I personally like the way that Obsidian and Typora hide the styling: when you get to where it would be, it shows up on screen to show you it's there causing the styling. When your typing indicator moves away from it, it hides it. Some don't like it because it can cause some displacement of text a bit because it's now showing characters it didn't before.
I found Obsidian’s way of doing it to be a bit jarring at first but now that I’ve used it for awhile I personally quite like it. Just takes a little while of getting used to
You could probably do this in a way that doesn't trigger text reflow if a popover appeared with the visible syntax exactly positioned such that the extra syntax slightly obscured surrounding text. It's a tradeoff but I think that might be slicker.
Not a user of either of those but that sounds an awful lot like "Reveal Codes" from WordPerfect which saved my ass more than once when formatting got screwed up in a document.
There was a podcast or video about this exact same issue in... Sweden? Some anecdata from people receiving welfare, but couldn't start a job or a business because if they received any money, they get nothing from welfare and wouldn't be able to support themselves.
This resulted in people that were trying to start a business not get paid for their work (I believe one of the anecdata was a photographer) because doing so would mean they couldn't support themselves.
Personally, I'm a big fan of the "for every $2 you make, you get $1 less from UBI/Welfare" concept. This seems a very easy way to wean people off of welfare. That money is already tracked by the IRS (unless you're getting paid under the table).
> Personally, I'm a big fan of the "for every $2 you make, you get $1 less from UBI/Welfare" concept. This seems a very easy way to wean people off of welfare. That money is already tracked by the IRS (unless you're getting paid under the table).
That's a more gradual phase-out, but it still is an effective marginal tax rate of 50%+ – a level that wealthy earners would complain about to no end.
In light of this study, it seems to me that a cash-support system that wants to encourage work should have a starting region with a negative effective phase-out rate: "for every $1 you make up to $X, you get $0.25 more from UBI/Welfare." That would encourage labour-market attachment even if tenuous, and it would also have a side benefit of making the worker want to report the income, possibly uncovering under-the-table payment schemes.
> a negative effective phase-out rate: "for every $1 you make up to $X, you get $0.25 more from UBI/Welfare."
The main problem with this is that the tax system is set up to prevent you from under-reporting your income. Over-reporting it is essentially trivial, e.g. two people who are in the relevant income range exchange favors (do each others' laundry etc.), or claim to have, and then actually report the transactions as income and get the credit.
But there's something else you can do here which is really neat. Stop using a complicated progressive rate structure, and instead eliminate the phase out entirely. Now instead of low income people having a nominal 0% tax rate but an effective 50% benefits phase out rate and high income people having a nominal 30% tax rate, you just use a flat 35% tax rate which implicitly has the benefits phase out built into the tax system. Which means you don't need any of this income reporting or annual tax returns or anything of the kind, the employer/seller just withholds the fixed tax rate and you're done, and everybody unconditionally gets the UBI to provide the effect of a progressive rate structure.
> Over-reporting it is essentially trivial, e.g. two people who are in the relevant income range exchange favors (do each others' laundry etc.), or claim to have, and then actually report the transactions as income and get the credit.
True, but this is less of a problem if the credit rate is comparable to the payroll tax rate. In that case, a worker who over-reports their income will create an obvious payroll-tax debt in the hands of the notional employer.
> Stop using a complicated progressive rate structure, and instead eliminate the phase out entirely.
From a welfare-cliff perspective, that's a fine idea. However, per the article here, the unconditional cash transfer seemed to lead to reduced labour income. That's an obviously worrisome sign, suggesting that integrated welfare system might need an even stronger pro-wage bias.
> True, but this is less of a problem if the credit rate is comparable to the payroll tax rate. In that case, a worker who over-reports their income will create an obvious payroll-tax debt in the hands of the notional employer.
But that's just an accounting sham to claim you're taxing them less than you are and you no longer actually have a negative marginal tax rate.
> However, per the article here, the unconditional cash transfer seemed to lead to reduced labour income. That's an obviously worrisome sign
Well that's mainly because they worked 1.3 fewer hours a week and were less desperate to take a low-quality job.
You might also notice that the effect you're referring to isn't net of the payments, and is also probably invalidated by the period the study was done -- it started during COVID. Between the first and last year of the study, the household income for the control group increased by $20,000 -- on a $30,000 base! The experiment group increased by almost as much before the payments and were ahead by more than $6000/year including them.
In any event, you don't have to use a different rate structure to do what you suggest, you get the same effect without the complexity by increasing the flat tax rate and adding the money to the UBI.
Suppose Alice makes $100,000 and Bob makes $20,000.
In a system that taxes at 5% up to $50,000 and 30% thereafter, the state gets a total of $18,500 from Alice and Bob.
In a system that taxes at 5% up to $50,000 and 40% thereafter, the state gets $23,500 from Alice and Bob.
In a system that taxes everyone uniformly at 25%, the state gets $30,000 from Alice and Bob. This is not a smaller number and 5/6ths of it is from Alice. In fact, you can use that money to give them each a $12,000 UBI, leaving Bob with an effective tax rate of -35%, delete all of the transfer programs that obsoletes and still have some left over for transit and uniforms.
You don't need it, it's already built in. The flat tax rate needed to serve as the implicit benefits phase out is already in the range as what you'd use in the high tax brackets in a progressive tax system with separate benefits phase outs.
If you want it to be more progressive you raise the flat tax rate and use the money to increase the UBI. If you want a less progressive system with lower taxes you do the opposite. Making it needlessly more complicated gains you nothing and costs you efficiency.
> In light of this study, it seems to me that a cash-support system that wants to encourage work should have a starting region with a negative effective phase-out rate: "for every $1 you make up to $X, you get $0.25 more from UBI/Welfare." That would encourage labour-market attachment even if tenuous, and it would also have a side benefit of making the worker want to report the income, possibly uncovering under-the-table payment schemes.
Nobody tell this guy about the Earned Income Tax Credit. Let him think he discovered it.
> Nobody tell this guy about the Earned Income Tax Credit. Let him think he discovered it.
I know about the EITC, but the ETIC net of benefit clawbacks still presents a high marginal rate. Then the EITC itself gets clawed back at its own threshold, imposing a small region of high marginal rates. (The EITC itself is also rather paltry for filers without children.)
Additionally, the US tax system is ill-structured to really implement this. If you're trying to operate on the "under-the-table cash payments for day labour" margin, a system that depends on filing one's taxes to receive a refund later is not exactly hassle-free.
The EITC isn't as complicated as the child tax credit; that one is not refundable so you end up trying to calculate a way to get enough tax to get it fully.
> That's a more gradual phase-out, but it still is an effective marginal tax rate of 50%+ – a level that wealthy earners would complain about to no end.
Yeah, my wording could have been better. The suggestion that I've seen for UBI is $12k/year (which is clearly not enough to live on in today's economy), with the $2:$1 reduction being only for the UBI, and then standard taxes starting after that.
This system was actually proposed a looong time ago (like 1970s, I think). Just by giving everyone a massive tax credit to start with.
It is a free gift, because you keep receiving it even if you dont make money next year.
And that's right, its not meant to pay for people who can pay their way themselves, just like in most income redistribution schemes the rich would be taxed at several (thousand?) multiples of the value they receive back.
In the current regime, the rich gain far more benefits from taxes (they pay little, and get to offload much of their cost of society to the rest of us) than in a UBI approach. That's the point.
1. Why are assuming that UBI would be paid for by individual income taxes?
2. Yes, no matter what, the richest people are going to receive so little benefit relative to their wealth/income that they won't support it. The same is true for most public services, actually. The ultra-wealthy receive little-to-no direct benefit from Social Security, Medicare, food stamps, public transportation, public schools (big one), public universities, or even public police and firefighters (they can afford their own). But somehow they haven't (yet) managed to rid themselves of these horrible violations of their privilege.
The sum total of the wealth of all the billionaires in the US in 2021 was ~$4.1 Trillion [0]. That's about the same as the government budget in a normal year pre-pandemic, or about 2/3 of the government budget post-pandemic.
Assuming a $1000/month and a population of ~350 million, you're looking at $4.2 Trillion per year. You could almost fund it for the first year by taxing all of the wealth of the billionaires at 100%.
But what are you going to do the second year? That's total wealth, not yearly income.
The stocks would actually crash if converted to money. The net effect wouldn't be more cash to spend, but a stake in the economy. You would probably have to invent some more democratic formats of corporate governance.
Stocks are converted to money with every trade. Every buy has a matching sell. That's something that happens trillions of times a day and stocks aren't crashing because of it. I'm not sure I'm following.
I think the hypothetical here is if you tried to fund UBI via a billionaire-wealth-tax, it would involve liquidating basically all stock they hold. If you sell that much stock, the price will go down. (It's the opposite side of the coin compared to why you can't do a hostile takeover at market cap by just buying stock - the price goes way up as you buy up all available shares).
There's several second and nth-order effects that seem crucial to our understanding.
Every seller has a buyer. Who would be buying these liquidated stocks?
What would the estimated new equilibrium be? What would be the effects of this equilibrium compared to the current state? Can we estimate the pros and cons?
Conversely, holding the belief that stock prices are crucial to our betterment, wouldn't that imply that we would be better off if stock prices were higher due to more wealthy people owning stock and fewer non-wealthy people owning stocks? At face value that doesn't sound right, so I must be getting something wrong.
> Conversely, holding the belief that stock prices are crucial to our betterment, wouldn't that imply that we would be better off if stock prices were higher due to more wealthy people owning stock and fewer non-wealthy people owning stocks? At face value that doesn't sound right, so I must be getting something wrong.
The driving factor there isn't who owns it, but how rapidly it's being sold. The exact same situation would occur if the stock was already owned by everyone equally, and they were all forced to sell due to a wealth tax on everyone - the price would crater.
just curious, but why is there always an implicit assumption in this debate that we only tax the wealth of billionaires? is the money of a half billionaire somehow less green than a full billionaire?
Keep going until you're taxing everyone that makes over $80K/year or so, and you pretty much have it being balanced.
I never understood the UBI argument. 30 seconds of napkin math would show you how insane the proposal is, even at the rate of $1000/month. If you want to increase welfare for those below the median income, fine, let's have that discussion. Don't play games with the word 'universal'
The premise of it being universal is that it doesn't have an explicit phase out and instead it's implicit in the tax system. Obviously someone making six figures is not going to be a net recipient, but they would still have the money deposited into their account. The amount would just be smaller than the amount they're paying in taxes.
The advantage of doing it this way is that it makes it clear what's going on. Right now we nominally impose low marginal tax rates on the poor but their effective marginal tax rates are high because of benefits phase outs, so their effective marginal tax rates are higher than the wealthy. With a UBI you replace the benefits with cash payments and eliminate the phase outs, but also flatten the tax rates so the poor are paying the same effective marginal rates as the rich, instead of higher ones.
The result would be that the poor pay slightly lower effective marginal rates and the rich pay slightly higher ones (although you don't even inherently have to do that; it depends entirely on the tax rate and the amount of the UBI), but the overall system is much simpler. And the consequence that the poor are paying higher effective marginal rates than the rich, which was presumably never intended, goes away.
Right! It also lets you eliminate the means testing part of the system that makes people jump through humiliating hoops to show that they’re poor enough to need a handout, punishes people who are working too much by taking away their benefits, etc.
You'd adjust marginal rates so the poor would (net) benefit, the middle class would about break even, and the rich would pay more. Napkin math on that isn't that bad, especially if you chop a bunch of other welfare payments (and the associated expensive means-testing and administration).
No one serious is suggesting "everyone gets $1000/month and literally nothing else changes".
Which welfare plans are you cutting? Social Security? Nope, because the average payout is 50% higher than $1000/m. Same with SSI/disability. You certainly couldn't replace any of the medical plans (Medicaid/Medicare) with anywhere near that amount.
The welfare plans that might be subject to being replaced only amount to a few percent of the federal budget. The bulk of the budget is those plans above, which would result in less benefits if replaced. You're not paying for this by finding lost coins in the couch cushions.
Yeah, as I said in my comment, the primary way to pay for it is to adjust marginal rates so that it's (mostly) a transfer from rich to poor. If you're rich, you'll get a $1k UBI and also pay $2k more in taxes (or $4k, or whatever). Probably for those at the median income it would be roughly neutral - but with the benefit that if you ever lose your job, or want to leave an abusive marriage, or want to try starting a business, you still have that $1k coming in.
Medicaid and Medicare being wholly replaced by a truly universal plan unrelated to UBI is probably a prerequisite for a UBI for a bunch of reasons. Social security would probably be unaffected, at least initially, and SSI/disability would likely either be reduced or gradually phased out, depending on the amounts.
I know the other various benefits aren't huge in the budget, but they add significant bureaucratic burden to both the state and the individual. Eliminating that would be a big benefit of UBI.
I don't think that's the case. Instead, it's just that the "let's tax the rich people more!!" idea is ill-founded to begin with, and the easiest way to show that is to point out that if instead of just taking some percentage more, you took everything they have, it still wouldn't solve the problem, not by a longshot.
Choosing some arbitrarily small segment of the population and saying "See, they don't have enough money to fund this program" is not the steelman you seem to think it is. Instead, try discussing something serious, like a plausible adjustment to the progressive tax system.
Nah, if someone puts forth an argument that is fundamentally flawed, it's neither wrong to point it out nor on me to do their thinking for them.
That said, if we want to talk taxes, I think a progressive tax system is nearly always wrong, immoral, and unfair, so you probably would disagree with any adjustments I'd suggest. :)
For new and expensive schemes it is often a challenge to figure out who will be paying for it. The proponents typically don't want to say for the obvious reason - the people paying for a universal service will probably be worse off than if they weren't so it isn't helpful to identify them (they'll just add to the resistance). But that means it is awkward to attack an idea on cost because detractors don't propose the scheme and are often dealing with people unwilling to suggest realistic costs or tax schemes. People with technically excellent arguments have to be a bit oblique in pointing out that someone has to pay and it'd speed the debate along for someone to figure out who. For a UBI, we might suspect it isn't going to be billionaires.
The fair way would be if sentences had to pattern match "I think [scheme] is a good idea and we will pay for it by [specific tax proposal].". Seems unlikely in practice though.
It's not about means-testing, it's about setting income tax rates/brackets sanely so that it gets taxed back in an appropriate way and not in a way that prevents people from picking up work, etc.
The reason UBI exists as an idea is that means-tested programs are inherently politically vulnerable. Another name for means-tested benefits would be "benefits ear-marked for the politically powerless".
Everyone making less than 138% of the federal poverty level (FPL) qualifies for free healthcare. I dont think most people would say that the USA has universal healthcare.
The same is true here. If you make $0, you get $12K UBI. If you make $24K, you get $0 UBI. Is that universal?
Assuming there's no other income tax on the first $24K you make, it's a bit aggressive but it's still a valid form of UBI and an improvement on the status quo.
This particular method is mathematically equivalent to both of them. There's no actual difference between "You get full UBI and you pay income tax on other income" and "You get X cents less UBI per dollar of other income".
The system could be as simple as "UBI, also income tax is 50%, end of description".
> The question isn't about mathematics, it's about psychology and politics.
That's valid, but when someone's roughly describing a plan I'll give them the benefit of the doubt and worry about whether it can be framed the correct way rather than whether they framed it right.
> In the second scenario, when do I get/spend my UBI money?
I don't know, every two weeks? So it's the difference between a $460 UBI check and a $400 paycheck, versus a $60 UBI check and an $800 paycheck.
I wasn't describing anything. A negative income tax is approximately what the guy I replied to was describing. It obviously wasn't a perfect description, but I didn't think my label of the description in his comment would be taken so literally. If you'd care to describe why you believe this isn't an approximation of the outcome of a negative income tax, then feel free to explain.
because in the scheme described the effective tax on your income is positive (the more you earn, the more is transferred away) as opposed to negative (the more you earn the more is transferred to you).
What you are describing might intuitively sound like what a negative income tax should mean, had you never heard of a negative income tax before, but that is not what a negative income tax is. A negative income tax, which is a name for a type of benefit system, does not mean that people are literally negatively taxed, regardless of their income.
A negative income tax increases your total benefits as you earn more (up to a point), the system that was being described is one where total benefits are decreased as you earn more.
Benefits do not increase with income in a negative income tax system. I'm not sure where you got that idea from. The point of a negative income tax system is to allow total income, from the combination of work and benefits, to increase as work income increases, preventing the incentive to not work due to benefits exceeding or only matching potential work income due to a hard income cutoff for qualifying for a non-dynamic amount of benefits. In this way, as work income increases in a negative income tax system, the benefits will incrementally decrease, until the individual meets the level where they become a net payer, not receiver, but those that are net payers will not have a total income less than any of those that are net receivers.
In the system that was described it would take two units of income to decrease one unit of benefits, allowing total income to increase with an increase in levels of work income, while not having a hard cutoff for benefits. This is an approximation of what would occur in a negative income tax system and it would not result in a net decrease in earnings considering it takes twice the earnings units to lower one unit of benefits.
> Personally, I'm a big fan of the "for every $2 you make, you get $1 less from UBI/Welfare" concept. This seems a very easy way to wean people off of welfare. That money is already tracked by the IRS (unless you're getting paid under the table).
Just subsidize the minimum wage. It's dead simple. Raise the minimum wage by $x but have that extra $x be paid from taxes, not the employer. Big businesses will scream "But inflation! But wage-price spiral!". Their screams are to be ignored.
Depends on what you're comparing it to. This thread is about unconditional cash. Giving everyone $1000 a month, unconditionally, is clearly many times more expensive than subsidizing the minimum wage by $1 an hour - it's rather difficult to work 1000 hours when a month has ~730 hours!
The "investment" (assuming that's what you mean by the math) can be as high or as low as any other proposal, there's nothing special about it. You can adjust the $/hr that you subsidize and the size of the group that is eligible to fit the proposed investment.
The difference is that money was created then for that purpose. In an ideal universal basic income, the money comes from taxes; not just printed on the spot. This to my (probably base and naive understanding of economics) would not result inflation, because it would be a re-circulation/flow of tax money, rather than injecting new money to the economy.
Ding ding ding. We have a winner. It also really matters which people get the money. For example: we printed gazillions of dollars after the 2008 financial crisis, but "inflation" was super low that whole time. What happened? We gave that money to banks and owners of financial assets, so the stuff that they buy more than others was what got inflated aka houses and startup equity (yes, your startup equity!) and the stock market and yachts and stuff. In 2020 we gave a bunch of money either directly to every individual or to their bosses to give to them, so a different set of things got inflated. What do wage workers buy more of with their money? Groceries et al. Home rental prices are through the roof, but home purchase prices are not. My guess is we see home price deflation (or at least lower-than-otherwise inflation) unless interest rates start getting cut again, which they will probably do because the people that get to influence and make that decision all benefit financially or politically from cutting those rates, but I digress.
So my (old, bachelors) degree in econ gives me a story that makes sense, but surely a more recent or grad-level or professional economist can probably point out all the ways I'm deluded. One of my physics teachers once told me that every year they start by telling you that everything you learned last year is a gross oversimplification and now they're going to teach you the way it "really" works.
Because of critical mass. A significant amount of non-technically inclined people use Windows. Some use Mac. And they're intimidated by anything different.
There's a bunch of non-web proprietary software medical offices use to access patient files, result histories, prescription dispensation etc. At least here in Ontario my doctor uses an actual windows application to accomplish all that.
Then they use those apps. The point is that since they usage of the OS as such is so minimal as to be irrelevant as long as it has a launcher and an X in the top corner.
> Then there's Adobe. The subscription prices are pretty outrageous. No warning. Hard to cancel. Easy to get a recurring charge. Adobe, like many companies, seems to have decided that whatever the sticker price was for the standalone software, charge that every year in a subscription.
I believe the pending lawsuit against Adobe is because if you cancel your subscription early for a "pay monthly yearly subscription", you have to pay 50% of your remaining subscription balance.
Eventually we'll have AI going through youtube videos and cutting out the ads for us before we watch them. This isn't a war that youtube can win. People who don't want to see ads won't. For me right now, that means I won't be watching youtube.
Otherwise you could probably fingerprint ad spots and submit them into a shared database. Like musicbrainz. For dynamic blocking of static content. Acoustic ID is probably enough and it would work with podcasts too!
I hate ads so much, I would totally volunteer to make this my hobby.
You'd probably throw some AI bullshit at this problem, in a race to the bottom. My hope would be for any "content creator" worth watching to be displeased with extremely low effort crap painted all over their production, so they ultimately get the message.
Advertisement simply sucks and is offensive. There is nothing to respect about any of it. People will always find ways around.
