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PoliteThaiBeep t1_j52kvtx wrote

Reply to comment by Fuzzers in UBI before riots, possible or a worthless pursuit? by nitebear

I think public opinion sort of bounces back and forth around issues trying to find "balance".

In the 70s there was a public push to reduce taxes, which overtime resulted in a massive reduction of effective taxes for the rich and since then inequality has been exploding.

A bit of breathing room happened in 90s which calmed the public I think. A lot of good things happened.

At some point hopefully not too late it'll again reach to the point where the public push towards higher taxes for the rich will make sense to part of republican constituents.

I actually think we're very close, we already had basically UBI payments across the whole country during pandemic and nobody bat an eye even though just a few years ago it seemed impossible.

There just needs to be some kind of public catalyst to implement effective taxes level of near 1970s levels and also start UBI at the same time. It doesn't even needs to be large or to be called "ubi". It could be a bunch of different things that would together act as a UBI, but we won't call it that.

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stievstigma t1_j5c4bvf wrote

You mean like a “Freedom Dividend”?

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PoliteThaiBeep t1_j5c8jqm wrote

I think Andrew Yang called it that right?

But his solution was to introduce VAT taxes and use that to finance UBI to avoid "redistribution" stigma.

I think politically it probably makes sense, but personally I think taxing rich passive income is more beneficial for the economy if implemented.

Right now poor people's major income source is work, investment income is a tiny portion for them. As you go up the bracket investment income tends to be more and more important and for billionaires I think it's over 70% income is in investment. I don't remember exact numbers but I remember the trend.

Despite this investment income taxes are capped at 20%. (For a stock owned for over a year) This creates a natural runaway wealth scenario where more money just makes money with limited incentives to actually create stuff.

I'd say UBI should be financed from the top 1% investment income taxes, make them higher like 30-50% for people with over 10 mil in investment, don't touch regular income taxes, don't introduce VAT.

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stievstigma t1_j5f2yt5 wrote

Yeah, it was Yang. I agree with most of what you said but I was under the impression that the VAT tax he was proposing was to be leveraged against big tech, as in, Amazon would be taxed on every transaction, Google would be taxed on every search, etc. Of course, it’s easy to see how those costs could trickle down though so yeah, taxing passive income makes more sense.

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PoliteThaiBeep t1_j52n424 wrote

Also I think the most important part of taxing rich is progressive taxing passive income from the stock market. Maybe we don't even need to increase income taxes. Maybe we just need to modify passive income taxes.

It does two things really well:

  1. Incentives rich to create things instead of just sitting on the money
  2. Very predictable flow of money to UBI
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