Hacker News Reader

Comment by NoMoreNicksLeft | Hacker News Reader

Get rid of all the welfare. Sure.

But quite a bit of that was paid for through personal income tax. So you're not saving anything there... it will be money you no longer have to pay for universal income with.

When you do the numbers, no matter what you cut, there's not enough to go around. You either make it not universal (in which case what little political support there is evaporates) or you make it so low that it's not enough for someone to live in a cardboard box eating Chinese-melamine-poisoned dogfood.

The math doesn't work. Your taxbase is eroding at a faster rate than your employment.

View on HN

To make a basic income work you need to change what you are taxing. If the premise is that work is no longer necessary, it no longer makes sense to have a tax system that taxes primarily labor income (both as "income tax" and then again to provide benefits in the form of "payroll tax") most heavily and gives preferential lower rates (as "income tax", and excludes entirely from taxation to support major benefit programs) to capital income. You have to shift your revenue base to focus on taxes on capital income as the primary source of revenue (especially if, in addition to funding basic income, you also want to slow the transition away from employment-as-a-norm -- heavily taxing employment encourages that transition by making employing people expensive for what the employee receives.)

The current tax system is based on the premise of employment-as-a-near-universal norm as much as any other feature of society is.

Currently, the total wealth of the US is somewhere around $100 Trillion. If we abandoned income tax for wealth tax (say 10% flat tax), everyone would get a check for ~$30,000 to ~$35,000, a year (2014). This would stimulate GDP growth and thereby increase future national wealth.

The challenge, of course, would be the logistics of taxing wealth over income. But, we'd be reducing the operational cost and size of government significantly, so we could afford the additional logistical costs.

Have you done the math?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com