By bipartisan support, I mean that if you want to get a basic income to appeal to people on the right you can appeal to existing branding. FairTax is just a basic income with a smaller stipend. Brand it that way. When you co-brand it with the ability to gut a lot of existing federal programs so that they can be reformed without inducing panic that will also garner support.
Consumption tax paired with a BI would significantly raise the offset at which it starts to affect people.
Things that hurt the middle class much worse than a consumption tax are an income tax that is a percentage and continually increases in that percentage until the percentage caps at the point that most people would call "incredibly wealthy" (IMO).
The perk to something like a Fair Tax is that it's also an economic solution to illegal immigration. If you're in the country, you're paying taxes. If you're legal, you're getting the BI/stipend. If you're illegal you are basically paying to be here. It guts a big portion of the cost argument.
A FairTax + Basic Income hybrid solution could solve a vast majority of hotly debated issues in this country.
"if you want to get a basic income to appeal to people on the right you"
Basic income is a conservative proposal (now gaining support among us liberals). My trog relatives are pimping the idea to me, a screaming pinko socialist hippie.
The conservation appeal, rationalization of BI is fairness. It lifts the floor for everyone, doesn't reward cheating, doesn't thwart personal initiative, etc. Being easier to admin is a bonus.
Uh, what? In general conservatives consider basic income as welfare/wealth redistribution and hate the very notion of it. Just because some of your conservative relatives like it doesn't make it a conservative thing, it's very much a liberal policy, not a conservative one.
"The idea isn’t new. As Frum notes, Friederich Hayek endorsed it. In 1962, the libertarian economist Milton Friedman advocated a minimum guaranteed income via a “negative income tax.” In 1967, Martin Luther King Jr. said, “The solution to poverty is to abolish it directly by a now widely discussed measure: the guaranteed income.” Richard Nixon unsuccessfully tried to pass a version of Friedman’s plan a few years later, and his Democratic opponent in the 1972 presidential election, George McGovern, also suggested a guaranteed annual income."
Just because a prominent conservative supported the idea doesn't make it a conservative ideal. If you were to poll conservatives on the idea of basic income you will not find wide support for it, you'll hear it called welfare and income redistribution. What the conservative party is now bears little resemblance to what it was in the 60's and a negative income tax is not the same thing as a basic income anyway. You've confused support for an idea among intellectuals for support for the idea of the party. The conservative party in no way supports the notion of a basic income, it is opposed to their very core of what the party is today.
Lincoln for example was a republican, but by today's standards he's a liberal. Basic income is a liberal policy in today's world, not a conservative one by any means. It is very much a liberal policy.
> A FairTax + Basic Income hybrid solution could solve a vast majority of hotly debated issues in this country.
Completely aside from the other response, this point is just...wrong. The vast majority of hotly debated issues in this country are not hotly debated because people share a concern but are divided on the best way to address it, such that there is some policy solution that exists which could "solve" the issue. They are hotly debated because people disagree on the first principles of what goals we should seek, not the mechanics of how to address them.
As well as the obvious culture-war issues where this is the case, this is true of much of the immigration debate, many economic debates (where fundamentally clashing ideas of what constitutes "fairness" that should be sought exist), and so on.
> By bipartisan support, I mean that if you want to get a basic income to appeal to people on the right you can appeal to existing branding. FairTax is just a basic income with a smaller stipend. Brand it that way. When you co-brand it with the ability to gut a lot of existing federal programs so that they can be reformed without inducing panic that will also garner support.
That's not rebranding basic income to appeal to people on the right. That's rebranding "FairTax", a right-wing proposal, with fairly niche support on the right, despite a small group spending lots of effort trying to promote it, as basic income. Presumably, to gain some support on the left for FairTax. But Basic Income is also a fairly niche idea, and the people that do support it tend to have a fairly specific idea of the features they support and why, and not just be attached to the BI brand, so rebranding FairTax as BI probably won't get you support from left-wing UBI fans, for whom the tie to a progressive income tax is pretty central to their support (though there's probably some on the left who support UBI who would prefer moving to a Georgist Land Value Tax.)
There's nothing there getting you bipartisan support.
> Things that hurt the middle class much worse than a consumption tax are an income tax that is a percentage and continually increases in that percentage until the percentage caps at the point that most people would call "incredibly wealthy" (IMO).
How does that hurt the middle class? (And, incidentally, are we using middle class in the common modern media sense of middle income workers or are we using it in the classical sense of the petit bourgeoisie? Because it makes a pretty big difference in evaluating claims about what hurts them, and to how important that is -- how it affects the latter will, of course, vary from person to person.)
> The perk to something like a Fair Tax is that it's also an economic solution to illegal immigration.
No, its not. (OTOH, the 2001 and 2009 recessions, and the poor distribution of the gains between and after them, was an economic solution to illegal immigration. But a solution worse than the problem...)
> If you're in the country, you're paying taxes.
True without the hilariously misnamed "FairTax".
> If you're legal, you're getting the BI/stipend.
Without the "FairTax", if you can establish that you are legally present (and, for some of these, legally eligible to work, which aren't the same thing) you have access to a variety of public benefits, perks, and, well, the right to work that aren't available if you can't establish that.
Consumption tax paired with a BI would significantly raise the offset at which it starts to affect people.
Things that hurt the middle class much worse than a consumption tax are an income tax that is a percentage and continually increases in that percentage until the percentage caps at the point that most people would call "incredibly wealthy" (IMO).
The perk to something like a Fair Tax is that it's also an economic solution to illegal immigration. If you're in the country, you're paying taxes. If you're legal, you're getting the BI/stipend. If you're illegal you are basically paying to be here. It guts a big portion of the cost argument.
A FairTax + Basic Income hybrid solution could solve a vast majority of hotly debated issues in this country.