Notices by Jamey Sharp (jamey@toot.cat)

@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.

@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

@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?

@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…

@clacke @daedalus @jasongorman @sabik If you've ever run the old https://dwheeler.com/sloccount/ tool you've seen estimates based on the COCOMO model. It's fun to come up with numbers estimating how many person-years your code might take to construct from scratch and how much those engineers might get paid for that time, but I don't know that those numbers have any useful relationship with reality…

@CelloMomOnCars @jay_peper Although I explicitly said that transit fares are not about money, I was very careful in writing that post to not say what purposes fares really serve. I have my opinions about that, which I think line up with yours. But my goal was to convince people to get some of their preconceptions out of the way of having a real conversation. Jumping straight to socioeconomic discrimination often does the opposite, inviting more knee-jerk reactions instead.

Besides, I haven't studied the broader issues in enough depth to feel like I could present and defend that argument well. This argument just required looking up some numbers and doing some math, and I know how to do that. But other people don't necessarily, so I think there's value in doing just this part too.

So ny hope is that people read my post and then are prepared to engage with comments like yours in good faith.

@jay_peper A few years ago I wrote up the surprising things I learned when I studied my local transit authority's budget for impact of making the system fareless: https://jamey.thesharps.us/2019/12/12/transit-fares-are-not-about-money/