Quote:
Originally Posted by Harry Lime
Leondros, did you not post yourself the chart showing that the negative taxation effects those making above 200K/year? That is not the uber-rich, but certainly not the middle class as blankall suggests.
At a certain point the scale of money that we are talking about in terms of personal income becomes a number that is not being returned to the local economy by the people that are earning it.
Also, I would venture that if people making over 200K/year are working 75 hours per week, then they need to restructure their own life/work ratio to enjoy their own pre-retirement years. If there is a lack of incentive for people to work excessively, that is probably a good thing for the people themselves.
Also, I'd like to apologize to blankall, I did not mean you personally were saying that poor people were lazy, but rather generally that many times in this thread it was insinuated that 20K/year would cause a general malaise, which is a statement with no basis in reality. I can't imagine someone refusing to work because they can afford Netflix for free.
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I was simply trying to provide some visual examples for people who were having trouble seeing how UBI would impact taxable income and how that would flow out.
A lot of assumptions were made that I don't necessarily believe in including that a 15% flat taxation rate gets us even close to be able to fulfill the UBI dream. I believe a GST tax, massive cuts, and shifts to social programs would all be needed and then some. Not to mention the taxes at a corporate level that will make business in Canada very unattractive leading to lower GDP and even less of a tax base.
While I believe UBI to be a nice idea, I put it up there with ideas like immortality and AI taking over the world - possible, but probably not in my life time. Blankall put it correctly, what we need is some semblance of wealth distribution while at the same time correcting a lot of social issues that are all interconnected. For this to be as successful as some have be postulating, a lot of prerequisites need to happen first while at the same time the implementation can't be "make the rich pay for it". History has proven that doesn't exactly work.