>Let's unplug them and test it before rolling it out on a large scale.
Not a bad idea, but wouldn't that essentially degenerate into a capital allocation business with a functioning taxation/wealth redistribution system?
Let's be honest here. There's nothing "magic" about UBI. UBI is just what happens when you successfully tax the top of the wealth accumulation frustrum such that overall the distribution of wealth is less a pyramid and more a recognizable trapezoid. Less triangular, more quad.
The main problem is tax havening, Hollywood accounting, and abusable tax loopholes. Fix the international taxation scene/arrangement, cut down on the viability of tax evasion via legal fiction engineering, fund the capability to track down and successfully audit examples of gratuitous tax evasion (or implement bug bounties for those who help flesh out corner cases in tax law) and actually implement decent social safety nets and we could be on to something.
I get it isn't easy, that there is a lot of difficulty in getting things just right, but I dare say that in terms of seeing actual credible attempts at implementing what needs to be implemented to make it work I've seen astonishingly little; especially given that these measures would be largely deleterious to the beneficiaries of the current status quo, and would greatly shift the calculus around capital allocation away from billion/trillionaires funding personal space programs to actually enabling national scale endeavor coordination; which also brings with it the absolutely critical aspect of getting the political operating smoothly again to unlock that newly collected capital potential by keeping it flowing back into the input layers of the economy.
I can't be the only one seeing the economy as a massive NN, in which individual people are the input nodes, legal fictions are hidden layers, and government/taxation are the feedback/error propagation mechanism am I?
> The main problem is tax havening, Hollywood accounting, and abusable tax loopholes.
But this is one of the other things that a UBI makes easy.
One of the best taxes in terms of resisting avoidance is a flat rate consumption tax. You can move your headquarters but you can't move your customers. You can't arbitrage the rate because it's uniform. The burden falls disproportionately on uncompetitive industries which have to eat the tax when a cost increase across the industry doesn't allow them to raise prices any further because they were already charging monopoly prices.
The normal problem with a consumption tax is that it's regressive. Everybody pays the same rate. But that's the part that gets fixed by combining it with a UBI. Someone making $50,000 may be paying a 35% marginal rate, and $17,500 in tax, but they get $12,000 of it back. Their effective rate is only 11%, even though everybody is paying the same marginal rate.
You get to have an increasing effective rate with increasing income while still having the fixed marginal rate that makes everything administratively simple, and the complexity was what enabled the avoidance.
I agree, it's essentially a large redistribution scheme that requires those that are supposed to be giving not having a chance to just leave.
Tax havens and loopholes are a problem even today, but hard to fix. Germany or France would (ostensibly) love to fix them, but can't make Luxembourg or Switzerland stop offering deals and havens. Introducing UBI (and higher taxes that provide even more incentives to leave) in France or Germany won't change anything on that front.
Anything that requires global cooperation seems outside of current possibilities. Building something on the basis of "that'll work, no worries" sounds like leaving out authentication of a bank system and saying "no worries, we'll convince everyone not to cheat and log into their neighbors' account". Sure, in theory that's a great concept, but practically I'd personally avoid using that bank.
Not a bad idea, but wouldn't that essentially degenerate into a capital allocation business with a functioning taxation/wealth redistribution system?
Let's be honest here. There's nothing "magic" about UBI. UBI is just what happens when you successfully tax the top of the wealth accumulation frustrum such that overall the distribution of wealth is less a pyramid and more a recognizable trapezoid. Less triangular, more quad.
The main problem is tax havening, Hollywood accounting, and abusable tax loopholes. Fix the international taxation scene/arrangement, cut down on the viability of tax evasion via legal fiction engineering, fund the capability to track down and successfully audit examples of gratuitous tax evasion (or implement bug bounties for those who help flesh out corner cases in tax law) and actually implement decent social safety nets and we could be on to something.
I get it isn't easy, that there is a lot of difficulty in getting things just right, but I dare say that in terms of seeing actual credible attempts at implementing what needs to be implemented to make it work I've seen astonishingly little; especially given that these measures would be largely deleterious to the beneficiaries of the current status quo, and would greatly shift the calculus around capital allocation away from billion/trillionaires funding personal space programs to actually enabling national scale endeavor coordination; which also brings with it the absolutely critical aspect of getting the political operating smoothly again to unlock that newly collected capital potential by keeping it flowing back into the input layers of the economy.
I can't be the only one seeing the economy as a massive NN, in which individual people are the input nodes, legal fictions are hidden layers, and government/taxation are the feedback/error propagation mechanism am I?