Raw LLM Responses

In a worst-case-scenario cartoon black and white world where a VAT is 100% passed down to the consumer and literally everything you buy has a VAT associated with it, the cost of everything goes up by 10%. If I were intellectually dishonest, I might be tempted to stop right there and say 'making poor people spend 10% on food is regressive!' Because it's totally true in isolation. But the whole point of the VAT is to raise money for a UBI. So the money raised by the tax goes right back into peoples' hands. In a world where everything is 10% more expensive but everybody has an extra $12,000 check coming in each year, the losers (net payers) are people who are spending more than $10,000 every month (per individual, not as a family) on taxable goods. In other words, the mega-rich. The net beneficiaries are the poor, the people who need to take care of ailing family, the people who fall through the current welfare net's cracks, the women who are working multiple exploitative or abusive jobs or staying in exploitative or abusive relationships to scrape by, the stay-at-home moms, artists, and the people who are legitimately stuck in a welfare trap. Just as a flat tax is regressive because it hits the neediest hardest, a flat cash transfer is extremely progressive because it helps to neediest disproportionately. It's literally a transfer from those who consume a lot to those who consume relatively little. A reverse means test. Except that it covers B2B transactions as well, such as when Amazon buys self-driving trucks in order to save money and stay cost competitive. It captures gains that show up in our 21 trillion dollar GDP but which would otherwise stay highly concentrated at the top. With a VAT+UBI, gains the economy are returned to the people in the form of a proper economic floor, potentially eradicating poverty, instead of becoming more and more consolidated. This is the literal definition of progressive. It will reduce income inequality by any measure, most notably by the Gini index and share of disposable income. Not surprising, as the mechanism literally takes disposable income from the mega-rich and distributes it across the population. It's the exact same goal and the exact same outcome as a wealth tax, except it's used in practically every developed nation to fund their social safety nets because it is the only tax which unavoidably and efficiently captures these sorts of gains. I try to give everybody the benefit of the doubt, and I generally think of myself as a very patient person. But to be frank, I have a very difficult time believing that people who go around implying that Yang's UBI proposal is somehow 'regressive' aren't engaging in an intentional smear campaign or at least subject to some seriously 'motivated' reasoning to come to such a lazy conclusion. I genuinely apologize if that's not true of you. I don't want to offend. But setting the record straight on this matter can get exhausting. If you're coming from a genuine place, then all I can say is that I implore you not to throw the baby out with the bathwater, so to speak. Yang's plan is not exactly how I would design it. I would have it completely overlap with all existing social welfare programs. I would nearly double the mount. I would ensure that any money raised by a VAT is intrinsically linked to the UBI such that congress can't misappropriate the funds in the future. And I don't agree with Yang 100% on everything because he is not a demagogue and I am not a cultist. But it is easy to get lost in the nitpicking and lose sight of the fact that his UBI proposal would be an incredibly positive change, and Yang has many other impactful policies as well.