promethea.incorporated

wirehead-wannabe:

voximperatoris:

The linked article,  “A Philosophical Economist’s Case against a Government-Guaranteed Basic Income,” is even better.

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.