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   Angle (angle@anticapitalist.party)'s status on Friday, 02-Jun-2023 09:13:59 JST Angle

   So, I've been thinking about this lately - and it should really be an easy problem to solve? Just make it so that instead of all the benefits cutting out after a point, there's a graduated scale - your first dollar past that point loses you 1 cent of welfare, and this ratio steadily increases, until finally your last 99 cents of welfare get wiped out by a dollar of income. Seems simple enough. :/

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     Gateway of Last Resort (wxcafe@social.wxcafe.net)'s status on Friday, 02-Jun-2023 09:14:01 JST Gateway of Last Resort

     in reply to

     @Angle yeah I was gonna say, taxes work like that. even though politicians love to pretend they don't

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     Angle (angle@anticapitalist.party)'s status on Friday, 02-Jun-2023 09:14:02 JST Angle

     in reply to

     I asked my dad about this, and he laughed and said I was thinking like a programmer, and that's just not how legislators or administrators think - but it still doesn't seem that hard to me? Taxes work a lot like this - graduated brackets, where you only pay higher tax rates on income above specific amounts. You could apply the same idea to welfare benefits easily enough, or use a fancy equation like I suggested. :/

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     joesabin (joesabin@mastodon.world)'s status on Friday, 02-Jun-2023 09:14:04 JST joesabin

     in reply to

     @Angle This is how SS works. You can earn a maximum dollar amount a year. For each $2 over that, you lose $1 of your SS.

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     Angle (angle@anticapitalist.party)'s status on Friday, 02-Jun-2023 09:14:06 JST Angle

     in reply to

     I suppose one possible criticism of this is that it's effectively a subsidy for low paying jobs - people will be more likely to take them vs spending time looking for higher paying ones, because they also collect some welfare benefits, which means that companies will have an easier time slashing wages. I think it's still worth it overall, but it is something to consider. :/

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     Jamey Sharp (jamey@toot.cat)'s status on Friday, 02-Jun-2023 09:14:14 JST Jamey Sharp

     in reply to

     • starbreaker

     @starbreaker @Angle According to that Wikipedia article, Friedman wrote that the NIT proposal "has been greeted with considerable (though far from unanimous) enthusiasm on the left and with considerable (though again far from unanimous) hostility on the right. Yet, in my opinion, the negative income tax is more compatible with the philosophy and aims of the proponents of limited government and maximum individual freedom than with the philosophy and aims of the proponents of the welfare state and greater government control of the economy." So… yes, I think you could describe it that way.

     That doesn't necessarily mean it's a bad idea. If we're only considering options which preserve the basic structure of capitalism, then I think it would reduce the harm of that structure, somewhat, depending on the exact parameters chosen. Of course, I think we should be considering other options…

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     starbreaker (starbreaker@libranet.de)'s status on Friday, 02-Jun-2023 09:14:15 JST starbreaker

     in reply to

     • Jamey Sharp
     @Angle @jamey Wasn't the Negative Income Tax something right-wing economist Milton Friedman invented and tried to sell to Republicans?
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     Angle (angle@anticapitalist.party)'s status on Friday, 02-Jun-2023 09:14:16 JST Angle

     in reply to

     • Jamey Sharp

     @jamey No, same idea. Though I think structuring it as a tax is still weird and confusing. Just call it graduated welfare benefits or something, that's what it is. :/

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     Jamey Sharp (jamey@toot.cat)'s status on Friday, 02-Jun-2023 09:14:21 JST Jamey Sharp

     in reply to

     @Angle Usually the proposal relates the magnitude of the tax to the amount of income. Someone making very little income has a large negative tax. As income goes higher the tax increases toward zero and then into positive amounts. Is that different than what you're proposing?

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     Angle (angle@anticapitalist.party)'s status on Friday, 02-Jun-2023 09:14:22 JST Angle

     in reply to

     • Jamey Sharp

     @jamey I think negative income taxes are different - they give you more money based on how much money you make, instead of more money based on how much money you don't make. :/

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     Jamey Sharp (jamey@toot.cat)'s status on Friday, 02-Jun-2023 09:14:23 JST Jamey Sharp

     in reply to

     @Angle Is there some recent discussion about this that I missed? There's some history to the idea of a graduated scale like you're suggesting, sometimes related to proposals around Universal Basic Income; see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_income_tax

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     clacke (clacke@libranet.de)'s status on Friday, 02-Jun-2023 09:14:31 JST clacke

     in reply to

     • Bob Jonkman
     • Jamey Sharp

     The UBI and the NIT as mathematical models are equivalent. But then people advocating certain implementations with particular technical details have attached themselves to one label or the other.

     Tax paid every month through withheld salary is better than an enormous lump sum once per year.

     NIT/UBI paid out every month is better than a lump sum once per year.

     @bobjonkman @jamey

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     Bob Jonkman (bobjonkman@mastodon.sdf.org)'s status on Friday, 02-Jun-2023 09:14:32 JST Bob Jonkman

     in reply to

     • Jamey Sharp

     @jamey

     Ah, thanx for that clarification. I had thought you were advocating for negative income tax!

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     Bob Jonkman (bobjonkman@mastodon.sdf.org)'s status on Friday, 02-Jun-2023 09:14:33 JST Bob Jonkman

     in reply to

     • Jamey Sharp

     @jamey

     The difficulty with a Negative Income Tax for #PovertyElimination is that people living in extreme poverty (ie. unhoused people) often have no way to file their taxes, keep records, maintain bank accounts especially if they have no address. And payments would come only once a year; low-income people themselves have said they prefer smaller payments spread over the year, monthly or biweekly more like employment paycheques.

     #UniversalBasicIncome #UBI

     @Angle

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     Jamey Sharp (jamey@toot.cat)'s status on Friday, 02-Jun-2023 09:14:33 JST Jamey Sharp

     in reply to

     • Bob Jonkman

     @bobjonkman Just to be clear: I'm not advocating for negative income tax, just pointing out that it's a term people have used for a particular idea, and that looking up the history of that term might be informative.