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Comment by k-mcgrady | Hacker News Reader

I think because UBI is guaranteed to be fair. With negative income tax you're still going to get people fiddling with their taxes to get every penny they can out of the system. UBI is also less bureaucratic so less expensive. You simply wire everyone who has registered their money. With negative income tax their is more paperwork which means more people need to be employed to deal with it and to deal with the potential fraud. It also places more burden on citizens to correctly report taxes or face prosecution.

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This is the answer. Disconnect the economic floor from the means to fund it - when you have a NIT, it tightly couples its revenue source to itself. One of the cornerstones of UBI proposals is to tie it to cost of living to avoid having to touch it, whereas with tax code you often want to change it all the time determined by how prosperous or stagnant the economy is.

In addition, humans are kinda weird animals. It is much easier to pitch much higher taxes and a guaranteed $1500 a month from the state to people rather than higher taxes and no state check.

The frequent counter argument to this, is that it isn't fair to give rich people a basic income at all. That it's inherently regressive to give rich people welfare. Instead, those income payments should be going to those that need it the most.

Basic income is fair like a flat tax is fair, and just as regressive.

I believe the premise is that those rich people will pay much more in taxes than their cut of the UBI pool.

I guess if you mean rich people who don't work / pay taxes, but I don't think that's an actual issue (since the few who end up unfairly benefitting don't matter in the grand scale), more so an emotional one.

Would love if anyone had actual numbers on this.

One could always tax capital a little bit to offset this. Like a 0.1% of capital, so that person who has 15M will pay their 15K annual basic income.

On the other hand, that person will generate interest income, which is taxed normally anyway, at a much higher rate overall.

There are a lot of ways to invest that don't produce interest income. Easiest example: buy a house in San Francisco.

The person you're responding to was suggesting a wealth tax though, not an income tax. With a wealth tax you'd pay some percentage of your wealth every year, including on your properties. It's not a crazy idea; either. France, along with many others, currently have a wealth tax: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solidarity_tax_on_wealth

They were hedging their recommendation, saying that we could have a wealth tax but maybe it isn't necessary because your gains on capital are all taxed anyway. The wealth tax obviously suffers from massive tax evasion as well.

Yeah, I'm not in favor of a wealth tax, precisely because of the evasion problems (which France is experiencing). I think a better and simpler solution is to not have abnormally low capital gains rates. And did you know that someone who is wealthy, who owns stock worth millions of dollars, pays $0 federal income tax until they reach over ~$80K in qualified dividend income per year? It's absurd. Income should be taxed the same regardless of source. Maybe give a slight tax break of ~5% for long-term investing of, say, 5-10 years or more, but getting a ~20% tax break for investments only a year old is absurd.

Of course, the most effective wealth tax of all time was implemented centuries ago and is continuing to perform amazingly. I'm speaking of the elimination of primogeniture, which does an excellent job of breaking up multigenerational wealth (and thus largely prohibiting the establishment of a permanent nobility class).

In Canada they have 'tax free savings Accounts'. It basically is a small allowance to invest tax free. You can add 5k every year. It actually allows compounding, so some people have managed to create 'large' accounts totaling more than hundred thousand dollars, although they could've at most contributed like 50k. The tax authority is trying to crack down on people trading in this.

Other than that, all dividend and interest income is taxed as normal income, all capital gains are taxed half income. Si those 80K of income would put you in a high tax bracket.

Fair. But most investments will incur some taxes when you turn them into something liquid like money. You know, if you actually want to benefit from the wealth that it represents.

The personal home is one of the few exceptions (at least in Canada, where there's a 'principal residence tax exemption'). But even there you need to pay at least some property taxes. Can you think of others?

Yes, like the Cayman Islands. And the entire existing tax avoidance industry.

By that logic it's also regressive to give rich people free access to roads, free access to public K-12 education, etc. Money is fungible, and if progressivity in an income tax pays for the "free" resource, it's disingenuous to call it regressive. It becomes a matter of practicality. Do you want both an IRS and a Department of Basic Income Administration?

Also, by definition a flat tax is neither progressive nor regressive. , so I'm pretty confused about what you're talking about. Note, flat doesn't mean fair by everyone's definition.

It's regressive because of the marginal utility of money. The difference between earning 0 and 10K (getting to pay rent and groceries) is more important than the difference between earning 100K and 110K (better luxuries), yet a flat tax assigns it the same value.

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