> They waste billions on fraudulent claims because they don't fund the program well enough to have compliance enforcement or auditing.
These are synonyms for having higher overhead, right? If you pay a billion dollars in claims with ten million dollars in administrative costs then your "administrative overhead" is 1%, even if half the claims are fraud. If you increase "administrative costs" to a hundred million to get rid of the fraud, in practice you just saved 410 million dollars but now your "administrative overhead" is up to 20%.
> In the end employers are the ones largely paying and they are professional negotiators enough to put price pressure on insurance plans. 20% of $0 is $0.
That's assuming price is the only variable.
Suppose one insurance company is accepted by more providers, including ones that might be closer (but pay higher real estate costs) or have nicer rooms etc. Meanwhile employers are looking for cost/benefit rather than just cost. If they give employees a better insurance plan they could pay them less or provide less of some other benefit and still get people to work there.
So before the insurance company didn't really care if you got a $10,000 plan or a $20,000 plan if they both had a $2200 margin, or if anything would prefer the former because they make the same money with lower costs. The employer is likewise fairly ambivalent as long as the more expensive plan seems like it's buying something (even if the something is convenience/luxury). But now the insurance company isn't allowed to have a $2200 margin on the first plan and still is on the second, so that's what they market, and then what more employers choose, resulting in higher average costs.
> Insurance providers also rarely operate at the full freight 20% either way though.
There are only really two options, right? Either the market is actually competitive and then a margin cap has no effect because competition would prevent margins higher than that regardless and the rule should be gotten rid of as totally redundant, or the market is less than perfectly competitive and then it does something but the something is a bad perverse incentive to raise costs to cheat the rule and it should be gotten rid of as actively harmful.
That's not actually how the measles thing happens.
What really happens is that the one nutter stands in the town square ranting about lizardmen and 99.99% of people ignore him, or an actual scientist gets bored and challenges him to a debate and then lizardmen guy gets trounced and further discredited, and everything is fine. Until someone with an authoritarian streak gets tired of winning debates with lizardmen guy and instead tries to shut him up, or starts suppressing data that doesn't actually support the crazy theory but is kind of inconvenient or complicated to explain.
Then you're screwed because you're letting the conspiracy guy point to an actual conspiracy to suppress his views, which provides evidentiary support for the claim that their crazy theory isn't mainstream because it's being suppressed. Meanwhile you get free speech defenders concerned about a bad precedent coming out to oppose you, and then political lines get drawn over something that never should have been partisan, but now everyone is expected to pick a side. And a lot of people end up on the side of lizardmen guy.
But once it's partisan, people are hopeless at being neutral. If you're on lizardmen guy's side then you're giving him the benefit of the doubt and on the lookout for any fault in his critics, which is how you get way too many people actually believing in lizardmen.
The problem is fundamentally that censoring something discredits you rather than them.
> That's not actually how the measles thing happens.
> What really happens is that the one nutter stands in the town square ranting about lizardmen and 99.99% of people ignore him, or an actual scientist gets bored and challenges him to a debate and then lizardmen guy gets trounced and further discredited, and everything is fine.
My observation (in Germany) is rather that many antivaxxer (and sceptics of forced measles vaccination) read the scientific literature quite deeply, but come to very different conclusions. Additionally, they often have marked "live and let live" personality traits, which authorities do not like.
Because of their deep intellectual investment in this topic, they often have a much deeper knowledge about the whole topic than working doctors. The only people who are real counterparties for them are actual respected scientific experts on the topic. While these are clearly even more knowledgeable, these actual experts fear the well-read antivaxxers because the latter
- love to show gaps in the whole theoretical frameworks,
Those "well-read antivaxxers" are the same as e.g. people with a fear of flying: they spend too much time looking at extremely rare catastrophic outcomes (dying or being seriously injured because of a plane crash or a vaccine side effect) and then think that it will surely happen to them or their children. The only difference is just that when someone who's afraid of flying doesn't take a plane, it only affects very few people (if that), whereas lowering herd immunity affects us all.
The difference between yesteryear, when everyone ignored the nutter ranting about lizardmen in the town square, and today is that the nutters can now find company and reinforcement for their beliefs thanks to the Internet. And ultimately it leads to people like Elon Musk getting high on their own supply of toxic disinformation and causing the death of thousands of people by shutting down USAID because they believe some far-right nutter on X more than what "the establishment" has been saying for decades...
Flying is safe, but I think it is not because some rules/regulations or due to "science".
A plane falling out of sky is a pretty big event and cannot be suppressed or silenced. It affects a large number of people at once. If planes starts to fall out of sky often, then the commercial aviation will come to a halt in a month. Given this eventuality, if you want to make money by flying people, it in imperative that there is no other way than to * do everything possible to make sure* planes don't fall from the sky.
If planes could fall out of sky without everyone knowing about it (For example, imagine that when a plane crashes, instead of killing the passengers right away, they only get hit after a month or so, and it is hard to link the deaths with the flight they took a month before), and affecting their business, then I bet that flying will no longer be very safe as companies will start cutting expenses with maintenance etc and paying off regulators/inspectors..
A stock market crash is also a pretty big event that cannot be suppressed or silenced, but they still happen regularly. The sad truth is that people (and companies) are greedy and will gladly cut corners with safety if it means making more money. So regulations (and enforcement of those regulations) are needed to prevent a race to the bottom that will eventually lead to a crash. Coming back to aviation, you only have to look at countries like Nepal (https://kathmandupost.com/money/2025/11/10/nepali-sky-remain...) to see what happens when there are no regulations, or regulations are not enforced.
Aircraft manufacturers and airlines have a lot at stake if they let any risks slip through. If anyone dies it will be big news and visible to everyone, with real consequences for the companies responsible.
(I'm in the US so this may only be relevant there)
Childhood vaccines could cause a serious chronic disease in 1% of kids and we would have no way to know because:
1) Many vaccine clinical trials only monitor outcomes for a few days to a couple weeks.
2) Most vaccine clinical trials have no placebo control. If they have do have a control group in most cases the control group gets a different vaccine.
3) Most kids in vaccine clinical trials are also getting 10-30 other vaccine injections during their first two years of life during the period that they're being monitored for the one vaccine in their trial. So the only way this could even produce a signal would be if the one vaccine under trial was the only one that caused harm and all other vaccines did not.
I am not saying that vaccines do cause chronic disease in 1% of kids - just that it seems to me we don't have a good way to know.
Furthermore, even if it was proved that vaccines caused harm, vaccine manufacturers are not liable for harms from vaccines on the childhood vaccine schedule.
One is the "do vaccines cause autism" sort of thing, which, basically, they don't, but there are a lot of wrong people who think they do for bad reasons. That's the thing where if you try to censor things you're screwing yourself by creating the breeding ground for bad conspiracy theories. And how you get enough people refusing vaccines for bad reasons to cause problems etc.
Then there's the policy debate on whether vaccines should be mandatory, where people can make some pretty non-crazy arguments that they shouldn't be. Or the question of whether a specific person in a specific circumstance should get a specific vaccine, to which a reasonable answer could occasionally be no. But the people making those arguments aren't even necessarily wrong and having them push back on something when they have a reason to push back on it is perfectly legitimate and the people wanting to stop them are the baddies.
In the "do vaccines cause autism" sort of thing, they don't.
But then frauds like Wakefield somehow got a bullshit paper published saying they do and it's off to the toon races.
The paper wasn't censored, it was disproven by multiple studies and discredited by investigation. The Wakefield paper studied 12 children (multiple who had siblings with autism) and was funded by lawyers suing the vaccine companies at the time.
Today Wakefield is on the anti-vax circuit giving talks and continuing to lie.
Measles is a Solved Problem. Polio is a Solved Problem.
But the toons are running the Fed now, canceling science and telling lies. So we'll have to wait until 2028 to get a final death count, assuming anyone is still tracking it.
Let's not pretend that nothing was being censored during COVID or that no one remembers it. The backlash is the primary reason we ended up with RFK.
There are also multiple ways to solve problems. If the Wakefield theory is that vaccines using mercury as a preservative can cause autism then you don't even need to challenge it to make it irrelevant. It has memetic power because having mercury in medicine seems intuitively bad and conjures images of 19th century quacks. So all you have to do is use a different preservative. Then you have a one-line killshot any time anyone brings it up -- there's no mercury anymore -- and you don't have to try to explain statistical sample sizes to people who failed high school math.
> If you posit a conspiracy that only involves a few people who could plausibly coordinate to conceal the truth, that's also not a grand conspiracy, and we don't call people conspiracy theorist for believing in regular, everyday criminal conspiracies.
No, but we did call people conspiracy theorists for believing the thing Snowden subsequently showed to be real.
Not me, I didn't. That conspiracy was certainly pretty big, but there was also a ton of smaller leaks as you'd expect on a real conspiracy of that size, so you certainly wouldn't be called nuts for assuming NSA were spying on a lot they weren't supposed to.
Security state loyalists were not nearly as influential in online discourse back then, as they are now. Probably astroturfing, AI and algorithmic amplification plays a part in that.
> You can't prove or disprove anything with someone who refuses to comply with the courts.
I don't understand how someone could even think this.
Suppose he stole the loot and refuses to say where it is, but he really put it in a bank safe deposit box. The bank teller remembers him coming into the bank with a big pile of loot and then leaving without it, so you use the teller's statement to get a warrant to search the box, get the camera footage from the bank, etc. There are many ways to prove something without the suspect's cooperation.
How is the alternative supposed to work? The judge tells you to answer a question you'd only know the answer to if you were actually guilty and then you stay in jail for as long as you don't answer it? What are you supposed to do if you're innocent?
The problem obviously being that then there is never a trial and no one ever proved beyond a reasonable doubt that he was even capable of disclosing the information.
Because the point of the contempt charge is to compel someone to obey a court order or ruling. So yes, demonstrating that you cannot comply is generally a relevant defense.
I don’t see any evidence he ever attempted to make that claim.
Demonstrating that you can't comply and claiming it are obviously two different things. The issue is that they're not required to convince a jury that you can't beyond a reasonable doubt before locking you up, and then what do you get from claiming it when you can't prove a negative?
Not sure what you’re trying to say here. Contempt charges like this are an established part of judicial process for when a participant is not cooperating with the process.
A core way to appeal a civil contempt is on the grounds that you cannot comply.
Then the human beings involved have to assess whether or not the claim has merit.
It would seem insane to sit in jail for 10 years without even attempting to make that claim if he legitimately couldn’t remember where he stashed an actual treasure trove. And yet, as far as I can see he did not even make the attempt.
Based on that, it looks pretty clearly like he knew where the treasure was, he knew they knew where it was, and he was willing to sit in jail rather than give it up.
> It would seem insane to sit in jail for 10 years without even attempting to make that claim if he legitimately couldn’t remember where he stashed an actual treasure trove. And yet, as far as I can see he did not even make the attempt.
How would you propose to prove that you can't remember something?
> Parents just want to be able to designate a device as belonging to a child---one setting---and have that respected.
The problem here is, what does that actually do?
If you say the device is for kids, can the kids then see content related to firearms? What if the parents are Republicans and don't want that censored for their kids? Also, what does it even mean? Does a YouTube video on firearm safety get blocked because it contains firearms? Should "kids" be able to view sex education content?
If nobody agrees what should be blocked then the reason they don't have a setting is that nobody knows how to implement it.
> Yeah, because the parent's time is now dedicated to their employers. When parenting wasn't outsourced, families typically had a parent at home doing it.
This seems to imply that the problem is that we started letting women work, but I suspect the actual problem is back to restrictive zoning again.
If you let people actually build housing, and then some people have two incomes, they use the extra money to build a big new house or drive newer cars etc. If you instead inhibit new construction, the people with two incomes outbid the families with one income for the artificially constrained housing stock, and then every family needs two incomes and like flipping a switch you go from "women are empowered by allowing them to work" to "women are oppressed by requiring them to work".
I don't think just building more housing is sufficient. That might decrease the cost of living somewhat, but probably not enough to remove the need for a second income.
I think ideally most families should be able to survive on the income of one parent, regardless of which parent that is. But I'm not sure how to get there, although I think the problem is closely tied to wealth inequality.
I also think in a better world, it would be practical for both parents to work, but work fewer hours, each working 20 hours a week. But in the US at least that generally isn't practical because most such jobs don't provide health insurance or retirement plans, and are typically very low paying jobs.
>I don't think just building more housing is sufficient. That might decrease the cost of living somewhat, but probably not enough to remove the need for a second income.
While shadowy special interest groups and large corporations are able to write text directly into the laws of anglophone countries, The People can't even talk about one instance without fragmenting into a trillion pieces covering topics such as the affordability of housing.
This is the thing where bad proposals are easier to come up with than good ones. If you want to actually fix it you need to identify the root cause, come up with a viable, efficient, effective means of addressing it, and then get it enacted.
If all you want to do is pass a bad law, all you have to do is pay money.
I don't disagree with you about affordability of housing. I just don't think that that by itself is sufficient to solve the problem of households needing two incomes.
The left wing constantly says “we started letting women work”. Women have worked for thousands of years. The phenomenon of manipulating women into believing working for a corporation is some kind of “higher calling” is relatively new, and it’s been a disaster for the family unit.
One is that people tell women it's good to work for a corporation, some of them believe that to be true and choose to do it, the others retain and exercise the option to do something else.
The other is that we set up an artificial scarcity treadmill so that if some families have two incomes, they outbid the ones that don't on life necessities and then women have to take a job at a corporation in order to be able to afford to live indoors even if that's not what they would otherwise choose to do.
I disagree. You simply increase the supply of labour by double digit percentage points. Thinking this will not affect the price, all else being equal, is magical thinking.
You're ignoring the other side of the ledger. If the supply of labor increases, but then those people get paid money, then they spend it and create additional demand for labor.
How do you suppose a country with 100 million people can have the same standard of living, if not higher, than a country with 10 million people despite having ten times the supply of labor? Or for that matter that large populous cities can have higher paying jobs than small towns?
> The left wing constantly says “we started letting women work”.
I’ve literally never seen anyone on the left (and rarely even the liberal capitalist center-right) say that. I’ve seen people on the hard right, when complaining, use that framing, though.
And, look, here its part of a complaint glorifying the defects of the capitalist-patriarchal family and whining that more equal treatment of women in the economic sphere hurt the “family unit” rather than recognizing that capitalism wrecks the family unit and greater equality for women just reduces the particular systematic of oppression of women within the capitalist-patriarchal system, but neither cures nor causes the damage to the family unit that comes from capitalism.
A UBI is a method of achieving the same effect as progressive taxation without the complexity and perverse incentives of tracking everyone's income and applying different marginal rates.
Suppose you have a tax system with progressive tax brackets and then a needs-based welfare system with benefits phase outs. It turns out, those two things (progressive rate structure and benefits phase outs) basically cancel each other out -- lower income people are supposed to pay lower marginal tax rates but if you're paying a 10% marginal tax rate and then have a 25% benefits phase out rate, that's the same as paying a 35% marginal tax rate. Worse, the benefits phase outs for different benefits often overlap, with the result that lower income people are often paying higher marginal tax rates than wealthy people, and there are some cases when their marginal rates even exceed 100% of marginal income.
So you have two unnecessarily complicated systems that mostly exist to cancel each other out, and to the extent that they don't they're doing something you don't actually want (excessively high marginal rates on poor people). It's better to just get rid of both -- no phase outs is the "universal" part of the UBI, and then you combine that with a uniform marginal tax rate for everyone.
You're basically getting rid of the progressive rate structure so you can lower the marginal tax rates on poor people to the ones being paid by rich people, and if that seems counterintuitive it's because the status quo is very stupid.
It turns out that a theoretically optimal non-linear taxation schedule features a UBI plus varying marginal tax rates (i.e. continuous tax brackets) that start out quite high (but sub-100%) in the UBI-clawback range (to manage the UBI break-even point while still offering a high subsidy to the very lowest earners) become very low for low-to-middle income earners and rise gradually for middle- and high-income earners. That's quite redistributive in intent, but the tax brackets themselves are neither "progressive" nor "regressive". Nevertheless, middle- and high-income earners do face moderately progressive rates.
They benefit from greatly lowered tax rates on their earned income (this is also a 'carrot' for the UBI net-receivers themselves, at least at the higher end), and high growth because you don't need to 'soak' higher-earning folks, who only pay moderately progressive rates. The alternative either has the lowest earning folks getting screwed out of receiving a meaningful subsidy (which is really bad) or pushes the break-even point way too high, which is not really what you want either and is the main criticism of UBI from a practical POV.
> They benefit from greatly lowered tax rates on their earned income
Lowered marginal tax rates. Raising the marginal rates on the lowest earners is raising the effective rates on the lower middle class. That they don't get anything is essentially the purpose of your proposal.
> and high growth because you don't need to 'soak' higher-earning folks, who only pay moderately progressive rates.
But did you actually have to do that? Having the lowest marginal rates be in the middle is pretty expensive because it's also lowering the effective rate on everyone above them, or at best is just balancing out having the highest rates at the bottom. It seems like you're trying to increase the amount of the UBI while making sure the extra money comes from the middle rather than the top. Having approximately the top half (50% of the population) pay so that the second quartile (25% of the population) can get ~half the UBI instead of none both doesn't seem like a bad thing and doesn't seem like it would cost them that much rate-wise because it's a 2:1 population ratio and they they have a higher per capita base to apply the rate to.
And having the highest rates at the bottom is pretty bad incentive-wise.
> or pushes the break-even point way too high
What's the problem with the break-even point being somewhere around the middle? The people only slightly below that aren't getting a large subsidy, they're just not getting literally zero.
Meanwhile the amount of "well I didn't make that much money because I had half of it paid to my kid" marginal rate arbitrage you're reintroducing is large.
> Raising the marginal rates on the lowest earners is raising the effective rates on the lower middle class.
Those are just clawback rates. The lower middle class don't need UBI in order to pay for the necessities of life, and most UBI proposals don't expect them to be net recipients, any more than they'd be net recipients of current welfare.
> it's also lowering the effective rate on everyone above them
That's balanced by the gradual progressivity of tax rates on upper-middle incomes.
> while making sure the extra money comes from the middle rather than the top
The low rates for the lower-middle class are actually ensuring the exact opposite of that claim. The upper incomes are the source for the bulk of income redistribution in the usual optimal system as it comes out of these analyses; they just don't face prohibitive rates.
> And having the highest rates at the bottom is pretty bad incentive-wise.
It's the opposite. The bottom clawback rates apply to a smaller part of the population, that can escape them simply by earning more than the UBI breakeven point. Meanwhile the high rates there help make the whole tax schedule sustainable. It may be a counterintuitive point but it's confirmed by rigorous, automated analysis.
> marginal rate arbitrage you're reintroducing is large
The most likely response is not necessarily arbitrage, it might just be earning enough that you start paying low marginal rates after the UBI is clawed back.
> The bottom clawback rates apply to a smaller part of the population, that can escape them simply by earning more than the UBI breakeven point.
That's not true. One of the issues any serious UBI proposal needs to face are the increasing demands of the labor market. A couple of generations ago, there were still plenty of opportunities for people who had little to offer beyond a pair of hands and some work ethic. Today not so much.
The bottom end of the labor market consists of a nontrivial number of people who are not productive enough to earn a living wage. But there are still societal benefits from having them work for living, instead of being passive welfare recipients or turning to crime. To make that happen, even a low wage should increase the net income significantly above UBI.
> The lower middle class don't need UBI in order to pay for the necessities of life, and most UBI proposals don't expect them to be net recipients, any more than they'd be net recipients of current welfare.
The premise of them receiving it isn't so they can buy corn, it's so they can save up a down payment on a house or have enough savings that if their car breaks down they're not completely screwed. They're supposed to get the money.
> That's balanced by the gradual progressivity of tax rates on upper-middle incomes.
That's not balancing it, it's further exacerbating it. You then have the upper middle class paying less than the full marginal rate, along with everyone above them for that part of their income range.
> The low rates for the lower-middle class are actually ensuring the exact opposite of that claim.
I feel like this is still confusing effective rates with marginal rates.
Suppose you have a 50% marginal rate up to $30,000 in income and then a 5% marginal rate up to $60,000. Alice makes $32,000/year. In this system her effective tax rate is ~47%. By contrast, Bob makes $60,000 and has an effective tax rate of 27.5%. Moreover, between the two of them they have $92k in total income of which the government gets $31600, ~34%. Why would we want Alice to have to pay ~47% instead of ~34% so that Bob, who makes almost twice as much, can pay 27.5% instead of ~34%?
Adding the UBI would lower both effective rates and result in a progressive rate curve, but why would we want to add "progressive" rates that make the system less progressive?
> The upper incomes are the source for the bulk of income redistribution in the usual optimal system as it comes out of these analyses; they just don't face prohibitive rates.
But why would you need prohibitive rates at all?
US GDP is ~$31T with a population of ~340M. To give a $12,000 UBI to every single person would be ~$4T, i.e. 12.9% of GDP, implying that's the uniform marginal tax rate you would need to collect the money. That's assuming the tax is applied uniformly (and applies to corporations as well as individuals etc.), and maybe you want to exempt non-profits from the tax or something, but as a ballpark estimate that's the number and it's not crazy high. Especially when it's a universal transfer payment and the majority of people are just getting most or all of it back immediately.
> The bottom clawback rates apply to a smaller part of the population, that can escape them simply by earning more than the UBI breakeven point.
That's not how that works. If you had a 50% marginal rate up to $30,000 and you're deciding whether to take a $32,000 job or not work, you're only getting $16,900 to put in your pocket from taking that job. Being "out of the clawback range" doesn't stop the majority of the pay from still being in it. And, of course, there are jobs that don't even pay that much, or some people might want to work part time and you're essentially screwing them for not making enough money.
> Meanwhile the high rates there help make the whole tax schedule sustainable. It may be a counterintuitive point but it's confirmed by rigorous, automated analysis.
Why do we need automated analysis to do arithmetic? You can avoid a huge increase in the rate on lower income people with a much smaller increase in a universal rate because the former only applies to a small proportion of total income and the latter applies to all of it.
> The most likely response is not necessarily arbitrage, it might just be earning enough that you start paying low marginal rates after the UBI is clawed back.
As soon as you have non-uniform marginal rates, arbitrage is going to happen. We don't have to speculate here because we currently have non-uniform marginal rates and it's extremely common. Family members in a lower tax bracket get added to the payroll to soak up taxable income at the lower rate.
We're talking about the lower middle class, they can sustain themselves by working, essentially by definition. They can get the money (compared to the status quo) - by working, because they'll be paying negligible overall rates on their own earnings as soon as the UBI is fully clawed back. Redistribution (UBI) is costly (being funded by high rates on the higher incomes, that deter them from earning more), so in most practical proposals it is largely limited to those who really are unable (or perhaps unwilling, but in a near-optimal system such 'unwillingness' is most often explained by practical inability) to earn enough for a tolerable life. Giving any part of the middle class a net-UBI only to claw it back with high rates (as it must be at some point in the tax schedule) wouldn't leave them any better off in practice and it would set up pathological anti-work incentives. It's a pretty clear non-starter.
> You then have the upper middle class paying less than the full marginal rate
If you're talking about effective rates being less than marginal rates, that's just inherent to any progressive taxation. There is in fact a strange theoretical result that the very top earner should ultimately be facing a zero marginal rate on their very last dollar of income since any non-zero rate on that "top" level is pure overhead, but of course that's a bit of a curiosity and hard to apply in practice, except maybe as a broad caution against the common idea of levying punitive rates on the very highest incomes. Progressive taxation at the high end is still the practical optimum.
> I feel like this is still confusing effective rates with marginal rates.
I feel like you're disregarding the fact that the high-rates at the bottom are purely UBI-clawback rates; in fact, $30,000 per year seems quite infeasible as a UBI range, so ISTM that you're inadvertently getting the wrong idea entirely about what the system might imply!
> We're talking about the lower middle class, they can sustain themselves by working, essentially by definition.
Then why does the existing system provide all manner of healthcare subsidies, student loan subsidies, etc. with phase outs extending well into that income range? The ACA subsidy for a family of four isn't fully phased out until $132k.
> Redistribution (UBI) is costly (being funded by high rates on the higher incomes, that deter them from earning more)
Aggressive claw backs are more costly because they require much higher marginal rates on lower income people and it's high marginal rates that provide the disincentive to work. Even before considering the argument that people being paid low hourly rates are easier to deter to begin with, because paying someone else to do something for you in order to free up time to work for money instead of doing it yourself is more costly to someone who gets a lower hourly wage.
> Giving any part of the middle class a net-UBI only to claw it back with high rates (as it must be at some point in the tax schedule) wouldn't leave them any better off in practice and it would set up pathological anti-work incentives.
Have you done the math on this one? The bottom 50% of people have <15% of total personal income. You get less money by increasing their pre-UBI effective rate by 50% than by increasing the universal effective rate by 7.5%, while providing them with a massive disincentive to work.
> If you're talking about effective rates being less than marginal rates, that's just inherent to any progressive taxation.
No, we need to distinguish two things here. One is the incremental effective rate for taking a job, i.e. if the employer pays $X to employ you, what total percent of X goes to the government? This is the thing that matters when choosing whether to take the job (incentive to work). You want this number to be uniform because any decrease in one place requires an increase for someone else and you lose jobs whenever you cause the rate to exceed the surplus derived from the job, so combinations of high and low rates are less efficient than uniformly medium ones. You especially don't want it to be higher for lower income people, because then the increase on them is disproportionately large.
The other is the effective rate net of unconditional benefits. When you get benefit (i.e. UBI) regardless of whether you take the job then that's included here but not there.
You get the same effect as a progressive rate structure in the second sense with a flat rate plus a UBI, because everyone pays the same marginal rate and therefore the same effective rate in the first sense, but someone who makes $54,000, pays a third of it in tax but receives a $12,000 UBI is on net paying $4000, i.e. 7.5% rather than 33% of $54k, whereas someone who makes a billion dollars is still paying a third and receiving the UBI, but $12,000 is a trivial percentage of a billion so their effective rate is still ~33%.
> There is in fact a strange theoretical result that the very top earner should ultimately be facing a zero marginal rate on their very last dollar of income since any non-zero rate on that "top" level is pure overhead
This theory assumes that the primary decision here is whether to work an additional hour, but the primary decision is actually which job to take, if any. You might make three times as much if you become a doctor, but then you give up 8 years of earnings to go to school and exit that with six figures in student debt. If you're deciding when to retire, or whether to enter the workforce but then have to pay much of your earnings in childcare and commuting expenses, you're either keeping/taking the job or you're not. The "incremental" rate when making the decision applies to the majority of or entirety of the compensation, not just the last dollar.
And notice that you can simultaneously screw this up on both ends. If you put oppressively high rates at the low end, even if that only lowers the high end rates by a minor amount, it just became relatively a lot more attractive to make three times as much money. Then you get elite overproduction and cost disease because you're screwing the janitors and service workers so hard on the tax rate. Some of them fall out of the workforce, others turn to diploma mills and employers have trouble hiring in that income range for necessary jobs and then have to raise prices on everyone. It's the same terrible thing the existing system does and what we should be trying to prevent.
> I feel like you're disregarding the fact that the high-rates at the bottom are purely UBI-clawback rates
There aren't supposed to be clawback rates. That's the entire point -- to get rid of the punitively high work-disincentivizing marginal rates for lower income people present in the existing system.
> in fact, $30,000 per year seems quite infeasible as a UBI range
That number is lower than the existing income level where people pay zero/negative federal income taxes net of benefits.
You should repeat that claim with concrete numbers.
What is the effective marginal tax rate in the UBI-clawback range, including any housing / healthcare / childcare / whatever benefits lost due to income? And what is the minimum hourly net income that would encourage someone with guaranteed basic income to take a job instead of staying at home? With those two numbers, you can calculate an effective minimum wage, below which it would be practically impossible to hire anyone.
> And what is the minimum hourly net income that would encourage someone with guaranteed basic income to take a job instead of staying at home? With those two numbers, you can calculate an effective minimum wage, below which it would be practically impossible to hire anyone.
The answer to the first question varies from person to person, and from job to job since some of them are less desirable to do independent of what they pay, which means the threshold in the second question doesn't actually exist. There may be 100 people willing to work a specific job for $X/year but not 1000 people, etc.
Mathematically equivalent does not mean human psychologically equivalent. e.g., people prefer a discount, even if the actual final numbers are the same. The framing matters
> I'm UBI-curious, but surely inflation would be inevitable if everyone suddenly had $x more disposable income per year?
The money doesn't come from nowhere. It's a transfer payment. People who make a below average amount of money pay less in tax than they receive, people who make an above average amount still receive the UBI but then the UBI is less than the amount of taxes they pay.
The result is not that "everyone has $x more disposable income per year" -- it's $0 on average, because lower income people have a little more and higher income people have a little less.
Notice that the existing welfare system already does this, but in the process creates a bunch of perverse incentives and income cliffs (you lose your benefits if you take a job or work more hours), leading to de facto marginal tax rates that are often >50% on lower income people when you account for benefits phase outs and in some cases they're >100%, i.e. if you make more money you make less money.
> Landlords and grocery stores and everyone else would raise prices because they know people can afford it.
That isn't how competitive markets work. If people had more money and a grocery store tried to raise prices, people would go across the street to the other grocery store.
It only works like that for products with fixed supply, i.e. things you can't make more of if the demand for them increases, because then if people have more money they have to outbid each other instead of sellers just producing more of what people are buying. This is one of the reasons zoning density restrictions screw people so hard -- land has fixed supply but housing doesn't, because you can build more than one housing unit on a piece of land. Unless the government bans that and mandates one unit per plot. Then people have to outbid each other. But your problem then is that, not people having more money. Notice that the same thing happens there if people get more money for any reason, e.g. more people go to college or the economy improves. It's a major problem that needs to be fixed regardless of what you use for transfer payments or if you do them at all.
> Who decides who gets to buy the best properties on Earth if money is no longer a factor?
The premise of that has always been pretty ridiculous. You can reduce the scarcity of some resource by making it more abundant, and that's generally a good thing. Good luck removing all scarcity from all resources. That's not a real thing.
These are synonyms for having higher overhead, right? If you pay a billion dollars in claims with ten million dollars in administrative costs then your "administrative overhead" is 1%, even if half the claims are fraud. If you increase "administrative costs" to a hundred million to get rid of the fraud, in practice you just saved 410 million dollars but now your "administrative overhead" is up to 20%.
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