A negative income tax guarantees everyone a basic level of income based on personal circumstances like number of children, disabilities etc. that can replace the current benefit system where we have all these useless job centres distributing universal credit that do nothing other than try to save a few quid here and there by sanctioning people, getting rid of the job centres alone would have enormous cost savings.
The ongoing Elon Twitter saga: "insert demographic" melts down
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A negative income tax guarantees everyone a basic level of income based on personal circumstances like number of children, disabilities etc. that can replace the current benefit system where we have all these useless job centres distributing universal credit that do nothing other than try to save a few quid here and there by sanctioning people, getting rid of the job centres alone would have enormous cost savings.
Most of this does not require human assessment, in fact the meagre amount of money saved currently by sanctioning people viewed as "playing the system" is vastly outweighed by the cost of the job centre apparatus itself which is why staff were given sanction targets.
Reduced administrative costs are used to help people and when the tax rate is lower you tend to have less avoidance and evasion, thus more tax revenue paradoxically. Just look at the income tax rates in the USA, they were reduced massively in the 20's and as a result tax revenue from the rich increased so much they ended up with a budget surplus. But people want to hit the rich with a high tax rate so much that they cut their nose off to spite their face.
As economist Thomas Sowell puts it, "do you want a symbolic high rate of income tax or actual increased tax revenue?".
That statement doesn't contradict itself.
At the risk of repeating myself, the lower marginal tax rates means expensive avoidances schemes are no longer worth it, so while the super rich will be paying more tax their financial position will mostly balance out, and better off in the context of tax evasion is pretty obvious, not at risk of going to jail. We need to change the incentive structures if we want to successfully target tax evasion. There is also the scope to improve public services with the increased revenue.
However there is really no need for people to pay more tax with a negative income tax, if you have a surplus that allows you to reduce the tax rate.
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Almost like you don't understand what a flat tax is!
I suppose some of the current staff will be pretty sycophantic towards Musk in order to try to save their jobs regardless.
Tbh I've never been a fan of him, he claims to be a libertarian but has received billions of public money, while I'm sure he's a good engineer, he's not a self made man by any stretch of the imagination, he has been constantly propped up with taxpayer money and has had many failed business ventures paid for by the American tax payer.
Why is giving taxpayer money to fantasy projects a bad thing, are you serious?
Hyperloop is probably the most prominent example.
Elon Musk is speaking out against government subsidies. Here's a list of the billions of dollars his businesses have received.
Musk's companies benefited from subsidies as recently as April, when SpaceX won a $2.89 billion contract from NASA. Tesla got subsidies for years.
www.businessinsider.com
In any case he's certainly not self made, he's propped up by the government which was my point.
Hyperloop is a fantasy/vanity project which they partnered with an agency largely funded by government money to the tune of $1.3bill for a feasibility study.
You're not self made if the government funds your business because they are spending other people's money, usually frivolously.
Now if you have an established product that the government are buying that's one thing, but expecting them to fund the development of projects is another,
It's certainly not as bad as a Murphy hole where one's positions are ceaselessly misrepresented
A lot of people that voted for brexit like myself were not paying attention to "the lies" and knew the actual implementation would be disastrous, so bleating on about it serves no actual purpose other than to reinforce the leave perspective even more to a typical voter. Ironically it has the opposite effect to what a lot of remainers believe.
It's kind of irrelevant what you think, that is the attitude of the typical voter on any given issue, so it's counterproductive to complain about it, but as someone who voted for brexit people like you are keeping support for it strong so I welcome it.
"I knew it was going to be disastrous but it upsets people I don't like so it's worth it."
What a **** attitude.
How awful to vote for something I think is best for the country based on the opinion of expert economists.
Remainers tears are the most delicious of them all tbh though so if I were going back in time I would vote leave just to upset you.Wow, this is even more bad faith than SC, the challenge has been upped. I need to get a "remainers tears" tumbler, wonder if I could commission one from Ben Shapiro?
Economics Professor Patrick Minford was already mentioned.
Brexit was always about short term pain for long term gain, in the libertarian movement support for Brexit was pretty unanimous, outside of the EU we at least have the possibility to make necessary economic reforms for example like abolishing all tariffs on goods which simply serve to protect people from low prices.
I don't think anyone politically aware was believing either Farage's 350 million for the NHS or whatever it was, or the projected end times from the remain campaign who were saying he wouldn't be protected by the ECHR anymore.
Why would you expect me to show respect and give a reasonable reply to a group of people that deliberately misrepresent my position in bad faith and demonise me just because I voted leave?
"I knew it was going to be disastrous but it upsets people I don't like so it's worth it."
What a **** attitude.
These ridiculous statements for example which are pure fantasy. Suggesting that everyone who voted for Brexit was doing it to upset others, and yes, of course I wanted the country I live in to turn disastrous. You couldn't make it up.
Anyway this isn't the Brexit thread and the above posters have shown no interest in good faith discussion...
Talk about bad faith and then take my quote out of context.
The “you actually wanted it to be disastrous” was part of a couple of hypothetical scenarios, hence the OR before it. It wasn’t a direct accusation.
If it helps restore some “good faith” I’ll retract the point that you wanted it to be disastrous. But you knew it would be and voted for it anyway. To me that still seems bizarre. Unless, as I said in my reply to Roar, the potential non-economic upsides were significant enough to offset the economic damage. I haven’t seen any evidence, before or after the vote, to suggest that’s plausible.
As for this:
That’s not a bad-faith interpretation of this kind of post:
As far as Miniford goes, his conclusions were based on almost complete deregulation along the lines of the “Singapore on Thames” model. He also predicted the collapse of UK farming, fishing, and manufacturing because of the above. If that’s more “short-term pain for long-term gain” then those long-term gains must be huge… I just still don’t know what they could be.
IIRC you’re a staunch libertarian, so perhaps it makes sense that you consider Miniford to be credible.
You threw the first punch by suggesting that I voted for Brexit to upset people, which was bad faith at that point, so I had a dig at you as you seemed to be overly upset and antagonistic to me simply because of the way I voted.
I said the implementation would be disastrous because we have a crap government, not that leaving the EU would inherently be disastrous otherwise I wouldn't have voted for it.
As I said the libertarian movement was very much in favour of leaving the EU for a whole host of reasons that many politicians didn't even touch on, I only referred to Miniford in passing because the implication being made was that everyone who voted for brexit was doing so because of the lies of the leave campaign and not a single expert was in support of it, the remain campaign at one point were fabricating material claiming that Martin Lewis from moneysavingexpert had said we should vote remain and were forced to retract that false information after he pulled them up on it, he quite aptly had said a leave vote was a gamble that things will get better in the long run. And that really hits a key point in politics, it's all about short term thinking, 5 year cycles which in the context of an 80 year lifespan are nothing, never mind the long term existence of the country.
Perhaps this video will give some context as to why most Libertarians voted the way they did.
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It's not a case of thinking "it's a good idea but it wouldn't work in practice", as the guy in that video explained, the libertarian hope was that in the long term future Britain would be able to become more libertarian outside of the EU than in it, looking beyond the current government and the awful undemocratic system we have. While I voted leave I wasn't a brexiter by any means, and when the public vote leave after listening to a prominent economist as discredited in his field as he may be, I can't call them stupid for doing so. It's very different to listening to some rubbish Farage was putting out.
So you're predicting eternal tory rule? A V for Vendetta liberation is probably more likely than that!
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