Tornado Alley (PROG)

[fuagf]

Kamala Harris’s new basic income-style bill is so frustratingly close to being great

"PegVA, Why leftists don't trust Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, and Deval Patrick"

.. with links ..

Harris almost endorses a real basic income, then doesn’t.
By Dylan Matthews@[e-mail] Oct 19, 2018, 12:00pm EDT


Drew Angerer/Getty Images

Likely 2020 Democratic presidential candidates are in the midst of a kind of big-idea arms race, with each one attempting to pivot left by endorsing bigger and bigger plans to expand the safety net.

First, Bernie Sanders unveils his Medicare-for-all bill; then Kirsten Gillibrand comes out for a job guarantee (and Sanders follows suit). Elizabeth Warren announces a plan to give workers seats on corporate boards, and Kamala Harris and Cory Booker propose new tax credits to help with rising rents.

The latest volley in the competition is the LIFT the Middle Class Act from Harris. As the Atlantic’s Annie Lowrey explains, the bill would offer a sizable cash payment to most middle-class households. Single people would get $250 per month or $3,000 a year, married couples would get $500 per month or $6,000 a year, and it would phase out for singles without kids making $50,000 or more, and for married couples or single people with kids making $100,000 or more. It costs about $200 billion in the first year or $2 trillion over 10, roughly in the range of the price tag for the 2017 tax cuts.

Like a somewhat similar bill from Rep. Ro Khanna and Sen. Sherrod Brown last year, you can think of Harris’s plan as a particularly massive expansion of the earned income tax credit, so that the solidly middle-class benefit too, not just the working poor. And instead of loading up benefits at tax time, people could get them as a monthly check in the mail.

[...]

The details of how the LIFT Act works

The LIFT Act is structured like a trapezoid, as the following diagram from the Tax Policy Center’s Elaine Maag shows:


How much families of different incomes get from Sen. Kamala Harris’s LIFT Act. Tax Policy Center/Elaine Maag

If you earn $0, you get $0 in benefit. But then it phases in very rapidly, dollar for dollar. If you’re a single person and make $1,000 a year, you get an additional $1,000 from the LIFT Act. If you make $2,000, you get another $2,000. It then caps out at $3,000 for individuals and $6,000 for couples.

The phaseout is much milder, with middle- and upper-middle-class families and individuals losing only 15 cents for every $1 their income grows after the phaseout starts (at $30,000 for individuals without kids, $60,000 for married couples, and $80,000 for single people with kids).

America’s two existing refundable tax credit programs for poor families, the earned income tax credit (EITC) and the child tax credit, also have this kind of trapezoidal structure: They phase in as families earn more money, then max out, then slowly phase out as they earn even more money than that. With the refundable child tax credit, families earning under $2,500 a year don’t get anything, and it doesn’t fully phase in until families are earning nearly $12,000 a year. That substantially limits its usefulness to the very poor.

The LIFT Act would solve a couple of big problems with our existing system. One, it would extend the value of the EITC, which phases out entirely for families after they reach $39,000 to $49,000 in earnings (it depends on how many kids they have), to higher-income middle-class families. That makes it less of a pure anti-poverty program, but it helps non-poor but still struggling families who could use some assistance, and whose support helps ensure the program’s political survival in the future.

Second, neither the EITC nor (obviously) the child tax credit does much of anything for workers without kids. The maximum EITC for single people is $519 in 2018, compared to $5,716 for families with two kids. The LIFT Act would bring childless people up to $3,000 in benefits.

That’s perhaps the least controversial aspect of the bill. For years, policymakers have issued proposals to expand the EITC to childless adults, or to adults who aren’t their kid’s custodial parent. A recent randomized trial conducted in New York City found that increasing the EITC to $2,000 for single people substantially reduced deep poverty and encouraged employment.

Problem one: excluding the poorest

https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2018/10/19/17995374/kamala-harris-lift-act-basic-income-cash-eitc

-

Why some countries are seriously considering handing out free money

VIDEO - What is universal basic income?
1:49 AM ET Thu, 28 Dec 2017 | 04:22

Elizabeth Schulze | @eschulze9
Published 1:44 AM ET Thu, 28 Dec 2017 Updated 9:27 AM ET Thu, 28 Dec 2017
https://www.cnbc.com/2017/12/28/universal-basic-income-why-some-countries-are-seriously-considering-handing-out-free-money.html

-

Next Year, a Californian City Will Launch the First Basic Income Experiment in the U.S.

Participants will receive $500 monthly for three years, no strings attached.

Dom GaleonOctober 19th 2017

No Strings Attached

The idea of a guaranteed income for all citizens regardless of their social and economic standing is called universal basic income (UBI), and it’s been floating around for centuries. Thomas Paine wrote about it back in the 1790s, and in 1967, Martin Luther King, Jr. expressed his support for a universal basic income in the U.S. Now, Stockton, California, mayor Michael Tubbs is keen on implementing such a system in his city.
https://futurism.com/next-year-a-californian-city-will-launch-the-first-basic-income-experiment-in-the-u-s