How About This To "End" Welfare

Great Debates
81

Again, I would need to see the numbers. But it seems more than likely to me that any decrease in the administration necessary to determine means-testing would be more than offset by the increase in administration by the changes in the tax code.

And also that this is inevitably going to lead to very large increases in taxation on the middle class. I very much doubt if there are enough rich people to slap a large tax increase onto, and have enough to fund $30K for everybody else. And there is a reason that tax lawyers can earn six figures - finding loopholes is what they do for a living.

In theory, yes, you can write a simplified tax plan that eliminates deductions and increases revenue. In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice, but in practice, there is. Eliminate the mortgage deduction, and watch the people in San Francisco and New York melt down. Raise the capital gains tax, and watch investments go overseas, or tank. Are you going to tax deferred earnings, or stock options? How about income from a Roth 401K?

Now we are going to triple or quadruple the federal budget. How much more can we get out of them?

Regards,
Shodan

82

Having spoken w/various people who 1) grew up on welfare for 2 generations, 2) worked with welfare clients, 3) in one case someone from UK at a time when everyone was “on the dole”:

They were not in favor of welfare-style incomes, and saw it as a disincentive to work. Even the guy who grew up on welfare hated it. His mom, and her mom, had never worked. He said it created a culture of, well, not valuing work. The guy who serviced welfare clients was a medic. His clients were discinclined to exert themselves in any way whatsoever. The guy from the UK was an artist, self-supporting, who described scads of young people on the dole who basically did nothing but smoke a lot of dope.

Probably not that different from a “trust-fund baby” who gets an income and doesn’t have to work for it. They often don’t have a work ethic or even a connection to society.

Having said that, the tent cities here in Oakland are bursting at the seams! That is pretty disturbing, a lot of us are only a few steps away from that with housing prices what they are.

83

There are reasonably-priced alternatives that fall somewhere on the spectrum between Oakland’s sky-high housing prices and living-in-a-tent, just an FYI.

84

I’m a fan of UBI so I’ll throw out some numbers to let you guys pick at them. I’ll start off saying that I would be ok with providing a floor that people have to choose to fall below and then if they choose that they can freeze in the gutter or have charities or other non-federal sources save them. My plan also screws over the elderly that are counting on the fat Social security check since I would pay for most of the UBI by getting rid of social security in a perfect world I’d try some sort of phased system so the people within X years of retirement keep on their current plan or perhaps allow all people who have paid into social security to choose to stay with SS or jump to UBI and only have the next generation given no choice. Those are both much more complicated if more politically realistic but I’m not building out that model for this post.

So with the goal of lifting people out of poverty on a federal level, I would use the federal poverty level found here. If more expensive states want to help more that’s their deal otherwise they may lose people to places with lower costs of living. I would break the payments up to monthly payments so that people with poor money skills at least have another check coming next month if they screw up rather than next year. That means a single person would get a check for $1,005 per month a married couple would get a check for $1,353 and a married couple with a dependant would get $1,702/month. In 2010 (the easiest year to google the data) there were 116.7 million households each having an average of 2.58 people so the average household would get a check for $1,555.37 each month and the entire program would cost $2.18 trillion or about 55% of the federal budget.

To pay for this I’d start by eliminating social services (my program would get paired with single payer healthcare so medicare/cade would get rolled into that not this). For now, I’ll call the social services portion of the budget social security and income security from that link. That gets me 37% so I need to raise 18% to pay for my plan. Next, I’d double the create a flat tax on business income at double the current effective rate of about 42.4% which would rise 9%. For the last 9%, I’d bump income taxes 20% current so the 10% bracket starts at $18,650 and goes to $37,310. and the current 15% bracket would go $37,310 to $75,900. After that I’d move the percentages up 20% to 25% goes to 30%, 28% to 33.6%,33% to 39.6%, 35% to 42%, and 39.6% to 47.5%. There could probably be more smoothing applied but that should do the job of raising the needed money any missing chunk would come out of the defense budget.

85

+fucking1

Medicare is not a handout. People on Social Security actually pay for their Medicare insurance.

86

The problem is that soon there won’t be any work a human can do better than a robot.

The only reason to hire a human to perform a job is because the human can perform the job cheaper, faster or safer than a machine. If the human can’t do it, the job goes to a machine.

Some people say ‘automation will just free people up for new jobs’. Not really. Did the advent of the internal combustion engine free up horses for new jobs? Nope, it replaced them. Horses used to be integral in agriculture, mining, transportation, etc. Then the internal combustion engine replaced virtually all the horses, the horses that still exist are kept around for novelty, not because they are superior to internal combustion engines.

The same thing will happen with humans. By the year 2100, there won’t be anything a human can do better than a machine. Write a song? Direct a movie? Conduct scientific research? Diagnose and treat cancer? Fill your coke at McDonalds? Robots will be vastly superior in all of these things.

We are looking at an age of mass unemployment in the next few decades. In the US there may be 400 million people by 2050, but only 50 million jobs. What are the other 350 million people supposed to do?

87

To be fair, the average medicare recipient gets 3x more in benefits than they pay in taxes.

Over their working life, the average medicare recipient may collect 200k in medicare subsidies, but only pay 60k in medicare taxes. A big part of why the system is sustainable is because in 1993 Bill Clinton eliminated the medicare tax cap (medicare taxes used to only apply to the first 120k or so of income, but Clinton eliminated that. Thank you Bill Clinton).

The health care system needs to change.

88

I see skyrocketing divorce rates and the death of the wedding industry in the future of this plan.

89

That’s the problem: They don’t. They contribute to it, but Medicare (more specifically, parts B and D) takes about $300 billion out of the general fund annually, outside of Medicare taxes and premiums. As **Wesley Clark[\B] pointed out above, the average Medicare recipient gets far more out of the program than he put in. With the annual deficit a little under $600 billion, it’s not just a handout, but a pretty substantial one in terms of the federal budget.

90

Possibly, yet the fact remains that it is cheaper for two people to live together than separately. Currently, you pay an additional 12% in taxes, in most cases, for getting married but that doesn’t seem to stop people. That being said if we want to determine household size differently then by using the current self-reporting on tax forms I’m ok with it but it seems it would increase the administrative costs of the system.

91

I’m from Alaska. In Alaska the oil companies pay royalties for the right to pump oil from state lands, and those royalties go into the Permanent Fund. Every year half the dividends from the Permanent Fund are reinvested in the fund, the other half are paid as dividends to Alaska residents.

There are no means tests. Everyone gets a check, the richest and poorest, oldest and youngest. In 2017 the check was for $1,100.

Thing is, that’s a decent bonus amount for a low income family of four. But it sure isn’t enough to live on.

If we wanted to replace all government assistance with a UBI, that UBI would have to be pretty high. A thousand dollars a month wouldn’t cover most people’s rent, food, health care, and so on.

So for all this to work, we’d have to radically revamp the tax system at the same time. We’re getting rid of social security, medicare, unemployment insurance, and so on. And since everyone is getting a check, we can get rid of deductions for dependents, since that’s taken care of by the parents just getting a fat check for every child. And get rid of the standard deduction for the same reason. You’re getting a check every month just for breathing, so we tax you on the first dollar you earn as well. And we’re going to have to drastically increase the tax rate on everyone, including the millionaires, because otherwise we can’t afford this. But no means testing, because the UBI is replacing all the tax deductions that working people get. Yeah, Bill Gates is getting that monthly check too. There are only 541 billionaires in the United States. A means test to make sure a few billionaires don’t get a monthly check will cost more than it returns. Bill Gates currently gets all the same tax breaks that working class wage earners get, so what’s the point? No means testing.

The good news is that everyone is getting a monthly check, but the bad news is that everyone at all income levels is going to have to pay something like a 50% tax rate with no deductions. Or to put it another way, the per capita GDP of the United States in 2016 was $57,000. So…if the UBI was half that, everyone getting $28,000 a year, that would obviously require taking half the GDP of the country just to fund UBI. Yes, we could eliminate a lot of government functions like social security and so on, but we’d still have to pay for roads and prisons and cops and the military and NASA and so on, so even more taxes on top of your 50% UBI tax. A less generous UBI means lower taxes, but too low and it’s impossible for the sick, old, disabled and unemployable to survive. If we have to subsidize the sick and disabled in addition to the UBI, what’s the point of the UBI?

And of course this ignores the second order effects. If everyone has a UBI does productivity go up or down? By how much? Is it a Star Trek style utopia where the creativity of the masses is unleashed, or a soul-crushing dystopia where everyone sits around getting super high and watching TV?

Or there’s the good old “all the poor people live in government dorms and eats government nutripaste” model. I thought we believed in the magic of the marketplace? What’s the evidence that building government dorms and government nutripaste spigots would be cheaper than just handing the poor some money and telling them to buy their own housing and their own food?

92

Putting all the poor in government housing is by itself a cost savings just because it somewhat reduces how often they run to the emergency room for free medical care.

I can’t speak for nutripaste, though.

93

There’s really some doubt in your mind as to what the outcome would be?

94

There should be, because there’s a pretty vast excluded middle there.

95

The higher the UBI, the more likely it is that people can live on it without working. And the higher the taxes on people who do work. So it becomes more likely that more people will not work, which raises taxes on those who do work, which makes it less likely that they will work, which raises taxes on those who work, who then become less likely to work, and so on.

The lower the UBI, the less likely it is that people can live on it, and that kind of defeats the purpose.

Regards,
Shodan

96

Here is Kurzgesagt’s take on UBI. From my libertarian point of view* it seems pretty even handed to me. I’ve been thinking about it a lot because of the spectre of automation. If, say, Ford fully automated and 1,000 workers can now do the work of the just-laid off 200,000 who’s going to buy all those automobiles?

*We’re not all Objectivist assholes.

97

Typically discussions of UBI presume that mechanization and such have obsoleted enough jobs that the economy can truck on with a certain number of people remaining outside the system. And it’s also typically presumed that the UBI (and provided housing or whatever) are sufficient to let the people maintain a decent-but-not-great standard of living, such that they’re no longer panicking about starving or freezing, but that there is still incentive to get a job so that you can afford the finer things in life, like a second bathroom or a complete collection of beanie babies.