Yeah not sure what GP is saying. VAT can absolutely suck up a huge amount of money. The UBI makes it far less regressive, basically to the point I no longer care.
(VAT + UBI is great for everyone but those 90th percentile luxury-car-and-McMansion-owning inner ring suburb types that are the Democrat's favorite constituency :/)
Coupling a regressive tax with money transfer creates an inverse "V" shaped effective tax rate that will squeeze some part of the society (probably on the middle class).
If the taxes and transfers are diverse enough, one can reduce that problem by making them compensating each other, but if you make VAT + UBI make the lion share of the government's money flow, it will be a really large problem.
Yes the nadir of the V is the inner-ring BMW suburb class, I so disparaged. And I really meant it when I said I didn't care about them.
It might sound like I'm being a culture warrior chest-thumper about those "liberal elites", but I really do mean something more material / economic here. I think most of that classes struggles (and they do take on huge debts) would not be worsened by taking away their money.
- This is the class most thirstiest about getting their kinds into good schools without being able to donate their way in. But the scarcity of "good jobs" that motivates this credentialism relates to inadequate demand of the masses. Giving them more money won't help the fact that the Keynesian feedback loop has broken down, causing the job scarcity. (And really, consumption not work is the goal, we should fix the feedback loop by working less not consuming more, beyond guaranteeing basic needs.)
- This the class hitching lots of their wealth on real estate, but it's precisely because our cultural obsession with owning single family homes that good land (i.e. that with good access to the other good land where people need to go) is in perpetual short supply. Even if they are the "vacation home" winners of the current ponzie skin, the portion of winners will bleed away in successive generations if housing continues to be a "good investment" --- and thus unattainable to increasingly many people.
- Perhaps this class is less affected by expensive healthcare (other than the richer ones above), but would still benefit from it being cheaper. Not a majority of them is doctors or biotech researchers or whoever else benefits from our shitty healthcare system.
So yes, I think even if they are at the tax advantage nadir, they still are benefitting:
- Richer masses fix their job anxieties
- We should separately fix real estate and transit so they can be at peace in condos not mcmansions
- We should separately fix healthcare to their slight advantage.
Also, I sincerely hope and empowered working classes / lower classes will prevent the richest billionaires from emerging (at least more than transiently), so the 0.1% stuff should be far more of a theoretically problem as we get a "thinner vertical tail" power law.
VAT's regressiveness would probably become a real problem in that situation, but that's a different problem.