The Panama Papers prove it: we can afford a universal basic income | Hacker News Reader

The Panama Papers prove it: we can afford a universal basic income

theguardian.com

53 pointsmortenjorck24 comments

This article is pure polemical, without any justification for its claims (not even a back-of-the-envelope estimate of what kind increase in taxes would result from ending offshore tax evasion). Outrage is not a substitute for mathematics or economics.

I personally support UBI, but we need to ensure that it's sustainable.

Well, what is really needed is a tax on international transactions... the moving of anything in, and currency out of the country. That would make evasion and funds shifting far less attractive. Beyond that would be what would be for some a very high base tax rate, universally... something close to 50%. I just have a problem with more than half of what you make going to taxes.

From there, funds should be dispersed into accounts... A portion would go to every tax paying citizen (filing income tax required for prior year) as a UBI. Everyone would get the same amount, every week.

Of the rest part would be distributed to states based on land size. Part would go to states based on population. The rest would be towards any federal spending...

In that, the budget would have to fit the means based on a percent of tax collected first... that would shift incentives a bit.

A UBI would also allow for many state and federal welfare programs and subsidies to be nuked. A larger portion multiplier could be applied to citizens over 65, then again at 70... To put those going into retirement years in a better position, displacing Social Security.

Taxing international transactions like international commerce and small things like travel? I don't think that would be good. We've been spending the better part of the last seven decades eliminating barriers to international transactions because of the problems tariffs caused... This would be a step backwards in that direction.

protectionism and peace: pick one

It can be incredibly easy and transparent... I'm not saying you can't order something internationally, only that it's taxed at the transaction... that's pretty close to how VAT systems work. Only that the tax is at the currency exchange, not the goods, to prevent cheating the system.

The back-of-the-envelope math I've done for the US indicates that to give families BI equivalent to the current poverty level (about $16250) means the deficit would double (annual expenditures would go to about $7tn). This was even after removing about half of the payments made to individuals & families under the current system (you'd have to leave Social Security for example, since it's a paid-in-advance system)

I agree that it's a worthy/interesting goal, but the numbers just don't support it.

Do we have enough food for everyone? Yes.

Is there enough clean, renewable energy available? Yes.

Can we provide everyone free mobility yet? Not quite, but lots of folks are working on electric, self driving cars.

What does that leave? Housing, health care, and education? Well, there you have it. The places we need to rapidly drive the marginal cost down.

I'm not sure I agree that there's enough clean, renewable energy - indeed it's the one thing we're most desperately short of - but this is the right way to think about economics. Too often people get distracted by the pretend numbers, and forget to look at the "raw" situation which provides insight. This can lead to absurd opinions like "breaking windows is good for the economy because it employs glazers" - yes, careful thought shows that the reasoning is fallacious (the money spent on glazers could have been spent elsewhere), but it's much quicker to trust in the common-sense principle that breaking stuff can't possibly create wealth.

Example: UK housing. There are hundreds of thousands of empty houses in the UK, roughly 10 for each homeless person or family - and yet there is a "housing shortage". The economics of supply and demand tell us that this shouldn't really happen, but it does. Investigating further, one finds that many of the empty houses are owned by people who cannot afford to renovate them to a standard where they can legally rent or sell them; like with the minimum wage, our so-called "standard of living" so impacts the liquidity of the market that many are forced to do without entirely. That doesn't mean that standard should be lowered, only that liquidity needs to be restored somehow - if those landlords were only lent the money they need to renovate the houses, they'd soon make the money back in rent. Therefore we do in fact have the resources to house everyone, just like we have the resources to feed everyone. But, through the pretend numbers, we've convinced ourselves we can't.

All economic resource problems can be categorised into "not enough resources" (increasingly rare nowadays, and soluble by technological development) and "not enough liquidity" ( e.g. "we have enough to go around but the pretend numbers say we don't").

A cute liquidity parable: http://economyblog.ncpa.org/the-tale-of-the-100-bill/

"A larger income, to ensure that no American fell into absolute abject poverty – say, $12,000 a year – would cost around $3.6tn. That is a big number, but one that once again seems far more reasonable when considered through the lens of the Panama Papers and the scandal of global tax evasion"

Regardless of what you think about UBI, the Panama Papers do not prove it could or could not work.

The US Federal Budget is $3.8 trillion. There is no way tax not being paid in Panama is coming even close to the $3.6 tn they mention.

This article is just click bait.

> The US Federal Budget is $3.8 trillion. There is no way tax not being paid in Panama is coming even close to the $3.6 tn they mention.

1. The 3.6tn figure is for the whole world. The US will only be a chunk of that, although probably a large chunk.

2. Why do you not consider these numbers plausible? On what factual basis can you dispute that the US is not in fact missing out on, say, 20-40% of their possible tax income because of tax evasion?

There are a little over 300,000,000 people in the USA.

$12,000 × >300,000,000 = >$3,600,000,000,000

There are a little over 7 billion people on earth:

$12,000 × >7,000,000,000 = >$84,000,000,000,000,000

Assets in cash are a stock not a flow. What happens when it runs out? It's surely not sustainable to do this.

I'd hardly use the phrasing that it 'proves it'.

A variant on UBI that I would like to see explored is to make the payments conditional on doing some kind of community service. Something like cleaning a park or volunteering at a school or something. Maybe a 1-3 hour / week commitment. Not as a way to save money so much as to strengthen communities and give people a way to contribute.

Make it 8. The Government is obligated to find something to do for all of it citizens (that require it) for 1 day per week and no one starves.

The reason I'm thinking 1-3 is that allows people to have a full time job and still get the UBI if they want or need to. But yeah that's another thing I've thought about - having a guaranteed job and pay.

Oh like UBI but with all the disadvantages of not being universal.

There are also disadvantages to being universal. Let's not pretend that the criticisms of ubi are invalid.

Sure, but let's be clear that a conditional basic income is very different to a universal basic income, not just some minor tweak on the idea.

So, a job ?

I fail to see what the proof is. Apart from plenty of opinion, this article fails to present any numbers from the Panama Papers that would prove that we could pay a basic income year after year.

This article is retarded on almost every level. I generally detest the Guardian but at least respect them for intellectual consistency. This is just plain atrocious thinking.

1. The fact that rich people from Russia and China hide their wealth in Panama means nothing about the US. There are actually no Americans on that list (http://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/panama-papers/why-are-ameri...).

2. The whole point of UBI is that it can come from savings on OTHER programs - such as welfare, food stamps, unemployment insurance, etc. Therefore we don't just take the number of citizens of a country as the new cost - but we also have to subtract savings from eliminating the other programs (and their administration).

Totally illogical, how do tax loopholes for the rich get affected by giving everyone a basic income? The middle class will pay more tax and give it to the poor. The super rich will continue paying no tax...

The worse thing is the article is titled "proof". Where is this proof? It be nice if the rich did pay for a universal basic income.

The opportunistic Guardian strikes again.

When did self-sufficiency lose its luster as a virtue?

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