Tag: VAT
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What is the belief you hold that is most likely to be wrong?
Another way of putting this question is: how does your ideology and social setting blind you? One way to answer is to look at those beliefs that you have the most incentive to deceive yourself about. What are your biases? For instance, I’m probably not as smart or as caring as I think I am, because…
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Another Badly-Aimed Attack on the Basic Income Guarantee from Crooked Timber
John Quiggin has been taking up the case against the basic income guarantee at Crooked Timber recently. See here and here. Unfortunately, he is attacking a weak man version of the policy. It doesn’t look like he actually opposes the BIG, in theory, but his objections all appear to demonstrate that a Basic Income is…
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Cap and Dividend
Scu pointed me to this discussion of a Cap and Trade dividend. One issue, which would also apply to a carbon tax + dividend: this would hit exports but miss imports. Contrast that with a plain-old VAT, which hits imports but is refunded on export. This would make our goods less competitive, while encouraging us to…
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Does Basic Income + VAT “Solve” Immigration?
One of my favorite liberal policies is the basic income proposal. The idea is that all citizens have a basic guaranteed income, below which no one may fall. As the argument goes, this supplies more flexibility than basic provision of essential services, and renders recipients much more autonomous than they currently are, since the government…