this post was submitted on 23 Feb 2025
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With UBI, it is possible to have a flat tax where corporate and lowest personal tax rates are the same. Without payroll taxes. That means that employment can be tax free as long as business doesn't get a tax deduction, though they still can if they lose money in a year.
There can be surtaxes on incomes above $100k, but they would appear to be very small, when personal income taxes are hidden this way.
As much as I am convinced we will need UBI in our automated future, statements like yours are way too optimistic on the financials.
Let's see if we can get healthcare, education, school meals, food stamps and social security funded first.
After that we can start funding generous unemployment benefits to handle the first waves of unemployment due to automation.
And as the automation keeps gobbling up jobs, we can fund schemes for reschooling, early retirement, increase paid parental leave, increase paid vacation, promote part time work (e.g. working 4 days for 100% pay).
Once the totality of all these schemes costs the same as UBI, we can simplify it all be replacing the schemes with UBI.
was commenting on possible tax reforms.
I strongly prefer UBI to conditional programs that have overhead. I get that politics needs to keep us miserable and promise conditional bandaids to a constituency to maximize their power, and the crab mentality that something is promised "just for them" as politics as its always been, but that doesn't seem to be winning, and oligarchist policies are much better funded and mediasplained.