arrested for beating or stabbing them. The difference is shoving someone away who is a cop and trying to arrest you is a crime, somehow, and perhaps thus should not be.
The first problem with your analysis is that it implies there is some 'logical' way of composing a social contract in such a way as there won't be some people who are 'made insecure' by violating the social contract.
Perhaps, perhaps not. We're well-aware of issues of behavioral health stemming from prior insecurity as a failure of our society, including mental health issues as a minority proportion of poor behavioral health, and poverty as a majority portion. We have several states and even nations around the world which have instituted minimum standards for treatment of prisoners in which their human dignity, safety, and individual needs are met, education and leisure is provided for, and every effort is made to integrate the prisoner with society and speed their rehabilitation is made. These efforts generally resolve the issue and convert prisoners to productive members of society who then uphold the social contract.
that is not a logical reason for the individual to not violate them if they find they are able to with impunity and doing so has the desired effect.
True! This is why I have often described the Fourth and Fifth amendments as checks and balances against government overreach by way of ensuring that a person who is not a sufficient nuisance is also not likely to be convicted of crime. You can make something illegal, but you have to find evidence to gain warrant to perform a search, trial, and conviction. This has had results ranging from laws which do nothing in practice (my State at one point had made it Constitutionally illegal for a woman to perform oral sex on a man--nobody has ever been arrested for this, and it happens quite frequently without actionable police evidence anyway) to laws which have proven utterly unenforceable and only created a lot of arrests but not the consistent ability to arrest (see: Marijuana).
In other words: it is likely you can violate the social contract if the social contract is invasive and without purpose, because your violation does not in fact threaten the security of those around you. The more your action violates the security of others, the more likely they are to know about it.
there is a significant body of scientific evidence that such an object exists as it is reported by the experience of many millions of human beings throughout time and is connected with many physical events that cannot be explained in any other reasonable fashion
Correct: The primary behavior of humans to seek security--to seek things like liberty and freedom, personal safety, and the long-term protection thereof--has been experienced by nearly all throughout history, and has lead to behaviors which cannot be explained through any other reasonable fashion currently known to the scientific body.
there is no such thing as evidence based ethics. There is no test for 'right or wrong'
Several years ago, I sat down and decided to explore this. People don't provide a real basis for right and wrong; I had determined that ethics are essentially a means to avoid difficult moral judgments by taking an action mindlessly based on a prior analysis so as to shirk your responsibility of making the right decision based on your own conscience. I later discovered rules lawyering, which makes the ethics thing a bit more problematic.
A human, alone, naked, and unarmed, is useless. It dies. It has no way to support itself, no way to protect itself, and generally will die from weather, starvation, or predation. Humans group together for security, establishing society: a group of humans agrees to a social contract by which the group protects its members and ensures their security.
Failure of a society to provide security for its members results in societal decay. Our broken penal system in the US actually increases crime by taking people for whom society has failed to provide security (or who have made mistakes) and making them even more insecure, thus they come out of prison as worse criminals, and end up back in prison soon after. You see similar in revolutionary societies where an oppressed underclass eventually turns on the rest of society and either cuts it off (wars of independence) or tears it down to start over and establish security (wars of revolution).
What is right is what provides the greatest individual security for the greatest span of society at the least expense to any member of society who does not violate the social contract. Criminal justice reforms are essentially based around creating security for those who violate the social contract by extending help to bring them back into society and forgive them so long as they become compliant. Welfare is based around extending security to those who have faced a lack of economic opportunity or other hardships.
Creating insecurity is wrong.
Yes, my view of right and wrong is due to a defect: I can't actually "believe", and only understand validation of conclusions by evidence or internally and externally consistent logical proposition extrapolating from physical fact. In this case, the motivations and behaviors of humans has always displayed instability when faced with insecurity, and stability when granted security: people need to feel safe or counterproductive and destructive things happen.
Right and wrong are based in physical evidence.
Any philosophy that views random sexual acts outside the context of child rearing as positive, will create an ethical system when women ( and men) are treated as objects for sexual pleasure instead of other people due the same level of respect as oneself.
Any philosophy where the consensual engagement of desired activity between two people is rejected by the greater social group will create insecurity for those with such desire, and a sense of oppression by society at large. Compliance occurs to retain the security of social acceptance, and comes at the expense of repression (unhealthy covering of emotions and impulses without addressing the root cause) instead of suppression (the delay of expression of emotions and impulses until appropriate). This causes psychological stress which is eventually released in unhealthy ways (rape or secret lives of adultery).
You suggest people are simple tools meant to reproduce, and that you have the ultimate moral authority over them. They are your toys, and they will play as you direct, for your approval.
Liberty is security. People sacrifice some so-called natural rights, such as the right to do harm onto others, to the government so that the government may use these rights to protect other natural rights, such as liberty and property.
Many of the dancers at one of our local "Gentleman's Clubs" are students working their way through college. No one is forcing them, loans are available.
No one is forcing a black teenager in South Carolina, 1820, to try to make a decent living while nobody will even let her shop in their store 'cause a free black is an affront to society. Slavery is available; she could even be one of them house wenches that gets to dress all pretty and smile for guests.
Student loans. Really.
I'm sure some of them are just fine with the situation and feel like they're in control; others are terrified of crushing student loan debt and feel like they have no choice.
Go and get a job at a gay bar, wear stupidly tight shirts and hot pants. Clothes so tight that they look ready to snap. Work there for a month and tell me how it felt. Tell me how it felt when a drunk patron makes a pass at you, how it felt when they waived a tip in front of you as they asked you out on a date.
Men can handle this somewhat better than women, although maybe not to that degree. We shrug a lot of stuff off. I've never quite figured out why; and I'm a bad model because I shrug everything off (near-perfect psychological resilience--it's a defect), so I can't really explore by introspection using the data I have.
I grew up in an era where you could generally insult a man for being fat, ugly, and stupid, because he'll probably get angry at you and then go about his life; whereas laying into women like that will get you beaten in the nearest back-alley because women actually wander away hurt and people don't give you a pass on that one. That's about the extent of data I have here.
The experiment might just end up with someone telling you a bunch of dudes are assholes but they don't see why women can't just "man up" and quit whining. This is especially-likely when you've prepared someone for the experience ahead of time by allowing them to consider the ramifications and then put themselves there by intent: they go in with stronger defenses, and will generally attempt to achieve validation rather than understanding.
It's like when people bring up that Pelosi is condescending and insane; Hillary won't take any personal responsibility for anything; and Warren is hurr hurr Pocohontas. Elizabeth Warren is literally unapproachable to these people: she has never really claimed any special privilege for the family heritage her grandparents shared with her growing up, and everyone from which she's accused of extracting special favor via privilege has detailed records denying this; yet all they can do is plug their ears and warble a lot about nothing. Meanwhile Pelosi and Hillary have earned the disfavor of Democratic voters because yeah, they're legitimately terrible.
Sarkeesian made her name by being the distaff Jack Thompson.
Whether you can blame Hillary for anything beyond being Hillary, though, that's another matter.
I do know a lot of right wingers who enjoy seeing people punished for their mistakes.
Creating more crime. We must implement full Nelson Mandela Rules and Dynamic Security as the standard in the United States.
I also know a lot of religious people who are convinced that if we don't get all this sinning under control God's going to wipe us out.
A deity demanding worship and obedience under threat of punishment is trampling your natural rights and must be evil.
You can see a great deal of peace in certain people who believe certain things about their religion; and a great deal of terror in certain other people who believe God is out to condemn us all to eternal torment if we don't repent and swear fealty every moment of every day and beat everyone who doesn't until they repent or die.
Slashdot Mirror
Most Basic Income proposals have a sort of disconnected funding source: you declare that each person will receive $10,000/year or whatever number, and then you find a way to fund that (levy taxes). This produces either a bunch of budgeting to take from the General Fund or something like Social Security's FICA system, meaning you're making adjustments all the time to get funding.
The Universal Dividend instead is a consequence of its funding source: you declare a 12.5% FICA tax (like the 6.2% Social Security you pay on your paycheck), then disburse that. There is no promise of some dollars and cost-of-living adjustment, but rather there is a system which disburses part of the income as a level baseline ("Fair Share"). Nobody asks where we're going to get the money this year or if the system will be solvent in 2034.
It's a bit more complex than that. The construction involves rolling Social Security OASDI payroll FICAs into income tax brackets, rolling OASDI into a pile of restructuring targets, and then cutting that restructuring (as a proportion of income taxes taken) off both corporate and individual income. Then, you levy a 12.5% tax on top the remaining tax brackets and disburse the result by dividing it among all Census-measured adults (it's really just resident American citizens). From there, you rebuild OASDI on top of the Dividend such that retirement and disability benefits total up to the same for any recipient when including the Dividend (shifts part of Social Security's load to this more-stable funding source), which only requires about a 6% payroll FICA (rather than 6.2% payroll and 6.2% income).
This rough construction gives you a 33.5% corporate income tax rate (down from 35%) and a 36.2% top individual tax rate (down from 39.6%). From there, you ask the CBO to do whatever magic is needed to adjust the income tax system to be more-progressive while bringing in the same amount of Federal revenue (you need to know precise distributions of income across all income levels to work this out; that's not generally available, or at least it's only available as an approximation). Mind you, the overall tax rate--counting the Dividend as a rolling tax refund (paid twice monthly)--is heavily-progressive in this system, seeing as the beginning point is deeply negative.
Of course, you lag behind naturally, so you have to keep e.g. 1% of the money taken to build a Trust fund--from which you disburse any excess whenever the fund is too big--so that when you're working on 2017 GNI and 2018 experiences an economic recession mid-year (assuming that's still possible) you have the reserves to make it to 2019 and re-adjust. Quarterly adjustment might make more sense tbh.
I've had a few years to work on this. To his credit, Sam Altman came up with the idea himself a few months ago; I think we're the only two yet to have independently suggested this direction.
Why would you say it is "self funding"?
Because it takes in a fixed FICA tax and pays it out flat, no promised benefit level.
I can assure you, that eventually you'll run out of other people's money.
Mathematically impossible.
Taxes slowly rise to cover Universal Income increases
The tax rate is permanently-fixed and never increases. The benefit increases faster than inflation because of this.
People slowly figure out "why work", and quit
The person working a menial job is living at a pretty decent middle-class level. The person with no income is basically going paycheck-to-paycheck, without the paycheck, and can't afford all those nice luxuries the guy across the street is getting.
The productive people leave due to increasing taxes, less opportunity
The taxes end up going down over time: the Dividend increases faster than inflation and so tends to reduce the overall effective tax rate.
As well, if productivity per person decreases, so does the Dividend's purchasing power, putting poverty pressure on those recipients without jobs. The Dividend ultimately only reflects a portion of what is produced (money isn't magical: you can't eat it).
You seem to have built an assumption based on an ideal of yours, but not contexted it against the real world.
Those kind of social experiments have a bad history of negative outcomes, something that educated people know.
You mean like popular sovereignty?
What about unemployment insurance? Old-age pensions? National medical care?
How about minimum standards for treatment of prisoners?
There's a distinct history of phenomenally-positive outcomes that educated people seem to know about.
Plus you pull out something completely new, that is also untested and unknown? Huh?
Kind of. It's engineering.
The Universal Dividend is mainly the result of an interesting financial exercise, so the fiscal impact is well-understood in the same way that the fiscal impact of buying or leasing a car is well-understood (you look at the numbers and do the math).
The Dividend behaves as a tax cut (by being a rolling tax refund) and a Keynesian economic stimulus, both of which are well-understood. A Keynesian stimulus generally involves deficit spending to create consumer spending so as to kickstart a downed economy (e.g. 2008 Great Recession, halted by a stimulus refund and a bunch of infrastructure spending); the Dividend doesn't create deficit compared to 2016 (the new 2017 tax law is broken), so essentially has the upside without the downside.
The rough fiscal model ends up cutting the corporate tax rate from 35% to 33.5%, and the top tax rate from 39.6% to 36.2%. That's adjustable, but actually adjusting it requires fiscal data most people shouldn't have: the CBO has to get involved.
Because the Dividend makes people less-poor--especially the poorest--it eases the pressure on the welfare system. This in turn allows welfare to reach farther and keep everyone stable: no homeless, no food insecure. The greatest proportional impact is in the poorest households, and thusly in the poorest local economies, and so consumer spending increases and corresponding employment opportunities appear most-significantly in these areas, creating jobs where there is most likely higher unemployment.
That sort of creates a runaway effect: people start moving up out of poverty and, thus, off welfare, lowering the cost of welfare. Because there's less welfare coming to any given household and the Dividend cannot be revoked, getting a job is less-risky and has lower direct cost, so this effect is stronger. We can improve welfare, lower deficit, or do other things.
The increase in employment and work translates to higher GDP-per-capita and GNI-per-capita, causing the Dividend to increase, creating a feedback loop. That causes a temporary runaway effect of economic growth as well. Without sufficient labor force, this growth creates an employment shortage, wage pressure, and inflation.
To control this runaway economic growth, we must shorten working hours, thus reducing the amount of productivity (per-capita, not per-hour) and spendable income, thus labor demand. People will have to work fewer hours and take home only a moderate amount of additional wealth instead of an enormous and unmanageable amount.
After that tuning, economic stability sets in: the Dividend is a permanent stimulus and thus rebuffs economic damage, so is constantly and continuously reversing transitional unemployment and any recessions which begin to form. This results in a permanent high rate of productivity growth.
All basic, known economic devices, just plugged together in strange ways (i.e. engineering). We know what an engine does, we know what gears do, we know what wheels do; let's build a go-kart.
Universal Dividend is a portion of all income being taxed and redistributed flat. The rough financial model actually winds up cutting taxes a whole lot.
Don't use a drill; use a torque driver. A power drill with a torque limiter is basically a weak impact wrench.
It has to be universal and permanent to really reflect the outcome expected.
I support a Universal Dividend, anyway, which is self-funding and doesn't have concerning fiscal issues presented by UBIs. The whole UBI thing is a clunky proto-ideal that I regard as old technology.
Putting gang members in jail is what fills jails with gangs, not how well or poorly you treat the gang members while they are there.
Empirical evidence has shown this is false, although you can continue to claim that consuming alcohol in high quantities over sufficiently short time spans doesn't cause drunkenness if you like.
All 50 screws are tightened the same way. Use a torque driver, you luddite!
There shouldn't be prison gangs. Prison should reflect society--the community we want to create--so that people come out of prison ready to thrive in society, to go on to be productive individuals. Prisons that create insecurity and fail to treat people with basic human dignity fill with gangs and violence, and emit violent and damaged criminals to terrorize our communities.
By creating an environment in which the prisoners are secure, treated humanely, and given attention to their individual needs, we develop a better community within the prison, and release into society those well-adapted individuals who are brought up and made whole by the support of such a community.
Prisons such as we see in many areas of the United States are cruel and unusual punishment.
Unacceptable. Solitary confinement shall not be used except in extreme cases, due to specific need, with the signature of the Prison Director, and never for a period longer than 15 days, for up to 22 hours per day, with council from a physician and psychiatrist that confinement will not exacerbate any physical or psychological illness, and a physician and psychiatrist visit each day. Should medical council instruct the removal of the prisoner from solitary confinement, it shall be carried out immediately. All matters on when confinement began, all medical council visits, and any harm to or removal of the prisoner due to confinement shall be documented in the prisoner's file.
Prisoners are to be provided contact with society to the greatest degree reasonable without creating a public safety hazard. This includes phone calls and access to current news and media.
Owning a home, even if a creditor forces its sale, provides a financial advantage over renting
They put a $1,200 tax lien on your house and then sell it for $1,200--or less. You get $0.
income tax is only progressive for the folks that get most of their income from actually working
Corporate bonuses, executive perks, any gains from stock sales within 1 year of acquisition, any newly-acquired stock (at its market value upon acquisition) that you don't pay for (executive equity compensation), any physical assets you didn't pay for...
Dividends first get taxed as profits (35%--stupid 21% now), then capital gains (15%), leaving you $55.25 for every $100 of corporate profits disbursed as capital gains.
Of course, owning a house or equity for a few years and then selling it gets you taxed at the capital gains rate of 15%, too. You do have to sell it.
A small group of individuals have a disproportionate amount of taxation at those lower levels, basically people for whom there is one of them for every 1,000 taxpayers. They pay more than the top 5% to top 1%, but a touch less than the top 1% overall.
Nor your defense of such a system, which keeps the working classes just getting by and destroys real opportunities for mobility
Actually, my system ensures that nobody can lose economic upwards mobility by being too poor. The immediate, short-term result is an end to homelessness and hunger; the more continuous result is the creation of employment opportunity and the attached upwards mobility in the greatest proportion directly around the poorest.
Further, the base support--the dividend and minimum wage--increase in direct proportion to the per-capita (per-adult, really) income, thus in practical lockstep with productivity; and the effective income tax rate is set by the taxpayer's income in proportion to per-capita (all population) income, with their income adjusted by an OECD Equivalence Scale based on the number of equivalent adult dependents in the household.
A fair share, fair compensation, and fair taxation.
You seem disinterested in understanding how any such thing would possibly work, however, having already made up your mind without exploration.
Personal property tax
Should also be abolished. My city has used property tax and water bill hikes as a means to drive the poor out of homes so they can try to sell them to developers, landlords, and more middle-class individuals (gentrification). I've spoken with my State Senator about a full homestead act: a person's home may not be the subject of a forced tax sale. Note that your summer home isn't your home; you only have one.
provides funding for most of the educational system
That's called the "general fund" and claiming you didn't get casino money or that all the expensive waterfront property became cheaper and so schools deteriorated is negligence and grounds for removal from office in the immediate next election cycle. Stop earmarking funds and you lose the excuse that "the money's not there" while standing in front of a giant pile of money.
Luxury taxes are the same thing.
A luxury tax is a sales tax on a non-essential good. A property tax comes back and says, "Oh, you still have that million-dollar thing you bought, that we taxed you on last year? You owe us another 1% of a million dollars. Actually, it's worth $1,050,000 now, so you owe us 1% of that."
Taxing labor is the most regressive taxation of all. It transfers wealth from wage earners to the wealthy.
It seems that the income tax is actually the most-progressive tax our nation has, and helps drive our tax system to be progressive overall; while the most-regressive tax is the payroll tax system, or perhaps sales tax--which would be a horrible national system.
Also I'm suggesting that laws against non-violently resisting arrest persuade some people at the margins to avoid resisting in ways that might escalate to violence
You don't seem to understand the concepts of jurisprudence and reasonable persons.
But who knows? Run the experiment and find out.
There's a reasonable approach.
False Trichotomy. Wrong on so many levels. I took college while working at a University, so I got a hella discount.
Good to know there are millions of jobs at university so every student can get a near-free education by also being a university employee.
There are scholarships, full and partial
Good to know that every single student entering college is qualified for a full scholership.
You have it stuck in your mind that this is some manner of sex trafficking existence
It's not sex trafficking; it's desperation--like when a man who cannot feed his children shoplifts food, and we call him a terrible person and a criminal when really he and his family are only those whom we have failed.
Actually, earnings are calculated pre-tax. Corporate dividends must come out of taxable profits, as they get taxed, and then forwarded as capital gains to shareholders (capital gains collected in this manner are taxed at 55.25% in total). At least, that's my understanding.
Some corporations retain a 20% or 30% profit margin on which they pay 35% taxes (pre-2017); others retain just 2%. That's long-running average; year-to-year is a red herring. Those corporations aren't investing that or passing those taxes onto consumers; they're reaping the profits. A corporation's necessary profit margin covers the threats of loss and the opportunities of gain: at the bare minimum, their long-running profit will be zero. It is fair for corporations to have a reasonable profit such that there is something to disburse to the shareholders and so forth, something not strictly necessary; it is unfair for corporations to drain the economy into a private bucket so they can marvel at just how much they retain, or to pay out dividends amounting to a huge proportion of their total revenue.
A wealth tax is nonsense. First you work to buy a thing; then you work to buy it back from the Government. Everybody knows this is stupid; that's why wealth tax proposals always come with a proposal to exempt people without a lot of money: you'd make it harder as you go up toward middle-class with that kind of thing if it wasn't just taxing the rich.
The wealth of a nation--its capacity to provide a standard-of-living--isn't idle assets that would get sucked down in months or, in extreme imbalances, a few short years; its the nation's capacity to produce, continuously, to meet that standard-of-living per person.
Hayek is long-proven a fool, but conservatives still love him.
Dancing naked or nearly so in an establishment designed for that purpose is not against the law, nor should it be.
The argument is not whether it is against the law; it's whether free will is involved when you have a choice: you can forego a college degree and be poor forever; you can take a student loan and be crushed by debt, and poor forever; or you can become an exotic dancer because you have no other marketable skills due to that whole "everyone wants you to have a degree" thing.
Poverty, debt, or humiliation. Choose.
As I have noted: there are many who do not see the last option as humiliation, as they enjoy that sort of thing anyway, and the pay is just a bonus. That does not excuse the existence of those who do not and feel it is their least-terrible option any more than the existence of the BDSM community excuses the existence of domestic violence.
You resolve this by eliminating the terrible choice: you ensure economic equity such that nobody is forced into this sort of degrading situation by sheer need, and then only those who see it as an expression of their own free choice will take up the practice.
Equity has a connotation of need. There are several current initiatives notated as fair, such as the Fair Vote Initiative.
Violence used against police would be criminal assault. It's kind of like how you don't get arrested for shoving someone away from you, but you do get arrested for beating or stabbing them. The difference is shoving someone away who is a cop and trying to arrest you is a crime, somehow, and perhaps thus should not be.
The first problem with your analysis is that it implies there is some 'logical' way of composing a social contract in such a way as there won't be some people who are 'made insecure' by violating the social contract.
Perhaps, perhaps not. We're well-aware of issues of behavioral health stemming from prior insecurity as a failure of our society, including mental health issues as a minority proportion of poor behavioral health, and poverty as a majority portion. We have several states and even nations around the world which have instituted minimum standards for treatment of prisoners in which their human dignity, safety, and individual needs are met, education and leisure is provided for, and every effort is made to integrate the prisoner with society and speed their rehabilitation is made. These efforts generally resolve the issue and convert prisoners to productive members of society who then uphold the social contract.
that is not a logical reason for the individual to not violate them if they find they are able to with impunity and doing so has the desired effect.
True! This is why I have often described the Fourth and Fifth amendments as checks and balances against government overreach by way of ensuring that a person who is not a sufficient nuisance is also not likely to be convicted of crime. You can make something illegal, but you have to find evidence to gain warrant to perform a search, trial, and conviction. This has had results ranging from laws which do nothing in practice (my State at one point had made it Constitutionally illegal for a woman to perform oral sex on a man--nobody has ever been arrested for this, and it happens quite frequently without actionable police evidence anyway) to laws which have proven utterly unenforceable and only created a lot of arrests but not the consistent ability to arrest (see: Marijuana).
In other words: it is likely you can violate the social contract if the social contract is invasive and without purpose, because your violation does not in fact threaten the security of those around you. The more your action violates the security of others, the more likely they are to know about it.
there is a significant body of scientific evidence that such an object exists as it is reported by the experience of many millions of human beings throughout time and is connected with many physical events that cannot be explained in any other reasonable fashion
Correct: The primary behavior of humans to seek security--to seek things like liberty and freedom, personal safety, and the long-term protection thereof--has been experienced by nearly all throughout history, and has lead to behaviors which cannot be explained through any other reasonable fashion currently known to the scientific body.
If you want to avoid having candidates you really dislike, get involved in the nomination process.
We have popular-vote instead of ranked-choice. People strategically vote based on for whom they think everyone else will vote.
Also, I'm voting for myself for US Congress this year.
there is no such thing as evidence based ethics. There is no test for 'right or wrong'
Several years ago, I sat down and decided to explore this. People don't provide a real basis for right and wrong; I had determined that ethics are essentially a means to avoid difficult moral judgments by taking an action mindlessly based on a prior analysis so as to shirk your responsibility of making the right decision based on your own conscience. I later discovered rules lawyering, which makes the ethics thing a bit more problematic.
A human, alone, naked, and unarmed, is useless. It dies. It has no way to support itself, no way to protect itself, and generally will die from weather, starvation, or predation. Humans group together for security, establishing society: a group of humans agrees to a social contract by which the group protects its members and ensures their security.
Failure of a society to provide security for its members results in societal decay. Our broken penal system in the US actually increases crime by taking people for whom society has failed to provide security (or who have made mistakes) and making them even more insecure, thus they come out of prison as worse criminals, and end up back in prison soon after. You see similar in revolutionary societies where an oppressed underclass eventually turns on the rest of society and either cuts it off (wars of independence) or tears it down to start over and establish security (wars of revolution).
What is right is what provides the greatest individual security for the greatest span of society at the least expense to any member of society who does not violate the social contract. Criminal justice reforms are essentially based around creating security for those who violate the social contract by extending help to bring them back into society and forgive them so long as they become compliant. Welfare is based around extending security to those who have faced a lack of economic opportunity or other hardships.
Creating insecurity is wrong.
Yes, my view of right and wrong is due to a defect: I can't actually "believe", and only understand validation of conclusions by evidence or internally and externally consistent logical proposition extrapolating from physical fact. In this case, the motivations and behaviors of humans has always displayed instability when faced with insecurity, and stability when granted security: people need to feel safe or counterproductive and destructive things happen.
Right and wrong are based in physical evidence.
Any philosophy that views random sexual acts outside the context of child rearing as positive, will create an ethical system when women ( and men) are treated as objects for sexual pleasure instead of other people due the same level of respect as oneself.
Any philosophy where the consensual engagement of desired activity between two people is rejected by the greater social group will create insecurity for those with such desire, and a sense of oppression by society at large. Compliance occurs to retain the security of social acceptance, and comes at the expense of repression (unhealthy covering of emotions and impulses without addressing the root cause) instead of suppression (the delay of expression of emotions and impulses until appropriate). This causes psychological stress which is eventually released in unhealthy ways (rape or secret lives of adultery).
You suggest people are simple tools meant to reproduce, and that you have the ultimate moral authority over them. They are your toys, and they will play as you direct, for your approval.
Liberty is security. People sacrifice some so-called natural rights, such as the right to do harm onto others, to the government so that the government may use these rights to protect other natural rights, such as liberty and property.
Many of the dancers at one of our local "Gentleman's Clubs" are students working their way through college. No one is forcing them, loans are available.
No one is forcing a black teenager in South Carolina, 1820, to try to make a decent living while nobody will even let her shop in their store 'cause a free black is an affront to society. Slavery is available; she could even be one of them house wenches that gets to dress all pretty and smile for guests.
Student loans. Really.
I'm sure some of them are just fine with the situation and feel like they're in control; others are terrified of crushing student loan debt and feel like they have no choice.
Go and get a job at a gay bar, wear stupidly tight shirts and hot pants. Clothes so tight that they look ready to snap. Work there for a month and tell me how it felt. Tell me how it felt when a drunk patron makes a pass at you, how it felt when they waived a tip in front of you as they asked you out on a date.
Men can handle this somewhat better than women, although maybe not to that degree. We shrug a lot of stuff off. I've never quite figured out why; and I'm a bad model because I shrug everything off (near-perfect psychological resilience--it's a defect), so I can't really explore by introspection using the data I have.
I grew up in an era where you could generally insult a man for being fat, ugly, and stupid, because he'll probably get angry at you and then go about his life; whereas laying into women like that will get you beaten in the nearest back-alley because women actually wander away hurt and people don't give you a pass on that one. That's about the extent of data I have here.
The experiment might just end up with someone telling you a bunch of dudes are assholes but they don't see why women can't just "man up" and quit whining. This is especially-likely when you've prepared someone for the experience ahead of time by allowing them to consider the ramifications and then put themselves there by intent: they go in with stronger defenses, and will generally attempt to achieve validation rather than understanding.
They're convenient because they're both terrible.
It's like when people bring up that Pelosi is condescending and insane; Hillary won't take any personal responsibility for anything; and Warren is hurr hurr Pocohontas. Elizabeth Warren is literally unapproachable to these people: she has never really claimed any special privilege for the family heritage her grandparents shared with her growing up, and everyone from which she's accused of extracting special favor via privilege has detailed records denying this; yet all they can do is plug their ears and warble a lot about nothing. Meanwhile Pelosi and Hillary have earned the disfavor of Democratic voters because yeah, they're legitimately terrible.
Sarkeesian made her name by being the distaff Jack Thompson.
Whether you can blame Hillary for anything beyond being Hillary, though, that's another matter.
I do know a lot of right wingers who enjoy seeing people punished for their mistakes.
Creating more crime. We must implement full Nelson Mandela Rules and Dynamic Security as the standard in the United States.
I also know a lot of religious people who are convinced that if we don't get all this sinning under control God's going to wipe us out.
A deity demanding worship and obedience under threat of punishment is trampling your natural rights and must be evil.
You can see a great deal of peace in certain people who believe certain things about their religion; and a great deal of terror in certain other people who believe God is out to condemn us all to eternal torment if we don't repent and swear fealty every moment of every day and beat everyone who doesn't until they repent or die.