Negative Income Tax. Your thoughts?

[white_wolf]

What do you all think of a Negative Income Tax? On the surface it seems like a good idea, supplementing incomes below a certain amount. However, the fact that Milton Friedman proposed makes me wonder if I'm missing something. His polices always seemed to benefit the 1%.

[Turbineguy]

1. Corporate accountants are specialists

at cooking up negative income. Corporations do this all the time. So it would most likely be a huge corporate subsidy mechanism.

[greytdemocrat]

2. On the surface...

Godzilla seems like a good idea but well, you know.

[The Magistrate]

3. He Still Had Scraps Of Sanity Then, Sir

[rufus dog]

4. As with the Mittster

They would use any huge investment loss to cover their risk, thus privatizing reward and socializing loss.

[NashuaDW]

5. McGovern - 1972

He advocated for something similar and won 1 state + Dc for a total of 17 electoral votes.

Do we really want to bring it up again?

[PoliticAverse]

6. Friedman's negative income tax morphed into the Earned Income Tax Credit.

[former9thward]

7. We have a negative income tax.

It is called the Earned Income Tax Benefit. It applies up to about 50,000 a year.

[jmowreader]

8. They have that in two forms

On the personal-tax level we have the Earned Income Tax Credit, which is a refundable credit. (The difference between refundable and non-refundable credits: if a refundable credit pulls your tax bill below $0 they send you the money; a non-refundable credit can pull your taxes to zero but they won't send you the excess.) The old Making Work Pay credit did the same thing.

On the corporate-tax level, there are write-offs you can use that will do that. The infamous $173 million tax refund GE got is an example.