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Comment by kaa2102 | Hacker News Reader

Conservatives, progressives, and libertarians call it different things. Basic income, negative tax rate, social safety net, etc. Milton Friedman advocated for a negative effective tax rate for low income folks. Rand Paul recommended not taxing (Federally) folks who make less than $50k USD.

We also need to consider micro and macro-economics. Folks with less money have a high marginal propensity to consume or likelihood of spending most or all of the extra funds they receive. Also, consumer spending is a factor of economic output or GDP. Increasing consumer spending increases economic output. Q.E.D. Give people with no money enough money to not fall through the cracks.

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Negative income tax is certainly a very interesting idea, but it is virtually unheard of as a position in any mainstream U.S. political compass.

It's generally considered that you either want to expand the current, highly convoluted system, or that you loathe welfare entirely as a matter of principle.

I think tax credits already accomplish this to a degree. The poor are more likely to have children, and they can already claim those children for tax credit, for example.

Child tax credits don't fully offset the cost of raising a child, so they aren't really a substitute for negative income tax.

It seems that you only get $1000 tax credit per child. That probably eases the burden on people who are going to have children in the first place, but is still net negative and doesn't do anything for people who aren't going to have children.

In the US, the Earned Income Tax Credit is similar to a negative income tax, and has bipartisan support (it was expanded under Clinton, Bush and Obama, for example). Economists love it, too.

> In the US, the Earned Income Tax Credit is similar to a negative income tax

EITC is like what a person who once heard of negative income tax but wanted to make a Rube Goldberg parody of it would create.

A negative income tax would, in its simplest form, instead of limiting AGI to a minimum of zero after deductions, let it go negative, and treat the (negative) calculated liability on that income as a negative total tax liability.

(Now, EITC helps a wider range of people -- with qualifying children, it hits about the same point for people without children -- than NIT would with the current deductions available for US taxes, but, that could be addressed by adding greater child deductions than the existing standard deduction.)

And if you hold neither of those positions, the mainstream political parties automatically treat you as though you hold the position that they oppose.

Some of us would prefer to replace the entire welfare system with simple automated scripts.

  if( 0 != ImmNatSvc.GetStatus( person ) & ( CITIZEN|PERM_RES|ASYLUM|REFUGEE|NONIMM_WORK ))
  {
      Treasury.DistributeBasicIncome( person );
  }

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