Means testing sucks. Sign your kids up for free lunch, get an Obama phone, discount on your gas bill, ACA…ok, get in the loser line…come up with all your documents to prove you’re poor and we’ll review them.
You paid $40000 in federal income tax last year. Maybe raise your taxes by a couple percent so that you pay $43000 next year, tax your UBI and you effectively made $500/month or something. Then give EVERYONE the $1000 and eliminate means testing (and the extra bureaucracy that goes along with it).
Debating how the money is raised, whether it’s from a sales tax (which is certainly not necessarily regressive) or raising the income tax rate is not the issue and Yang is not going to be POTUS.
The payment of UBI is not regressive. Like I said, I’m not talking about how the money to fund it is collected and that has nothing to do with whether it’s means tested or not.
Giving a flat benefit to everyone (like the library, roads, schools) is not regressive. If anything, it’s progressive as it’s proportionally way more beneficial to people with less money.
Sales taxes or VAT is a completely separate issue from UBI, regardless of whether or not it’s part of Yang’s plan to pay for it.
And VAT works in every social welfare state in Europe, and it works in California. Ideally taxes would all be based on wealth and income, but there are a real world things to consider when rates get to the point that they do actually cause money to move out of the country and/or into the black market. Creating classes of things like food, which are exempt, addresses this somewhat, but anyway, the real world sometimes needs to be taken into account.
Maybe, like with health care and college, we should just assume countries like Denmark are just doing everything better than we are.
Generally in this country we invest way too much mental energy into figuring out if how we pay for government is progressive and way too little into figuring out if the spending is progressive. Hint: it really isn’t.
yes she’s at 3/4 and it’s tough to see her missing now with the recent 2 polls she got. Beto is at 2/4. Castro will miss the debate.
I could’ve gotten out at a 10% loss or so a week ago but stubbornly decided to lose most of it instead. Hillary Clinton is the only person to have ever cost me betting on this shit and she got me again.
I think this is not even fair towards Yang. I don’t see him advocating for lowering the income tax, let alone eliminating it, and he calls for treating capital gains as income, a financial transaction tax and removing the social security cap.
So yeah, that’s obviously some people’s idea here. But Yang didn’t say anything about this, and certainly I didn’t. And it’s $1000/month per adult. The average SNAP benefit per household is $253/month. And people go through a lot of shit to get and keep that. It’s almost like that’s the point.
And they can’t get a job. And people on disability too. Like a lot of them could work and want to work, but if they do, they lose their benefit. And a lot of them work under the table. I know it doesn’t happen in the higher paid world, but it’s pretty ubiquitous in the construction worker realm that I live in.
What if the people with steady jobs didn’t get their $1k and instead we give that money to the unemployed factory guy and maybe he could get like $2k instead?
It would be worse for all the reasons that means testing sucks and there would be no benefit. Just give everyone the $2k then and skip the bureaucracy, degradation and bad incentives that go along with means testing and adjust your marginal tax rates accordingly.
What if we just decided to stop providing public school for the children of people with jobs? What if people with jobs had to pay a toll to use the roads, but that unemployed factory guy could wear a badge or something that gave him a free pass?