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This is exactly what Mitt Romney was referring to during the 2012 election when he said he wasn't worried about the very rich, and he wasn't worried about the very poor. The truth is if you are making $20k/yr in income you're likely in a better position day-to-day than someone making $40k/yr, especially if you're raising a family and especially if you live in a city with functioning social services. He was excoriated in the press for saying he didn't care about poor people, which isn't exactly what he said and isn't at all what he meant.

>especially if you live in a city with functioning social services.

that may make sense in 2012. In 2024 I am much less optimistic that this is the case.

Compare that calibre with this year’s roster and it makes me cry. Why didn’t he run a term later?

Let's be honest, no matter who the Republicans run, the candidate will be demonized. Only years later, when the person is not a threat to Democrat dominance will people judge them more positively on their actual value like is happening here (and has happened to McCain, and to Bush...).

If you don't get points for running a good candidate, there's no incentive to run a good candidate, only one who can win.

Heh dont get me wrong. I think Obama is a philosopher king but by giving such emotional speeches and rhetorics he set the stage for very strong reactions. Reactions that bloomed into the awful culture wars of today. At the time I saw Obama as a good politician but the wrong time for it. Mitt Romney was a good candidate that would likely have normalised the tensions post 9/11. Alas it did not happen so.

The current republican candidate is highly different. He fomented a mob on the steps of the capital because he was upset he didn’t win.

The others you mention just had political qualities people disliked.

That's part of the point. People spewed vitriol at both Bush and Trump with similar levels of hate. It didn't matter that they were of different quality.

If you're already 100% sure the other side is going to passionately hate your candidate, no matter who you pick, then you can't win by choosing a reasonable or moderate candidate. Therefore, you pick whoever has the strongest appeal amongst your side.

Because people don't care who it is. If it's a Republican candidate, he will be portrayed as devil incarnate.

Mitt Romney was a smart guy who actually had plenty of on-ground experience. But no, deliberately interpreting everything he said in the worst light (anyone remember "Binders full of women"?) was more important.

> To add insult to injury, means testing[2] often costs more than the cost of fraud in social benefit programs!

This is not informative. The correct comparison would be of the marginal cost of eligibility testing (both in terms of false positives and false negatives) vs the marginal cost of fraud. In other words, whether the current cost of means/asset testing is more than the current total fraud is irrelevant to the economic case for reducing or increasing funding for eligibility screening.

> The correct comparison would be of the marginal cost of eligibility testing (both in terms of false positives and false negatives) vs the marginal cost of fraud.

There is a much better way to do this, because the way we do it is entirely asinine.

On the one hand we say that people who make more money should pay higher marginal tax rates, and set marginal rates on lower income people to low or zero rates. On the other hand we demand means testing at lower income rates, which is equivalent to a tax on marginal income.

We should just let these things cancel out, using a flat tax that funds unconditional cash benefits (i.e. UBI) and delete an epic amount of unnecessarily complexity.

>On the one hand we say that people who make more money should pay higher marginal tax rates, and set marginal rates on lower income people to low or zero rates. On the other hand we demand means testing at lower income rates, which is equivalent to a tax on marginal income.

Isn't this already the case? It's true that you need to means testing to get access to additional benefits, but the tax rate itself is already progressive even if you don't any means testing.

Means testing does the opposite of progressive marginal tax rates. It cancels them out by increasing the marginal tax rate on people who make less money, by the amount of the benefit phase out. There is no point in incurring the complexity of doing both at the same time just to have them delete each other.

Another way of saying this is that a flat marginal tax rate combined with a fixed-amount universal tax credit (UBI) is a progressive tax system. But it's a much simpler progressive tax system which is harder to game and doesn't result in unintended nonsense like phase out cliffs or higher marginal rates on lower income people than higher income people.

I love the idea of a UBI, but there is a real risk of the UBI being impacted like the minimum wage. When initially passed it's set to a barely reasonable level, and then not adjusted for decades.

Not saying it can't be solved, tie it to inflation or CPI, but I doubt that could pass.

This has nothing to do with a UBI. What happens if the government doesn't raise the benefits amount for a food stamp program? In both cases you can either index the amount to inflation or you have the same concern, so it doesn't matter which one you use and isn't a reason not to use a UBI.

If anything it's a reason to use it, because raising the amount that everybody universally gets would be easier to pass when there are more beneficiaries. Nobody cares about the minimum wage because hardly anybody actually makes minimum wage, whereas around half (and plausibly a slight majority) of the population would be a net beneficiary with a UBI.

Index it to inflation and someone that wants to attack the program just needs to make the Bureau of Labor unable to issue accurate inflation metrics.

I think UBI would need some sort of scaling factor but you can't just hand wave it away to some other corruptible government group.

I would argue progressive taxes are less complex than your proposed flat tax because you can load all the expenses on the high brackets who won't miss a meal if you set the value too high instead of trying to pick a single value that works for everyone.

To begin with, that isn't what "complex" means. Having to track every income source to every citizen in order to impose differential marginal rates is always going to be more complex than not doing that. We nominally do it so people who make more money pay higher effective tax rates -- but a flat tax with a UBI does the same thing. If everybody paid a 30% marginal rate and everybody got a $12,000 UBI then the effective tax rate on someone with $30,000 in income would be -10%, at $60,000 it would be 10% and at $200,000 it would be 24%. That's a progressive tax system.

Meanwhile you don't really want low marginal rates when you're providing benefits, because then the benefits phase out too slowly. Suppose you were providing $12,000 in benefits and the phase out rate was only 10%. Then someone making $100,000/year would still be a net recipient of benefits, which would bankrupt the government. In practice the phase out rates we currently impose on the poor are higher than the marginal rates in the highest formal tax brackets, which is probably bad, but making them uniformly the same is certainly not going to result in something less progressive than we have now.

>Having to track every income source to every citizen in order to impose differential marginal rates is always going to be more complex than not doing that.

It's the same exact load as tracking everyone's income source to impose a flat tax. Taxing income is the same "tracking load" whether the tax system is progressive, flat, or regressive.

>That's a progressive tax system.

No it's a flat system with a $12k UBI. The effective tax rate of a millionaire and a billionaire is the same in your system because it's flat.

>but making them uniformly the same is certainly not going to result in something less progressive than we have now.

A million of income would pay 29.64%, a billion of income 29.99%. That's literally less progressive than those incomes would pay today.

> It's the same exact load as tracking everyone's income source to impose a flat tax. Taxing income is the same "tracking load" whether the tax system is progressive, flat, or regressive.

It is not. If you go and work for a corporation and they pay you a salary without a flat tax, they don't know what your tax rate will be. It depends on whether you do any work for someone else, or sell any property with a taxable gain, or have any tax deductions, all of which change your taxable income and therefore your tax rate, so now you have to keep track of all of them.

With a flat tax the rate is always the same, so your employer withholds the tax from your paycheck, the seller of some deductible product simply doesn't pay tax on it to begin with, and there is no individualized calculation to do because the rate for each thing is always the same and known ahead of time.

> No it's a flat system with a $12k UBI. The effective tax rate of a millionaire and a billionaire is the same in your system because it's flat.

The effective tax rate of a millionaire and a billionaire are as much the same in the existing system. Someone who makes $5 million currently pays ~36% compared to someone who makes $5 billion who pays ~37% (because the highest bracket is 37%).

> A million of income would pay 29.64%, a billion of income 29.99%. That's literally less progressive than those incomes would pay today.

That has nothing to do with the mechanism, it's just because the example rate was 30% instead of 37%. You can make it arbitrarily more or less progressive by changing the flat rate and the amount of the UBI.

But also notice that you wouldn't need tax rates to be as high, because in a simpler system less of the money would be wasted on administrative overhead or arbitrary constraints on what the poor can do with the money which causes it not to go as far for them. And they would spend less time doing benefits paperwork which they could instead spend doing work that earns money, or use the time for DIY instead of paying someone else to do things they didn't have time to do. Allowing everyone -- including them -- to pay lower tax rates from the increase in efficiency.

A flat tax disproportionately favors the rich and hurts the poor; a progressive tax is much, much more fair. A poor person making $2k a month can make more use of $200 to improve their lot vs what the person making $2M can do with $200k to improve theirs

You've missed the part where we've already removed -- no, inverted -- the progressive rate structure via benefits phase outs.

> means testing[2] often costs more than the cost of fraud in social benefit programs!

This is like saying that since robbery is rare, the cost of permitting robbery is lower than funding the police force, thus we should defund the police.

Robbery is rare because the police exists

>Robbery is rare because the police exists

https://www.techdirt.com/2023/07/17/if-the-crime-rate-goes-d...

>To add insult to injury, means testing[2] often costs more than the cost of fraud in social benefit programs!

The point of means testing isn't to fight fraud, it's to better divert a limited pool of resources to the neediest people. If you have a pool of money to distribute, only giving it to the poorest 25% (ie. means testing) means the recipients can get 4x the money compared to giving it to everyone. Sure, there are ways this can be done badly through onerous requirements or whatever, but the cost of means testing vs the fraud rate is a completely irrelevant metric.

The problem is that means testing programs often have a cliff where you go from qualifying to not qualifying instead of being a gradual ramp-off. In other words, earning $1 more can remove $100 in support from the government instead of something more reasonable like only removing 10c at the beginning and up to $0.9 if you’re already on your way out.

The common criticism of means testing is that more money is spent on the bureaucracy implementing the testing than if you just took the money you otherwise spent on bureaucracy and gave it directly without means testing.

I disagree.

There's only so much money to go around, if I chose to spend more money on preventing fraud than the fraud would cost, I'm prioritizing righteousness over helping people.

If you have funding for 500 people, and fraud would cost you funding for 10 people. If you spend the cost of funding 40 people on fraud prevention, you're harming the 30 people you can no longer fund to keep those 10 from undeserved funding.

Agreed. I really think we'd be better off if EBT was expanded to everyone. Maybe this is a more palatable step into UBI.

>To add insult to injury, means testing[2] often costs more than the cost of fraud in social benefit programs! Not to mention, the biggest fraudsters with Medicaid are providers not recipients.

Intuitively, I'd expect fraud to go up (at least to some degree) as means testing goes down like a differential equation. The depressing part of this is that it doesn't matter what is actually true, or what either of us are convinced is true, as the system will do its own thing.

"Eliminate means testing" doesn't mean that you stop verifying if someone qualifies for the program, it means that you stop imposing conditions on qualifying for the program, i.e. turn it into a tax credit that everybody gets unconditionally, and adjust rates to compensate.

In principle you can do this without affecting the budget at all -- if there is a benefit that phases out at, say, 20% up to $30,000 in income, this is equivalent to paying the benefit unconditionally and increasing the marginal tax rate by 20% in the same income range. All it does is eliminate the application paperwork.

In practice the problem is that there are multiple overlapping programs like this, so the poor aren't paying a 20% marginal rate (on top of any formal taxes), it's more like 60-80% and in some cases it even exceeds 100%. This is a poverty trap. But to get out of it while balancing the budget you'd have to use a lower total phase out rate, requiring higher marginal rates on people who make more money. These people -- as much upper middle-class doctors and computer programmers as Jeff Bezos -- then object to this, and so here we are.

Of course, another way to do it would be to cut some other government spending and use the money for this.

This is by design, and not an anti-socialist viewpoint, but another way to treat poor people with disrespect and to encourage class warfare between the working semi-poor and very poor. Keep people trapped by a myriad of low arbitrary thresholds rather than tapering off. In America, you're sometimes "better off" making no or almost no money.

Also, the benefits are paltry. If you're completely homeless, have no resources, and out-of-work in, say California, per month you will get MediCal*, $240 for food**, $149 in cash "aid", and that's it. There is an inconsistent patchwork of programs to give slightly more benefits that require a certain range of income threshold and specific demographic strings. Most all of these programs treat recipients like criminals and require regular paperwork and significant time, time during work and transportation that the working-poor can least afford.

The elderly and disabled qualify for Medicare***, which isn't quite "Cuba-level" health insurance but administered by a for-profit health insurance company under the vague supervision and standards of Medicare who pays for it. Medicare+MedicAid special needs plan (SNP) and Social Security**** is what a disabled or elderly homeless person would typically have.

* Same as the federal program known as MedicAid. It is much worse than Obamacare (health insurance for the working poor), and moderately worse than Medicare (for the disabled and the elderly) and almost no regular doctors take it. Providers who do take it usually are far away and usually serve a specific demographic. While it covers emergency care almost completely and some medications, it's not very good. There is significant healthcare bias in America based on health insurance and age.

** "Food stamps" that used to be actual stamps. In the US, the federal program is either SNAP or WIC (pregnant women, infants, and children).

*** Medicare is a federal health insurance system comprising many types of plans run by private corporations with a Byzantine patchwork of limitations and benefits.

**** Social Security is monthly cash for disabled (SSIDI) and retired people. SSIDI waives work requirements. Non-disabled elderly receive an amount based on how many years they worked and how much income they received, up to a relatively low limit. There is a debate about cutting off income- and/or asset-rich people from receiving Social Security when they don't need it.