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Comment by nodesocket | Hacker News Reader

How is he proposing to pay for UBI aged 18-64? The only way I would support a UBI is to completely eliminate social programs like welfare, food stamps, and housing assistance. It may then be cost-neutral.

Also, this language is just not accurate:

> unraveling President Trump’s tax breaks for the wealthy

It is mostly for corporations; middle-class citizens will also see a reduction in their taxes. Until the market meltdown last week, the new tax plan was widely praised even by very liberal business leaders such as Tim Cook. US corporate taxes were absurdly high and tax reform has been positive in terms of the slew of bonuses offered to employees (not executives), raising of corporate profits, and helping repatriate huge amounts of capital back to the US.

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The tax breaks for the middle class are only temporary. Most CEO's are praising them because it's great for them and shareholders. Most CEO's acknowledge they will use the additional profits to perform share buy backs.

While the middle class got something, the majority went to the wealthy, and as per my previous comment on shares, they are not going to be flooding it back into the economy.

Also US corporate taxes were about median for the world, they were not absurdly high, you should check out some countries in Europe for that.

See this NPR[1] article which listed the previous US corporate tax rate as the highest of advanced economies. This included France, Belgium, Germany. Also fun fact, go visit Dublin and see all the tech companies (Google, Facebook, Microsoft, etc) who have a Europe HQ there. The reason, they have a 12.5% corporate tax rate.

[1] https://www.npr.org/2017/08/07/541797699/fact-check-does-the...

The effective US corporate tax rate is more median. Our headline tax rates were higher, but we also had larger deductions and tax credits.

That is a very bad policy to have though because it encourages wasteful spending on tax avoidance and rewards the companies that do it. It also gives an artificial competitive advantage to the largest companies, who have the scale to invest in complex tax avoidance schemes, at the expense of smaller more productive companies.

If you see the chart just below the first one, the actual tax rate is roughly median with the rest of the world. The CBPP[1] article explains further.

While some countries offer low tax rates or incentives, they are to attract international business because they have no other means to attract them. The US is not like Ireland in this respect.

US companies have had record profits recently. The big tech companies like Apple are hoarding cash reserves. Why is giving them more cash going to change their approach?

[1] https://www.cbpp.org/research/federal-tax/actual-us-corporat...

The bonuses were actually a crass tax arbitrage.

1. Issue bonuses at end of 2017, push out tax obligation into 2018 2. Mush into newer, much lower tax rate

There is a reason they chose to issue bonuses and not raises.

I think Tim Cook was talking as a CEO rather than a liberal when he praised Trump's tax cut. Very few CEOs would have the luxury to do otherwise, except for maybe Gates and Buffet.

> How is he proposing to pay for UBI aged 18-64?

Everybody currently aged between 18-64 who is not living in poverty or is unemployed is already receiving that amount of money (or more) from her/his employer.

Hence, as a cheap palor trick you could just relabel part of the paycheck as UBI (so the money is there). In addition, you could then subsume most social services inside a flat amount, saving money in admin overhead.

The hypothetical counter argument is that lots of people would not work if given UBI. This has been shown to be false when tested. Also, social services in Germany and many Scandinavian countries are not that far off and these countries do not have 50%+ unemployment.

> Also, social services in Germany and many Scandinavian countries are not that far off and these countries do not have 50%+ unemployment.

Especially in the case of Germany they're pretty far off. After loosing employment, iff you're looking for new employment, you indeed get ~60% of your former salary. For a maximum of 12 months, if you were employed for 2 years. But after that, or if you never worked, it's considerably less. ~400EUR, plus additional money for rent. Additionally there's age dependent additional money for each kid (~240EUR - 316EUR).

And if you've independent income/wealth you're not eligible.

>How is he proposing to pay for UBI aged 18-64? The only way I would support a UBI is to completely eliminate social programs like welfare, food stamps, and housing assistance. It may then be cost-neutral.

That won't do it. $1,000 a month for every working age adult would cost over $2 trillion a year. That is roughly equal to what the Federal government spends on Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and Defense combined. There is no way this plan can ever be cost neutral. For it to even be financially feasible it would need to come with a rewriting of the entire Federal tax system and budget (which would probably be a good thing, but it would be a political impossibility at this point).

The federal government can create any amount of money they want. They have created trillions and given it to banks. Why not give that money to individuals instead?

While there are a lot of positives for the tax reform, and US corporate taxes were insane by global standards, passing a revenue-negative tax reform during a deficit is fiscally irresponsible.

A lot of the negative press the tax reform got was based on a lot of highly ambitious parts that fortunately didn't make it into the final bill.

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