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As Republicans in power work to create a strong, affirmative agenda, they would do well to revisit a policy proposal devised by the late Milton Friedman.
Liberals tend to dismiss Friedman, a Nobel Prize-winning economist, as an extremist libertarian and an enemy of any kind of social help. This was always an absurd charge.
In his 1962 book "Capitalism and Freedom," Friedman acknowledged that some form of welfare was necessary in capitalist societies; the trick was to improve it.
What kind of program could help protect every citizen from destitution without granting excessive power to bureaucrats, creating disincentives to work and clogging up the free-market economy, as the modern welfare state had done? Friedman's answer was the negative income tax, or NIT.
The NIT is easy to describe. "The basic idea," Friedman wrote in a 1968 Newsweek column, "is to use the mechanism by which we now collect tax revenue from people with incomes above some minimum level to provide financial assistance to people with incomes below that level."
I will consider this idea as an adjunct to my proposed All Income from All Sources income tax that only collects from above the 90th percentile. Some of that income could be used to replace our absurd social welfare systems with simple cash payments sufficient to provide food and shelter for the indigent including the previously employed social services employees.
Business work very hard, and frequently illegally using monopoly and collusion, to redistribute wealth from the producers to the investors and a system like this would take some of that wealth and redistribute it for another run around the cycle.
If this were to replace ALL current social welfare programs (medicare, social security, food stamps, unemployment, etc.) then I might be willing to get on board.
And GregW - please give it a rest. Not all of us want to drive the top 10% of incomes (the people who create businesses and jobs for us regular people) out of the country through taxation. ok?
Not quite. Actually, if you have little to no income, your credit isn't going to be as large as it could be. One of the biggest instances of fraud is people overstating their self-employment income to maximize the amount of the EITC.
Also, you get a better credit if you have 2 or more kids. (Two, three, six, doesn't matter, credit for EITC doesn't change any.) Because you have a higher threshold for earnings.
What makes you think that any of the top 10% that left would be allowed to keep their US citicizenship?
How un-American are you? You want to revoke the citizenship of people because they were successful? Take some pride in your country, and have some respect for fellow citizens.
Ridiculous. I'm sorry, it's just an absurd idea. Let's have NO income tax and have only a sales tax. That way the more you spend, the more you are taxed. That's the only way the rich can be taxed. And that's also why it won't happen.
I will consider this idea as an adjunct to my proposed All Income from All Sources income tax that only collects from above the 90th percentile. Some of that income could be used to replace our absurd social welfare systems with simple cash payments sufficient to provide food and shelter for the indigent including the previously employed social services employees.
Business work very hard, and frequently illegally using monopoly and collusion, to redistribute wealth from the producers to the investors and a system like this would take some of that wealth and redistribute it for another run around the cycle.
Link????
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