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Comment by SmokyBourbon | Hacker News Reader

Andrew Yang:

> I am a huge fan of a negative income tax, but I prefer a UBI for multiple reasons. It lowers the administrative burden because you don’t need to figure out how much I made last year. It removes any strange shenanigans in terms of trying to report a low income. It alleviates a payments timing issue — you’re not likely to get your negative income tax when you might need it. And politically, I think it’s more appealing to be able to say to everyone: You have intrinsic value. This is how much you get for being an American, [a] human being.

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>And politically, I think it’s more appealing to be able to say to everyone: You have intrinsic value.

The universality of UBI is key to its political viability. Just look at the number of people who are against forgiving college debt because they have already paid off college or are past the stage in their life in which they are personally concerned about college debt. Most people still view "fairness" as everyone being treated equally. So just give everyone an equal amount of money.

Fairness is treating everyone equally, the fact you put that in quotes is concerning...

Further it is not just people that have paid off college debt or are past the stage where are concerned about college debt..

Many people worked their ass off to become good at a trade or other profession with out incurring college debt, why should we then have to pay increased taxes to pay of those that bought into the college lie?

No one is offering me Mortgage Debt forgiveness? Housing is more of a necessity of life than a collage degree...

Fairness often leads to zero sum outcomes, sometimes positive sum outcomes for all parties can be had from "unfair" allocation.

When it comes to government, equal treatment for all individuals in society is the only ethical method

Everything else is just corruption

Let’s say you are at a family reunion and want to play a game of baseball with everyone. Is it “fair” to have the same rules for the 6 year old child and the 25 year old who used to play on his high school baseball team? More likely you would tweak the rules a little or pitch a little slower to the kid so everyone has fun and can fully participate.

Sometimes fairness means leveling the playing field so everyone can compete equally.

Well your straw-man is completely weak and not relevant the conversation about government tax policy

We are not talking about a "family" but talking about government, that is something very different and it is very dangerous to view government as a "family" in the same way it dangerous to view a corporations or your employer as "family"

It is an analogy. It doesn’t mean we are literally a family. If you want to use a tax analogy, let’s look at marginal tax rates. It is widely regarded by a majority of the population that a flat tax isn’t fair as it treats everyone the same. It is fine if you aren’t in that majority, but you can’t pretend that “fair” means treating everyone the same is some universal truth.

Well that is another bad analogy, and while I do find all income taxation to be unethical marginalize tax rates are not treating people differently, they are treating incomes differently.

To treat people differently you would have to start basing income tax rates on characteristics of a person, such as race, sexual identity, age or height (like in your previous analogy)

Saying all income from 0-50000 is tax X, and income from 50000-100000 is taxed Y is not treating PEOPLE differently, all PEOPLE are treated the same in that situation.

To be clear I am a supporter of replacing all Welfare programs with a Negative Income Tax. I would also be in favor of a UBI that was not funded with Income taxation.

I also support the abolishment of all Income based taxation replacing it with Georgism Single Tax System

>To treat people differently you would have to start basing income tax rates on characteristics of a person, such as race, sexual identity, age or height (like in your previous analogy)

Characteristics like their marriage status, the number of children they have, the status of their home, their status as a student, or even the specific example you used of age which is tied to all sorts of taxation issues?

Although I'm not sure there is any point to continuing the conversation if you are going to nitpick any analogy and refuse to recognize that your views on taxation are an extreme minority opinion.

And I disagree with all of these. Government should not treat people differently based on age, martial status, how many kids they have, or age

Absolutely it would be fair to have the same rules for everyone, regardless if they were 6 or 25 or 70 or a professional player, once the players are in the game. It might be _mean_ to treat the six year old like the 25 year old, but it would be fair. It would, however, potentially be unfair to put them in the same game in the first place, especially if there were alternatives.

Meanness and unfairness are two different things.

Especially in a family setting, sometimes niceness can Trump fairness.

My phone apparently autocorrected trump and capitalized it, and I didn't notice. An unfortunate impact of the former administration.

That is something I just really don't get. It is like being against the Polio vaccine simply because "I had gotten polio just before the vaccine came out, so if I had to suffer everyone else should too". I've never heard of anyone being against vaccines due to "fairness".

The difference is that people didn't choose to get polio. But they chose to go to college knowing that they would get into debt and then dug their way out of the consequences. If the next generation of college-goers would not have to put up with the same crap, that would mean that their own self-inflicted suffering was meaningless. At that point, cognitive dissonance kicks in and people make the illogical argument that "if I had to suffer, they should have to suffer too".

There is no definition of fairness that a substantial majority agree on.

Equality of opportunity? Equality of outcome? Low penalty for failing? Low penalty for breaking the law? Eye for an eye?

I see no reason why a direct quote from Andrew Yang (probably the best-known proponent of UBI at the present time) should be flagged to death in this conversation. Vouched -- which doesn't indicate that I necessarily agree with him. I just hate people who are making a valid contribution to the conversation being mobbed down.

It wasn't flagged to death and nobody mobbed anybody. The account that posted it was banned. Posts by banned accounts are killed by default.

You're right that the parent was a good contribution and deserved to be unkilled. That's what vouching is for, and you made an excellent use of it.

Banning on HN isn't punitive, it's preventative. When a banned account has changed its ways and has reliably been sticking to HN's rules for a while now, we're happy to unban it. If people see cases like that, they should email hn@ycombinator.com so we can look into it. That's a fine way to watch out for a fellow user.

When a banned account hasn't been reliably sticking to HN's rules for long enough, or hasn't posted enough to decide that yet, it stays banned for obvious reasons. In that case their good posts can still be unkilled, just on a comment-by-comment basis. That's why we created vouching and it works well.

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