A Basic Income Should Be the Next Big Thing

Image everyone has $10 on island A. Island B sells coconuts and the going rate for a coconut is $1. Based on other bills the islanders need to pay for, $1 fits the average budget and is what people are willing to pay for coconuts.

Now make everyone on island A have $100. The demand for coconuts rises but people on island B soon realize they can make more money by raising prices even though they sell less units. They eventually increase the price of coconuts to $10 because that ends up being the price point at which the Island B people are making the most money.

Therefore by increasing the income of everyone by a factor of 10, you end up increase the prices by a factor of 10. There is some lag time where prices will balance out though, so if you just kept doing this every month you might have a period of faux prosperity but you would also be creating runaway inflation.

As soon as you give people as little as 100$/month you will see some people tweeting about all the tricks they found to make it enough. Of course it wont be enough to bring most from poverty and those who can live off that will often start off some possessions, but the goal is to lower the bar of entry into that situation.

Only under these conditions can we transition from the bullshit-job economy we have and make sure that the general automation of production will benefit most instead of a few.

Again: the solution is to talk to someone. There are many who go through what you do, and there are many people out there who can help. You're not alone.

Which is a de facto consumption tax because it means you only pay tax when you sell securities without buying other securities, which you only do when you want to spend the money.

> Not really. You just structure the transactions to avoid what is taxable, e.g., you buy the yacht at a low nominal price and simultaneously (and completely coincidentally) by some financial investment not subject to consumption tax from the same party at an inflated price.

As opposed to the current system where you work for somebody for a low nominal wage and simultaneously (and completely coincidentally) they "sell" you a car for one dollar. Which in either case will get you prosecuted for tax fraud.

> Anyone who can avoid paying taxes on their income in an income tax system can avoid paying taxes on it in a consumption tax system. (If you have an "unconditionally tax every transfer of money between two parties" system, it gets harder, but that has all kinds of downsides.)

This is not actually that hard. You make the amount of the consumption tax based on the market value of the purchased item rather than the amount you nominally paid for it, with a presumption that the amount you paid is the market value, which the IRS can easily rebut when you're claiming the market value of a yacht is $20.

> Sure, if you only ever sell shares that have lost value, you can avoid paying the (low) capital gains tax, at the expense of always losing money.

It's not actually losing money. You invest in a diverse portfolio of stocks, some go up, some go down, some stay the same. When you want to spend some money you sell the stocks that have underperformed rather than the stocks that have performed well, which (at the risk of selling low) is plausibly what you want to do anyway, and then you pay no taxes because you realized no gains.

Even if all your stocks went up and by the same amount, if you want to spend 1% of the total assets then you still only pay tax on 1% of the gains because the rest of the gains are still unrealized. So it's already effectively a consumption tax as long as you can avoid changing what you're invested in.

Except that it's a consumption tax that taxes only the spending of interest (and earned income) but not principal, which seems to be to the benefit of people with more wealth.