(03-01-2020 01:22 PM)Owl 69/70/75 Wrote:  I take a whole different approach to mine. I'll start with the tax side. I am proposing a 15% (7.5%/7.5%) SS tax with no wage cap, a 15% consumption tax, and a 15% flat tax on all business and investment income, with no individual income tax. That taxes wages and salaries, business and investment income, and consumption at a uniform rate of 15%, and produces enough revenues to:
1) balance the budget,
2) pay for Bismarck universal private health care, and
3) pay for a subsistence-level universal basic income (UBI) based on either a) Milton Friedman's Negative Income Tax (NIT), which I thought was the most sensible proposal I had ever heard of when I read CAPITIALISM AND FREEDOM in Econ 201 in 1968, or b) the Boortz-Linder prebate/prefund, which is basically the NIT adapted to a consumption tax environment.

The way the UBI works, everybody starts out with it--from the homeless person sleeping under I-69 to Bill and Melinda Gates. Then you pay taxes on income and consumption, which zeroes out the prebate/prefund effect at about the poverty upper limit, and you are in a net tax position thereafter.

I'll be honest that my knowledge of different tax policy options is ... basic at best. Do you have any good links that will explain NIT, Boortz-Linder, and your suggested consumption tax? I could google them, but I don't want to come up with links that explain things differently than you are proposing.

I'll admit that I am becoming more and more interested in some form of UBI (long before Andrew Yang). Coming from Alaska, we have a small UBI for state residents (permanent fund dividend), so I've already had exposure to some form of UBI since childhood. And at work I handled our social security disability appeals docket for almost 15 years. The sheer amount of administrative resources expended administering the program blows my mind (currently around $2.8 billion, but that probably undersells things since their are related costs that aren't reflected like Assistant U.S. Attorney's spending their time on appeals and private costs by plaintiff attorneys that are paid by beneficiaries in some circumstances). There are also around $143 billion in benefits paid.

I think it would make sense to get rid of social security disability in favor of a UBI if the finances could be worked out. Obviously the $146 billion from SSDI itself wouldn't be enough, but it is a start.