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Comment by mikeash | Hacker News Reader

Yay, tax code simplification.

Oh crap, "flat tax."

This is the fundamental problem. Everybody wants a simpler tax system. But nobody can agree on which parts to remove, or how to change it. The current system is close to what you get when everybody tries to get what they want. Even if you blew it up and started over, I think you'd get back to the current state pretty fast.

Edit: everybody can stop replying to my comment proposing your favorite simplified tax system and explaining why it's great. You're missing the point here. If you want to discuss your favorite tax system, make a top-level comment.

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Flat tax + basic income is the only sane way forward. Most other systems lead to stupid incentives, unjust inequality, and over priced accountants.

For example. Assume a household of two people. one earns $20k per year, the other earns $80k per year. With a 50% tax and a $10k (after tax) per year basic income you get the following:

    2*$10k + 0.5 * ($20k + $80k) = $70k

Now if each partner earned the same you would get:

    2*$10k + 0.5 * ($50k + $50k) = $70k

Which is exactly what you want. The problem with income splitting measure that try to replicate this is that they lead to a perverse disincentive to divorce. So in the first example, the person earning $80k would no longer be able to offload part of his income to the lower paying person, and the two persons effective income decreases just when their expenses double. Furthermore it discriminates against people that are single, which is politically expedient, but unjust.

It also solves the welfare and old age security paperwork problem. There are some other problems: like having a higher tax rate to pay for all this basic income, but ultimately I think it would unleash more minds on problems that matter instead of setting up family trusts for the wealthy.

Your proposal sounds good, but I doubt it'll fly, because the people who like the idea of basic income and the people who like the idea of a flat tax have almost no overlap.

My point is that everybody agrees on simplifying the tax code but nobody can agree on how, so it probably can't happen.

Actually, there's quite a lot of overlap. Milton Friedman, who is worshipped by much of the right, advocated a "negative income tax", which is basically the same thing.

"It also solves the welfare and old age security paperwork problem. There are some other problems: like having a higher tax rate to pay for all this basic income, but ultimately I think it would unleash more minds on problems that matter instead of setting up family trusts for the wealthy."

A basic income is unsustainable. As more and more people become dependent on it, taxes will only increase over time and we will run out of tax dollars. In addition to this, there will be massive inflation.

"instead of setting up family trusts for the wealthy."

I see where this is going now: the wealthy need to be punished for earning more money than the rest of us. This has never really been a good strategy historically for creating a happy and free society.

The ironic part is that the more rules you impose on the public in terms of taxes and money, the less mobility the lower and middle classes actually have. The rich can just leave the country and still make a killing with new laws in place like what you propose. The middle and lower class don't have the luxury making it that much more difficult to start and run a company (which is really the only way to have true economic freedom).

Paul, I'm broadly libertarian. I don't want taxes to asymptotically approach 50%, I'd prefer if they were lower. But what we have now is taxes that asymptotically approach 50% unless you have clever tax planners, like I do.

Furthermore the rich can leave the country, I'm personally of the opinion that taxes should be based on land and resource usage, but very few people share this view, so I talk about how to reform income taxes over switching tax systems.

What I'm saying though would be much better than we have right now. Right now we have massive inequality in treatment for families that earn identical amounts.

Furthermore, a basic income is not unsustainable. What we are doing now is unsustainable because robotics are going to replace people in low skilled areas of the economy, like trucking, taxi driving, and construction. The system of taxation we ultimately use will be able to tax the wealthy that leave the country if they derive economic benefit within the country they left. For example, sales taxes.

Are you a geolibertarian?

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

Broadly, yes. It's even on my twitter profile. https://twitter.com/zachaysan

I think that some people have a childish view of libertarianism, so I shy away from straight out calling myself a libertarian these days. I recognize the need for expediency in things like food labelling and even immigration and healthcare; but I don't view healthcare as an innate "right" I view it as something that is necessary to keep the economy efficient and something that almost everyone would want if something bad happened to them. I'm very against wars of aggression, but I'm not so libertarian as to deny the need for things like nuclear weapons or a realist influenced foreign policy (even if my international relations view is much more strongly influenced by liberalism). I don't think most libertarians are correct on the environment, since they aren't practical enough to admit that pollution is currently unavoidable, and strong treaties are needed to keep the oceans clean and full of biodiversity.

I call myself a geolibertarian, but I clarify it because I don't want people thinking I want to tear everything down. I just want to tear down some things, like grants for the arts, corporate welfare, militarism, and complex bureaucracies.

Another way to go is get rid of income tax altogether and replace with a national sales tax. Nice thing about that is that you can exempt essential things like unprepared food. That way the effective tax rate is much lower if you're a low earner, since most of your money will be spent on essentials.

No more IRS is another bonus, and since most states already have a sales tax the infrastructure is already there.

Oh I'm all about not having income / corporate taxes. But working within the framework that we're discussing, I think my proposal is more effective.

I think taxes are best done on land / resource usage, since it minimizes privacy, but a sales tax would be way better than income / corporate taxes.

Eliminate the choosing of winners and losers (which items are exempted) by having pre-bates that cover the sales tax amount that we decide is the "poverty limit". Then we all only have one thing to decide: what is the poverty limit.

Then the wealthy make all of their big purchases outside the country and import them in. If the country starts taxing purchases made outside the country, then those purchases become "gifts from a good friend."

There's also the fact that the ultra rich get unbelievably rich because they spend only small fractions of their income, meaning the rich would be paying pretty much nothing in taxes ever.

This is how I feel about anarchists.

"Things would be better if we did away with the system."

"But what about when things go wrong?"

"Well, there would be agreements in place to handle that."

"Yes, that's called a 'system of government.'"

Or, "The government shouldn't tell me what to do."

"The word 'govern' literally means 'to conduct the policy, actions, and affairs of people.' That is, in fact, the whole point of government: to tell you what to do."

I remember a comment on HN a little while ago which went something like, "Why does the government need to get involved? Why can't people just come together and figure out how to deal with it?" I replied pointing out that this is what government is.

That's just playing with multiple definitions. When people say "government" they mean the government, that is, the representative bodies that form our current system, not the abstract concept of any system by which a state is governed.

Governance is certainly necessary. Having "a government" is just one possible way of achieving it.

it is what government is, with guns and jails.

https://youtu.be/fibDNwF8bjs

Whitest Kids You Know illustrated this perfectly in a sketch routine

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