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Comment by salient | Hacker News Reader

I agree, for this to work, everyone would have to receive that amount of money. Or at least say, everyone receiving under $100,000 a year in salary. Otherwise, you might feel cheated if you replace your $12,000 free money for a $20,000 job. You'd still have to receive the free money, so you'd then earn $32,000 a year.

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Every adult citizen receives basic income, no matter their "means."

That's what makes it equitable.

The equitability of a basic income is not its main selling point, as I see it; in other words it is not necessary that it be equitable according to some specific conception in order for a basic income to provide value to society as a whole. The selling points are, as I see them:

- There are now more people spending money because they have disposable income. This is good for businesses.

- There is added incentive to work, because one does not lose income by starting a job.

- The people being made redundant by automation are given a cushion that will help as they figure out how to become economically relevant again. This is good for everyone, because there are fewer families forced out onto the streets, etc.

- There is, potentially, less of a bureaucracy to manage the distribution of existing welfare programs, assuming existing programs can be consolidated into the new basic income scheme. This is an attractive point for conservatives and libertarians.

There's no need for equitability here, although that's also something that is desirable within bounds. But I think few millionaires and billionaires will find a significant decrease in their standard of living if they have to pay more into the pot than they receive. Also keep in mind that the billionaires are billionaires because society provides a framework for them to accumulate and retain the capital that they have; for this reason they have an implicit debt and obligation to society.

Equitability is not absolutely necessary, but it is a great selling point.

With a scheme like this, one would replace a system full of loopholes (for the rich) and handouts (for the poor) with a simple flat system.

Everybody gets $x/yr, and everybody pays y% in taxes on all income after that (not just earned income). No deductions, no credits, no loopholes, no welfare state (other than the UBI).

For some people this "mincome" would be theirs to spend, but for others it'd just be a minor reduction in income taxes.

What's somewhat clever about this is how it essentially balances out. The billionaire won't even notice the extra amount in their bank account, but there aren't many billionaires. Meanwhile the three jobs four kids single mom will be greatly impacted by this, which is the whole point.

The billionaire won't notice it because it won't exist; the billionaire will be taxed way above mincome, because otherwise how are you going to pay for it?

That's exactly the purpose of basic income. If a billionaire businessman replaces all of his workers with robots, all of his income goes directly to him. The laid off employees are now competing for the few jobs that are available which have not yet been automated, and not all of them will be able to find another job because other businesses are automating away humans too. We need a way to redistribute wealth from the billionaires who make their money off the efficiency of automation to the people who would have previously worked for them.

$100k limit is completely unnecessary in a universal income. The whole point is that the basic income is fully "paid" through taxes at some point. If the universal income is $12k and someone is paying $14k in taxes total, the "true tax" to fund the state (apart from basic income) is $2k.

The only way for it to be fair is for everyone to receive it. Naturally, there will be an inflection point where at some income level a person starts paying out more than they receive.

I once calculated, based on what amounts to a back-of-the-napkin calculation based on a flat tax, that the inflection point would be somewhere in the $60-70k range for Canada. The US would be a bit higher due to the greater income inequality.

I would hate to be the person who earns just over that arbitrary 100k line.

At some point, that $12,000 you would receive turns instead into $12,000 you deduct from your taxes, so it all works out. There isn't a sudden step.

Happens in the UK. Every £2k over £100k and you lose £1k of your tax-free allowance. This means that you keep 38p of every £1 earned between £100k and £118k, before the tax rate relaxes back to a more sensible 40% after £118k (and then up to 50% at £150k).

Marginal taxation rates are even higher for the very poor: well over 90% in some cases.

Wouldn't be that much different than progress tax brackets, though. In that case, lowering the tax rate for you by 10 percent would basically mean receiving $10,000 more a year in "free money".

> I would hate to be the person who earns just over that arbitrary 100k line.

Yeah, that would be terrible. How could one survive?

hiring managers would use it to convince people to take sub-100k wages. This pretty much happens already in progressive taxation countries(e.g. belgium) where you can actually make less money by having a higher salary because your tax-rate increases.

I have yet to see an example about net pay decreasing with marginal tax rate increase. When you earn 120k, only those 20k over 100k will be taxed with the higher rate, not the amount below 100k, so every increase in gross salary leads to increase to net salary.

If you include welfare state benefits (which have wage-income-based phaseouts) in income, it's not hard to produce such examples. http://mises.org/daily/3822 has a simple case which has >100% effective marginal rates between about 20k and 50k for a family with one adult and 2 kids.

_That_ is the sort of thing that could go away with a guaranteed basic income. At that point, you'd just have taxes, which do in fact behave as you describe.

The US AMT can have that punitive effect, because AMT is an alternative calculation, not a marginal calculation. Yeah, not marginal, but it is a common tax system.

And there are some programs that don't have marginal phaseouts. Each one is trifilingly small, but they may add up.

Even programs with marginal phaseouts can end up adding up to the phaseout being > 100% of the income (e.g. 10 programs, each of which marginally phases out 11 cents on the dollar).

>This pretty much happens already in progressive taxation countries(e.g. belgium) where you can actually make less money by having a higher salary because your tax-rate increases.

All sane countries with progressive taxation always apply the higher tax bracket only to the part of the salary that is in the bracket.

E.g. if the tax is 10% < $50k and 25% >= $50k, a $60k salary would have to pay 10% * $50k + 25% * $10k in taxes, and all wage increases increase net pay.

> This pretty much happens already in progressive taxation countries(e.g. belgium) where you can actually make less money by having a higher salary because your tax-rate increases.

You don't understand how progressive taxes actually work. This simply doesn't happen. You can't make less money by making more money.

Agree, but there is one interesting example of where this went wrong: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pomperipossa_in_Monismania

If you like Astrid Lindgren, you're my friend. :)

yea, I might have gotten it wrong about progressive taxation. The context I picked it up on was in choosing a higher salary vs. some benefits. The benefit did lead to more spending power compared to the salary increase and HR would push for this as salary increases would lead to more costs for the company.

That's why taxes must be proportional too. The state spends X euro, the productive economy pays Y euro of salaries+dividends, therefore everybody pays incomeX/Y of taxes. X/Y is the income tax rate.

Or if you prefer to tax sales, with Z being the total amount of sales, priceX/Z. X/Z is the VAT rate.

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