ETA: Okay, seriously, folks. Give this some thought - if the US restructured corporate taxes to something that made even of modicum of sense... and reduced personal taxes on all but the very highest brackets to offset that change... Do you think UBI would even be needed?
You are unfamiliar with the term "working poor"? Reducing personal taxes on the poor to make their salaries sustainable would be like trying to fill an automobile with jello. It makes no sense! How do you make the working poor not poor by reducing their tax rate?
UBI in the US isn't a solution to any of the actual problems.
You mean like SNAP, food assistance, housing assistance, health care assistance? How much money do we spend on these programs? SNAP alone was over $100 billion!
I want to address the issues just as much as you guys do. But I want to address those issues in a way that will work over a long time period, is sustainable, and is a benefit to EVERYONE. Bandaids might come in pretty colors with your favorite cartoon characters on them, and it might make you feel happy to have a snazzy bandaid on your body... but they're not an appropriate treatment for a severed fucking limb!
The trouble is, you are using a colorful bandage, but just don't see it. Shifting tax law doesn't fix poverty. It doesn't even begin to address it.
I don't think that changing tax structures is the ONLY thing needed.
<sigh> I have a generalized complaint. Not just to you, Jimmy, but to pretty much everyone. You guys keep looking at one single thing at a time, and thinking you have a solution. But it's not a single thing, it's a dynamic system of interconnected things. You can't look at *just* low income people and say "give them more money". That's nothing more than "let them eat cake". You have to look at the drivers of that income, and what else is connected to them, and what the net effects are on the entire system. And that includes a realistic consideration of the risks involved in any proposed solution, including tail risks and the associated costs of those low-likelihood events. Value at Risk is something that needs to be thought about as you're working through these things.
UBI has *risks*. UBI is *expensive*. You're complaining about the US spending $100B on SNAP? As LD has so kindly shared with us, UBI would cost 50 times as much, and that only gets us a poverty level income base. That's not a solution to the actual underlying problems.
So what are the actual problems when it comes to income disparity in the US? Some of it is certainly overly generous taxes on the highest brackets, we can increase those a bit. But we have to consider the dynamics involved - if the rate increases too much you risk capital flight. And then you have $0 to tax at high rates, and your entire tax revenue ends up decreasing. Additionally, as the US currently operates, those wealthy people are almost all associated with corporations that have a shameful degree of influence on congressional policy - so if you hike the rate too much, you end up with those wealthy people exerting corporate influence to squash it.
Some of the disparity is the result of those policies toward corporations in the first place. It would make a whole lot of sense to address *those* policies *before* you try to increase the rates on the top brackets, then you mitigate one of the risks noted above. And like I said in my recent post above, I'm not talking about just increasing the corporate tax rate, but actually changing the definitions of what is taxable in the first place. I think I gave a fairly good description of the dynamics there, so I'm not going through it all again, except to repeat that this would help to reduce income disparity by disincentivizing astronomical compensation in the first place.
Those are some of the *first* things I would do... but that's not even remotely all that should be addressed. Poverty in the US isn't just a case of income inequality. A whole lot of it is the result of opportunity inequality - and that gets into a much more complex realm. EDucation needs an overhaul, and at a minimum, public schools shouldn't be funded based on local property taxes. Talk about a disastrous trap - that results in low income kids having shitty public educations, which doesn't give them the skills necessary to rise out of that income when they grow up. We need to address how we fund education, and we need to make sure that ALL kids are given the same OPPORTUNITIES for growth.
But education alone isn't enough, because you can give a kid the very best opportunities and it's useless if they can't access them. School needs to include healthful and adequate food for all children, and preferably that would extend to preschool (which should also be public in my opinion) and all the way through some post-secondary school. I think that university, college, and trade school training programs should be considered part of our public school system. I think there needs to be some serious consideration given to what kinds of requirements are in place with respect to maintaining grades within universities, and perhaps a limit to the number of years of school that is publicly funded (I know people who would be eternal students if it were all free, and that's not a net benefit to the country as a whole). I'd also argue that all of those tertiary education systems should include dormitories and food, but that is open to debate.
For all this to happen, we still need those public assistance programs. We'll probably need to increase those programs.
Anyway, my point here isn't that I have some magical solution - I'm sure I don't. My point is that all of these things (and more probably) need to be addressed... and none of them can be solved by just giving people free money. I also don't think that my proposals are going to cost materially *less* than UBI - certainly not in the early years at least. We're still going to have to increase taxes (preferably corporate tax as already discussed). But I also think that this approach is going to be more effective and is more sustainable.
In particular, I think this approach has a significantly higher likelihood of producing better results in a shorter period of time. And by doing so, the tax burden is self-limiting. As more kids obtain the skills and opportunities to be successful and independent, the less we'll need to public assistance programs designed to overcome poverty, and the less taxes we need to collect, and the less income disparity there will be.
My objections aren't about the intent or the idea. They're about the strategy. To solve these problems, you need to be able to define a goal and then build a pathway that will actually accomplish that goal in a way that ensures long-term success and sustainability.
Call me crazy, but I have a bit of an ethical objection to people charging abusive rates for necessary services where the customer doesn't have an alternative.
