https://web.archive.org/web/20160321083817/http://mattbrueni...
What I care about is that the function from income earned to income (including subsidy) received be monotonic. Again, the income tax system (at least in the US) is carefully designed to have this property: when you make enough more money to move into a higher tax bracket, that higher rate is applied only to the amount of your income in excess of the lower bound at which that bracket applies. So the total amount of tax never jumps discontinuously, even though the marginal rate increases. Even though you keep less of your next dollar of earnings the more you make, there's never a point at which earning the next dollar will leave you with less money after tax.
The same should be true even if you're receiving a subsidy. That's all I'm saying.
> Even though you keep less of your next dollar of earnings the more you make, there's never a point at which earning the next dollar will leave you with less money after tax.
The problem is that's not the only thing you want. You also don't want marginal rates of 75%+ for low and middle income people. It's not only that taking a $20K/year job shouldn't cost you $21K/year in benefits, it's that it shouldn't cost you $15K/year in benefits while you now incur more transportation and childcare expenses.
I don't know about you, but I don't think that the problem in the US system is that a family with two senior developers pays too many taxes.
Therefore, on top of a UBI, the only thing that doesn't screw the middle class over is to maintain a progressive tax rate.
> Nothing short of a 50% fixed rate will not be a huge tax break for us in the 1%.
The current highest bracket in the US is 39.6%, which doesn't come into play until you've made more than $400K. The vast majority of "middle class" people pay 28% marginal rates or less -- anyone up to $190K for single or $231K for married filing jointly.
A household making $200K currently pays an effective tax rate of ~22% -- and that's $200K after all the deductions. To meet the same effective tax rate with a flat tax against a $12K/year UBI would require a flat tax rate of 28%.
Moreover, to be in "the 1%" you need household income in excess of $400K.
And most of the actual 1% pay the long-term capital gains rate, currently up to 20%, whereas with a 28% flat tax they would be paying 25 to 28%.
However, there are two problems that I see. I suspect there are more.
First is that what you spend is only related to what you make. Specifically, it is relatively easy to find ways to not spend money if you have extra. What this means is that, at an absolute level of what you make, a flat tax actually gives a very easy way for high income people to have a lower tax rate. Turning it into "the more you make, the more you can proportionally keep." Which is sorta antithetical to the idea of the flat tax.
The second problem is essentially the cold start problem. Society is expensive to keep going. There is not much of a way around that. So, the rate will have to be relatively high to get the necessary funds. And this will hit those with low incomes harder than the ones with high.
I don't think either of these are necessarily road blocks to the idea. But, I do think it will necessarily get complicated.
I think you are missing the point. If it is truly a flat tax, the number of dollars you are taxed goes up (in a directly proportional way to the number of dollars you make). So you DO pay more the more you make. It isn't even a logically arguable point.
"a flat tax actually gives a very easy way for high income people to have a lower tax rate.":
-- again that's a completely illogical statement. If it is truly a flat tax *EVERYONE* has the same rate -- that's the very definition of a flat tax.If so, apologies. It is still easier for the wealthy to dodge. But not as easy. (Main way I can think of is that at that level you can often live off the company. I don't think this happens enough to care about. Could be wrong.)
This still doesn't address the cold start problem. If a region needs X dollars and that requires Y rate, how do you ensure that doesn't drown out the poor?
And again, I'm not pushing these problems as show stoppers. Just things that contribute to a complicated solution.
No one is going to refuse a salary bump because it will increase their marginal tax rate.
And moreover, how likely is it that they can increase their hours, but be paid exactly the same hourly wage?
I believe such people are extremely rare and as such this hypothetical disincentive isn't particularly relevant.
By "not worth it", I suppose you mean that he valued the marginal increase in income less than the marginal decrease in free time – which is entirely subjective and different from person to person? I don't see your point.
http://www.learnliberty.org/blog/the-welfare-cliff-and-why-m...
Also, don't you see how callous it is to worry about how a rich person has to pay country club dues, in the context of talking about poor people who struggle to afford food sometimes? Why would your sympathies lie with the person who has all of their basic needs met and is "struggling" only to utilize as many luxury goods (yachts, country clubs, sports cars, box seats) as possible?
Way to go towards helping people help themselves, encouraging middle class values, responsibility, yadda yadda, all the usual stuff Republicans blather about but don't actually care about.
Taxes should be used to pay for shared resources (roads, police, military,) but paying other people's living expenses? No thanks. America has poor and unemployed, yet Democrats seem to have no problem with illegal immigration which reduces the ability for those poor and unemployed to gets jobs.
Umm, because we don't want them to die? And society as a whole benefits from it?
> I am not sure I understand why my labor must pay for others against my wishes.
What gave you the idea you get to decide what taxes are used for?
The way capitalism is designed is that not everyone can have a job. So you pay the poor not to starve and come loot your house.
Also, I believe, there was a study suggesting that more equal society is better for everyone involved, including you.
Poverty also inhibits education and I suppose you can figure out why uneducated or lowly educated society is bad.
1. Poor people on welfare wouldn't be dis-incentivized to work more.
2. It reduces the cost of those programs like welfare that cost a lot in bureaucracy for no gain.
3. Lower income people have money velocity that stimulates the rest of the economy.
> Democrats seem to have no problem with illegal immigration which reduces the ability for those poor and unemployed to gets jobs
Illegal immigration doesn't do that... automation is a big factor in that. If your job is being taken away by an uneducated illegal immigrant then you are not competing for highly paid jobs.
> If I want to donate to charity, I will.
Charity has been shown to be less efficient than just giving money directly to poor people.
Can you provide sources for this? Also, what do you mean "efficient"? If you mean there's no overhead, sure, so long as you don't spend any time trying to determine where the need is and just hand cash to the homeless guy you see on the street, but I care about effectiveness, and that's very likely not going to be "give money to the guy on the street near my office".
GveDirectly is better than most charities (which is mostly just giving money to poor people, but is a charity that does it intelligently). Additionally, the Against Malaria Foundation probably has a higher effectiveness.
The problem with depending 100% on people giving to charity is not that it's worse than depending on them giving money to the poor. It's that it completely ignores the various externalities that can be corrected through taxes and government spending. Would the world be better off if we cut government spending in half and send that money to AMF, GiveDirectly, and similar programs? Sure. But would the world be better off if we just cut government spending and hoped rich people would become more altruistic? Probably not.
To answer your real point. You can never have full employment. There are always going to be people that can't have a job, whether that's due to health, lack of job availability, or a number of other issues. What do you do with these people? They have to eat or die.
The current system design is to provide a a safety net. The alternative is that people resort to crime to survive. Do you think that'd be a better country to live in? Do you have an alternative system?
>How many people have been deported under Obama?
>President Barack Obama has often been referred to by immigration groups as the "Deporter in Chief."
>Between 2009 and 2015 his administration has removed more than 2.5 million people through immigration orders, which doesn’t include the number of people who "self-deported" or were turned away and/or returned to their home country at the border by U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP).
>How does he compare to other presidents?
>According to governmental data, the Obama administration has deported more people than any other president's administration in history.
>In fact, they have deported more than the sum of all the presidents of the 20th century.
http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/obamas-deportation-policy-num...
But if you did include the number of people who "self-deported" then you'd find that the total number is not that great under Obama and in fact is lowest since 1970s.
Now, I don't know what these two numbers from DHS reports actually mean and the DHS does not tell me, but I find it peculiar that the number of "returns" under Obama decreased 10-fold, while the number of "removals" doubled. More peculiar that the "returns" had been pretty stable for the past 30 years too, the 2014's 162K returns only had been seen in 1968 before.
https://www.dhs.gov/immigration-statistics/yearbook/2014/tab...
Obama does not initiate self-deportation though, so it's not really relevant to a discussion on the democrat's immigration policy
>I don't know what these two numbers from DHS reports actually mean and the DHS does not tell me
It tells you at the bottom of that link
> Until recent years, most people caught illegally crossing the southern border were simply bused back into Mexico in what officials called "voluntary returns," but which critics derisively termed "catch and release." Those removals, which during the 1990s reached more 1 million a year, were not counted in Immigration and Customs Enforcement's deportation statistics.
>Now, the vast majority of border crossers who are apprehended get fingerprinted and formally deported.
>Expulsions of people who are settled and working in the United States have fallen steadily since his first year in office, and are down more than 40% since 2009.
Just putting this out there.
If it were such a great idea for a country, it would have already occurred at a smaller level.
Nothing except the humongous coordination problem involved in doing so. These are exactly the kind of problems that government exists to solve.
It has. The Svanholm community in Denmark (http://svanholm.dk) raised taxes to 80% for all its members, but in return you free housing, food and all other essentials. They have been doing this successfully since the 70's.
Also, from the english translation: https://translate.googleusercontent.com/translate_c?act=url&...
"It requires personal energy, commitment and desire for self-management in the community to become Svanholmer. Both people with work "out of town" and people who want to work at home on the estate can participate."
This doesn't sound like they just hand out money, and seems likely (I'm just guessing here), that if you don't work you may get kicked out.
This all in all seems a lot different than UBI.
So some of your earning power really belongs to the community, and should be divided equally among the community, including yourself.
Modern day liberalism has become a religion, where "what should happen" and what's "morally right", and who has "advantage over others" replaces "God's commandments", "sin", and even in the case of affirmative action, "original sin" (being a white male, you are born having others more deserving than you).
And just like any other religion, it's all just a bunch of horse shit.
I'm pretty sure all the business owners who take advantage of illegal immigrants to violate labor laws, pay them pennies compared to what they'd have to pay those 'poor and unemployed' Americans, and generally abuse the heck out them... --all-- vote Republican.
If Trump actually builds a wall that works, a bunch of scummy Republican business owners are going to be screaming bloody murder. Illegal immigration is a problem, but there is a demand side to it and no one ever seems to bring that side up in discussions.
1) High income: My personal gross income was among the top 20 % of earners. Thus, high taxes.
2) Poverty: My family's net income after housing expenses was below the threshold of the last-resort income support.
All it took was having three small children, wife not working as the youngest was a newborn thus only the minimal maternity allowance, Helsinki region housing costs and the progressive taxation of "high earners".
The way to get out of it was to take a job abroad for a while. But Finland is my home, even if I hate some parts of the welfare state politics, so I came back.