191–200 of 681 posts
There was an experiment with this called Mincome in Canada. They found that the only two groups of people who worked less were new moms and teenagers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mincome
1. The neglected non-citizen: statelessness and liberal political theory. http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/17449626.2011.558...
> "How would we pay for it? We could start by getting corporations to pay their taxes." I don't know why people keep harping on corporate taxes. If anything, taxing corporations is regressive -- the taxes ultimately get passed on to consumers through higher product prices, regardless of their income levels. Taxing corporations doesn't produce magic money -- it's still taxing people in the end, but it's the consumers.…
My feeling is that corporations shouldn't have a disincentive to make money. Rather all ways of extracting money from corporations should be taxed at a high income tax level (rather than the low dividend and capital gains levels).
Corporate taxes are not a disincentive to make money. They are (since the structure of deductions applying to them makes them a tax on retained profits more than income) a disincentive to retaining profits within the corporation to avoid the taxation the stockholders would pay were the profits distributed (or earned by a business subject to personal rather than corporate taxes in the first place.)
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> "corporate taxes are ultimately passed onto people" I don't really get this argument. It's always made as if the taxes are applied in a vacuum where market forces no longer exist. If corporations are operating in a competitive market, they will seek cost advantages and continue to compete for market share. Raised taxes represent an additional expense (for the purposes of this discussion), much like raised energy pr…
> reduce costs elsewhere Like by hiring less employees.
In any case, one of the big premises of the article is that hiring less is happening anyway and contributing to the need for a basic livable income. So, that's a bit circular.
And, of course, that's just one of many potential cost-cutting measures.
Can we come up with a solution that doesn't strong-arm workers into keeping society's dead weight around? Why make sure that every non-worker in society has enough money to eat McDonalds and watch cable TV at the cost of the freedom of everyone to make and spend money as they please?
Would you prefer they die? You do realize automation will soon ensure there simply isn't enough work to go around?
> Why make sure that every non-worker in society has enough money to eat McDonalds and watch cable TV
Because it'll keep society from crumbling.
Wouldn't the basic income value need to vary across regions? For example, the notion that: "Every single adult member receives a weekly payment from the state, which is enough to live comfortably on" would mean a different value in San Francisco than in Grover, NC. If the government adjusted the basic income to account for regional cost-of-living, I imagine it would be popular to maintain a fake residency in an expen…
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1) The numbers don't work out. Even a very steep CO2 tax will produce too little revenue for any form of meaningful BI. The USA currently consumes about 450 billion gallons of petroleum products per year, which is about 1.5 trillion pounds. We also mine about a billion short tons of coal per year, which is 2 trillion pounds. We have about 300 million people. Taxing $0.75/pound on carbon fuels would generate a bit ove…
Your carbon tax of $1500/ton of carbon is a couple of orders of magnitude bigger than any proposed carbon tax. Proposals are for $20/ton to reduce greehouse gas emissions to targets. Estimates of the social cost of carbon dioxide range from $50 to $200 per ton.
> "How would we pay for it? We could start by getting corporations to pay their taxes." I don't know why people keep harping on corporate taxes. If anything, taxing corporations is regressive -- the taxes ultimately get passed on to consumers through higher product prices, regardless of their income levels. Taxing corporations doesn't produce magic money -- it's still taxing people in the end, but it's the consumers.…
> If anything, taxing corporations is regressive -- the taxes ultimately get passed on to consumers through higher product prices, regardless of their income levels. Actually, the studies show that corporate taxes are essentially a proxy for the taxing the ultra-wealthy - a cut in the corporate tax rate is very similar to cutting the highest marginal income tax rate. After all, if corporate taxes truly fell on the po…