351–360 of 498 posts
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NIC is analogous to basic income. At a certain point, the taxes you pay in a basic income scheme are equal to the basic income you earn. Those who earn less than you are earning a NIC, those above are paying income tax. It is the same thing.
No its not in practice. NIC is generally tied to working. A part time employed person will make less than a full time one. Under BI it is not tied to working. The incentives are worse.
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Critical omission on your part: not everyone needs to live on this wage. Think about high school kids trying to get a summer job. They don't need to survive on this wage, they simply need something productive to do over the summer. Should my business be required to shell out $15/hr for a high school kid, when the value of his/her labor is way less than that?
Employment of high school kids has been plummeting. This line of thinking you are exposing here has not kept up with the times and is more of a red herring. The teens most likely to work are not in school, and thus they actually need a living wage. Youth enrolled in high school had an employment rate of 18 percent. This is down from 36 percent in 1995: http://www.childtrends.org/?indicators=youth-employment#stha... A…
And is that a good thing or something we should try to reverse? Employment has a ramp-up like anything else.
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Critical omission on your part: not everyone needs to live on this wage. Think about high school kids trying to get a summer job. They don't need to survive on this wage, they simply need something productive to do over the summer. Should my business be required to shell out $15/hr for a high school kid, when the value of his/her labor is way less than that?
Employment of high school kids has been plummeting. This line of thinking you are exposing here has not kept up with the times and is more of a red herring. The teens most likely to work are not in school, and thus they actually need a living wage. Youth enrolled in high school had an employment rate of 18 percent. This is down from 36 percent in 1995: http://www.childtrends.org/?indicators=youth-employment#stha... A…
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The correct measure is something like quality-adjusted life years ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quality-adjusted_life_year ), treating the particular details of the job as a disability.
For many people working improves their quality of life. Making things, having some purpose, giving back to society, ect are all very rewarding things.
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I don't know exactly how you're picturing the US, but it's not as dystopian as you seem to think. We do in fact have soup kitchens and volunteer opportunities and people with Down's Syndrome who contribute meaningfully to their communities. (What we don't have a lot of anymore are factories. Go figure.)
Didn't mean to offend anybody, but just by hearing about a lot of mentally ill people being homeless in the US, i got a bad impression. But i may be wrong. And it's not necessary a factory. It's not hard to create awful work environments.
Back in the 70's and prior, mental health facilities were barbaric. "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" brought to light these travesties, and many were shut down.
Later, republicans then shut down more by defunding as well. What effectively happens is people are shunted to other communities where better services are offered. Lookup "Greyhound therapy", where city govt's pay for bus service to 'somewhere else'.
Now, the primary caregiver is the penal system. And remember, we still do not have single-payer medical, so unemployed/homeless are still without.
Negative income tax makes more sense to me. (NIT is a system where you either get or give money from/to the governement, depending on your income.) First it's both a simple welfare and tax system in one package. Basic income as typically understood is only half of the story. It's also easier to reason about, the money flows are way more obvious, it's immediately clear whether you are a net contributor or receiver and…
Incentives. Incentives. Incentives. People respond to incentives, it's been proven time and time again. A negative income tax isn't the worst idea, but it has all the wrong incentives. The more money you earn, the less help you get. Which seems sensible on the surface but can lead to situations where people ask themselves "why should I even bother working a job I hate when I can get the same money without working?" T…
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The counter argument is that human labor has an actual cost. That is the cost to keep a human alive and in some level of comfort. Government benefits of many different types have "artificially" lowered this cost. Where employees refuse to pay enough for a human to live on, the government picks up the slack. Raising the minimum wage may be "artificial," but its not the first control placed on some otherwise natural la…
Read Smith. "A man must always live by his work, and his wages must at least be sufficient to maintain him." https://en.m.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Wealth_of_Nations/Book_... An enterprise which cannot pay the full cost of its inputs isn't an economically viable activity. It's a charity benefiting its owner.
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Either you're wrong, or I'm about to learn something. Explain?
You probably paid a higher purchase price, because even if you couldn't take the mortgage interest deduction (for whatever reason, maybe you paid all cash), you are still competing against other buyers, most of whom could take the deduction. That deduction saves them money, meaning they're willing to pay a higher price than they would if they couldn't take a mortgage interest deduction. That those other buyers are wi…
A quick google search doesn't produce results that suggest that removing the deduction would reduce housing prices to the point that people in this thread are saying. Here is just one example that states it would reduce prices by 0.3%: http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/taxvox/what-changes-mortgage-...
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NIC is analogous to basic income. At a certain point, the taxes you pay in a basic income scheme are equal to the basic income you earn. Those who earn less than you are earning a NIC, those above are paying income tax. It is the same thing.
Equavalent to basic income with a specific tax system. But the whole system would be harder to understand and have 1 redundant parameter.
NIT is a counter-intuitive trick to achieve the same thing within a tax bracket framework. Maybe it's more elegant, but understanding it requires a comprehension of mathematical concepts that many people (especially on lower incomes) simply don't have.
The only way I can see Basic Income working is if the average person has a net income change of $0. That means someone making the average income of ~$45k/yr gets a $10k check from the government every year, but also has their taxes go up by ~$10k. I believe others have referred to this as a negative income tax. From what I can tell the average salary of a hackernews reader is above $100k. Each of us would probably en…
In exchange of that money, given to "total strangers" we get to live in a better country, and have the security of knowing we won't end up homeless on the unlikely case we can't find work anymore (yeah, I pay for that safety today - both methods can be either added or replaced, replacing is harder). Here at Brazil the numbers would be lower overall, but the consequences get bigger.
I think any implementation would need to start with a small value and increase slowly. It's not certain that the median wage is either viable or optimum, but might be a sane ceiling.