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You guys should check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revenu_de_solidarit%C3%A9_active
I made 3 comments here a couple of days ago, and I think they were all based on a misunderstanding of the relation between UBI and NIT. It seems to me that there are two fundamental concepts, namely a universal payout and a limited payout to wage-earners through the tax system; and there are two names, UBI and NIT, so I assumed that the two names corresponded to the two concepts in the natural way. However this seems to be mistaken: both names refer to the first concept and the second concept has no name.
I was led astray by the List of basic income models which describes NIT as an ‘alternate’ to an unconditional payout which is ‘dependent on work income’, which I understood as meaning that elibility was dependent on work status. Maybe it means that the size of the payout depends on income level. This is what the first para of the UBI article implies when it characterises NIT through its property that ‘the government stipend is gradually reduced with higher labor income’. This is a distinction without a difference. The government gives a stipend with one hand and takes a tax with the other: it makes no difference whether the stipend is constant and the tax increases according to a certain formula, or the stipend decreases and the tax increases under a different formula.
Tony Atkinson in his book ‘Inequality’ (2015, p207) says that:
Such a cash credit is a basic income, and it was proposed in the United States under the title of a “negative income tax”...
Now the second of the two concepts I mentioned above is not without interest. It was proposed by Pigou in 1933 and again by Atkinson in his book (under the name ‘Participation income’). It might even merit a mention on Wikipedia. But at present it seems to me that the terminology is hopelessly confusing. If UBI and NIT are two names for the same thing, the articles should be merged and NIT redirect to UBI. If they are different, both articles should make clear what the fundamental distinction is. (I may delete my 3 earlier comments in a while since I don’t think they help anyone.) Colin.champion ( talk) 07:56, 22 June 2020 (UTC)
Take note that the term "partial basic income" appears on [1], and the existence of the term implies "basic income" means something more than just a payment. Basic income is understood to mean an income that pays for a minimum standard of living; NIT, GMI, and other demogrants don't necessarily need to do that. John Moser ( talk) 21:37, 11 December 2020 (UTC)
I wonder whether @ Avatar317 was too quick in rejecting @ Malcolmeintre’s additions. An editor is expected to understand what he or she reads and to paraphrase it rather than copying and pasting, and this surely implies that he or she can recognise its subject matter. In the present field the terminology is so unsettled that requiring a system to be identified by any particular name is an unreliable criterion. In any case, the reference to ‘negative tax’ can hardly be understood as referring to negative VAT.
In fact malcolmeintre’s references are drawn largely from the French NIT page which has a slightly different slant from the English one.
On the other hand, as things stand I don’t think example implementations belong on the current page (though I’m reluctant to stir up the hornets’ nest of terminology). My understanding is that economists are wary of using the generic expression ‘negative income tax’, perhaps for fear of confusion with Friedman’s system; but that when they do so, they are referring to a fairly broad concept which is a large component of UBI as well has having other instantiations. The right place for lists of implementations is therefore under the articles associated with particular flavours of NIT.
The following diagram may illustrate the relationships:
full | partial | ||
unconditional | full basic income |
partial basic income |
|
conditional | ? | wage subsidy |
|
tax and benefit |
I understand all four cells in the top-left square as incorporating negative income tax. By this criterion I would argue that malcolmeintre’s additions, assuming that they are valid, belong on the wage subsidy page (which already mentions EITC).
However I’m not confident that the current arrangement of material is ideal. ‘Wage subsidy’ is a page I created myself at at time when ‘NIT’ sought to limit itself to Friedman’s system.
What does anyone think of the following proposal?– I add the above diagram to the NIT page, trying to turn some of the cells’ contents into links while drawing a circle round the 4 top-left cells and labelling the circle ‘negative income tax’. I then look over malcolmeintre’s additions, taking them to the wage subsidy page so far as they seem appropriate (and degallicising his English). Colin.champion ( talk) 09:27, 18 April 2021 (UTC)