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Comment by bryanlarsen | Hacker News Reader

So to get a BI of £12K, average taxes would have to go up by £8K per person. And since about 2/3 of the adult population are taxpayers, that gives £12K per taxpayer, which balances the payout they'd receive from BI. People with above average incomes would pay into BI, and those with below average incomes would net from BI.

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In other words, legally redistribute wealth from the rich to the poor. Not saying there’s anything wrong with that, but that’s what this program is.

That's absolutely what it is at the core. The problem with it's application has been proven over and over again; the very wealthy have the means and motivation to avoid it while the burden falls on the same segment of the population over and over again.

The solution is simple: legislate so the very wealthy can't avoid it, while remaining in the country. It's really not that hard: if they have assets here and reside here, then you tax them, and seize them if necessary. The only reason this isn't done is because too many people vote for politicians who pass laws favorable to the very wealthy.

You don't think they've tried to "legislate" it so people can't avoid it? It involves guns and prisons.

No, I don't think that. The one thing governments don't try is to homogeneously tax rich people.

I do think governments all over the world work hard to find some way to tax their foes and let their friend pay a pittance. At the same time, they don't care any bit about the people with just barely a surplus, that end up collectively paying most of it.

> The solution is simple: legislate so the very wealthy can't avoid it, while remaining in the country.

... then they'll leave the country. I don't think you've thought this through.

At least in the USA, its very hard to expatriate to avoid taxes. IIRC it requires a one-time payment of ~40% of your net-worth and you to have citizenship somewhere else.

Other countries could follow suit, though the USA probably has the easiest time enforcing due to its global hegemony.

America has a real problem with money in politics which has prevented strong penalties on top earners. But, the US does currently levy a minimum tax total for overseas personal income, it basically can be summarized as "If you earned X in the US you'd owe us Y, you payed the government of the country you're residing in Z which is less than Y, you owe the US government Y-Z", this law is extremely poorly enforced currently but even if they leave the country they still owe the taxes, legally speaking.

If they flee to other countries and illegally circumvent the law then that's where the US should start flexing it's muscles.

Yep, and you can just renounce your US citizenship. That Facebook guy did it a couple years ago.

How do you take real estate out of the country?

1) As the other poster said, how do you take real estate out of the country?

2) Where are they going to go? Somalia? Other countries are going to tax them at least as much. These rich people aren't idle rich, they're rich because they're working in some capacity. You can't do that in Somalia. They get their wealth from being located here. That means they can be taxed here.

>As the other poster said, how do you take real estate out of the country?

Sell it. Or don't, it's their choice. At some point real estate holdings aren't worth it if your host country decides it's entitled to 95% of your wealth.

>Where are they going to go? Somalia? Other countries are going to tax them at least as much.

There will always be another first-world country more than willing to undercut other first-world countries for the opportunity to host wealthy citizens. It's the same principle that gets us to where we are today, with states competing against each other to give tax breaks to corporations to entice them to set up shop.

It's funny how there's no end to people complaining about how the wealthy always seem to get out of paying their "fair share" through loopholes, but THIS TIME, we've got a foolproof plan to redistribute their wealth that they can't weasel out of! Sure thing.

What exactly are these people going to do to earn money in these new countries? We're not talking about idle billionaires here, we're talking about very high-earning people.

Legislation unfortunately involves legislators, people who really like the money those wealthy people give them. As long as we have legalized bribery I don't see it happening.

Well, just as I said before, it's really not hard. Ban bribery. Plenty of other nations don't have legalized bribery (such as just about any western European nation), so it's not like it's an impossible task.

This would cause massive capital flight and long-term capital avoidance of that jurisdiction.

Not wealth, income.

Indeed. I think that probably a fairer way to allocate taxes for this sort of purpose would be either a wealth tax or a georgist land tax.

Which will cause the upper middle class to stop working as hard, because why bust your ass for not much of a better life. Fall back down with the common class which would cause the whole thing to fail.... god I hate socialism.

I thought BI was equal distribution across the population; how can you charge less than its value per person, and pay it off?

Some of the population would pay more towards BI in taxes than the amount they receive as BI (just as some of the population gets taxes more than they receive social benefits currently).

By cancelling current benefits programs, which the OP calculated at 4K per person.

Assuming we're talking about the UK here, that would require £517,000,000,000 - or about 70% of current tax revenues.

Yep; though the usual corollary is also that you'd cancel a bunch of other welfare programs -- that is: you're replacing benefits with UBI, not just tacking UBI on. (Not advocating for it; just saying that 70% of tax revenues makes it sound like you'd nearly double taxes to cover UBI, and that's not quite true.)

Assuming zero other changes to the tax code or spending which as far as I know nobody wants to do.

The US example is usually to remove Social Security, food stamps, HUD, unemployment insurance, low income tax breaks, etc which means close to zero net cost but a massive shift in benefits.

Overall I think the driver for UBI is more about complexity than welfare. For example without changing revenue you could eliminate the need for tax prep. However H&R block for example really loves their billions per year in waste. So in many way's that's the context UBI should be judged not just it's direct impacts.

That number is fairly meaningless though, since a majority[1] of people will be receive more money from BI than they'll lose in the increased taxes. Only the very rich will see significant real increases.

1: the average income is significantly higher than the median income.

Well, I think it's quite meaningful - it's the amount of money the government would have to raise to pay for this, compared to what they raise now. I bring it up because the revenue side seems like the harder half of the basic income equation, and the one that's more neglected.

It looks like the highest marginal tax rate in the UK is 45%. You could raise that higher, of course - but it's not clear how much, and if doing so would actually raise revenues - where the UK is on the Laffer curve.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laffer_curve

(Clearly, if you raised it to 100%, it would lower revenue - you can't tax the rich if you don't have rich people anymore. And if you're at 45%, how much higher can you go?)

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