Moving Forward on Basic Income
This is probably where my ignorance of socio-economics will shine, so please bear with me. In all the articles I&#x27;ve come across regarding universal basic income, I&#x27;ve never seen the idea of a flat tax rate mentioned (e.g. everybody, everything, 20%). It seems to me that it could work for the same reasons UBI is supposed to, i.e. reduce overheads among other things, while in this case also potentially reducing the risk for abuse and manipulation.<p>In my view, a universal flat tax rate would go hand-in-hand with a universal basic income. Since the essential aim of UBI is to ensure people can at least meet their basic needs to achieve a certain degree of freedom, it wouldn&#x27;t seem too far-fetched to imagine meeting those needs at the societal level as well (which is already done to a large extent in a lot of countries anyway), i.e. free public healthcare, improved and completely free public education, even free electricity, water, internet and so on. The knock-on effect obviously being that the UBI wouldn&#x27;t need to be as high should some or all of the basic needs be covered by default as public services.<p>Taking this a bit further, I&#x27;d like to see companies be incentivized to have their employees participate in Education in general. For instance, employees could spend 4 hours&#x2F;week of their working time to go explain what they do to kids or run training sessions for adults trying to change career paths. The employer could be rewarded through some sort of tax break or something similar. Teachers would of course still exist, but the &quot;burden&quot; of Education would no longer be theirs only. I think this would have a number of benefitial effects:<p>- it would subsidize the cost of Education to some extent<p>- it would help level and adjust the job market more rapidly<p>- it would help participating employees have a better understanding of their own job<p>- it would expose people undergoing education to more professionals as opposed to almost only academics<p>But most of all, I believe it would make people realize that Education is everybody&#x27;s responsibility and that it is a continuous and evolving process for people of any age or background.<p>There&#x27;s obviously a lot more to be said about any of my points above, but I&#x27;d be interested to hear what people here think.<p><i>I understand that YCombinator would not have the ability to set tax rates and such, this is more of a thought exercise.</i>