It’s sort of funny how, contra the anti-capitalists, the two sectors that are currently threatening to eat up the economy are healthcare and higher education, both of which are heavily regulated, and primarily administered by non-profit organizations.
I too would like to tax these sectors, reduce their subsidies, and redirect the savings towards a basic income program.
I love how politically unworkable this plan is
I note that university professors and health insurance administrators are not on that graph :)
…or we could just privatize-mutualize them, deregulate heavily, withdraw government funding (except maybe replace healthcare with the Singaporean system), put ~all the moneys~ in UBI, and let the free market eat the rentseekers…
Fun fact: the public sector in the US is exactly the same size as it is in Finland when ignoring military (and bigger when guns are accounted for; the US is just richer so the public sector appears smaller), so the idea of abolishing all public services and transfers and programs and corporate welfares and other things and replacing them with a $15k UBI for everyone (or split into a $6k UBI and $9k service voucher for children, for things like school, daycare etc.; the public school system of Finland costs that much and is famous so we already know one can afford quality schooling for that price) would technically be completely possible. Without a single cent in new taxes.
Homelessness? Lolnope, that extra $15k is enough to pay rent almost everywhere.
Poor families? A single parent of three would get $33k and not be penalized at all for working, while any childcare costing less than $9k a year would be effectively free (and with proper deregulation, it could be done; all it takes is for a bunch of parents to pool together so that one person takes care of four children to earn a respectable income from it)
Rural poverty? With this massive cash injection the demand for services would skyrocket and create jobs. Actual jobs, not bullshit make-work.
And speaking of bullshit jobs, yeah, they’d be going away. Nobody entitled to this UBI would willingly subject themselves to the inhumane treatment some employers are able to demand.
Jobs getting outsourced? Still have that UBI which is enough to give one, when supplemented with some earned income (remember the absurdly low marginal tax rates because this wouldn’t need new taxes and thus the pretty much absolute abolition of incentive traps), quite a degree of freedom in creating meaning in one’s life.
And because this would be revenue-neutral, one could replace the current tax system with a universal flat consumption tax of quite a reasonable size (and by “reasonable” I mean “low”), combined with a land-value tax to fix cities, and a revenue-neutral carbon tax to fix global warming (or one could privatize-mutualize the atmosphere for the same results; privatizing-mutualizing aquifers and other such commons is a pretty obvious source of extra income as well)
Combine this with ending the war on drugs and not starting any new wars on anything, abolishing the NSA and banning the state from ever again having one, and opening the borders completely but only gradually phasing in the UBI for immigrants and you have my policy platform for the 2020 presidential race.
now if you don’t mind I need to have all the freaking drinks and take all the drugs because as rational economic actors I’d suspect about 200 million americans would directly benefit from this plan and by “rational economic actors” I mean “haha never going to happen”
but it totally could, without a single extra cent in taxes; that’s why I shall have to intoxicate myself thoroughly
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