RE: The alternative to the living wage.
May 14, 2014 at 9:54 pm
(This post was last modified: May 14, 2014 at 10:15 pm by Heywood.)
(May 14, 2014 at 9:47 pm)Lemonvariable72 Wrote: But in the mean time me and every working person has to pay for his lazy ass.
You're doing that now anyways....but you are also paying legions of government bureaucrats to administer a rag bag government programs to make sure pot smoking John doesn't starve(food stamps), or freeze(housing/heating assistance) to death, and that he can get a hold of his dealer 24-7(Obama phones).
Huge swaths of government, and the potential for abuse and corruption such swaths bring....can be eliminated.
(May 14, 2014 at 9:53 pm)Cthulhu Dreaming Wrote: So let's see a realistic example, as I asked for.
Such a wholesale change to tax code is going to incentivize a whole new set of behaviors and disincentivize a great many things that our current tax code incentivizes. Whether we agree on whether those incentives are positive or not, they nonetheless are what they are. Have you considered what impact your scheme ia going to have on the incomes of working families?
Under the examples of negative income tax I gave, a Husband and wife would have a minimum of $25,000 year income if neither earned any income (each gets $12500)....which is enough for a couple to comfortably live off in most of the country. They would not incur any positive tax liability until their combined income exceeded $50,000(remember each gets a $25,000 exemption). If their combine income reached $75000 their net after taxes would be $62500. The would be paying an effective tax rate of about 17%. Add a kid who gets his own exemption and their tax rate decreases even more.
To give you more specific examples requires me to write a tax code...which I am not prepared to do. I am simply trying to argue that wealth redistribution is better than the government monkeying with labor markets(where some will end up as winners and others as losers).