I would argue progressive taxes are less complex than your proposed flat tax because you can load all the expenses on the high brackets who won't miss a meal if you set the value too high instead of trying to pick a single value that works for everyone.
To begin with, that isn't what "complex" means. Having to track every income source to every citizen in order to impose differential marginal rates is always going to be more complex than not doing that. We nominally do it so people who make more money pay higher effective tax rates -- but a flat tax with a UBI does the same thing. If everybody paid a 30% marginal rate and everybody got a $12,000 UBI then the effective tax rate on someone with $30,000 in income would be -10%, at $60,000 it would be 10% and at $200,000 it would be 24%. That's a progressive tax system.
Meanwhile you don't really want low marginal rates when you're providing benefits, because then the benefits phase out too slowly. Suppose you were providing $12,000 in benefits and the phase out rate was only 10%. Then someone making $100,000/year would still be a net recipient of benefits, which would bankrupt the government. In practice the phase out rates we currently impose on the poor are higher than the marginal rates in the highest formal tax brackets, which is probably bad, but making them uniformly the same is certainly not going to result in something less progressive than we have now.
>Having to track every income source to every citizen in order to impose differential marginal rates is always going to be more complex than not doing that.
It's the same exact load as tracking everyone's income source to impose a flat tax. Taxing income is the same "tracking load" whether the tax system is progressive, flat, or regressive.
>That's a progressive tax system.
No it's a flat system with a $12k UBI. The effective tax rate of a millionaire and a billionaire is the same in your system because it's flat.
>but making them uniformly the same is certainly not going to result in something less progressive than we have now.
A million of income would pay 29.64%, a billion of income 29.99%. That's literally less progressive than those incomes would pay today.
> It's the same exact load as tracking everyone's income source to impose a flat tax. Taxing income is the same "tracking load" whether the tax system is progressive, flat, or regressive.
It is not. If you go and work for a corporation and they pay you a salary without a flat tax, they don't know what your tax rate will be. It depends on whether you do any work for someone else, or sell any property with a taxable gain, or have any tax deductions, all of which change your taxable income and therefore your tax rate, so now you have to keep track of all of them.
With a flat tax the rate is always the same, so your employer withholds the tax from your paycheck, the seller of some deductible product simply doesn't pay tax on it to begin with, and there is no individualized calculation to do because the rate for each thing is always the same and known ahead of time.
> No it's a flat system with a $12k UBI. The effective tax rate of a millionaire and a billionaire is the same in your system because it's flat.
The effective tax rate of a millionaire and a billionaire are as much the same in the existing system. Someone who makes $5 million currently pays ~36% compared to someone who makes $5 billion who pays ~37% (because the highest bracket is 37%).
> A million of income would pay 29.64%, a billion of income 29.99%. That's literally less progressive than those incomes would pay today.
That has nothing to do with the mechanism, it's just because the example rate was 30% instead of 37%. You can make it arbitrarily more or less progressive by changing the flat rate and the amount of the UBI.
But also notice that you wouldn't need tax rates to be as high, because in a simpler system less of the money would be wasted on administrative overhead or arbitrary constraints on what the poor can do with the money which causes it not to go as far for them. And they would spend less time doing benefits paperwork which they could instead spend doing work that earns money, or use the time for DIY instead of paying someone else to do things they didn't have time to do. Allowing everyone -- including them -- to pay lower tax rates from the increase in efficiency.
