(May 14, 2014 at 8:30 pm)Heywood Wrote: 1. A negative income tax.I've seen this referred to as a 'diagonal tax.' Set a standard deduction and then a flat rate on all income past that amount, so that lower-income earners are taxed at a much lower rate. Perhaps apply a similar formula to businesses based on size or profitability? Find a way to make it more attractive to turn a larger percentage of profits into salary?
The universal income is interesting, though I can imagine it would be a logistical nightmare to manage. Just determining who is eligible (anyone 18 and over? More for families?) would take a long time and the apparatus needed to try to minimize waste and corruption might wind up as the prime source of waste and corruption. But at the same time, we may need to do something like this before long.
"Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape- like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered."
-Stephen Jay Gould
-Stephen Jay Gould
