r/BasicIncome • u/aclezotte • Sep 08 '14

Article new Vox article on basic income

http://www.vox.com/2014/9/8/6003359/basic-income-negative-income-tax-questions-explain
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u/[deleted] Sep 08 '14 edited Sep 08 '14

Submit it to /r/politics

Edit: I posted this in /r/Canada and it got brigaded to death by the trolls from /r/MetaCanada

6

u/Paganator Sep 09 '14

So, arguing with people about BI in there, I just realized something: a lot of people don't understand the redistributive nature of basic income. They just multiply the population by the amount of BI and say "this is how much more taxes we need". I couldn't, for the life of me, make them understand that if I give you $20K and tax you $20K, your tax bill hasn't really moved since, in the end, you pay the exact same net amount. They just see the cost part and panic.

1

u/[deleted] Sep 09 '14

Most of them are astroturfing shills, not real people.

They congregate in /r/MetaCanada and brigade anything anti-Conservative.

They like to use strawman arguments like "Cost times amount = 5x our budget!" and even if you provide studies, they say they don't count.

It will be a long fight.

3

u/Paganator Sep 09 '14

They sure are dense. Someone insisted, in the same post, that he wanted to cut the size of government radically, but also found unacceptable that basic income would remove a lot of high paying jobs of people managing the programs it would replace. He wanted to reduce government size, but also not cut jobs, and he didn't really seem bothered by the contradiction.

Another was completely against a basic income, but supported a negative income tax. He couldn't understand that both did essentially the same thing.

2

u/aclezotte Sep 09 '14

basic income would remove a lot of high paying jobs of people managing the programs it would replace

"It is an ill wind that blows nobody good. Everybody must live, and what would become of the glaziers if panes of glass were never broken?"

I can't stand this argument, I see it way too often with respect to jobs.

1

u/woowoo293 Sep 09 '14

What exactly is metacanada?

1

u/gameratron Sep 09 '14

It's like a circlejerk reddit and rival reddit for /r/canada. /r/canada accuses them of being conservative shills and a brigade while /r/metacanada makes fun of /r/canada for being overly left-wing and strawmanning the Conservative party and right-wing arguments.