Comment by chollida1
9 years ago
Can someone actually explain what Sam wants to do here? I've read the post 4 times and I still can't see an y sort of plan, numbers, etc to actually critique,
Which is odd because he specifically ask you to give feedback but never follows through on presenting the actual idea.
He does motivate why he thinks a share of the GDP is so he gets the why, but never actually gets into the what, and how.
I mean the GDP isn't just something you can siphon off money from and give it to someone as it's not a thing that anyone owns.
So if you want to give out a portion of the GDP, I think what he really means is pay a universal income that is locked to GDP growth, but he never really says this.
> Can someone actually explain what Sam wants to do here? I've read the post 4 times and I still can't see an y sort of plan
Run for office perhaps. In other words, if you can't discern a plan, maybe the post is more about Sam than it is about a plan.
(NOTE: I do think he has a plan here, just very back of the envelope. I think he's mulling over ways to incrementally roll out UBI, which if you think UBI is a good idea, figuring out an incrementalist approach is hugely crucial, important work. I don't think UBI is a good idea, but I do think this post is about a real thought and not just Sam posing or something. I have faith that there's real intellectual sincerity here.)
It's basic income branded in a way that's more attractive for economically right-wing people (aka "capitalists").
If you want to brand basic income in a way for conservatives, advocate for a Negative Income Tax (Friedman's idea) as an alternative to welfare bureaucracy.
Basic income isn't like Negative Income Tax at all. The core idea of BI is that no matter how much money you make you always get the BI, it's "basic".
NIT is just moving the progressive tax system into negative values, which means you subsidize the poor but once you make enough money you won't get subsidized.
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The difference between this and standard UBI proposals is that standard UBI gives everybody a certain fixed amount of money, whereas this gives everybody a certain percentage of GDP.
On the nose. Reads like he picked up a copy of Lakoff's "Don't think of an elephant!"and is attempting to apply framing theory. Great job sans the lack of details–though that in itself is probably intentional.
It's useful to try out different metaphors and see what sticks.
Universal basic income. He wants to (numbers _entirely fabricated here_) tax 20% of US GDP and then give that money evenly to all adults, therefore giving every adult American an equal share of 20% of the GDP (which would be about $14,000 per year per adult).
You can't tax the GDP, it's a calculation on the state of the exonomy not a cash flow to the state.
Of course you can tax GDP, every country in the world already does it. Surprisingly few people seem to be aware that GDP is the same thing as GDI, the sum of all income earned in a country in a year, the vast majority of which is already taxed.
About 60% of all US income (GDI) is compensation for labor (salaries, wages, benefits), 40% compensation for capital (dividends, interest, rents). Both parts are already taxed, at varying rates. The total amount of taxation is about 33% of GDI, while total spending is about 36% (the deficits is filled by borrowing).
Since the entire article looks like a big tax and transfer proposal, it's pretty bizarre to omit almost all basic government accounting, except for a throwaway footnote. The analogy with joint-stock companies or Homestead acts are neither here nor there. The government owned a lot of American land back then. It doesn't not own a large share of of current American corporations, nor many laborers. So the way to pay any significant "citizen's dividend" is boring old taxes.
A much better discussion with concrete numbers and speculation on incentive effects can be found here: https://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?f=24&t=1286141&s...
It's an abstraction. You can tax people/things at a rate that causes a number of dollars equal to 20% of the GDP to end up in the state coffers (which brings up its whole own class of issues - what, exactly, do you tax to get that money? Income? Wealth? Stocks? Vanity license plates?).
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I would phrase that more as how does Sam propose to specify a tax or set of taxes such that it represents 20% of the GDP.
He proposes a soft version of Socialism [1]. You can own a company but you will have to pay additional 20% income tax or 20% VAT (I am not sure how to gather in taxes 20% of GDP).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialism "There are many varieties of socialism and there is no single definition encapsulating all of them, though social ownership is the common element shared by its various forms"
It's remarkably similar to market socialism, discussed briefly by Matt Levine here: https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-11-22/uber-hack...
and Matt Bruenig here: https://peoplespolicyproject.org/2017/08/17/index-funds-are-...
One possible implementation would be to build an index tracking fund that tracks a significant portion of the US economy, and pays dividends to all citizens.
It seems like it would be difficult to lock an entitlement program to GDP without encountering funding gaps at some point, though I suppose a funding gap hasn't stopped the Social Security program from continuing to pay out.
It's a rebranded form of guaranteed basic income.
An annual bonus just for being an American.
s/bonus/dividend/
Alaska does this [1]. The only problem with the idea is that some things aren't considered GDP while they grow the pie - open source and volunteering being good examples.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alaska_Permanent_Fund
"voting with the wallet"
This is why research grants and outright government spending is a good tool in the toolbox. People are still paying for it through taxes, but because of the indirect nature we can judge the problem a bit more on its merits ("of course we want cancer research to happen and be funded")
I think it would be an annual bonus for some Americans, and an annual tax increase for others. As someone who, I suspect, would be in the second group, I feel like we do enough of this kind of thing already.
And as someone who, I suspect, would be in the second group as well, I feel like we do the tax increase part way too much, but we don't do the annual bonus part nearly enough.
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He's putting forward a vague political plan because he wants to be a politician.
He wants to share your money that you've worked for.
Go make that money in a bubble completely separate from society and then maybe you can claim that society isn't entitled to some of it.
While I agree with what you said, the counter-argument is that we do already pay taxes for the services that we use. You could argue that those taxes are too low because they don't capture the "gestalt" of civilization. But if you pursue that argument, then all humans, not just US citizens, should have equity since all humans contribute to the gestalt of civilization.