It might make sense to do away with the dozens and hundreds of various assistance programs that subsidize dozens and hundreds of things, and just hand everyone in the country a check on the first of the month, and let them spend it however they like. Then we do away with social security, unemployment, WIC, food stamps, home mortgage interest deductions, tax brackets, housing assistance, minimum wage, personal deductions, and on and on. We’ll probably have to increase the nominal tax rate a bit, low income people essentially pay negative income taxes as the monthly is much larger than what they pay in taxes, middle income people pay low taxes as the monthly check is about the same as they pay in taxes, high income people get a drastically simplified tax code that means they’ll have to pay a higher effective rate.
It is a simplified version of the negative income tax, the simplicity is that every dollar you earn is a net benefit since you can never edge over income limits to assistance programs. Dramatic decreases in bureaucracy since you don’t have to monitor or administer assistance programs, everyone gets a check whether they’re a crackhead living under a bridge or Bill Gates. I suppose if you’re incarcerated then your monthly check will be garnished to defray the cost of keeping you locked up.
It’s a pretty good idea, the primary benefit is simplicity and transparency, since poor people already get all kinds of random-ass direct and indirect subsidies. However, this is why we will never ever implement something like this. Everybody likes the convoluted method because it hides all sorts of things that various people prefer to keep hidden for various reasons.
