[hedora]

I'm a fan of flat income tax with flat, per-person guaranteed income. Set the tax rate and base income so that the changeover is revenue neutral, zero income people are a bit better off than currently, and the 90th percentile pays about what they pay now. Billionaires will end up paying way more. (In this proposal, capital gains are treated as regular income.)

The beauty of this is that now you can add astronomical consumption taxes, and just plow the increased revenue into the guaranteed income pool. On average, the consumption tax is revenue neutral for the government, and (as a percentage of income) disproportionately goes to the poor.

Also, you can eliminate 99% of the US tax accounting industry, food stamp program administration, and all sorts of other bureaucracies.

[sprucevoid]

Yes to per-person guaranteed income. No to flat income (or wealth) tax (progressivity is better so no good reason to switch to something worse). Revenue neutrality: only if, and to the extent, it makes it makes the policy package easier to pass.

[hedora]

In practice, progressive tax curves and incentive programs let politicians meddle. Once they can meddle, lobbyists write the tax code.

So-called progressive taxes are always regressive in practice, at least in the US. Keeping the math simple makes it easy to keep them honest. (Make the marginal rate 40-50% if you want. Just set the base income so that the middle class is paying 33%.)

[sprucevoid]

> In practice, progressive tax curves and incentive programs let politicians meddle.

Is there cross-country comparative empirical evidence for that? My hunch is that very obscure tax curves (trapezoids and what not with layers of ad hoc edge cases) are vulnerable to meddling. But I doubt there's a general meddle-ability difference between simple forms of progressivity vs flat.