Comment by dataflow | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dataflow | Hacker News Reader

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> I mean, do you really have an incentive to work if 90% of the money is going to taxes which pay for the other people not working? Obviously not, that’s a terrible deal.

It's not obvious at all; in fact the tax percentage is meaningless on its own. People get too hung up on tax rates instead of focusing on purchasing power and quality of life. It's almost like adding zeros to the currency. The only thing that matters is your purchasing power (which comes from your net income), not your gross income or what percentage tax that corresponded to. Like if (in today's economy) you pay me $10M/year and I have to pay 90% of that in taxes, I would happily work for you. If you pay me $10k/year, I wouldn't even work for you if my "tax" rate was -100%.

Is there a way to make the math work out? Honestly, I don't know. Maybe it's impossible, maybe it's practical, or maybe it would come with so much baggage that we'll prefer the status quo. What I do know is that the people who declare the answer is obvious consistently arrive at that conclusion by artificially constraining the problem in some way that is not implied by the premises, like "you can't raise taxes significantly", or "you can't touch defense spending", or "we won't decrease healthcare costs", or numerous other things.

>It's not obvious at all; in fact the tax percentage is meaningless on its own. People get too hung up on tax rates instead of focusing on purchasing power and quality of life.

1. in an economy where 30% (or whatever) of people aren't working and the remaining are getting taxed higher % of their income to fund the people who are not working, how is the living standard of the people who are working go up?

2. A sense of "fairness" factors into this as well. People are known to reject "unfair" deals, even though the said unfair deal would still give them strictly positive values.

1. They try to find higher paying jobs to earn more money to raise their living standards. Which is exactly what people who want higher living standards would do right now. I'm not sure I understand your question.

2. The "fairness" that's relevant here is a function of (say) "net income/expended effort", not "tax rate". People get mad that others who put similar effort earn a lot more net income than them, not a lot more gross income.

I think the issue though is that one can not look at money in this situation. A higher paying job means you are more productive, at least to whoever is employing you. It maybe, imo will be, the case that the few people who remain cannot increase the amount of goods and services they produce to provide for the rest of the population.

For example, if before UBI a worker on average was producing one car, and assuming that after UBI half the working population quits their job, that worker now needs to produce two cars for everyone to maintain their standard of living. Except since that additional car must go to the UBI recipient, in other words his income was taxed, his quality of life does not go up despite becoming more productive. So either he needs to become more productive through than one more car so that he can raise his own standard of living, or he just won’t do it.

The rational play is to live off UBI and diamond hands speculative assets, not find a better job. The reason is that with UBI you can believe enough other people will be doing the same, leading to speculative bubble after speculative bubble.

Why would you assume there is enough funds left over to be able to speculate on assets?

Why would you assume there’s not?

Given any amount of UBI people will be able to fix their costs below that and put the rest toward speculation.

I don’t know of a way to fix UBI right at cost because there is so much variability for a person’s costs.

There might be some small amount of leftover for a few of the population, but I doubt it would be much to speculate with other than on scratch off lotteries.

Presumably, UBI would be a single number nationwide. For example, a politically acceptable minimum quality of life in the middle of Mississippi or whatever is cheapest. There is no worrying about people’s variable costs. If they want to live somewhere more expensive, they work for it.

> 1. They try to find higher paying jobs to earn more money to raise their living standards. Which is exactly what people who want higher living standards would do right now. I'm not sure I understand your question.

Where will these higher paying jobs come from? Are they coming from automation or by virtue of UBI being implemented? If it's the former, if I'm 2x more productive, why should I have to give up 0.8x of that productivity to non-workers? Moreover, why should I stay in a jurisdiction that taxes me the productivity gains, as opposed to another jurisdiction that lets me keep all the gains?

>2. The "fairness" that's relevant here is a function of (say) "net income/expended effort", not "tax rate". People get mad that others who put similar effort earn a lot more net income than them, not a lot more gross income.

Is there any research to suggest that people only care about net income/effort rather than gross? It seems pretty obvious in this thread that at least some people are care about the gross income/effort, as evidenced by the disdain of people on UBI as lazy weed smokers.

Isn't this why states like California have higher tax rates than the rest of the nation?

How is this any different from other social programs like Social Security or Welfare?

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