Comment by nullfield | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nullfield | Hacker News Reader

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).

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