I've been thinking similarly, that we're quickly going to want to start minimising dependencies and code size in the programs we make to try to reduce attack surface area.
Trying to keep code small could backfire by ballooning dependency on dependencies to do more of the work.
The unix philosophy prevails!
You might want to remind yourself what caused the November 2025 Cloudflare outage!
Funding FOSS projects without advertising, dopamine-hacking, donation-begging into the void, or being subsidized by billionaires that want to influence the electorate is still largely unsolved.
The problem isn't even the billionaires.
The problem is convincing comfortable, ambitious middle-high earners to put a cap on their and their bosses' prospects in exchange for the stability (and subsequent ground preparation for innovation) of a higher floor.
They're the stumbling block because they're the ones who, on balance and en masse, have the money and votng power to excuse and enable the status quo.
Part of the problem is that there are people who think all rather than only some of those things are a good idea.
High marginal tax rates and taxing unrealized gains are both unintended consequences factories. Especially the second one, but even the first one is basically a trade off between creating perverse incentives and arbitrage opportunities (i.e. massive loopholes) because the high rates don't apply to everything, or supercharging offshoring because the high rates do apply to everything.
Conversely, a UBI is a good idea, and doesn't actually require oppressive tax rates because it replaces most of the existing system of government benefits and subsidies -- which impose even higher de facto marginal tax rates on most of the middle class in the form of benefits phase outs. US federal spending is already >$20,000 per capita.
Not all of that is assistance programs, but a large proportion of it is. And most of those programs are a net negative compared to reallocating their budgets to a UBI. Having separate bureaucracies to administer separate programs for food assistance, housing assistance, education assistance, etc. is foolish even before they create weird marginal rate cliffs and higher marginal rates on lower income people by having arbitrarily overlapping phase out rates.
It isn't about the source of the money. Converting those things to a UBI would cost less money to give people more money because you'd save the amount spent on administration, while improving economic efficiency by not imposing arbitrary restrictions on how it's spent. The primary reason we don't do that isn't upper middle class people demanding a status quo in their own interest -- it isn't in their interest.
It's a combination of ordinary incompetence and bad structural incentives because politicians like to claim credit for creating new programs instead of just indexing the amount of a cash payment everybody gets to GDP per capita and then sending them all home.
I never said it was. They think it is, though, and fight cash payments tooth and nail. People don't vote in their economic self-interest when it involves new and unusual policies that they perceive as an attack. There are a lot more of them voting than there are billionaires, and they contribute quite a bit to efforts to keep things the way they are. I think breaking the pact six figure earners have with people making much more is crucial to restructuring the economy to work for people who aren't elite wealth-holders.
>It isn't about the source of the money. Converting those things to a UBI would cost less money to give people more money
We're talking about two different things. You want benefit reform. I want benefit reform, and forced distribution of productivity gains to labor, and heavy structural impediments to outsize personal wealth. You say "unintended consequences" when you I think you mean "undesirable consequences", but the funny thing is that they're both intended and desirable. Let's go back to an exec's lifestyle being tied to his job because he can't extract a huge paycheck without being taxed heavily. Please, take your money and inflate a foreign economy instead of spending it to buy elections here (if you manage to get it past the IRS).
Sure you did:
> The problem is convincing comfortable, ambitious middle-high earners to put a cap on their and their bosses' prospects in exchange for the stability (and subsequent ground preparation for innovation) of a higher floor.
The thing about a UBI is that it works regardless of what the amount is, up to any reasonable threshold. If it's small it doesn't do as much but it still does better than the same amount in some other benefits. You can only mess it up by making it excessively large, e.g. you can't do a $100k/year UBI because you'd need to collect ~$34 trillion in tax revenue from a ~$32 trillion GDP. Everything other than that is a trade off which is basically asking the question of how redistributive you want to be.
The amount of redistributive we are right now isn't zero, so converting that existing budget to be a UBI instead is "free" -- it's a net positive to essentially everyone -- no reduction in prospects or bonuses required.
But we can't even manage to do that.
And we could even get a "real" UBI without having oppressive tax rates -- $15,000 for every US citizen comes from a <16% universal tax rate, i.e. a flat tax of <16% of GDP. That's the number with no other government programs, but it's also something that replaces most of them.
> You say "unintended consequences" when you I think you mean "undesirable consequences", but the funny thing is that they're both intended and desirable.
I mean unintended as in you won't like them.
There are a lot of things that it's hard to tax because they're hard to value. How much is it worth to have a job that lets you play with the company's toys, or choose who they hire, or who gets their contracts? How much is a piece of "intellectual property" worth? How about a contract with an unspecified probability of having a large payout in the future? Things like that can all be used to transfer value at a reduced amount of tax, but they bring inefficiency and corruption. Misallocation of resources, nepotism and cronyism, bureaucratic empire building, reduced liquidity, etc. The higher the tax rate you use, the more incentive there is to do these things in order to avoid it.
If you subject people to very different tax rates then they can be arbitraged. Instead of Bob in the highest tax bracket making $X, a dozen family members in lower tax brackets get "hired" to be paid $X/12 so the family gets the same money without paying the higher rate, and now we're incentivizing nepotism and cronyism again.
More than 90% of new businesses fail. That means the remaining <10% need to have significantly better returns for the founders than what you get by working a corporate job or nobody would do it, and if nobody starts new companies then markets consolidate as existing companies fail or buy each other, and the more markets consolidate the more they screw consumers/workers and the more influence they have over the government.
Tax rates have a strong effect on where companies build things. If you invest a million dollars in something that will produce a 15% annual return and there is a 20% tax rate, that's a 12% return after tax. If you make the tax rate 80%, it's a 3% return after tax. Meanwhile if you build it in some other country you get a 10% return after tax, and they're going to do the thing that has the highest after-tax return, so you raise the tax rate and the factory is gone, along with the jobs.
> Let's go back to an exec's lifestyle being tied to his job because he can't extract a huge paycheck without being taxed heavily.
Wait, what? That's basically setting it up so that your boss owns you, and how to set up the economy so that it runs even more on cronyism and favors because there is no tax on the implicit value of a back room deal.
Ah, subtle misread. You think a cap is against their interests, but my point was that lower-class stability nets out better for them. Right now, the bottom is as sticky as the top, but it's much easier to fall and the middle class is unstable. This is backwards from what it should be: extreme difficulty in rising to the elite or falling into poverty. More of the upper middle class would benefit from not being driven into bankruptcy by medical costs than do now from the opportunity to become centimillionaires.
>But we can't even manage to do that
Swing for the fences.
>And we could even get a "real" UBI without having oppressive tax rates
The "oppressive" rates are a feature. Democratizing and socializing wealth is a good thing.
>I mean unintended as in you won't like them.
Yes, that's what I said. And then followed up with, "I actually will like them."
>If you subject people to very different tax rates then they can be arbitraged. Instead of Bob in the highest tax bracket making $X, a dozen family members in lower tax brackets get "hired" to be paid $X/12 so the family gets the same money without paying the higher rate, and now we're incentivizing nepotism and cronyism again.
The dozen family members don't move in lock step the way Bob does when he has all the money. One cousin sinks all his money into entertainment, another opens an esoteric shop (doesn't matter if it fails, for a time it provides employment to people who otherwise couldn't find jobs), one donates to a pet cause. Bezos loses half in the divorce and it unleashes a philanthropic beast in his ex, when otherwise it would have gone to another yacht or TRT cycle.
>That means the remaining <10% need to have significantly better returns for the founders than what you get by working a corporate job or nobody would do it
Do you know people? Especially people who start businesses? Most businesses fail because people start them for reasons other than raw profitability. Many businesses are happy to break even or even lose money for the sake of a mission.
>Wait, what? That's basically setting it up so that your boss owns you
Company already owns you, since healthcare is directly tied to employment and housing is effectively tied to it to. This makes it so that the company owns the execs, too. Instead of being wealthy independent of the company, able to rely on bailing out with a golden parachute when things get rough, their lifestyle would require actually performing. I see this as an absolute win.
EDITED TO ADD: If you’re looking for a UNIX anti-hero regarding “do one thing and do it well” (that predates systemd), look no further than emacs.
Dependencies are.
Part of that is reading bits and pieces of what Nancy Leveson had to say about the subject. Subsystems even when working to spec can produce spectacular failures.