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Ted Cruz

7 (6.5%)

Rick Santorum

16 (14.8%)

Michelle Bachmann

13 (12%)

Chris Christie

23 (21.3%)

Rand Paul

49 (45.4%)

Total Members Voted: 107

[Descan]

Yeah, as soon as someone say "The Left seem to think..." or "The Right are all..." I just kind of go "Oh. You're that kind of person," and shift gears down a little. :v

[FearfulJesuit]

Point me where I said "All poor are saints."

What I'm saying is that "The aggregate of people know enough about what they need that they don't need to be hand-held by an expensive voucher system. What they need is the money to put into practice what they already know."

If you are *REALLY* worried about people wasting money like that, then funnel the money you would spend on the voucher system into child services, the foster system, and economic counseling. But don't say "Some of you aren't responsible so we're going to hold ALL of you by the short leash."

Hey, people can be as irresponsible as they want with their own BI checks. Now I'm not saying you can't introduce a bit of variety into your childrens' diet, or anything like that, but all children need milk, all children need basic fruits and vegetables, some form of protein, housing, books, etc. If you're cashing the entire financial value of your kids' vouchers- and these don't need to be strictly regimented, they can be more fluid, but they still split the money into different budget items, all of which are fairly essential parts of raising a kid- isn't that maybe a tip-off that hey, maybe something is up? Now that's not to say that that should be enough to get CPS called- because as you correctly point out it shouldn't be-, but maybe you'd call the kid's teacher, maybe you'd call the kid's doctor and see if there's enough to start piecing together. Or maybe you only let teachers or doctors put in spending review requests.

It's not a short leash, it's a long leash. It's a very long leash that covers most normal, well-intentioned spending by most people making rational decisions.

Moreover, is there really anything wrong with trying to implement some sort of social engineering with BI? For example, a very large proportion of lower-class households in America have video game consoles. I grew up in a fairly poor part of rural Virginia- all my classmates had them. A very small proportion of lower-class households have lots of child-appropriate books. It's such a widespread problem that it's structural as much as it is personal- but it is still an aggregate of millions of spending choices. Is giving people a $20/month book voucher for their children really that objectionable, when we know that it helps solve a huge problem, and when we know that just giving the equivalent amount as a check labeled "entertainment" will in many cases be spent on XBox games?

It's not as if I'm a right-wing lunatic. If I were a right-wing lunatic I'd be completely opposed to the idea of BI in any form. I'm asking perfectly normal questions that most voters are going to have if/when BI ever makes it to the polls, and if the only defense you have is "you're being problematic!", you're not going to like the reception the idea gets.

Except he really didn't. Like, didn't to such a degree that I can't imagine where you'd have gotten that idea from.

It was more a reaction to "the left seems to think the poor can do no wrong." It's a strawman.

I said that there's a strain on the left that seems to think that. I'm not saying that that's what everyone on the left thinks, or that The Left (whatever that's supposed to mean) enforces that as a matter of ideological purity, but I'm seeing echoes of the thought in this discussion.

[nenjin]

I still think it's a strawman. It's about as reasonable as saying "there's a strain on the right that wants to watch the entire world be engulfed in flames." Makes for great hyperbole, and an almost indefensible belief. Because I don't think there's honestly anyone sane on the left that thinks the poor can do no wrong. I think they're just unwilling to watch others tar the entirety of the poor with the same brush, so they will defend the poor (and many of their regrettable decisions) on principle.

[FearfulJesuit]

I still think it's a strawman. It's about as reasonable as saying "there's a strain on the right that wants to watch the entire world be engulfed in flames." Makes for great hyperbole, and an almost indefensible belief. Because I don't think there's honestly anyone sane on the left that thinks the poor can do no wrong. I think they're just unwilling to watch others tar the entirety of the poor with the same brush, so they will defend the poor (and many of their regrettable decisions) on principle.

That's fair, and I think my rhetoric may have been too reactionary.

However, there's a line between a decision that might merely not be the most bootstrappy in the universe, and buying meth with your child's welfare checks. A basic income can leave some room for the former, but it shouldn't leave room for the latter. Of course, only a small proportion of people will be doing the latter, but if we're arguing from a human rights perspective- doesn't the right of people to have stable home situations, so far as it can be guaranteed, outweigh some fuzzier, less clear right of their parents to be bad stewards of minors' resources without anyone checking up on them? (Because that's what you are when you have dependents, in this situation- you're managing their resources because they can't do it themselves, but you have a responsibility to them not to screw it up. It isn't really your money. Your BI check is your money, so go ahead and spend it at the strip club, I suppose, if you feel like that's the wisest use of it.)

And if the former right does outweigh the latter, then you will have some bureaucracy, even if it's just a computer program that cross-checks a kid's health and school attendance against how their BI check is spent when requested to by a doctor or teacher. You can't have everything. This is an economic issue, so some sort of trade-off has to be made.

(A more palatable proposal might be to send checks so long as a certain, favorable result is achieved, and voucherize only when necessary. Brazil's Bolsa Família is a good precedent here- it's a supplementary income program for the lower class that gets sent rain or shine so long as your kid is in school at least 85% of the time and gets a health checkup every year.)

[LordSlowpoke]

guys

what if we just

add a maximum wage

tax everything above the maximum and throw it into, well, shit that needs taxes

and i'm just going to throw it at this thread because it seems merica is the place needing it most

[Zanzetkuken The Great]

How about eliminate income tax altogether and replace it with a high sales tax on items that are not-necessities?

[Lord Shonus]

That's been proposed several times, and all studies show it to be a horrible idea that benefits only the very wealthy and hurts the middle and lower classes far more than any income tax.

[Zanzetkuken The Great]

That's been proposed several times, and all studies show it to be a horrible idea that benefits only the very wealthy and hurts the middle and lower classes far more than any income tax.

Can you explain how?

[MetalSlimeHunt]

That's been proposed several times, and all studies show it to be a horrible idea that benefits only the very wealthy and hurts the middle and lower classes far more than any income tax.

Can you explain how?

Non-income based taxes have an inherently regressive nature because gross purchasing power can overcome the proportional taxation on the good. It essentially sets up a system where the poor and middle class are allowed to subsist but all of the quality goods go to the wealthy. I'd rather not bring back serfdom.

[Zanzetkuken The Great]

That's been proposed several times, and all studies show it to be a horrible idea that benefits only the very wealthy and hurts the middle and lower classes far more than any income tax.

Can you explain how?

Non-income based taxes have an inherently regressive nature because gross purchasing power can overcome the proportional taxation on the good. It essentially sets up a system where the poor and middle class are allowed to subsist but all of the quality goods go to the wealthy. I'd rather not bring back serfdom.

What if you scale it by different price brackets, with the range of the brackets being modified depending on item type (ie. Lamborghinis have a higher tax rate than your standard Ford truck, but a similar rate to those $1000 clothing that celebrities buy)?

[Lord Shonus]

To put it more clearly, someone making $4,000,000 (who would be paying one or two million in income taxes at present) a year can afford paying an extra $30,000 on a new $300,000 yacht much more easily than a working class guy making $18,000 a year (under the current system, he would pay very little income tax) can afford to pay an extra $60 when he wants to buy a $600 TV. All a flat sales tax does is put life's little luxuries further out out of reach of the lower-income brackets while making it much easier for the already wealthy to afford them.

Even if you scale it, you're STILL hurting the middle and lower classes more than the rich. Taking our two examples, the rich man buying a Corvette isn't going to be hampered by even a %50 taxes much, but if the poorer man really wants one, he would be able to save enough under an income tax system for a down payment on one (probably used, but still a major purchase) over a period of several years, and probably manage to keep up the payments if the car is important enough to him to scrimp and save in other ways. Add another %50 to the cost, and it's out of reach completely.

[Descan]

Basically, unless you put a HUGE percentage tax on them, like upwards of 200%, then the additional tax on the rich persons purchase is still a smaller percentage of his income than the percentage of income that the additional tax on the poorer persons purchase takes. Even though the actual costs may be wildly different, the percentage of disposable cash that it takes up is very much in the rich persons favour.

For an example of this, there are rich men who say things like "I don't actually have that much money. Once you take into account the house, the car, and the boat, I maybe have 100,200k left over at the end of the year." Meanwhile, most people don't even *have* a boat, and would feel fairly lucky to be *making* 200k a year, let alone having that as "left-over" cash. Plus, the rich guys car and house are much better than those peoples.

So he views "100k" as chump change, where-as the poorer person views 100k as "yearly income if I'm lucky."

[MetalSlimeHunt]

Further, even if you do create a system in which certain goods are given such an absurdly high bracket of taxation (we're talking >1000% at this point) that the rich are paying proportionally for them, you have also essentially labeled them Rich People Only, thus strongly reinforcing the class structure.

[Bauglir]

Yeah, you literally need to tie taxation directly to income in some way in order to make this work in a way that doesn't ultimately screw over the poor in some fashion or another. Anyway, if you want to tax goods, it should be related to some objective quality of the good in question, and not with the "intended" audience, because that's a line of excessive meddling I don't think our culture can handle.

[Sergarr]

You can't change an economic structure of society with taxes... the only method which reliably works is increasing the efficiency of production.