Posts by BenWilson
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Polity: Home-spun non-truths, in reply to llew40,
But floating balloons that gives aggressive political opponents (and their proxies) opportunities to frame the debate negatively? I thought the idea was to float balloons that give you the opportunity to put your opposition on the back-foot.
I don’t know, this looks like a balloon loaded with candy. Is the Government not likely to shoot itself in the foot when it shoots the balloon down?
ETA: OK that was a bad mixed metaphor, since a bullet that shoots a balloon down is very unlikely to hit the shooter in the foot. Can I revise to "Is the Government not likely to get crushed by the ballon when it shoots it down"?
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Polity: Home-spun non-truths, in reply to Marc C,
It will not completely do away with a kind of “welfare system”
Absolutely not. The welfare needs of some people are way higher than others. But it could do away with some kinds of welfare specifically. Like the unemployment benefit and superannuation. Super basically is already a UBI, it's just an ageist version, and the unemployment benefit (or is "Jobseeker" now? I lose track) has much the same purpose as the UBI, albeit with a much higher level of humiliation and compliance delay added on.
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Polity: Home-spun non-truths, in reply to Rob Stowell,
Other jobs might decline in value – because they offer personal satisfaction at a rate that amply compensates.
I think that already has happened. Many professions are not as well paid as they were because people like being professionals more than they like cleaning toilets. Not just because of the pay, but also because of the work itself.
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Polity: Home-spun non-truths, in reply to Brent Jackson,
I also think that the top tax rate should never exceed 50% on principle.
It's hard to pick a number for this, it being rather arbitrary. 50% is a psychological magic number. Your other point is much more salient - that if the corporate rate stays at 30% then pretty much everyone would be better off working as a company. No one would want to be PAYE.
There's probably a way around that. Make corporate tax the same as personal, with all the same brackets? That would favor small companies over large, which isn't the worst thing in the world? Especially since large companies already fiddle tax around the world to essentially pay squat.
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Polity: Home-spun non-truths, in reply to Daniel Carr,
It's a start! It does look horrible to have all those tax rates jump, until you consider that the benefit offsets them so the actual cash in hand for many will go up. I guess you could model that with your numbers, so that we can sort of see the "effective tax change". but it's complicated by all the benefits that are replaced. Hard to model an "average" case in each tax bracket.
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Polity: Home-spun non-truths, in reply to JonathanM,
It would be useful if the problems that the UBI is meant to address were recognised as a starting point so that the UBI ‘hammer’ can be compared with other approaches.
I think it would be hard to enumerate them into a small list. It's a change in the way we even think about human value. Basically, it's seeing that people have the right to a small return from society no matter what. How can you really compare that in some one-to-one way? Currently no such assumption is made, but we recognize (if we believe in the welfare state at all) that people undergoing hardship due to poor financial circumstances should be assisted. The help is thus covered in caveats and hobbled with moral judgments, and can be withheld easily, and frequently is withheld.
How do you measure that? The change in attitudes towards people who are in poor circumstances, as no longer "beneficiaries" but rather "people on the smallest possible income". Their choice to work is not then nobbled by the brutal removal of any assistance, and the prospect of a stand-down if the work they get is precarious (as it usually is for people in such circumstances). Indeed, any paid work they choose to do is their business, they just have to pay their taxes like everyone else.
But yes, absolutely, if it were to go ahead many statistics would need to be kept, to evaluate how well the idea is doing. Which ones were you thinking of?
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Polity: Home-spun non-truths, in reply to Adam H,
I guess it’s partly because it eliminates the ability to moralise and penalise lifestyles. How could we target specific voter groups if you can’t differentiate…?
I think it's actually entirely about that. Because everyone can see given even one second, that it is possible to rejig all the taxation so that it's a cost neutral change.
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If Labour do actually make this their policy (given that it's not insane as Farrar asserts, and is coupled with other changes to make it affordable), I will actually vote Labour. This is a big enough issue, and a bold enough move, for me to decisively say that.
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Has anyone who was interested in this scandal not already heard it? I heard it like the day after it happened.
It wasn't very interesting. IIRC, the only fun bit was where both parties winked and nodded about what funny old fool Don Brash is.
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Speaker: The real problem with the ‘Kiwimeter’, in reply to Stephen Judd,
How can we make that clearer?
Maybe like this?
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