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Eliezer_Yudkowsky comments on The Robots, AI, and Unemployment Anti-FAQ - Less Wrong
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I mean that when somebody in the bottom quintile gives me a car ride to Berkeley for $5, nothing else happens to them. They don't pay Social Security on the $5. They don't have their health benefits phased out. They don't have to fill out a form. They just have an additional $5.
I know this is a completely radical concept.
Roughly half of Americans don't owe anything to the IRS each year. Pre-recession I believe this figure was about 40%. They of course pay other taxes, such as payroll (social security, medicare, which most people consider taxes), state sales tax, property taxes, etc. It'd be nice if they at least didn't have to file tax returns.
http://www.cbpp.org/cms/?fa=view&id=3505
The problem isn't just all those other taxes but phasing-out of benefits - this is what leads to the calculations and observations by which somebody making $25,000/year isn't much better off than someone getting $8,000/year.
ADDED: Also, any paperwork can easily be an extreme barrier to that IQ 70 kid that Gwern was talking about.
It's an extreme barrier (in the sense of an ugh-field) even for smart would-be employers.
I'm kind of worried that 20 people upvoted that any paperwork is an extreme barrier to smart employers--presumably people like themselves?
What kind of opportunities have you all been passing up for want of avoiding a form?
And what kind of opportunities are present to eliminate or stream-line such (ie, turbo-tax)?
I'm not very well informed on this topic, but isn't something like that always going to be the case in a society with a safety net? e.g., if we make sure everyone has at least $25k to live on, anyone making $8k a year isn't going to be any worse off than someone making $25k.
Of course I'm not sure how well America's arcane maze of benefits, tax deductions and whatnot fit into this simple abstraction.
Safety net should be a slope, not a cliff. Earning your first dollar shouldn't mean you get $1 less in benefits - there's actually a good argument for subsidizing the first $X of income - which is what the EITC is. Basically negative income tax.
You mean about half (actually 46%) of all American households did not pay any income tax (which is different from "not owing anything to the IRS") in 2011.
20% of all Americans don't pay income tax by virtue of being too young to work.
I thought they wouldn't need to file taxes, but I just completed a "tax assistant" wizard at the IRS website, for a single, non-retirement-benefit-receiving, single individual with $20k in gross income ... and I was told they'd have to file a return.