Preparing for the challenge to France, Edward had to make up for the disparity in numbers by some superiority in weaponry or tactics. In 1337 he had prohibited on pain of death all sport except archery and canceled the debts of all workmen who manufactured the bows of yew and their arrows.
That … definitely is one way to make your subjects into better archers
If there’s a basic income of $200 a week for all adult citizens, it could be phased in to migrants so that after every year they’ve spent in the country (calculated by days; days spent abroad only postpone full entitlements by the same number) their weekly entitlements grow by $20.
However, they would be entitled to a tax rebate of the full amount of the basic income on any taxes they pay; if we assume a 25% income tax, migrants would only start effectively paying taxes on weekly earnings exceeding $800; amounts below that would be registered and immediately refunded. The taxes paid could shorten the time to full entitlement so that one who has no (official) sources of income would get it after 10 years, and reaching the zero tax level shortens it to 5 years, and so on. This creates an incentive to participate in the formal economy, and reduces employers’ ability to steal immigrant workers’ wages because there’s a clear paper trail, and stops the state from exploiting the labor of immigrants by taking taxes without offering anything in return. If there’s a non-income tax, the tax rebate could be offered in cash. Give every citizen and resident a wage account (if necessary, buying the entire country of Estonia is cheaper than trying to have the US government/its incompetent crony contractors implement it) which automatically calculates and pays taxes correctly and gives people an easy way to have full guaranteed compliance to the taxation.
As far as voting rights are concerned, depending on how vulnerable the immigrant population is to the democratic mob, one could argue that making everyone wait 18 years from arrival (whether by birth or immigration) is fair (assuming strong constitutional protections so the citizens can’t just decide to start exploiting the migrants or deporting them), or one could tie it to the full welfare eligibility which would arrive sooner.
Anyone can come in, as long as they are carrying enough money for an ID card, vaccinations, and a mandatory return ticket so they can go back on their own expense if they need to (this is just to pacify the asshole voters; it should be an unnecessary expense for the vast majority of immigrants). Their arrival would be registered so that even if someone steals their passport/ID card they can go to the cops and tell them they arrived in the country through the immigration office of Whateveritwas and can verify their identity that way (once again, use estonians instead of trying to buy american) and now the asshole who took their docs is in trouble.
When “illegal” immigrants are discovered, they are promptly asked to register at their nearest immigration office so they get on the citizenship track asap and don’t miss out on their legal rights.
Pre-welfare-eligible immigrants would get healthcare they can pay for, plus the very basics of infectious disease prevention, maternal and emergency healthcare, and the most cost-effective routine care. It’s probably better than what they could’ve received in Shitholistan anyway, and if americans see people not having access to proper healthcare in their own neighborhood they’d probably be more interested in doing something actually effective about it, while people suffering the same thing in Shitholistan just elicit a shrug and a “whatever, my niece is going there as a totally useless voluntourist mainly for the photo ops”. Maybe it would divert nonprofit funds from Make-a-Wish to ‘Helping Even Non-Cute Immigrants With Common Diseases’.
If one is eligible for asylum and protection, one gets the full welfare benefits immediately, but rejected asylum seekers would still be allowed to stay because nobody must ever be deported back to Shitholistan.
yes it creates more visible inequality in the US and that’s exactly the point because the inequality is already there and assholes are just saying it doesn’t count because it’s a different country but guess what I don’t believe in countries and borders I believe in people and it’s really unfair bullshit that the privilege of one’s birth is allowed to determine one’s fate so thoroughly with this plan instead after ten years people would be far more equal and that’s way better than having people non-consensually stuck in Shitholistan just because some assholes are whining about their tax dolla
(I am of two minds here. @oligopsony has recently pointed out how an explicitly codified apartheid might be destabilizing to the entire political-economic system - which, in context, is good, because stability here is the stability of the atrocious and laughably evil global distribution regime today. In practice implying that the non-citizen class, unless contained with powerful and specific repressive measures as in e.g. Singapore, would be great for activism, left-wing organization and all such projects aligned against their exclusion.
Bertram takes the opposite view in the linked piece, however; assuming effective repression and stable, profitable, long-lasting apartheid… this all looks like a dark prospect indeed.)
(idk… it’s 1am, and a very tricky issue)
Replacing global inequality with local inequality would probably force people to face the existence of that inequality instead of sweeping it under the rug and reifying it with borders and walls and “not our problem”s. There is already the global apartheid of “people allowed to live in the best places” and “people not allowed to live in the best places” and the first group is very intensely invested in not considering the existence of the second group or its own culpability in maintaining the distinction. Letting the second group in (modulo the standard “no fraud, no coercion” which department the gulf states seem to be pretty dramatically lacking in, and even the migrant forager labour utilized in Finland is being exploited by methods that should in any just society be totally illegal) wouldn’t make things any worse because things are already worse.
I don’t support the kind of accelerationism that seeks to maximize misery to create $miracle because it all too easily leads to simply increased misery without $miracle, but there’s an obvious way to implement this so that people are better off and the distribution regime can’t stay as laughably evil as it is now. Instead of creating permanent apartheid, phasing in full rights and entitlements after X years of residency along with opened borders (18 is an obvious and elegant and also a bullshit forevertaking option; I’d personally go with 5-10 for migrants with the basic income being gradually introduced along the way, so eg. someone who has been in the country for 30 months would get half of the full amount) would reduce the flow of white whine while still letting other people in without subjecting them to the bullshit requirements of asylum-seeking, restricted work-based visas etc.
Also, in a certain way the current global situation is pretty similar to the one in Britain during early industrialization when people’s movement and ability to move to the places offering better alternatives, and thus directly their negotiating power against local capital, was artificially constrained by legislation. There are global forcible inclosure acts happening in the form of third world land grabs; and the workers aren’t allowed to seek a better bargain elsewhere and thus are forced to accept whatever bullshit the local robber barons are able to shove down their throat. Opening the borders would mean that exploitable third world labor would suddenly have significantly more options, and those benefiting from the limitations upon their freedom would be forced to either offer a better deal (recommended) or try to impose extra repression to prevent the global proletariat from using its new opportunities (something which might prompt more action from the international community than the currently existing “well borders just happen to be the way it is, not our fault, literally SNAFU”).
I
want to do the numbers properly sometime, but at a glance pretty much
every government’s budget feels like an innocent-hurting version of the
silly budgeting meme and there would be plenty of things to cut and
reallocate way more optimally if only voters would stop acting like
voters and states would stop acting like states.
The government:
Crucial governance stuff: $50 Badly implemented but theoretically laudable redistribution: $1500 Buying votes from assholes: $3600 I dunno, cops or something: $200 Help me budget this, my poor people are dying
Me: spend less money on buying votes from assholes. also UBI.
The government:No
Around 3/4s of the federal budget is social security, defense, medicaid, and medicare. So, it’s mostly redistribution and defense, which is a mix of crucial
governance stuff and buying votes from assholes that’s not easy to disentangle. (I would argue that there’s a fair amount of
buying votes from assholes
with how medicare is implemented too, either way it’s not easy)
Getting buy-in is also what a state or any theoretical non-state political body has to do, even in the absence of democracy. If you have a theoretically optimal government but it’s not actually achievable, then it’s not optimal at all.
And then there’s the Keynesian issue of whether stuff like defense and those other misc programs actually benefit the economy through increasing employment and demand, which is a whole other mess.(That I’m not qualified to argue)
The US could afford to cut defense a lot by reducing inefficiency in the Pentagon, and stopping the practice of listening to bushes and getting stuck in deserts without exit strategies. And not buying votes from assholes with “must create jobs in the defense industry”.
Social security, medicaid, medicare etc. I’d simply replace dollar-for-dollar with a basic income, except for a basic public health insurance for catastrophic conditions; Europe and Singapore can produce far more cost-efficiency so the same (or let’s face it, way better) health outcomes for poor people could be achieved by implementing a non-bullshit system, and the savings could be passed onto the basic income.
Then there’s corporate welfare which by a quick calculation is at least $80B directly and who knows how much indirectly, which needs to go. All the grants for renewable energy etc. could be replaced with a carbon tax.
Then there’s land and natural resources; a land value tax is not a bad tax, and natural resources most naturally belong to everyone, so basically sell a sustainable amount of groundwater etc. to the highest bidders and put the proceedings into the basic income. Solves the drought in California and gives free money to poor people.
Putting all that together; $2.3T from various forms of means-tested welfare (including state budgets though), $200B from defense, at least $100B from corporate welfare and other sources, the total that I could “trivially” reallocate to a basic income would be, at above $2.6T, pretty close to what would be needed to provide all adults $10k a year and all children $6k. Subtract public healthcare reform from that, but also account for the fact that a non-bullshit system would benefit everyone massively.
In fact, if I assume I could make public healthcare twice as cost-efficient by importing a healthcare czar from a country with a better system, just the healthcare savings and welfare alone would be around $1.5T in the federal budget, no need to touch the lower levels of government; not that far from the estimated $2T for a basic income to all adults. Save a bit on defense, get some more income from somewhere and one is already really really close to affording it.
The keynesian issue would be solved by just giving people the money to use on the things they want to use it on, instead of robbing them and giving money to cronies who sure “create jobs” for a certain value of creating jobs, but who also destroy value compared to just letting people choose what they actually want. It would be such a horror, people would use the money on things like affordable housing, instead of buying the latest gadgets for oppressing people.
Democracies have the predictable problem with voters voting in bullshit, and that’s why I don’t really believe in democracy without a strict constitution saying that whatever the voters want to do is probably not allowed, and that tax money should just be given to people instead of implementing degrading and humiliating means-tested programs.
Democracy is the government equivalent of duct tape for engineering; use it if you must, but for the sake of all that is good don’t use it any more than is absolutely inevitably necessary, and specifically don’t try to build your entire system out of duct tape. If I was the Everything Czar of the US, I could fix Everything (although a lot of people would yell at me); but I can’t do it, so I need to find a non-state solution to poverty and other bad things.
For about ten seconds I read this as a totally sincere motivational sign and was briefly motivated.
…I am just not the intended audience for this rhetoric.
WORK HARD!
Children, the elderly, and the chronically ill cannot fend for themselves!
oh noes, taxation is theft
As someone who is not exactly a friend of taxation, I’d be very glad if my tax money went to millions of poor people instead of millions of rentseekers, wealthy moochers, crony capitalists, special interests (of the statist, not the autistic kind), and various forms of shooting and kidnapping innocent black and brown people both at home and abroad. Providing an adequate basic income to everyone is one of the most legitimate uses of taxation IMO, and I do find this sign personally motivating.
I would have liked to see some exploration of more possibilities, including a NIT, but overall the first section of the linked article is good. The rest of it is mostly appeals to liberty based on moral intuitions that I don’t share, so I can’t comment on how convincing others will find it.
In general though, yes, we need more people playing around with the numbers and trying to figure out exactly how expensive all of this would be.
IT DOESN’T ACCOUNT FOR THE EFFECTIVE MARGINAL TAX RATES OF PEOPLE CURRENTLY RECEIVING ANTI-POVERTY PROGRAMS
If we replace all income taxes and anti-poverty programs (and also all the bullshit benefits like the mortgage deduction) with a flat income tax equivalent to the current highest marginal tax bracket and a basic income equivalent to what we can afford then, we’ve certainly superficially increased taxation substantially, but the massively increased simplicity in the economy must be accounted for in any analysis that wishes to be actually sufficient.
Having an anti-poverty program with a cutoff income is equivalent to effectively having a really bullshit form of taxation with marginal tax rates all over the fucking place which distorts the economy far more than a nominally higher but stable and predictable flat marginal tax rate (because we aren’t hiding any bullshit anywhere). Anti-poverty programs with bullshit cutoffs also introduce deadweight loss (or else I’ve seriously misunderstood what deadweight loss means) and if deadweight loss is equivalent to the square of the effective tax rate, a universal flat tax rate minimizes it.
(And for the progressives who are worried about progressive taxation: the beauty of a basic income is that it turns anything that is not a head tax because fuck head taxes, even a consumption tax even though people usually think those are regressive, into an effectively progressive tax; no need to fuck up the system otherwise because social justice is built-in to it anyway!)
This is also why NIT and UBI are effectively the same fucking thing and why we can’t just look at how much we are “taxing”; their difference is merely an accounting trick because the effective marginal tax rate is always the same in both (assuming both are implemented with the same base parameters).
You motherfuckers don’t just increase all taxes by a flat 50% because what the fuck, you abolish the FICA because it’s a bullshit tax, and tax everyone’s income at the highest marginal tax rate of approximately 40% (or more if you want to replace some of the lost taxation from abolishing the FICA, but seriously just implement a basic income and otherwise privatize pensions there’s no need to make it complicated).
The Philosophical Economist is a lazy motherfucker who should not be commenting on economics. Address basic income properly or go home. If steelmanned basic income, in its best and strongest and most justifiable form, is found wanting; then I will try to find something else. Until then, I only see people whacking at strawmen and weakmen.
I am with Milton Friedman. The true effective tax rate is basically the same as the percent of GDP taken up by the government. So the effective tax rate in the USA is quite high. There is plenty of money for GBI.
Of course “the government” covers quite alot of programs. you only get back approx 40-50%+ of GDP (depending on country) if you cut everything the government does. Roughly speaking local/state spending are both somewhat less than 50% of federal spending in the USA. Very few people want to cut the whole government in any nation (certainly I don’t want to). But redistribution does actually take up a large share of the federal budget. And much of the government really could be cut.
I want to do the numbers properly sometime, but at a glance pretty much every government’s budget feels like an innocent-hurting version of the silly budgeting meme and there would be plenty of things to cut and reallocate way more optimally if only voters would stop acting like voters and states would stop acting like states.
The government:
Crucial governance stuff: $50 Badly implemented but theoretically laudable redistribution: $1500 Buying votes from assholes: $3600 I dunno, cops or something: $200
Help me budget this, my poor people are dying
Me: spend less money on buying votes from assholes. also UBI.
I would have liked to see some exploration of more possibilities, including a NIT, but overall the first section of the linked article is good. The rest of it is mostly appeals to liberty based on moral intuitions that I don’t share, so I can’t comment on how convincing others will find it.
In general though, yes, we need more people playing around with the numbers and trying to figure out exactly how expensive all of this would be.
IT DOESN’T ACCOUNT FOR THE EFFECTIVE MARGINAL TAX RATES OF PEOPLE CURRENTLY RECEIVING ANTI-POVERTY PROGRAMS
If we replace all income taxes and anti-poverty programs (and also all the bullshit benefits like the mortgage deduction) with a flat income tax equivalent to the current highest marginal tax bracket and a basic income equivalent to what we can afford then, we’ve certainly superficially increased taxation substantially, but the massively increased simplicity in the economy must be accounted for in any analysis that wishes to be actually sufficient.
Having an anti-poverty program with a cutoff income is equivalent to effectively having a really bullshit form of taxation with marginal tax rates all over the fucking place which distorts the economy far more than a nominally higher but stable and predictable flat marginal tax rate (because we aren’t hiding any bullshit anywhere). Anti-poverty programs with bullshit cutoffs also introduce deadweight loss (or else I’ve seriously misunderstood what deadweight loss means) and if deadweight loss is equivalent to the square of the effective tax rate, a universal flat tax rate minimizes it.
(And for the progressives who are worried about progressive taxation: the beauty of a basic income is that it turns anything that is not a head tax because fuck head taxes, even a consumption tax even though people usually think those are regressive, into an effectively progressive tax; no need to fuck up the system otherwise because social justice is built-in to it anyway!)
This is also why NIT and UBI are effectively the same fucking thing and why we can’t just look at how much we are “taxing”; their difference is merely an accounting trick because the effective marginal tax rate is always the same in both (assuming both are implemented with the same base parameters).
You motherfuckers don’t just increase all taxes by a flat 50% because what the fuck, you abolish the FICA because it’s a bullshit tax, and tax everyone’s income at the highest marginal tax rate of approximately 40% (or more if you want to replace some of the lost taxation from abolishing the FICA, but seriously just implement a basic income and otherwise privatize pensions there’s no need to make it complicated).
The Philosophical Economist is a lazy motherfucker who should not be commenting on economics. Address basic income properly or go home. If steelmanned basic income, in its best and strongest and most justifiable form, is found wanting; then I will try to find something else. Until then, I only see people whacking at strawmen and weakmen.
Look, David Henderson is a smart guy. He’s not an idiot. He’s not a “lazy motherfucker”.
Your main objection is (as you put in all caps): “IT DOESN’T ACCOUNT FOR THE EFFECTIVE MARGINAL TAX RATES OF PEOPLE CURRENTLY RECEIVING ANTI-POVERTY PROGRAMS”.
Well, so what? Most people aren’t receiving funds from anti-poverty programs. I’m not sure why you think this sinks any part of his analysis. Yes, having steep “welfare cliffs” discourages them from working. And this is bad:
But these welfare cliffs (and that’s the most extreme you can make it) don’t cause any marginal disincentive to work for people above the level of the cliff.
And also, this is mitigated to large extent by the fact that you just can’t get welfare for the reason “I just don’t feel like working”. You have to have a real need. Now that creates fraud and bureaucracy all over the place. But it also increases the incentive to work.
A flat 40% tax may be more “predictable” than the current arrangement. It’s also a really freaking high tax! That decreases the incentive to work for everyone, not just the poor.
That is why taking everyone’s money and then giving it back to them causes deadweight loss. Willingness to supply labor is not perfectly inelastic; you tax it, you discourage it. A targeted welfare program also causes deadweight loss, even a higher level of deadweight loss for the people affected, but less overall because it covers fewer people.
The main point here is that you act like you have an absolutely knockdown argument that Henderson is an idiot for not recognizing. Yet your argument is pretty much irrelevant. A basic income or a negative income tax would cost a lot of money, much more than the current welfare system. You can’t make up the difference by eliminating (as Trump would say) “waste, fraud, and abuse”. You have to not just “superficially” raise taxes. You have to actually, genuinely raise taxes. By a lot.
Now of course you can simply pay out less for the basic income. Just eliminate all welfare and give everyone an equal share of the funds, without raising taxes. But then it’s not nearly as much money as the basic income people want. Though David Friedman estimates that providing people with the truly minimal amount they need to live, “enough food and shelter so that their lack would not greatly reduce your life expectancy,” is about $500 a year.
Eyeballing that graph, the effective marginal tax rate from $20k to $80k is about 85%. From $30k to $45k it’s about 66%. From $70k to $100k (the only part really above the welfare cliff) it seems to be pretty close to 40%.
That is not insignificant when the US median household income is around $50 000. According to Wikipedia, in 2010 the average income of the middle quintile was within the welfare cliff region.
Also, it looks like my 40% was a gross overestimate based on being accustomed to nordic levels of taxation (For comparison: the state of Finland pays out to its social programs the equivalent of around $15k a year per citizen.) and the US actually has significantly lower taxes.
I can’t spare the time for a thorough analysis right now but the entire point of the basic income is to use higher marginal taxes to phase it out from the non-poor, something I haven’t seen included in these calculations. The taxes hurt my brain so I won’t calculate them, but calculating the price of a basic income from the assumption that the lowest nominal tax brackets would stay the same is deeply mistaken because the entire point of the basic income is to make the effective marginal taxes visible and transparent and spread them more evenly.
I did take a quick look at the entire US government budget though and it seems that if I was made Economy Czar, I could gut the state enough to fund a basic income of $10k to adults and $6k to children by removing all kinds of useless non-social-program spending as well. Naively assuming the FairTax is revenue-neutral as proposed, combining it with this one seems to be my new favorite proposal. Thoroughly politically impossible because I wouldn’t be nice to the middle class and corporate cronies, but theoretically elegant and beautiful.
I would have liked to see some exploration of more possibilities, including a NIT, but overall the first section of the linked article is good. The rest of it is mostly appeals to liberty based on moral intuitions that I don’t share, so I can’t comment on how convincing others will find it.
In general though, yes, we need more people playing around with the numbers and trying to figure out exactly how expensive all of this would be.
IT DOESN’T ACCOUNT FOR THE EFFECTIVE MARGINAL TAX RATES OF PEOPLE CURRENTLY RECEIVING ANTI-POVERTY PROGRAMS
If we replace all income taxes and anti-poverty programs (and also all the bullshit benefits like the mortgage deduction) with a flat income tax equivalent to the current highest marginal tax bracket and a basic income equivalent to what we can afford then, we’ve certainly superficially increased taxation substantially, but the massively increased simplicity in the economy must be accounted for in any analysis that wishes to be actually sufficient.
Having an anti-poverty program with a cutoff income is equivalent to effectively having a really bullshit form of taxation with marginal tax rates all over the fucking place which distorts the economy far more than a nominally higher but stable and predictable flat marginal tax rate (because we aren’t hiding any bullshit anywhere). Anti-poverty programs with bullshit cutoffs also introduce deadweight loss (or else I’ve seriously misunderstood what deadweight loss means) and if deadweight loss is equivalent to the square of the effective tax rate, a universal flat tax rate minimizes it.
(And for the progressives who are worried about progressive taxation: the beauty of a basic income is that it turns anything that is not a head tax because fuck head taxes, even a consumption tax even though people usually think those are regressive, into an effectively progressive tax; no need to fuck up the system otherwise because social justice is built-in to it anyway!)
This is also why NIT and UBI are effectively the same fucking thing and why we can’t just look at how much we are “taxing”; their difference is merely an accounting trick because the effective marginal tax rate is always the same in both (assuming both are implemented with the same base parameters).
You motherfuckers don’t just increase all taxes by a flat 50% because what the fuck, you abolish the FICA because it’s a bullshit tax, and tax everyone’s income at the highest marginal tax rate of approximately 40% (or more if you want to replace some of the lost taxation from abolishing the FICA, but seriously just implement a basic income and otherwise privatize pensions there’s no need to make it complicated).
The Philosophical Economist is a lazy motherfucker who should not be commenting on economics. Address basic income properly or go home. If steelmanned basic income, in its best and strongest and most justifiable form, is found wanting; then I will try to find something else. Until then, I only see people whacking at strawmen and weakmen.
