Moving Forward on Basic Income

In my view, a universal flat tax rate would go hand-in-hand with a universal basic income. Since the essential aim of UBI is to ensure people can at least meet their basic needs to achieve a certain degree of freedom, it wouldn't seem too far-fetched to imagine meeting those needs at the societal level as well (which is already done to a large extent in a lot of countries anyway), i.e. free public healthcare, improved and completely free public education, even free electricity, water, internet and so on. The knock-on effect obviously being that the UBI wouldn't need to be as high should some or all of the basic needs be covered by default as public services.

Taking this a bit further, I'd like to see companies be incentivized to have their employees participate in Education in general. For instance, employees could spend 4 hours/week of their working time to go explain what they do to kids or run training sessions for adults trying to change career paths. The employer could be rewarded through some sort of tax break or something similar. Teachers would of course still exist, but the "burden" of Education would no longer be theirs only. I think this would have a number of benefitial effects:

- it would subsidize the cost of Education to some extent

- it would help level and adjust the job market more rapidly

- it would help participating employees have a better understanding of their own job

- it would expose people undergoing education to more professionals as opposed to almost only academics

But most of all, I believe it would make people realize that Education is everybody's responsibility and that it is a continuous and evolving process for people of any age or background.

There's obviously a lot more to be said about any of my points above, but I'd be interested to hear what people here think.

I understand that YCombinator would not have the ability to set tax rates and such, this is more of a thought exercise.

That having been said, I personally like this idea a lot. Maybe the balance between the two can be adjusted by cutting out (the market rate + agency cost) out of your BI – i.e. If a month's cheap food is $200 at cost, if you participate in a food stamp program, it takes $250 out of your BI (since a bunch of people have to be employed to verify things about it).

That way, people will be more motivated to not use the government agencies since they get a better deal by just saving that amount out of their BI.

First, we should provide BI in a half/half combination of monthly and daily deposits since money management is a skill that is often lacking in the people who need BI the most.

Secondly, the government should continue to provide what I would call "Critical Infrastructure" programs, such as funding public transit, the public roads, and public education, public EMS and Fire Response, and public libraries. (I personally think that public dental, vision and preventative care clinics should fall in this category.) What else qualifies as 'critical infrastructure' is something that can be determined by voters at the local, state and federal level.

The finally, we should continue to support the further safety nets that are provided by private charities. (Food kitchens, homeless shelters.