Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why would you get bipartisan support for the FairTax? Redesigning the tax structure to favour millionaires ( massive net beneficiaries because their US consumption expenditure is usually a tiny fraction of their capital gains tax and/or income tax bills) over the middle classes (no matter how high the stipend is someone has to pay for the millionaires' tax cut) isn't exactly a popular proposal even on the right That…
By bipartisan support, I mean that if you want to get a basic income to appeal to people on the right you can appeal to existing branding. FairTax is just a basic income with a smaller stipend. Brand it that way. When you co-brand it with the ability to gut a lot of existing federal programs so that they can be reformed without inducing panic that will also garner support. Consumption tax paired with a BI would signi…
That's not rebranding basic income to appeal to people on the right. That's rebranding "FairTax", a right-wing proposal, with fairly niche support on the right, despite a small group spending lots of effort trying to promote it, as basic income. Presumably, to gain some support on the left for FairTax. But Basic Income is also a fairly niche idea, and the people that do support it tend to have a fairly specific idea of the features they support and why, and not just be attached to the BI brand, so rebranding FairTax as BI probably won't get you support from left-wing UBI fans, for whom the tie to a progressive income tax is pretty central to their support (though there's probably some on the left who support UBI who would prefer moving to a Georgist Land Value Tax.)
There's nothing there getting you bipartisan support.
> Things that hurt the middle class much worse than a consumption tax are an income tax that is a percentage and continually increases in that percentage until the percentage caps at the point that most people would call "incredibly wealthy" (IMO).
How does that hurt the middle class? (And, incidentally, are we using middle class in the common modern media sense of middle income workers or are we using it in the classical sense of the petit bourgeoisie? Because it makes a pretty big difference in evaluating claims about what hurts them, and to how important that is -- how it affects the latter will, of course, vary from person to person.)
> The perk to something like a Fair Tax is that it's also an economic solution to illegal immigration.
No, its not. (OTOH, the 2001 and 2009 recessions, and the poor distribution of the gains between and after them, was an economic solution to illegal immigration. But a solution worse than the problem...)
> If you're in the country, you're paying taxes.
True without the hilariously misnamed "FairTax".
> If you're legal, you're getting the BI/stipend.
Without the "FairTax", if you can establish that you are legally present (and, for some of these, legally eligible to work, which aren't the same thing) you have access to a variety of public benefits, perks, and, well, the right to work that aren't available if you can't establish that.