Haha, yes! Nice anarchist picture mod maker!

Like him or not, Friedman was a legend

my austrian penis can only be so erect

Can we please have the new version for this? Can't find the .zip file anywhere on Google to even install it myself :( It does not get downloaded once I subscribe to this mod!

Why is there no income for the government? The whole point of the negative income tax is that the 50% subsidy of the difference between what the worker earns per annum and what the tax allowance is. The other 50% is taxed to the government and therefore replaces the original Income Tax we have at the moment as well as the welfare state. Please update this MOD as soon as possible please because it's costing me alot. I have to set a middle and higher tax bracket just to compensate the cost of £25-27 billion.

Yes, this is the Libertarian version of UBI.

So is this just UBI but uneccessarily complicated?

u fucked it up
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xtpgkX588nM

@RichardMNixon unfortunately, government programs often don't consider that. Disability payments in my area, for instance, look at your income and give you enough money to bring that up to the specified level. If you get a liability payment because the airline you shipped your bike on destroyed your bike, that payment counts as income. (Covered on the news a few hours ago)

Milton Friedman FTW!

"People would be disincentived from earning higher incomes because it would mean that they would receive lower benefits."

Not if you phase it out slowly enough. No one is going to consider an opportunity to make an extra $10k, then think "Wait, I'd lose $200 in benefits though, hmmmm...."

@FOG Valladarex publicanimal has obviously not read or listened to Milton Friedman's idea of a Naegative Income Tax. Until he/she does, the debate is pointless.

You've greatly misunderstood your own source. The title in your link says it all, "Flat Tax with FIXED PAYMENT". That means that everyone IS given an equal benefit. You are conflating the net amount that people receive from the government after taxes with the amount of benefits that they receive, which is a fixed amount that is equally provided to each citizen.

I explained this fairly clearly and simply in my second comment if you care to re-read it. As such, the policy should include effects to middle income groups as well, as my Citizen's Dividend policy does, if you care to look at it.

Your policy as you've explained it would take away benefits as people earn more income, which would have a welfare trap effect. I don't think that this is really a debatable point; the fact is that you are still mistaken about what the Negative Income Tax is, and how it works.

Now I see that you are the one that doesn't understand the negative income tax. It DOES NOT "distribute an equal benefit to all citizens." What I said IS how it works.

Here is a graph that illustrates how the negative income tax works: https://conductunbecoming.files.wordpress.com/2009/04/negflattax.png%3Fw%3D450%26h%3D304

In that example, people earning no income are given $10,000. People making $10,000 are given about $5,000. People making $25,000 are given approximately $1,000. The more money you earn, the less you get in benefits. This is what I mean by inversely proportional.

This does remove the welfare trap because benefits are not abruptly taken away like in this real world example: http://www.debate.org/photos/albums/1/6/5123/74292-5123-mgx4b-a.jpg
This welfare cliff is the source of today's welfare trap. That's what the NIT removes.

The heart of my criticism is that you called this Negative Income Tax and labeled this as a tax policy when it's neither. My suggestion would be that you either rename it or provide an explanation that it's intended to only be part of the picture. I would also suggest that you research the Negative Income Tax policy more so you understand how it actually works to decrease the welfare trap by ensuring that no one has to make a decision between earning more money and receiving less in benefits. If the policy "distributes benefits inversely proportional to the amount of income a poor family receives from their job" it does not eliminate the welfare trap, it exacerbates it.

I think the mod is a cheat because:

1) A welfare policy should not make capitalists happy at all.
2) The functions for decreasing the poverty rate, and increasing poor happiness and equality, and others are extremely overexaggerated.
3) The policy should reduce state employee membership at a flat rate rather than a linear rate.

I would further argue that the effects on unemployment should be exponential and not linear as the spending on your policy increases. I would implore you to compare your policy to my "Citizen's Dividend" policy in a spreadsheet to see what I think are more reasonable equations and spending levels for such a policy. I put a lot of though and work into that specific policy.

I'm glad that you agree that "this mod is not a negative income tax on it's own". It's disingenuous to claim that you "never asserted it as such", because you named the policy "Negative Income Tax" and you never explain anywhere that it's only the social welfare portion of the Negative Income Tax. You have it labeled in the game as a Tax policy and not a Welfare policy, which makes no sense because it is not a tax.

You couldn't have studied the subject very carefully because you are under the mistaken assumption that "the negative income tax distributes benefits inversely proportional to the amount of income a poor family receives from their job", when the Negative Income Tax is supposed to distribute an equal benefit to all citizens.

This mod is not a cheat because it is very expensive and doesn't even completely eliminate poverty. It has costs that were meant to simulate the costs of having a negative income tax. It also has similar drawbacks, being increased unemployment (if too high) and lower productivity. You can see in the image the cost is nearly the same as healthcare vouchers when both are maximized. Except when you maximized spending on the policy it creates a ton of unemployment, so it's usually not worth it.

I don't see how anyone could see this as a cheat when you compare it to the other welfare programs, and their costs vs. benefits. This is a very reasonable mod.

I'm annoyed by how you are asserting I don't know how this policy works, when I've studied this greatly and have written a lot on the topic.

I obviously understand that you can make a taxation system combined with a welfare system in this game. That's why you choose what type of tax you want to combine with this policy. This policy was meant to be a supplement to the flat tax or progressive income tax, not act independently. That's the only way you can make a negative income tax in this game, having it seperated in two different parts, the part where the benefits are given to the people who's incomes are below the income floor and the taxation part for when people's incomes are above that floor. This mod is for the part with incomes below that floor. I didn't think I would need to explain that to someone with a degree in economics.

I think you are trying to prove this mod is not a negative income tax on it's own, and I never asserted it as such.

Please understand, your policy is simply not a negative income tax under any possible definition of the term, because it has no tax aspect. I say this as someone with a degree in Economics who is fairly obsessed with the work of Milton Friedman. If you take a look at my mod, Ultimate Capitalist Rebalance, you will see that I also have a picture of Friedman as the picture for my mod. At a certain point I tried to include a Negative Income Tax policy as part of my mod, but I had to remove it because as far as I know it isn't possible to code a policy that is has both tax and tax credit functions simultaneously. The game will allow the policy to exist and be implemented without crashing, but if I remember correctly it ignores the costs of providing the tax credits so I removed it because it functioned as a mega cheat. I'd be very impressed if you could figure out how to implement a proper Negative Income Tax, but this is simply not a Negative Income Tax in any way, shape, or form.

What you describe as the Negative Income Tax is just a welfare program with no tax aspect. Now, it's true that simply handing poor people money (as your policy does) would be more economically efficient than maintaining an array or welfare programs that need to be administered by bureaucrats, so that's preferable to most standard welfare programs. However, if it were to "distribute benefits inversely proportional to the amount of income a poor family receives from their job" it would have serious problems, because it WOULD NOT "prevent the 'welfare trap' problem that leads to perpetual poverty". People would be disincentived from earning higher incomes because it would mean that they would receive lower benefits.

The beauty of the Negative Income Tax system as Friedman proposed it is that it DOES (mostly) eliminate the welfare trap. Your policy would not, and quite frankly your policy in its current formulation acts as a cheat.

Everyone who works has their income taxed under a negative income tax system. However, the very poor end up having their tax credit be higher than the amount they owe in taxes, so they don't pay anything to the government and instead the amount they owe is simply deducted from their portion of their tax credit and they receive the difference as income. Lower to Middle Income groups pay little or nothing in taxes because the tax credit is close to equal to what they would owe in taxes, and upper middle and higher income groups pay most of the taxes, because the tax credit that they receive (which is of equivalent value to the tax credit given to all other groups) is of negligible value compared to the money that they owe in taxes.

I'm very, very well aware of what the Negative Income Tax is. In its most typical formulation (as advocated for by Milton Friedman), it is a flat tax on income combined with a basic minimum income guarantee in the form of a reimbursable tax credit which is granted in equal value to all citizens (not in a value inversely proportional to the income earned as you claim in your description). Some have proposed formulations which combine progressive marginal tax income tax rates with a basic minimum income guarantee. The point is that the word "tax" is right there in the name, and your policy has no tax aspect.

You are completely mistaken that the Negative Income Tax is "the income tax in reverse". You unfortunately don't seem to understand what it is and how it actually works.

Hello publicanimal,

This policy was not named by me, and was developed decades ago. It's called "negative" income tax because it is the income tax in reverse. It gives the poor money instead of taxing them. You can read about it here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_income_tax

I've gone over why this policy reduces socialism before, which you can see in earlier comments. The reason this system makes capitalists happier is because it's meant to be a replacement to the government managed welfare system. For the same reason school vouchers and healthcare vouchers lead to happier capitalists, this does the same. It is a way to help people without interfering in the economy and people's lives. Capitalists simply want a limited, efficient government and free markets, which is what the NIT allows for. Don't forget though, if too much benefits are provided, capitalists will end up seeing the program as wasteful and oppose it.

This policy is completely misnamed. It's not a tax! It doesn't generate any income for the government, it is simply an income redistribution program. It's a completely false premise that such a program would make capitalists happier.

I tried to make a genuine Negative Income Tax policy but I personally found that it wasn't possible to code for a policy that had both a cost to the state and simultaneously generated income for the state. I was excited to see how you had pulled it off, but I was disappointed to see that you didn't. You simply called a policy with no actual taxation features the Negative Income Tax.

What this really is is a cheat to make capitalists happy and decrease socialism in a way that makes no sense. Very disappointing and dishonest.

If you take a look at my "Ultimate Capitalist Rebalance" mod I provided a more honest way of implementing a true Negative Income Tax by implementing two policies, the game's vanilla flat tax and what I call the Citizen's Dividend.

Libertarian socialist sounds like an oxymoron. At the very least, you would need to embrace the non-aggression principle, otherwise you're just an anarchist.

As a libertarian socialist, the hit to socialist demographic makes me sad. :<

I changed "gradually reduces" to "distributes" to help clear up what I meant. I believe inversely proportional is the correct word in this context. Thanks for pointing out that the sentence was confusing.

Nice idea. I'm confused about one thing, I think "reduces benefits inversely proportional" is a double negative. Reducing PROPORTIONAL would mean, the more they earn the less welfare they get, which, I think, is what you meant.

Socialism is used very loosely in this game. France isn't actually socialist, yet in this game it is. This game is, as a whole, a very capitalist game. And socialism in this game is more or less the more socialist side of capitalism.

So in my view, the author of the mod probably has the right idea. To the extent that it may or may not reduce socialism, such a policy would certainly be totally alien/incompatable with a socialist economy.

Re: several comments about the impact of this policy on socialism. Socialism and Communism are really the same ideology (ie. the Communist Party of the Socialist State). Therefore, both Socialism and Communism deal with the allocation of ownership of the means of production.

Welfare and trade unions aren't socialist in my view - they're both products of capitalism.

What a negative income-tax truly represents is an example of social market economics (not "socialist" just "social") This is not to be confused with "market socialism" which is a form of socialism that utilizes cooperatives, as was seen in Yugoslavia. All of this is according to my understanding of comparative economics and the termonology that's used in that field, which to me seems to make comparing these different kinds of economies quite clear and useful, in contrast to the liberal=socialism conservative=capitalist paradigm that's commonly used in the US political discourse.

...

This is all fine and good but if you think that socialism ONLY deals with public ownership of the means of production I invite you to read a bit about the difference between socialism and communism.

In regards to the liberalism effects, it's true that I could have reasonably added that in the policy. I probably would add it in if I can figure out how to update the mod. The reason I wasn't thinking about that is because I was focusing mainly on the economic aspects of the NIT. Plus, this policy already gives a lot of nice perks that adding more benefits didn't seem necessary.

This reduces Socialism because socialism is public ownership of the means of production. The government controls some part of the economy under the idea that it would better if the government did.

That's not what the negative income tax is. The negative income tax effectively privatizes the government managed welfare programs that exist today. For the same reason that school and healthcare vouchers benefit the poor and reduce socialism, this policy is a free market alternative that demonstrates how government control of the economy isn't necessary, and in fact privatization can be superior to government management in many aspects.

Capitalism isn't inherently anti-worker. That's a narrative thay many socialists want people to believe, but it's not necessarily true. Workers can thrive in a capitalist society just as they can in a socialist society, and many would argue more so.

I don't understand why this reduces Socialism rating. The redistribution of wealth, especially to reduce or eliminate poverty, and increase the welfare and liberty of workers, like a negative income tax would be, seems very socialist. Remember, socialism doesn't necessarily mean top-down control of the economy, it simply means that the economy works in favour of the workers. From trade unions to the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, it's all about improving the life of the worker.
An additional pointer: given this policy's tendency to small government, shouldn't it also increase liberalism and/or the satisfaction of liberals?

I'm actually subscribed to your mod, good job on it by the way! And it's very true that the basic income is similar to the negative income tax. The negative income tax is actually a variant of the basic income. In real life, the main difference between the basic income and the negative income tax is how the money is appropriated.

But in relation to your basic income mod, I think it's cool, but a problem I had with it was that it did not reduce poverty, but still costs a huge amount of money. I tried to orient the NIT towards a more capitalist form of the basic income, where it gives lots of nice perks to capitalist players, but still has realistic drawbacks and costs. I wanted to give subscribers a sufficient alternative to all of the welfare programs that the game has to offer.

I'm glad to hear you are interested in the concept :)

Interesting concept :)

It is similar to the Basic Income in my Fiscal Policy mod.