We Need VAT and UBI | Hacker News Reader

We Need VAT and UBI

wilsoniumite.com

34 pointsWilsoniumite67 comments

VAT is the most regressive tax since inflation. Rich people spend basically zero of their wealth. Poor people spend almost all of it. Even though there are exceptions and item-level exemptions, it's still the poor people who feel these prices the most, and it is reflected in spending behaviors in European countries in my experience.

I was about to comment something like this. Consumption from a VAT perspective doesn't increase linearly with wealth, so a more wealthy person isn't going to spend and get taxed via VAT 100x more than someone with 100x less wealth, and VAT affects the poor much more than the rich because it's a tax on consumption irrespective of wealth, so the poor pay a larger percentage of their wealth to VAT.

We should just get rid of VAT and replace the lost tax revenue with something that's more equitable, such as a proper wealth tax. It's not like wealth goes away with a UBI.

This. But this is also by design. So ask your government why it has been designed that way.

It's because an all-encompassing taxation system gives value to the paper money the government and the banks create.

VAT is regressive when you consider wealth yes, but as I wrote in the piece it's both counterbalanced by the UBI, and indeed there are mechanisms by which VAT is actually progressive. This OECD paper goes into more detail [1]. The short version is: VAT on its own and in practice is regressive but only because of savings. That's pedantic, I know, but it matters for the purposes of how the VAT-UBI loop scales. In particular, it allows you to fund a larger UBI more quickly than with any other funding method.

[1] https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/reassessing-the-regress...

from the paper:

> even a roughly proportional VAT can still have significant equity implications for the poor – potentially pushing some households into poverty."

from your page:

> Elastic goods, i.e luxuries, shed demand as prices rise whilst inelastic goods like bread do not. This has the effect of refocusing the economy away from luxuries and toward inelastic necessities, which effectively makes VAT progressive, not regressive.

As someone who lives with a VAT rate of 20% on most goods (and 5% on other with 0% on most foods) it doesn't meaningfully direct away from luxury goods. Its just priced into things (and if your a build er o cash in hand, then you can make 20% extra)

Personally I would rather we look at "council houses" and making them much more universal. As that would be cheaper than UBI but have some of the same benefits.

It's priced in, yeah. As I said in the comment and in the post, VAT on its own is not nice. The paper also states:

> Nevertheless, any VAT increases, including VAT base broadening measures that impact the poor, should be accompanied by compensation measures for poorer households, such as targeted tax credits or benefit payments.

Which is essentially what I propose through UBI, I just have broader scope.

I see the point, but I don't see what is wrong with that, and I am relatively poor person. I see calls for equality all over the place, but nobody wants to be equal, especially not in taxation - a fix amount (not percent of something) sum per citizen is equal and nobody wants it. Equal rights, equal taxes, equal obligations, no exceptions - be it financial, demographic, military, etc.

A Georgist-style land value tax (LVT) is fairer and has the added benefit of ending land speculation, a practice that leads to distortions in the housing market and harmful property boom-bust cycles.

That is basically removing property rights, when the land is not yours but you just rent it ... you will own nothing and be happy.

You didn’t make the land (nobody did). LVT is the “least bad” tax because in an LVT-exclusive system you are not taxed on your labor, your inventions, or your possessions. You’re only taxed for your exclusive use of a common resource (land).

You may be opposed to all taxes, but if you acknowledge the need for some kind of tax, it at least has some kind of rational and seemingly fair justification.

You bought the land, so it is yours, right?

Yes, I am fine with taxes, but not with any type of tax, not property taxes (it is bought with money already taxed) and not with taxes as punishment or taxes as political games. I am opposed to taxes as a purpose, I am for taxes as a means to pay for some universal services that you cannot pay by consumption.

Land is a category of thing that isn’t always straightforward. All land borders other land. Land has more land underneath it and sky above it. Water runs both into it and out of it, and often that water is crucial to neighbors. It has been there before you and will be there after you. Land as an aggregate defines a nation of laws and men. Land can be on a national border.

This is why there’s so many complicated rules around land, it doesn’t fit neatly into a defined yours-or-mine category.

Georgism allows exclusive use of land—ideally without restriction unless it affects neighbors through pollution—it just asks that landowners pay for that exclusivity on an ongoing basis. If they no longer wish to pay, or no longer can pay, then the market can allocate that land to someone who will pay. It’s a pro-development system that calls for increasingly limited land to be put to economic use, unless that land just isn’t very useful/valuable.

First you are deflecting and going in discussions about points that were never made, then you keep preaching a system where you don't have property rights under the nice "think of the children" pretext that it is a "pro-development". Basic communist argument of the greater good against the individual.

A number of people do refer to it disparagingly as “land communism.” (Especially those on the California property ladder.)

I just think it’s better than other forms of taxation. I don’t see why I should need to report my income or employment to the government, nor do I see why I should be taxed on my labor. To me this is much less justifiable (and much more invasive) than just taxing land.

Why do you “own” land? Who first owned it to have the right to sell it? Usually land ownership claims eventually go back to violent conquest. Why did the conqueror who stole it have the right to sell it? Why should we treat the claims that descended from this as inviolate?

How about we make taxation as a fix amount per citizen and then nobody needs to declare their income OR land? And it is equal and fair, as in "pay your fair share", and that's it: you are a citizen, then you pay $X as your contribution like everyone else. Problem solved.

Flat tax is also a possible solution, but a truly flat tax would probably have to come with substantial welfare for the lower classes, as the tax burden would fall disproportionately on them. (This is less about “fairness” and more about preventing bad outcomes like mass criminality and/or revolution.)

We don't need a VAT. Taxes on consumption are insanely regressive.

Put a tax on the value of land instead of the property improvements. Then you'll start to see some wealth flow away from the UHNWIs.

Taxing primary residence or the land its on will destroy middle and lower class and allow rich ones to go even further hand.

Luxury tax and tax on secondary homes would probably be better.

Have you done the math? Under a revenue-neutral shift that taxes buildings less and land more, the median homeowner comes out ahead:

https://landeconomics.org/reports/spokane-report

I think what you're missing is that land in the wealthiest parts of town is worth exponentially more than land out in the suburbs

LVT taxes only the land.

Some recent studies have shown that a properly implemented LVT avoids harming most homeowners, in fact you may come out ahead if other taxes are eliminated. (LVT alone is adequate to fund government spending and entitlements.) The homeowners who will typically feel a pinch are those who have inherited very large estates which don’t generate income. They may need to sell or develop part of their estate.

Land speculators, however, will be in serious trouble.

Georgism? In the big 2026? Now that's a blast from the past!

Now, land value taxes obviously have their place in the gamut of different taxes to levy, so I don't wish to badmouth them too much. But as a consumption tax, VAT also does have its place. Sure, they are absolutely regressive, but this also helps them to act more like Pigovian taxes, since they can be used to make certain categories of goods and services more expensive. And so if one can afford to pay the value of the negative externalities, why not. And hopefully it can then steer people towards better choices.

> And hopefully it can then steer people towards better choices.

As a counterexample, tobacco taxation is less effective for reducing smoking than alternative policies [1]. So, yes, we can hope that higher taxes help people make better choices. Or we can implement better policies that are known to be more effective.

[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20250323131704/https://tobacco.u...

> Won’t we get massive inflation?

I was expecting they would adress the elephant in the room : the price of the room to fit the elephant (as, in "rents").

There are form of subsidies in France called "APL" (nothing to do with the programming language - the form you have to fill in order to request the subsidy is waaay more cryptict.)

The tacit agreement in the flat renting business, is that your rent will be "whatever you earn as subsidy from the government, plus however we can afford to ask." So it's still a free market where homeowners get to set the price - because they own a scarce asset that is in high demand, probably because they wisely chose their parents and year or birth.

It's just that the subsidy artificially increase the floor price.

I've always wondered how a government implementing UBI would prevent such an effect on the goods that are the most scarce, unliquid, and high demand / low supply.

UBI lottery! Everybody gets something, nobody knows how much.

You see the same when governments offer grants/assistance for down payments when buying houses. The price of houses increase that by that exact amount

> This is not a political post

> I’m aware of the irony of this statement. Everything is political.

This is a horrible cop-out. Sure, everything is political to an extent.

The subject of the article though, taxes, is political in nature. There is no way to discuss taxes outside of politics. Taxes are one of the most political subjects there can ever be, and trying to untangle them just means your argument will have exactly zero relation to reality.

This is true, but we also have monetary policy which for the longest time we have thought of as and tried to make apolitical. I would argue this is almost just monetary policy, and that's why I set this up as something that a central bank should do. It uses the word "Tax" but it really hardly is a tax.

Monetary policy is not apolitical, as much as neoliberals will try to make it look like so. When a central bank increases interest rates, it's the poorer who can't buy houses, and can't get credit; it's the poorer who will receive fewer and lower quality public services, etc. There is no way to disconnect one thing from the other.

Furthermore, as others in the comment section have noted, VAT is an extremely regressive tax. The poor spend all their money. The rich spend close to none (and arguably will spend exactly 0 of their own UBI), and are the ones who benefit the most from consumption.

The poor will pay for their own UBI, plus for the UBI of the rich, plus for the products and services they have to consume which as noted will make the rich richer.

Your proposed scheme will expand inequality. Like I said, none of this is or can ever be apolitical.

The rich spend close to none of their wealth, but they do still, in absolute dollars, spend more than the poor per individual. This means the VAT collects more from the spending of a rich person than of someone that is poor. The full construct with a UBI is not regressive, and is actually progressively redistributive.

> spend more than the poor per individual

This is meaningless, when there's so many fewer reach people than poor.

Why do so many people make the same analytical error? It's really simple what is going on: information and power asymmetries are used to accumulate more wealth and therefore power. This happens through a whole bunch of mechanisms usually referred to as market power abuse in economics all centered around getting control of a pain point that makes it less likely people will leave for a competitor and then pushing prices down (think chain restaurants saturating a region and only offering minimum wage, think the app economy getting you on the app and watching your every move to price your labor as low as possible, think larger companies spending money on lobyists to push new regulations to decrease competition and kill start ups)

The government is implicit in a lot of this when it should be doing stuff like breaking up big companies to curtail it. UBI and VAT would just exacerbate the actual problem because it would grow the government and the government would eventually just get captured again (or stay captured) and be put to work ensuring the wealth keeps flowing to a select few.

VAT could be sensible only when it applies to clearly luxury items, e.g. air travel. It doesn't make sense to apply it to everyday necessities.

I think the main problem is that this will not survive very long once implemented.

Politician A will promise "no VAT on bread" to get elected. The next guy will promise "no VAT on essentials". The next guy will promise "no UBI for the rich". And so on.

And you end up with the next politician dismantling the whole system as unfair.

Sort of but that's actually ideal, I don't think it will be completely scrapped if implemented, some parts will remain. Those being the ones that make the most sense to the most people.

If exemmptions need to be made, the tax isn't taxing the essence purely. With the 'no VAT on bread' example, we need to work out why. How can we quantify why bread shouldn't be taxed?

I'm guessing eventually we'll work out that 'fresh food' shouldn't be taxed, and the processed food should be. It's here we can work out that certain chemicals, processes, facilities, etc, are actually what should be taxed at source, and through doing so, we can save the world billions in accountancy bills.

So what you're saying is basically we should stop implementing reasonable measures as a government because there will always be a Ronald Reagan or Maggie Thatcher who will dismantle it out of spite, greed, or both? Surely if we never do anything right or good the baddies will stand no chance of being what they're best at, namely being worse than everybody else. This for sure is a wise plan to stop bad people in their tracks.

What will happen will be 'no vat on rice, flour and vegetables', which in my mind is very ok. Maybe if a demographic crisis happens, vat on baby care will be removed.

But VAT is a dumb tax anyway. Anybody with high enough wealth can evade it, you just have to found a company that will pay for your computer, car and probably other stuff. I'm pretty sure I could pay for a 3d printer without paying any VAT. If I was devious, I would start a 'sailing course' company and buy my wings/sails/foil through it, while teaching once a year or so.

Nice to see others thinking along the same lines as I am[0]. I can use this to expand my thoughts on the issue as well, maybe finally get around to that blog I've been thinking of for years.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48428776

The article argues that consumption taxes are necessary for this model, but there's no mention of why VAT is the best tool for the job. I'm not sure why VAT is sacrosanct.

I've read that it costs small companies around 2% of turnover to be VAT compliant. In the modern age, this is absolutely insane.

We have the ability to work out how much businesses spend to do a job. We can boil that into a transaction or sales tax, which - with digital payments - can practically be automated at source. (if people pay in cash, that assumes a local service being supported, so who cares if its taxless? it balances out the unethical practices associated with hugebusinesses).

There's also no mention of externality taxation. If we're going to have socialised services, surely consumption taxes need to be raised in parallel to how much goods/services impact society?

Everyone keeps saying VAT is regressive, that seems to miss the point that the author explicitly pairs it with UBI.

It's also dubious that a VAT is intrinsically regressive, a VAT is essentially a tax on business revenue. Most items for which the price is set by demand will face downward pricing pressure a force that ultimately results in the VAT contracting profitability and not being regressive.

The issue with the argument that consumption based taxes like a VAT or tariffs are regressive is that it assumes an altruistic pricing mode. A state which is very far from reality. If our multinational corporate conglomerate market dominators could raise prices to absorb all taxes then their current pricing is too low. A case I don't think many would make in the current age of consistent record breaking profits.

The thing to remember is the corporate goal is that prices are set to be the maximum the market will bear.

VAT is intrinsically regressive because poor people spend all of their money, and wealthy people spend almost none of theirs. Sales tax is no different. UBI is also an incredible waste. Don't give money to people who don't need it. The person with the 10 million dollar home doesn't need to receive UBI, and they're spending practically none of their money to contribute back into the system with VAT.

> If you so much as whisper “that’s socialist” or “you’re defending the bourgeoisie” I will beat you to death with a sickle tied to a demand curve.

> This is not a political post

Why is this rage bait on the front page of HN?

It's Sunday

I think UBI is necessary but it’s about where you get it. Just making up and printing money for it is like when I was a kid and thought that you could just write checks and create money. We need to move money from the ultra wealthy and corporations to UBI. It’s actually astounding Americans repeatedly vote for the exact opposite to happen. Maybe the midterms can be a turning point.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wealth_inequality_in_the_Unite...

I also think UBI is necessary, but I don't have a political agenda on how to force people funding it. Maybe it's me growing in a communist country and hating it to death (communism, socialism and all the variants that treat people like cattle "for the greater good").

Since it looks like you’re the author, well… “you’re (that’s) socialist.”

Given you’ve (ironically or not) opened with a threat to murder anyone who makes this claim, via “I’m tired of being calm about this. If you so much as whisper ‘that’s socialist’ […] I will beat you to death with a sickle tied to a demand curve.”:

You may try to beat people to death with your precious sickle. In the civilized world, you’ll die from a stream of (ideally lead-free, but when people are try to kill you being environmentally friendly is optional) high speed projectiles.

You propose redistribution intentionally and explicitly, then claim, “redistribution isn’t the point”. Yes. It is, and we all know it.

You lie that it won’t cause massive inflation to just print money and then tax it, before going on to admit, “Whoever calculates the national CPI will have a tiny bit of extra work to do. It also is inflation in terms of eroding savings and assets.” …so yes, it will be inflation, but you just need someone to do the lying for you via a bit of “extra work”.

You claim this will solve the stagnation of Western economies, the “far right”, nationalism, housing, and “consumption as a component of economic activity”. Will it also solve world peace and hunger, or do you want to stop while you’re behind?

Just admit what you want directly AND stop lying in the process.

I know my tone was harsh, but that's mainly because I'm tired of people thinking I'm taking a side. Using VAT to fund this means that it isn't a tax on capital or on labor, that's why it's more neutral than all other methods. A wealth, profit, dividend tax, that's a tax on wealth or capital or rich people or business, whatever you prefer. An income tax is a tax on workers. VAT avoids that question.

It is slightly redistributive, yes, but really only slightly. Its hard to design it to not be redistributive, but if you really want to do that then you raise VAT and lower income taxes instead of funding a UBI. I wrote about that later in the piece.

This is essentially "The Fair Tax" proposed many years ago, it's a VAT, but with a pre-bate check that covers the VAT up to a certain percent of income. So if there's a $100K no VAT minimum. The pre-bate is $25k. Anyone spending less than $100k annually pays zero taxes. Pair that with VAT exemptions for second hand goods and business under a certain size and you solve most wealth inequality and welfare issues very quickly.

VAT absolutely doesn't help. Companies don't pay vat by design. Wealthy people almost never pay VAT, unless it's a gift, because they own companies. My and a lot of my cousins never paid VAT on their school supplies, as they were bought by our uncles companies.

My sister cooked on a yacht for a company that lost money every year by selling their services at loss, before selling its assets to another company (who then hired her). The company did not pay VAT when they buy the yacht, the only moment the owners pay VAT is when they buy the yacht company 'services' (which are basically free).

VAT is one of the most regressive taxes imaginable, the author doesn't know what the hell he's writing. Or maybe it's AI-generate slop, too lazy to check.

Maybe you should check before throwing around accusations? I didn't get the impression it's AI generated.

That was not an accusation, just a potential excuse for the author. If it's not AI then it means it's either stupidity or class-based ill-will.

Imagine having as your highest aspiration in life: Getting free money from the government.

What a nightmarish mind and prison for the soul. What a waste of our precious time on Earth.

It certainly shouldn't be. But society has a responsibility to take care of everyone to a basic minimum standard. Everyone deserves somewhere safe to sleep at night, to be able to bathe and clean themselves, to be healthy, and to have enough to eat and drink. If you can guarantee these things for anyone who can't afford it themselves, then you don't need to do literally anything else.

Flagged for being about politics

If you flag, please don't also comment that you did.[1]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

OK thanks. I won't in future.

Can we just tax billionaires who take out infinite loans against a market they get to rig because they take out infinite loans against a market they get to rig because they take out infninite loans against a market they get to rig because they takeout infinite loans agianst a market they get to rig because thye takouet inifnite loans?

I don't think this "infinite loans" narrative holds water. The richest people in society pay the most taxes, not zero.

oh, they pay the most income taxes which are not in millions or billions.

It's bizarre to think people who can change the tax brackets via dark money are "paying the most".

Sure man, if I pay zero because I'm homeless and you pay a dollar; wow! you're paying the most taxes. Congrats on your logical fallacy.

They pay the most taxes, but they also pay the lowest percentage of taxes compared to the money and assets that they have.

What does the percentage has to do with anything? Do they have more percentage in voting? Or in the spending of the money they pay as taxes?

I don't know how people have the guts to pretend equality, but not in taxation. One human, one vote, one dollar.

> Do they have more percentage in voting?

Considering they basically own and operate the uniparty and its media apparatus, they have enormous influence over the entire electoral process and peoples' thoughts to a degree that makes any notions of 'democracy' illusory at best.

It was bad for decades, and then corporation-controlled social media brought the corruption to new heights.

That is just a bad deflection, not an answer to the point.

If the system is shown to be corrupt, the point becomes irrelevant.

a bit much with all the self promotion, my dude. maybe post something else for a change

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