Just food stamps and TANF. Housing assistance stays. Means testing is super unpopular with poor people. Have you ever been poor? Do you know any actual poor people? I spent most of my life poor and know plenty of poor people. They LOVE this idea. They all live in fear of losing their benefits. They all hate the fact that if they make more money they’ll lose more in benefits that they earn.
Getting 800+ a month richer is a much bigger deal for a poor person than getting 1000 a month richer is for you.
Again the existing welfare programs are huge political losers. They are easy to vilify and easy to run against. UBI can be grown to the point where every adult starts with enough money every month to pay basic bills. That’s a much better world than the poor live in now. That’s where we want to go.
There are no paths to that better world that involve helping just poor people and not everyone else. Everyone else won’t stand for it.
We’re talking about systematically eradicating poverty and simultaneously making life significantly easier for pretty much every working American. It’s a huge net transfer of wealth from the top 40% (to whom the extra money is a nothingburger) to the bottom 60% to whom the money is life changing.
And get exactly no benefits. I spent my late teens and early 20’s bouncing back and forth between being lower middle class and being poor never quite qualifying for any help at all. The poverty line has intentionally not been moved for decades lol.
The people who make 30k a year need help badly. They are usually living in an aggravated state of stress about how they are going to make ends meet, and they all universally are working a ton of hours often at multiple jobs (which means no overtime). Talk to most of them and they hate the people who make 12-15k off benefits because they are getting helped and they aren’t. They see them as moochers. The stigma is huge.
You simply would not believe the number of times I’ve been told some variant of ‘these insert minority/immigrant group here just sit around all day getting housing assistance and welfare while I bust my ass at three jobs and still can’t really afford food/rent/healthcare’ from people who honestly should be below the poverty line. It’s an easy message for politicians to sell because when you’re killing yourself to make a pittance other people getting helped while you aren’t feels really shitty. It’s just envy, but it’s totally reasonable.
We have to help the entire bottom 60% to even have a prayer of moving the needle on getting the very poor any more money at all, and it’s from the upper echelons of the bottom 60% that a lot of the support for killing those benefits comes from. Families who are raising 2-3 kids on a household income of 50k are not happy about paying taxes so that other people can get government help. They feel like they deserve government help… and honestly they’re right.
So lets give everyone the help so that we can give away exponentially more of it. Heck lets give some money to the top 40% too. They’re the ones who are going to pay for it all. We somehow got the 70-95th percentile to mostly fund social security with minimal complaining that way. Let’s do that again instead of trying to help the bottom 10% at the expense of the top 90%. A lot of the people in the bottom 10% are the opposite of sympathetic.
I think something that doesn’t get enough attention in this debate is the fact that making it truly universal gets rid of the constant, perpetual debates about where to draw the lines with means testing and the equally constant creative ways republicans come up with to insert additional hurdles. You don’t hear people arguing we need to drug test people who go to the library, or have a work requirement to drive on the interstate.
I’ve explained that in detail. How about we tax you drastically more to completely eliminate poverty and send you a check once a month that doesn’t begin to cover how much we taxed you for? Same difference?
This this this this this. Most of this is about being able to get it passed. In a vacuum Trolly has a point that we don’t need to send rich people money… but it’s way easier to get done politically if we do, and it’s worth it to get rid of the means testing and stigma which are huge negatives for poor people now.
(Advocacy worker here, engaging with public services on behalf of marginalised people is most of my job) it also creates an antagonistic mentality in those responsible for awarding and disbursing the payments. Instead of administrators, they become gatekeepers. Dealing with Social Welfare sections administering benefits (based on social insurance contributions, not means-tested) is a wholly different experience from dealing with sections administering social assistance payments (not based on contributions, means-tested). It’s night and day.
tl;dr means-testing is bad, don’t do it, don’t favour it, don’t support programmes that feature it
VAT taxes can be made significantly less regressive by exempting basics. But there’s a strong reason why Europe runs on VAT. It’s because it’s muuuuch harder to evade than any other type of tax yet created.
VAT taxes are a good thing. They look like sales taxes, but do not work the same way in the real world. It’s because so much of the VAT is collecting before the product even reaches the retailer. Companies pass on as much of their costs to consumers as they can, but in real life how much that is comes down to how much control they have over their market and what their actual costs look like. An awful lot of products pricing is set not based on how much it costs to make but how much demand the price point generates. VAT taxes hit the producers/sellers of those products square in the face and almost nothing gets passed on to consumers.
But even if 100% of Yang’s VAT tax got passed on you would have to spend 120k on eligible goods to be in the same place you were in before the UBI arrived. It’s a huge net transfer of money from upper middle class consumers (like you) to poor people if you actually run the math.
To be clear the #1 thing you want to pay attention to when asking if a tax is regressive or not is how easy/hard it is to evade. There’s a reason why the top 400 richest people in the US are paying less tax as a % of income than you and I are. It’s because they can afford to hire lawyers to help them avoid those taxes. Google/FB/Amazon pay at or near zero in taxes. They can’t avoid a VAT tax and would pay the full 10% without passing on a penny. This is because they have very high margin and tons of market power and are setting pricing based on maximizing their total revenue totally independent of their costs. These types of firms are poster children for why VAT taxes are awesome.
