Not realistically, it wouldn’t. I have done the math in the other thread. Even under extreme assumptions (such as eliminating Social Security in favor of this method, and every other welfare program), there is no way to do this. There is only so much money you can suck out of taxpayers.
Well, I think the idea is that most people would see their taxes go up, but then also get a check. You can suck a lot of money out of taxpayers if you turn around and give most of it back.
Apropos of nothing, I went to School/Schoolen, with the son of a Zurich Psychologist.
The Swiss are mean and tight, personally I think the Banks deserve the description of amoral, alpha to omega.
If there is a big stink in post World War Europe, it’s not an apartment in Munich, look deeper into the bloody Sweizzers.
P
Alaska already does something like this with oil dividends. How does that work out?
The notion has been discussed in Norway for almost a century. Basically a Citizens Wage.
Personally I think there is a layer of young people whose life would be steered into a blind alley by this. Primarily male, without qualifications and at the start of the ladder of their personal earnings, they’d would grow too comfortable on a program like this, instead of getting qualifications or climbing that ladder.
That said, Brazil seems to have done well with a vaguely similar program.
I like this idea and would like to entertain it if it’s mathematically possible. Terr and others seem to think it isn’t, but I am not so sure. If it simplified the ridiculous mix of state, city and national welfare systems, it might be worth it. If people want to fritter their Citizen’s Wage away on strippers and blow, so be it. But if they die of exposure on the streets because of it, oh well, so sad.
And I agree that living off of 10K a year would be a bare minimal existence unless you were also pooling your money together with family or friends and splitting expenses. So if you wanted to go off and live on your own (very important to many people), you’d still have incentive to go get a job.
I like the idea and think there are ways it could work. We’d have to eliminate social security, but we have to offer universal health care. We could also eliminate all food stamp programs.
I do think every one should get the money, but maybe children must save some portion until they reach a particular age.
I think we could easily pay for this with a small increase in taxes to people in Romneys income level. Maybe going to 16% instead of 14% would do the trick. I don’t know. I stink at math.
Combining savings from welfare to the poor, social security, and the $500 billion or so we are historically undertaxed relative to our GDP, it would be doable. It might even be wise in the long term since it would unlock the potential of more innovators who are either just scraping by or are administering programs.
But it isn’t a given. Unless it can be shown to be better, I’d rather have the $500 billion go to lowering the deficit. If we had had that extra tax money starting from 2001 onward, and hadn’t gotten into Iraq, then we would have had Clinton-era debt levels now.
I’ve heard similar proposals where the money goes in full to the lowest 50 % of the population, and tapers gradually off for the next 10 % or so. Basically, cuts the costs with 45 %, with the reasoning that the top 40% dont really need it.
It would be a somewhat different program though.
That’s handwaving. Show your math.
The thing I see left out of this, which I usually see in NIT proposals, is a simplification of the tax code. So instead of the graduated tax brackets and the plethora of deductions, you just cut a simple tax rate of, let’s say 25%, and then it’s truly progressive. People making less than $40,000 see a net benefit, people making more than that see a net tax. for a person making $100k, that’s an effective 15% tax rate ($25,000 taxes - $10,000 refund = $15,000 net tax).
It’s also floated as making taxes much easier for most people, since they just have a single deduction each paycheck and get a biweekly (or whatever) check from the government, so they never have to file taxes. Obviously this doesn’t work for small business owners or people that get most money from capital gains, but those people would need an accountant anyway.
Of course, people would also see their Social Security taxes go away, plus removing the SSA drops $5T (EDIT cite: Intragovernmental holdings - Wikipedia) in intra-governmental debt. So some savings from no more debt service there, also.
If we take the $2.2T price tag for this, Subtract the $882B for social security, (the next two are broad brushes, I know), $88B mandatory for the Labor Department (no unemployment insurance), $41B discretionary for HUD (no housing checks), we’re left with $1.189T. If we drop what I think are $127B in farm subsidies, we’re at $1.062T. Drop $67B from Education (student loans), and you’re under a trillion.
The next question, of course, is what this will do to the economy. Poor people tend to make their money circulate in the economy a lot better than the rich, plus they won’t be disincentivized to work as they sometimes are in the current system, plus they won’t be taking time off to jump through all those bureaucratic hoops, so I think it’s a fair assumption that the economy would surge. Surge enough for another $1T in revenue? I dunno, that would be quite the surge. I think the fear that people will just live off the dole and nothing else would materialize only in small doses - not enough to offset the worthwhile benefits of the program.
The real question would be how this would affect revenue. Currently, the us governement gets $959B from SS taxes and $1359B from income taxes, for $2318B of it’s $2902B revenue. I’m comfortable lumping those together, because the NIT replaces SS as well as other ‘welfare’. Looking at Statistics | Tax Policy Center for effective tax rates, this is a dramatic lowering of taxes so at 25% rate isn’t going to be enough, although I’m not sure how to calculate the actual revenue.
Given that the OECD tax rate average is 36% while the US is only 27%, (cite: How do US taxes compare internationally? | Tax Policy Center) I think we could stand to raise the tax rate to 33%. That moves the “you get more than you put in” line down to $30k, and puts the $100k earner at a 20% tax rate. Of course, taxes will go up quite a bit on the 0.1%, but I personally think that’s overdue anyway.
So, in short I think it could be done without throwing the budget out of whack, although adjusting the amount given out and the tax rate to make the numbers work would take someone that knows how to do that better than I.
All numbers from 2013 United States federal budget - Wikipedia
Past the edit window: my last set of numbers was % of GDP for taxation, not tax rate, which throws off the second to last paragraph. I think the point that we could stand somewhat higher taxes for a more progressive and less complicated system stands, though.
Second past the edit window (I apologize for not organizing my thoughts better): Presumably since nobody would be under the poverty line any more, we could cut medicaid, since that is for people below the poverty line 
although this seems a bit disingenuous. The real drags on the budget are military, SS, medicare, and medicaid. While the above proposal does eliminate SS and you could make an argument for it eliminating medicaid, there would still need to be effective tax increases on the rich or hefty cuts to medicare or the military. Going single payer might help contain medical costs in general and allowing more economic growth, but that’s getting quite speculative.
[QUOTE=yellowjacketcoder]
If we take the $2.2T price tag for this, Subtract the $882B for social security, (the next two are broad brushes, I know), $88B mandatory for the Labor Department (no unemployment insurance), $41B discretionary for HUD (no housing checks), we’re left with $1.189T. If we drop what I think are $127B in farm subsidies, we’re at $1.062T. Drop $67B from Education (student loans), and you’re under a trillion.
[/QUOTE]
Except, as we all know, those programs aren’t going to be cut. Because if you do, it would be a net loss for poor people. Take Social Security. Unless you are getting less than $833.33 a month from SS it’s going to be a net loss for you just in that one program. If you take all of those other programs out then the only ones this will really benefit are those who never use any of those programs and who will still be getting their $10,000.00 a year, since they will still be paying something similar to today in taxes. Of COURSE some conservatives would be for such a program.
The reality, however, is that we won’t be cutting those other programs because simply giving everyone $10,000.00 per year would be actually taking benefits and money away from the most needy. So, what we’d end up with is either having to substantially raise the BLS amount ($15k/year? $20k/year?) or keep many of those programs in place exactly as they are, which would me we’d be raising the annual budget from $3.8 trillion to around $6 trillion. Which isn’t going to happen.
Interesting. It sort of meshes with an idea a bunch of anarcho-Leftists friends and I had been kicking around for years - namely, given that the mass costs involved are very low (and most of them are one-off) every last citizen should be provided with 10 square meters of living space inside a government-built housing project, a TV and as much bland NutriPaste ™ as they could put away ; for free, their entire lives, no questions asked.
If you want more, work for more ; if that’s enough for you, fuck and Art away to your heart’s content. But the point is : don’t be scared to try and fail, or to quit your McJob to reach for the stars, because the baseline is housed and fed. Healthcare we deliberately put away to work on later, cuz that’s a tough one :).
Obviously a universal check is a bit more lenient than our admittedly deliberately strict (some would even say fascist) scheme, but it’s still good enough for me. If it the law passes, I might just become Swiss - I always was a bit slow, anyway :).
I always find this a silly argument. Of course, the whole system is unlikely to change drastically in the next year, so it’s quite unlikely that anything is going to pass. But fighting the hypothetical doesn’t add anything to the conversation. If someone proposes a solution with parts A, B, and C, and you offhandedly decide to ignore the whole argument because B seemly unlikely, well, good for you, but then is rather pointless to interject into the discussion.
I think there are a lot more programs that could be cut or greatly reduced. Some may not be immediately obvious, but I’m sure there are a lot more programs that wouldn’t be needed under a plan like this. I think prisoners should get the money too, but they should be charged for housing, food and security while incarcerated. So we save money on prisons too.
I get what your saying, but I think XT’s point is a little more then denying the hypothetical. He’s saying it wouldn’t happen because the program would make poor people worse off. The second part is the important bit. What’s the point of a social welfare program that is both expensive and takes money from poor people and the elderly?
If you think social welfare programs are intrinsically bad, and that they should be cut to lower tax rates, then you should just argue that. But Murry’s plan is basically just a round-about way of cutting social welfare and lowering everyones elses taxes by 10k while pretending to be doing something else.
Exactly.
Prison costs an average of $31,286 per inmate, with a range of $14,603 (Kentucky) to $60,076 (New York). The entire $10,000 would thus go to the cost of their confinement, so there’s nothing to be gained by including inmates in this scheme.