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Comment by Karishma1234fff | Hacker News Reader

> One could argue this is Good.

Milton Friedman has several lectures around this. While excessive taxation and inflation are both bad for various reasons, inflation disproportionately hurts the poor.

People who own homes, businesses, stocks, cars, gold, silver, bitcoin, farm land etc. dont have to worry about inflation as much. Those who have only cash in hand are the losers. Poor people who typically have only few thousand dollars in cash deposit savings see their money being wipes out by inflation. You dont have to worry if you have sp500.

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The poor aren't affected so much by monetary inflation as by old-school wage-price inflation. If wage inflation > price inflation, they're winning. Considerable effort has been invested (mostly by Friedmanites) to suppress the mechanisms of wage inflation. Conversely, if wage inflation < price inflation, that's a serious and immediate cashflow problem which will eat up their savings far faster than mere inflation will.

> typically have only few thousand dollars in cash deposit savings see their money being wipes out by inflation

10% inflation on $1k savings vs 10% inflation on a $20k salary: you do the maths?

Couldn’t the government counter this effect with tax breaks or UBI? Like how a carbon tax along with tax offsets alleviates the burden on the poor due to an increase in price of consumer items.

The carbon tax, like vat, is a tax targeting the poor entirely. Tax offsets? Yea right..

The middle class pays nearly the entire tax income ball. Funding UBI or anything else will have to come from there. The tax offset will always be in the benefit of the upper brackets, because they can't fund such a pool of money to be redistributed anyway. Tax corporates? Oh no, that would stifle innovation and reinvestment. So, tax the middle class. But that won't work. They already spend 2/3 of their earned wealth in various taxes. Nobody is going to work to fund a UBI they can get anyway.

I love the idea of UBI, but doing the math and figuring out how people think about whether producing value for others vs doing nothing should show that it just can't work.I would happily be won't and take the UBI cheque and do something productive while not really having to care about the adoption of whatever I'm producing

> The middle class pays nearly the entire tax income ball.

Only because we choose to gift the capitalist class with preferential tax treatment. If we treated all income as income, the tax burden would shift from the middle class and higher-income working class to the capitalist class, where it rather self-evidently belongs

The Canadian carbon tax returns 90% of its revenue as a rebate. It works great -- my family gets $500 a year, more than what we pay.

As far as the middle class paying for most of UBI, that's exactly what's supposed to happen. If you're an average taxpayer and UBI is $1000/month then your taxes should increase $1000/month.

The 90% carbon tax rebate is interesting, because everybody thinks they are at least 10% better than average.

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