I can’t remember if it was @Sabo or @microbet or both or someone else who discussed concepts similar to Borough Bucks.
https://twitter.com/ZachandMattShow/status/1349535821263728645
Good point and this is how I try to sell conservatives on UBI.
At least the conservatives that actually care about others.
If you want a society that has equal opportunity you can’t even come close to that without UBI and UHC.
The upper class will still have more advantages but at least you are coming closer to a America that is sold to us in the marketing materials.
The single biggest gift I want to see the bottom 60% of this country experience is the freedom to fuck up without being totally ruined by it. The anxiety of knowing you’re one medium sized fuck up from a 5-10 year period of grinding your way back from it (if you survive that well) is pretty damn real. It doesn’t even really have to be your fuck up which is even more anxiety inducing.
If you’ve got 1k a month and you decide to quit your job you have some space to make decisions. If you want to try something new you can. Bad stuff is still going to happen to people, but having a 1k guaranteed flow of cash that can’t be taken by collectors is going to make that bad stuff hit a lot less hard.
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USA#19 already has a UBI equivalent for housing that is means tested. It’s called Section 8. Because the people who designed the program intentionally did not address the underlying systemic issues, it’s essentially a huge hand out to the landlords and the financial system.
The owning class makes their money by extracting economic rent. This is done in finance, insurance, and real estate; it’s also done when we privatize what could/should be public goods and services. We don’t have to speculate about what would potentially happen without systemic reform. The experiment is on going, but the results are in. Wealth begets wealth.
In a system that codifies and enforces absentee owner rights(that’s capitalism!), the money that the non-owning class (temporarily)possesses gets hoovered up and is converted into profits and private wealth for the owning class. It doesn’t matter if the money started out as wages, section 8, or UBI–the destination will remain the same without systemic reform.
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Have you read Piketty yet? Not intended to be anything but a straight question. Not sure how deep to dive here. I’ve got specific ideas about how to handle the wealth problem. The social safety net doesn’t have much to do with it though IMO.
I want to uproot the existing systems because they are politically toxic and defending them costs energy that could be spent getting something better to replace it. That’s what UBI is. Whatever it is that you want to see happen for all citizens just build it into the floor that your UBI provides.
The broad strokes are enough on Piketty. The problem is that the way the system is structured winning begets even more winning to the point where everything is sliding out of control off a wealth inequality cliff. Know that what follows about what I’d do if I was dictator of the US is basically straight up ripped from him.
Look if I was dictator of the US we would be making military threat backed orders to shut down to tax havens. Our new tax laws would include a 100% inheritance tax and income taxes would be more like anti snowball mechanics in video games. The top marginal tax rate would probably be 75% lol. Charitable acts wouldn’t have any tax impact. There isn’t really a good economics argument for why anyone should make more than ~180-300k in the entire economy.
But I’m not and we have to actually get this stuff passed… and that means we have to live with the fact that we probably won’t get everything we want and the best chances we have for big wins come from getting our opponents to agree to stuff they don’t understand.
Conning the conservatives into agreeing to the largest expansion of the welfare state ever and the largest effective tax increase on the people at the very top of the economic pyramid ever by using their own ideology against them is something that I can only get so erect for. It’s also very nearly our only hope.
To understand how Yang’s VAT funded UBI plan does what I’m telling you it does you really have to understand how all the pieces work mechanically… but the basic concept is that you’re taking a chunk of the gross profit - salaries out of every transaction that gets done outside of some staples that would hammer people at the bottom (grocery stores mainly) and you redistribute that money to everyone per capita. It’s almost impossible for the very rich to avoid because you can’t make money without doing transactions and you can’t pretend a transaction didn’t happen if the other side of the transaction needs to report the transaction to the government to deduct the transaction you just did on his own VAT tax.
It’s not avoidable so it’s going to catch everything including the financial transactions of the people at the bottom. You can mitigate it a bit by excluding specific stuff, but the risk there of course is that it will turn into a loophole for the rich the same way that current welfare dollars really subsidize McDonalds franchisees. The important thing is that all of this collected revenue goes back out in an equal way. It has to be equal because that will make it popular AND because it means that the payments received by the wealthy are absolutely nowhere near the new tax obligations they have to manage.
And to be very clear the wealthy have to manage VAT. Most of the financial transactions (I know you know this I’m just setting up my point) in dollar terms are processed between different entities that are ultimately owned by rich people. The wholesale transactions that happen to convert a barrel of oil into a few pallets of plastic army men in a plastic bag hanging from a cardboard piece with a metal hole in it for the shelving to interact with all happen in this way. All of those people have to ask themselves how to do pricing with regard to VAT.
If you’re in a low margin commodity business you’re probably just going to tack the VAT tax cost on to the selling price and your customers will simply see commodity input prices rise slightly. They will then have to decide whether to pass it on or eat the cost depending on their situation… and so on. By the time you reach the top of the ladder you have reached some player in this whole process who actually gets to keep the vast majority of the profit. If this is the cosmetics trade this is the brand who through marketing magic convert 3 dollars worth of materials into a bottle of bullshit worth 85 bucks. They are going to have to decide how much of their own VAT tax to pass on… and they are going to have a problem. The problem is that their pricing is not in any way dependent on their cost structure. High margin businesses like people who have captured industries set their prices on maximizing revenue over time NOT on how much their costs are. They aren’t going to pass on the VAT tax for the same reason that they didn’t raise their price XX% last month. Because it would negatively impact their top line.
Those are the people who are actually getting plowed by a VAT for UBI structure. Everyone else is either getting someone else to pay the VAT tax for them or getting way more UBI than the passed on VAT taxes are costing. Most people would be surprised how many vendors wouldn’t decide to pass on the cost of VAT but I doubt you would. You know the software/pharma/etc guys are going to pay up. You know Amazon is going to absorb the VAT on their own fee structures as much as they have to to remain competitive.
The VAT is more regressive than an income tax… but it catches a lot of money that the current system doesn’t even know exists. It’s a trade off. A trade off you can handle by just cutting all the people you don’t want it to hurt a check.
Carbon taxes and VAT should be how we determine how big of a pot we redistribute. That’s the dial we’re trying to get. I want that fucking dial.
Not cover to cover, only snippets. You?
I read it. How well I absorbed it is a good question. A couple of years later if you gave me a real test on the subject I’d probably get a 50 on a fill in the blank and a 95 on a multiple choice. Multiple choice is really stupid lol.
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If we traveled back in time to medieval Europe, and you and I correctly observed that “the serfs are poor and the nobility are wealthy because feudalism is exploitative”. How would you react to someone responding: “Exploitation comes from power imbalances not from ‘feudalism’ (there are obviously quite a few power imbalances in our current economic system)”.
The problem is power imbalances, I agree, that is why I’m specifically being critical of those power imbalances. Under capitalism the power of the owning class to enforce their absentee ownership rights and extract economic rent from the non-owning class is baked in. I’m not using capitalism as a stand in for everything bad about people. And neither is “my crowd”.
I asked this question of @clovis a while back and never got an answer. When you hear leftists say “End Capitalism”, what do you think they are advocating the end of? Surely you don’t think they are saying that and meaning “end the exchange of goods and services”, right. Because exchange of goods and services is a good thing, and not unique to capitalism. And surely you don’t think that they are saying that to mean “end greed, hate, murder, etc”(“a stand in for everything bad about people”), right. So, what is it that you think they want to end?
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Not really a trial run but what metric are you using for saying it did not go well.
The reports I read on how people spent the money indicated it did go well.
I just donated to Andrew Yangs campaign suckers!
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If Yang becomes mayor of NYC, he’ll be the best mayor they’ve ever had from a personal integrity perspective.
The question then becomes does he stick to his principles or does he get swept up into the political machine. Probably a combination of both.
Even here where rent is fairly cheap 1k would just barely cover it on a crappy place. So with the sophie’s choice of the 1k or benefits you would be in trouble.
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ugh…
Those guys pass on VAT on all that stuff already in Europe. You don’t need to theorize, there’s a 50 year track record with VAT.
Look, I’m fully on board with UBI, it should be enough to live on (1k is a joke) and paid through more progressive income tax rates and progressive property taxes or something, idk. How to pay for stuff and what to pay for should be different discussions imo.
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I’m genuinely curious what would be the income cut-off points for individuals contributing various amounts of tax revenue via the VAT (through consumption + capital ownership) assuming it exactly covers the entirety of the cost of a $1,000 a month UBI.
This isn’t in any way an attack on Yang, but it goes without saying every individual would be contributing a non-zero amount. (And, just to be clear, I’m aware an individual’s VAT burden is not directly based on their income.)
Well exactly. What are you even saying you’re going to end? What do you think I mean when I say ‘reform capitalism’?
The goal is to build a system that maximizes the well being of the population. One of the negative byproducts of building the organizations needed to do that up to the size they need to be to do it is that there are going to be some powerful people who are going to self deal.
Where the free market purists are idiots is that they act as though powerful private interests are different in any way from powerful government interests. If anything private interests are less accountable and a bigger problem than powerful government officials.
My preferred way to build big without wasting a bunch on rent seekers is to make the rules have very little room for interpretation and change them semi frequently reactively to prevent whatever new form the rent seekers take.
But to be very very clear my mental economic model sees high earners as waste not as a resource in any way shape or form. Even when the reason they are getting paid like that is that the work they do is very very important we’ve created an abomination having the value of a human being be their economic value. Everyone has value as a human being that is separate and more important than their economic value just from an ethical standpoint. I’m fine with people making more money than other people even 10-15 times more… but that’s pretty much as much money as it ever makes sense for anyone to have. Above that it’s waste.
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I never got this answer and look at his site a little a ways back and could not find it but since its UBI do kids get it?
IIRC,Yang’s website says it’s for those 18+. Which seems like a leak to me, because in USA#19 poverty rates are highest or close to it in the under 18 cohort.
Ah. Yeah seems like it should start at birth.