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Comment by cogware | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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/

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