[jes5199]

okay, I have a pitch for an MVP.

It's an independent organization that functions as a voluntary tax collection. Everybody who believes in basic income signs up for it, and makes a monthly donation. At the end of each month, we divide the total pot of all donations by the number of users: if you need the money, you withdraw your portion. If you don't need it, you can leave it in, so that the next month's pot will be bigger.

That's the whole algorithm.

I think it's self-balancing - if I, as a software developer, have the opportunity to withdraw a small sum, I won't bother - I don't need an extra $5 or $50 or $500, really. But to someone in a lower income bracket, that might be a significant amount of money.

[TaulantRamabaja]

incomethax already mentioned that this is essentially supplemental insurance.

Basic Income is needed because while productivity increases the ownership of these productivity increases are centralizing in the hands of a few. Through system-effects these centralization are leading to further rent seeking than could have happened before.

To give an example. It is game theoretically highly likely that there can only be one centralized social network such as Facebook, simply because the cost of centralization is lower than that OF decentralization (think diaspora). However, the cost of switching to another service doesn't make sense to a single user, hence rent seeking becomes possible. Telcos are another good example. To change this paradime the cost of decentralization has to be significantly lower than the cost of centralization, even to each individual user.

So the real problem isn't that all people are not paying into such an insurance contract, rather that the rent seekers are able to seek out rent at increasing scale while contributing ever less to society. Any BI fund would logically need to be funded by taxing the rent seekers rather than normal people who's productivity gains normally don;t lead to rent seeking due to more liquid markets for employees.

Taxing land, monopolies, money (through demurrage rather than inflation) and adding all of those funds to BI would make a lot more sense. Think Norway Sovereign Fund or the Alaska Fund.

[jes5199]

While I agree with you that rent-seekers have more concentrated wealth than us merely overpaid people, I don't know how to voluntarily separate those people from their money.

[devdas]

Tax wealth and capital rather than income. You want to tax gain in capital rather than direct income (just reverse the capital gains and income tax rates, and gains are realised when stock prices go up, rather than when you sell if your stock values are above a certain small number).

[JoeAltmaier]

Sounds like 'vat' or something. Very European.

Tax codes don't make sense, because they get diddled every year to meet some Senator's (Lobbyist's) pet purpose. Stir and bake for 100 years, and we have the baroque mess we're in.

As somebody famous said, taxation is the art of 'getting the most feathers from the goose, with the least squawking'. Noting in there about making sense or being fair.

Taxing wealth is similar to the old idea of the property tax, used 100's of years ago to encourage working idle lands in the hands of useless absentee-landlord lords and ladies. Worked pretty good. Maybe its time to do the same for bank accounts, investments etc.

[TaulantRamabaja]

Land and money are most likely more efficiently taxable than almost anything else. Land doesn't move and property rights toward land are anyway only virtual claims within some sort of state ledger/database. Money as we know it exists only exclusively in the banking system which ultimately depends on central banking and centralized databases which can be taxed through demurrage. Demurrage has strong theoretical and practical support (1). So does Land value tax (2). Both have very positive anti-inflationary second order effects.

Other monopolies which can easily be taxed are natural resource extraction businesses.

Taxing modern monopolies such as Facebook or IP/Patent based businesses is a lot more tricky.

However, once you tax money, land, and monopolies, there is no sense in VAT, income tax, corporate tax or any of the other net-negative taxes. Minimum wage, to some extend even pregnancy leave would become obsolete. Laws protecting workers from getting fired could become more lose. This combined with some sort of UBI would extremely streamline the entire state apparatus and cut out the potential for power grabs by politicians. It would make business a lot more dynamic.

This scheme would also make business formation and entrepreneurship incredibly easy. Imagine 3 guys who have this great idea but can't just barricade themselves in a basement and built a product atm, with UBI they can. Once they have an actual company going they have easier access to capital because large capital holders have pressure to put it back into the economy and hold stocks rather than cash or land/property. Due to UBI more people have cash to actually buy their widget. The 3 founders could hire a lot easier because people can easily switch employers without the fear of red tape such as losing healthcare or some other nonsense. Hiring freelancers/consultants to help should also be a lot easier because there is going to be plenty of people out there who do it just for the projects and who don't have the pressure to get the next gig. Firing people would be easy because of the presumably easier employment laws. You might even be more competitive in the global marketplace because you just got rid of almost all taxes for the startup. You might only have to pay capital gains taxes on your stock gains, but you got a lot faster to that point without ANY risk. That's pretty much the wet dream of any VC, fast generation of companies, fast traction, access to further capital, easy hiring, super fast closure and multiples. Then the cycle begins again.

(1) http://www.lietaer.com/2010/03/the-worgl-experiment/ (2) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_value_tax

[incomethax]

This is basically supplemental insurance (think Aflac) - the caveat with those insurance companies is that their incentive is to not pay anything out unless a very specific set of circumstances is met.

[growupkids]

I like this idea, it certainly makes it fair. If you support the idea, you pay for it. I suspect this would likely fail though, if you didn't have some disincentive for withdrawals then it only takes a tipping point of free loaders to bankrupt the system.

Still, I love the idea of making it's voluntary. It certainly would allow the BI proponents to put their money where the mouth is. I suspect what makes BI unlikely to succeed is when it's proposed as mandatory wealth redistribution, since it's never as far as I know been done successfully and the consequences of failure are potentially massive, the risks would seem to outweigh the hypothetical rewards.

Would a voluntary pay in system, you could prove it works or doesn't work without forcing anyone else to take the risk. I wonder if a local community could do this for it's residents?