I don’t know how relevant this is now, but here’s a link to another post where I expressed my thoughts on what kind of pitfalls you might most likely face – https://lemmy.world/post/36867409
By the way, what is this phenomenon on Lemmy? Let’s say people are reluctant to read and comment on old posts published just a couple of days or a week ago, but with new ones, it’s a completely different story. What kind of psychology is this? Or it seemed to me?
That would effectively create a planned economy. In theory it could work. Unfortunately, the human element cripples it. How do you rank the value of doctors against cleaners? How do you rank bananas against bread? The core elements were tried with communism, and found to fall severely short.
What has been found, in Africa, with micro loans/grants is that people are a LOT more efficient at maximising value locally than a lot of applied rules. Giving them money (e.g. to start a business) is a lot more effective than giving them resources directly. It uses capitalism to optimise on the local scale.
One of the key things with UBI is letting people and businesses sort things out on the small scale. While capitalism has massive issues, it’s VERY good at sorting this sort of problem.
My personal preference would be a closed loop tax based system. Basically, a fixed percentage of money earned (e.g. 15%) is taxed on everyone. That is then distributed on a per capita basis. There would be a cutoff point where you pay more than you receive. The big advantage is that it’s dynamic to the economy. If the economy shrinks, then UBI shrinks with it, encouraging people to work more to compensate. It provides a floor of income, letting people negotiate working conditions, without the fear of homelessness. It also channels money from the rich, where it moves slowly, to the poor, where it has a far higher velocity.
The income ranking for comes from what I call ERK: Effort, Risk, Knowledge. Effort is how tough the job is. Crop pickers have to deal with the weather, lots of backbreaking labor, and so forth. Risk is things like when a lumberjack cuts down trees - their industry tends to have high fatality rates, due to unpredictable and heavy trees falling. A researcher needs lots of education to do their work.
What we will need is a council and research institute, that creates objective standards: How much continuous labor does a person need to do an effective job? Does their environment have things like AC and plumbing? Is there travel involved with this industry? What sort of education is required to make a capable worker? Is there a social stigma? All these factors and more have to be considered for each profession, then slotted into fixed income ranks. Of course, the standards used for ranking job types has to be public, so that people can contest the results if a job is implausibly ranked.
I am assuming this goes into a six-hour workday, alongside things like education being a paid job for students. The goal isn’t perfect fairness, rather it is to allow individuals to have enough agency to safely pursue a career, enjoy everyday life, and fulfill life goals without getting distracted by predatory capitalism.
However, we also need to constrain people in such a way, that they can’t become a fiscal distortion that can damage society. In that respect, I want people to eventually bow out of ‘the game’ at some point, because they can’t accrue anymore wealth due to absolute caps. This essentially forces people to reorient themselves on using their time on things that aren’t about money, such as raising family, creation, or being part of their community.
We don’t specifically price bananas. Presumably, the government buys the ‘blemished’ fruits, veggies, and so forth, that are perfectly fine, but otherwise get tossed out for not being pretty. Grocery stores can focus on delivering the premium versions of food. For example, the government allows anyone to order generic Jumbo Corndogs #1 for free, but capitalism sells Pancake Corndogs by Krustez. People value individualism and variety, which is where capitalism excels. We just don’t want capitalism to dictate a person’s wellbeing, because it simply isn’t suited for that.
As to taxation, I figure that the bulk of the government’s discretionary tax money should come from corporations and immigrants. When it comes to taxing individual citizens, my design intent is a bit different: they should be used to cajol individuals into funding society, by allowing people to tag specific projects with their tax dollars. For example, an map app of roadways and infrastructure, where a person can tag particular bits of roads that they think needs to be maintained. By assigning their taxes to that section, they communicate to the government that upkeep needs to be done. Ditto goes for proposals to build schools, parks, and other social goods.
In addition to an individual’s ‘Social Tax’, they also get a ‘Cultural Tax’. The latter is that they can assign a portion of their taxes towards cultural projects. Say that a studio needs funding to create an anime, and needs money. Individuals can assign their Cultural Taxes towards that project. They won’t receive any goods or privileges from doing so, it just encourages the creation of cool stuff. No one individual can fund enough money for cultural projects like that, but when you have a thousand or so people contributing, it becomes possible. Be it churches, books, or music, people have a portion of their income dedicated towards funding things they think are neat by default.
Essentially, individual taxes are treated as a form of enforced crowdfunding. I feel that by having people directly earmarking their taxes towards specific things, their bond with society will become stronger - they think about how their neighborhood should be, or what new exciting things are on the horizon.