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Comment by alephr | Hacker News Reader

what kind of taxing scheme would make it so you want to work again?

> what kind of taxing scheme would make it so you want to work again?

I stopped wanting to push my business forward when my govt has forced me to get computers and internet access in my grocery store for sending info about each transaction. That equipment slows down a number of people which I can serve per minute. The software I have bought is ugly as hell and prints 5cm of advertisement on each paper check I use to give to a client. Excuse me trees, I do not know how to fix that.

In a perfect world, RMS' advice about tax rate based on the fraction of any given market that the company controls seems a good start.

How's the government supposed to know your market share without those computers though?

The way they did it for hundreds of years before computers

Replace need-based welfare programs with universal basic income. Everyone survives, but you always have an incentive to earn more money. Plus you eliminate layers of bureaucracy that does need testing, poorly.

UBI is constantly touted as a panacea to everything, but it only seems to work when not everyone gets it.

When everyone gets it, it becomes baked into rents or mortgage payments, and I've never heard a convincing argument about how the money just doesn't go to rent seekers over time

Time for nationwide rent control to keep prices from surging past UBI then. The argument against rent control has always been that investment will go where there isn't rent control since this maximizes profit for the investor. However if you give the investor no alternative then the law of TINA suggests that if they would like to have exposure to the U.S. housing market the only option is to invest in the U.S. housing market, and if the entire market is under rent control then there will be no winners and losers based on having local rent control ordinances in place or not.

Another solution is to invest more in our public housing stock. Private apartments could march up sure, but they'd be competing with the government building with subsidized rents designed to be affordable under the UBI plan, which would put downwards pressure on prices.

Plus you have a flood of unskilled/uneducated migrants from abroad, that are aware that they can get it if they cross the border and get residency or birth a child after. This continues until the whole system "suddenly" collapses.

Are the immigrants receiving ubi?

If so how?

If not, how are they cheaper than somebody who only wants to work for fun?

> When everyone gets it, it becomes baked into rents or mortgage payments

True, unless there’s a land value tax. But a man can dream.

Then the land value goes up to match rents and thus the ubi.

The ubi receiver still loses and needs other support

Land value taxes lower the value of land. The UBI recipient can conserve his share of land and rent it out to someone who needs it. That will result in an overall increase in economic efficiency and that surplus can in theory be used to buy products and services to meet the basic necessities of the recipient.

Alternatively, the recipient can run a homestead on his share of land.

You can increase the land value tax all the way to 100%. In the limit the UBI can be paid for entirely by land value taxes, which leave no surplus for land owners. It’s very easy for a UBI to end up benefiting only the non-working and land owning classes but it’s avoidable.

I don’t follow. Why would UBI make GP want to work when taxation is the cited issue? Don’t they already have an incentive to earn more money?

That’s basically what happened with the stimulus checks, and big surprise now we have massive inflation.

You really think the $1200 we got two years ago has made any impact at all on the prices we see on supply constrained goods today? Most of that money probably evaporated into paying off credit card debt or allowing for some breathing room from rent.

We got $1200. The people who didn’t work at all got $30k plus in unemployment.

30k plus while you are unemployed is not a very significant amount of money in many places in America these days. Not enough to make a dent in inflation imo compared to the wider supply chain crisis that is driving inventory shortages and price hikes on goods.

It’s a year of salary for an enormous amount of people. Insane how out of touch or intentionally misleading you are.

People were also getting $10K, $20K, $60K in unemployment.

Well yeah, when 25% of households have a wage earner who lost their job due to COVID that will send a much larger hit to the economy than those unemployment payments ever could. Even then they merely helped people float along.

https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2020/09/24/economi...

Taxes on liquidity and land value taxes.

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