A radical left-right compromise US budget

[theymos]

Although I'm an anarcho-capitalist and in an ideal world I'd like there to be no government at all, I'm very interested in government/politics, and I don't scoff at gradual changes in the right direction. For a while I've been thinking that a left-right compromise is possible by increasing total tax collected while simultaneously reducing intrusiveness, regulation, and size of government. Here is a specific plan:

1 - Remove income tax and replace it with a national sales tax and a national property tax

Income tax is bad for the economy -- when you tax something you always get less of it --, and it's also highly invasive because almost everything you do might generate some income.

Property tax is a sort of wealth tax, which is quite anti-freedom, but it's also a pretty non-invasive tax since the government just has to go to the land and demand that the tax be handed over. They don't even need to know who lives on the land. It's also impossible to evade, which would be relevant if the entire world switched to private cryptocurrencies. Sales tax is also pretty non-invasive. Only businesses have to directly deal with it, and they just have to count up their sales and pay the appropriate tax.

The total land value of the US (not including improvements) is about $18 trillion.¹ US consumers buy about $14.3 trilion in goods per year.²

I propose a 10% annual national property tax (on the value of the land alone, not including improvements, unlike most local property taxes) and a 55% national sales tax. This gives a (naïvely estimated) revenue of $9.7 trillion, much higher than the current US tax revenue of about $3.4 trillion.

A 55% sales tax sounds high, but keep in mind that the US currently has a 25% "sales tax" on imported steel, an 8% sales tax on diesel, and roughly a 22% sales tax on cigarettes. People can live with it, especially if their income tax is being eliminated.

2 - universal basic income

In order to offset the regressive nature of the sales tax and also act as a sort of very easy-to-administer welfare system, I propose a UBI of $20,608 per US citizen per year. This is calculated from the current federal poverty guideline of $12,490 plus 55% to cover the sales tax and 10% to cover the property tax. No means testing, since that complexifies the system -- think of it as undoing some of the property/sales tax in a progressive way.

More humans are good. A new human is someone who's almost certainly going to produce more in his lifetime than he's going to consume; it's not "just another mouth to feed". So in my plan I decided to include even children in the UBI, which massively subsidizes having children. You could instead choose to not include the 20% of US people under 16, or to give them less per year, which would reduce costs.

The US population is about 306 million³ when you subtract the 7% of the US population who are non-citizens ⁴. So the UBI has a total cost of $6.3 trillion per year, far higher than the current welfare spending.

3 - eliminate all other welfare

Eliminate social security, medicare, medicaid, and all other welfare. The UBI covers it instead. This saves about $3.3 trillion from the budget.⁵

Most people should be working. So don't complain about the (real) $12k/year not being enough for every little thing. For the miniscule percentage of the population who can't work at all, they could move to somewhere far away from major cities, where $12k/year is often enough to live on, or they could live with one or more roommates to reduce costs. If someone needs major surgery or something and they can't afford it, they should look to charities and their neighbors for help.

4 - eliminate all work-related regulations

Since nobody has to work in a particular job in order to survive, there's no argument for any work-related regulations. All work is now totally optional. So eliminate minimum wage laws, regulations related to hours worked, child labor laws, etc. This will boost GDP and probably increase tax revenue, possibly allowing for lower tax rates than given above, though I'm not qualified to estimate this.

Summary

So the budget is:
 - Property tax revenue: $1.8 trillion
 - Sales tax revenue: $7.9 trillion
 - Total tax revenue: $9.7 trillion
 - Non-welfare spending retained*: $3.3 trillion⁵
 - UBI: $6.3 trillion
 - Total cost: $9.6 trillion

(*Note that I would want to massively reduce war spending, but that's out of scope for this discussion.)

Although tax revenue is massively increased and total welfare is about doubled, the size of government in its intrusiveness and number employees massively shrinks. This IMO would be a pretty good outcome, and perhaps it's not politically impossible that the "far-left" and "far-right" could join forces in order to achieve something like this.

[1] https://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/z1/Current/z1.pdf
[2] https://apps.bea.gov/iTable/iTable.cfm?reqid=19&step=2#reqid=19&step=2&isuri=1&1921=survey
[3] https://www.kff.org/other/state-indicator/distribution-by-citizenship-status/?currentTimeframe=0&sortModel=%7B%22colId%22:%22Location%22,%22sort%22:%22asc%22%7D
[4] https://www.census.gov/popclock/
[5] https://www.usaspending.gov/#/explorer/budget_function

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[DireWolfM14]

1 - Remove income tax and replace it with a national sales tax and a national property tax

Like you said, when you tax something you get less of it.  We'll just end up with less property ownership, and fewer sales.  So, this would just shift the burden from one type of tax to another.  We would all end up paying the same or more.

Your premise that a property tax is a "wealth tax" also falls flat.  Everybody needs a place a place to live, or to do business.  The property owners are just going to pass on the costs to their tenants.  Regardless of whether you own the property, you'll be paying the tax.

2 - universal basic income

Your math doesn't add up.  If you tax $18 trillion worth of property at 10% and 14.3 trillion worth of sales at the same percentage rate, you only barely cover half your costs for the UBI.  That doesn't leave anything for infrastructure, defense, education.  We would have to be taxed 20% by fed.gov just to pay for the UBI.  That doesn't account for our state and local taxes.

Not a good idea, sorry.

[Quickseller]

The biggest problem with your proposal is UBI. You are proposing a "grossed up" figure of what someone would need to receive to live on the poverty line. However someone living above the poverty line would receive government benefits (welfare):

Medicare/Medicaid pay below (well under) market rates for healthcare, but if these programs are eliminated, those who would normally receive benefits under these programs would need to pay market rates. The annual premiums for an unsubsidized health insurance plan is between $4700 and $12,800 per year (for a single person), depending on, primarily the deductible. At the low end, someone should expect to pay about a total of $5,000 in healthcare costs per year, per person. This would include the cost of health insurance and a small amount of out of pocket expenses. This amount would be for a generally healthy person.

The annual food stamp benefit is around $2,000 per person (based on a 3 person household).

The EITC is ~$3,500 with one child, or about $1,175 (rounded up to $2,000/year) per person assuming two parents and one child. It is ~$5,800 with two children, or $1,450/person with two parents. Budget assumptions need to be at least 1 child/person, otherwise the population would shrink, which would cause other budget problems.

The above three programs alone are valued at approximately $9,000 per year, and it is not uncommon for a working family to be eligible for all three of the above programs.

For someone that is not working, or only earning a very little amount, the additional government benefits will far exceed the UBI amount. Most states pay between $300 and $500/week in unemployment benefits. Assuming a $400/week benefit per working adult, or $200/week/person, (based on two working adults and two children) works out to $10,400/year. Someone on SSDI will receive ~$14,800 per year, or ~$7,400/person (based on two working adults and two children).

The above covers the majority of Federal Welfare spending that UBI would replace. In order for UBI to work the cost of healthcare would need to be added to the annual benefit amount.

The problem with UBI when the majority of a population can work is those on the low end of the income spectrum will effectively be subsidizing those who are "rich". The purpose of welfare programs is to help the needy when they are most vulnerable, not to give money to everyone, regardless of need. Ideally, the government will create circumstances in which the need for various welfare programs is short lives and unusual.

Taxes -

The biggest owner of land is the federal government, which cannot raise money by taxing itself. I haven't looked into your figures closely, but I suspect the claimed revenue from a property tax is overstated.

The Net Present Value of any asset is the current value (discounted value) of all future cash flows the asset will generate. If an asset will incur additional costs it did not previously incur, then its value will decline, all else being equal. Imposing a tax on real property will cause its value to decline, so you would need to either impose a higher tax rate, or budget for less revenue.

A sales tax is also difficult to enforce, and not all sales taxes due are paid by businesses. If someone is paying in cash (or crypto), a business could simply not report this as a sale, or they could report they gave a non-existent discount to pay less sales taxes. The incentives to do this would be large with a 55% sales tax rate.

Regulations -

I agree most regulations are harmful, but some are not.

Wage and hour laws (regulations) prevent an employer from offering high wages to employees for temporary work, only to not pay them. They also prevent employers who are going out of business from not paying employees for work performed immidiately prior to the business closing. Probably most importantly, they prevent an employer who has vastly more power than an employee from unilaterally changing the terms of an agreement without real (not forced) consent of the employee after work has been performed.

Child labor laws prevent young children (who lack the ability to understand the consequences of their decisions) from being abused in the labor market, and remove most disincentives of young children from completing basic education, which benefit society in the long run, and will benefit the child greatly in the long run, while only removing a very small amount of benefit to the child in the short run.  

Labor safety laws (OSHA) force employers to provide a safe working environment to employees. Employees generally lack the ability to evaluate the safety of their work on an individual level, and employers frequently lack the resources to pay for judgements resulting from injuries/deaths of employees if something goes massively wrong -- the employer would simply go out of business/bankrupt.

When implemented property, minimum wage laws will prevent employees from being abused during an economic downturn, which will make it more difficult for the economy to recover, which is bad for everyone. The current attempts to make the minimum wage a "living wage" is nothing but harmful to workers.

In general, a regulation that protects a person from themselves is bad, and a regulation that meet the all below criteria are good (there may be others):
*Protecting a person from being taken advantage of by someone with great strength/influence
*Does not unreasonably impede on the free market
*does not prevent a person from entering into an agreement with someone they would normally want to enter into when not under duress.

[KingScorpio]

who the hell cares? that budget is for the us institutions that are all highly in dept globaly.

as long as they dont change their dept situation everyone in the world should ignore that budget as its only serving the communists in america (left right compromisers)

[Jet Cash]

More humans is bad. As automation and robotics increases, then most of them will have no function other than that of consumer.

The other problem is that most of the world is still controlled by the Eton/Oxford elite that have morphed the old British Empire into a new supra-national entity that is run through trusts, derivatives and holding companies that are managed through the City of London. The origins go back to a creation by Cecil Rhodes, the Rothschilds, the English Crown, and some other dynasties. Washington, Westminster and the EU are just the fronts to act as fall organisations to protect the City of London.

There is hope though. UK politics used to be split vertically between, Conservatives and Labour, and the US had a similar structure. Recently the split has been horizontal with leaders like Clinton, Obama, Blair, Theresa May, Margaret Thatcher, and many others controlling the decision making in the "democracies", and the junior back benchers only having a minor role as noisy protesters. Nigel Farage's Brexit party is collecting those populist back benchers into one political group, and this poses a real threat to the Eton/Oxford elite. Countries auch as Italy that want to remove central banking, and the creation of debt, are another hope for the removal of the  banking slave masters.

[KingScorpio]

More humans is bad. As automation and robotics increases, then most of them will have no function other than that of consumer.

The other problem is that most of the world is still controlled by the Eton/Oxford elite that have morphed the old British Empire into a new supra-national entity that is run through trusts, derivatives and holding companies that are managed through the City of London. The origins go back to a creation by Cecil Rhodes, the Rothschilds, the English Crown, and some other dynasties. Washington, Westminster and the EU are just the fronts to act as fall organisations to protect the City of London.

There is hope though. UK politics used to be split vertically between, Conservatives and Labour, and the US had a similar structure. Recently the split has been horizontal with leaders like Clinton, Obama, Blair, Theresa May, Margaret Thatcher, and many others controlling the decision making in the "democracies", and the junior back benchers only having a minor role as noisy protesters. Nigel Farage's Brexit party is collecting those populist back benchers into one political group, and this poses a real threat to the Eton/Oxford elite. Countries auch as Italy that want to remove central banking, and the creation of debt, are another hope for the removal of the  banking slave masters.

why should human have a function and why should there be someone who tells them which function they have? isnt the usa a country based in liberalism?

maybe someone should give you a function like hamburger sandwich maker so you understand how freedom works?

freedom to earn your money and enrich the central bank that funds lawyers that then illegalise every competitior

[Beerwizzard]

1. 10% annual property tax is a pure robbery, especially for people who live around the silicon valley.
2. UBI is shit by default.
3. This UBI shit only seems reasonable in you are going to eliminate the other welfare. But in this case you are just choosing a better of two evils.
4. Elimination of work-related regulations is an extremely naive idea. US bureaucracy has been creating itself for loooong decades. You won't eliminate it just because it is a cool idea.

[otrkid1970]

You say Remove income taxes? The basic principal of incomes taxes is fair and i don't mind paying my fair share but when companies like Amazon make Billions and pay nothing this is a real problem that needs fixing.

You say end Welfare? I agree that alot of able body people abuse the system and it needs overhaul. End Social security?? Hell no! Social security is what we have been paying into our entire life. I'm not just giving away the last 35 years of my hard earned money back to the Government.

You say Universal Basic income? Nope. You want to End welfare etc. and make an Even Larger welfare system?

[eddie13]

I would sail away..
Buy a sailboat and take my free income traveling the world, avoiding the national sales tax by buying everything in other countries, and land taxes by not living on land.

I like the idea of removing income tax because we could eliminate most of the IRS and money leaching bureaucracy but property taxes are already bad enough.
I am concerned that property may not be as good of an investment as one would think because the government can change their mind at any moment and tax you right off your land, or if property value skyrockets in your locality you will be taxed out of affordability.

The UBI, well I think I could live like a king in south america for that money.
I like your idea that more humans are good as far as reproduction of productive people but every person in the world will be trying to come get their piece of that UBI and I highly doubt they would average net-positive.. We would need some serious immigration control and very nice walls. How are you going to keep non-citizens from getting UBI like they get all the other welfare now?

Do you really think that UBI will cover medical? What if the poor guy needs $300k worth of work to live but would live? Who is going to pay for that, or are you going to pull the plug on him because of money? Pulling the plug on people over cost is another discussion entirely..

I think this would also be a dangerous step toward communism. It is giving them a lot more than an inch and they will never stop grabbing at the mile.

This sounds a lot like National Socialism which might work if you can hold onto the National part but it will be very hard for it not to turn into open-boarders socialism attracting millions of net negatives from around the globe. It only might work if you can strictly keep to your base of highly productive people. For all non highly productive people this would be the holy grail to come take advantage of, and me dipping out in my sailboat because if this is what society is I want no part of it.. I would be demoralized about paying for so much free stuff and just drop out, unless you somehow take my citizenship gibsmedat away for traveling.


I much prefer a dog eat dog may the best man win society where the unproductive would be let to fail and leave. I would prefer society to use a distributed currency such as Bitcoin but if this nation must have a fiat currency I would prefer only tax via inflation where they would just print money for gov spending taxing everyone equally through the gradual devaluation of the currency.

[Netnox]

I don't agree with most of your ideas.

Replacement of income tax with sales tax: this will slow down the economy, as people will not spend their income
UBI: never going to work as lazy people will just sit at home and refuse to work
Removal of benefits: some groups need welfare, such as the elderly and disabled. You can't deny that to them.
Removal of work related regulations: what do you want? workers dying of exhaustion after working continuously for 48 hours?

[Spendulus]

Although I'm an anarcho-capitalist and in an ideal world I'd like there to be no government at all, I'm very interested in government/politics, and I don't scoff at gradual changes in the right direction. For a while I've been thinking that a left-right compromise is possible by increasing total tax collected while simultaneously reducing intrusiveness, regulation, and size of government. Here is a specific plan:

1 - Remove income tax and replace it with a national sales tax and a national property tax

Income tax is bad for the economy -- when you tax something you always get less of it --, and it's also highly invasive because almost everything you do might generate some income.

Property tax is a sort of wealth tax, which is quite anti-freedom, but it's also a pretty non-invasive tax since the government just has to go to the land and demand that the tax be handed over. They don't even need to know who lives on the land. It's also impossible to evade, which would be relevant if the entire world switched to private cryptocurrencies. Sales tax is also pretty non-invasive. Only businesses have to directly deal with it, and they just have to count up their sales and pay the appropriate tax.

The total land value of the US (not including improvements) is about $18 trillion.¹ US consumers buy about $14.3 trilion in goods per year.²

I propose a 10% annual national property tax (on the value of the land alone, not including improvements, unlike most local property taxes) and a 55% national sales tax. This gives a (naïvely estimated) revenue of $9.7 trillion, much higher than the current US tax revenue of about $3.4 trillion.

A 55% sales tax sounds high, but keep in mind that the US currently has a 25% "sales tax" on imported steel, an 8% sales tax on diesel, and roughly a 22% sales tax on cigarettes. People can live with it, especially if their income tax is being eliminated.

2 - universal basic income

In order to offset the regressive nature of the sales tax and also act as a sort of very easy-to-administer welfare system, I propose a UBI of $20,608 per US citizen per year. This is calculated from the current federal poverty guideline of $12,490 plus 55% to cover the sales tax and 10% to cover the property tax. No means testing, since that complexifies the system -- think of it as undoing some of the property/sales tax in a progressive way.

More humans are good. A new human is someone who's almost certainly going to produce more in his lifetime than he's going to consume; it's not "just another mouth to feed". So in my plan I decided to include even children in the UBI, which massively subsidizes having children. You could instead choose to not include the 20% of US people under 16, or to give them less per year, which would reduce costs.

The US population is about 306 million³ when you subtract the 7% of the US population who are non-citizens ⁴. So the UBI has a total cost of $6.3 trillion per year, far higher than the current welfare spending.

3 - eliminate all other welfare

Eliminate social security, medicare, medicaid, and all other welfare. The UBI covers it instead. This saves about $3.3 trillion from the budget.⁵

Most people should be working. So don't complain about the (real) $12k/year not being enough for every little thing. For the miniscule percentage of the population who can't work at all, they could move to somewhere far away from major cities, where $12k/year is often enough to live on, or they could live with one or more roommates to reduce costs. If someone needs major surgery or something and they can't afford it, they should look to charities and their neighbors for help.

4 - eliminate all work-related regulations

Since nobody has to work in a particular job in order to survive, there's no argument for any work-related regulations. All work is now totally optional. So eliminate minimum wage laws, regulations related to hours worked, child labor laws, etc. This will boost GDP and probably increase tax revenue, possibly allowing for lower tax rates than given above, though I'm not qualified to estimate this.

Summary

So the budget is:
 - Property tax revenue: $1.8 trillion
 - Sales tax revenue: $7.9 trillion
 - Total tax revenue: $9.7 trillion
 - Non-welfare spending retained*: $3.3 trillion⁵
 - UBI: $6.3 trillion
 - Total cost: $9.6 trillion

(*Note that I would want to massively reduce war spending, but that's out of scope for this discussion.)

Although tax revenue is massively increased and total welfare is about doubled, the size of government in its intrusiveness and number employees massively shrinks. This IMO would be a pretty good outcome, and perhaps it's not politically impossible that the "far-left" and "far-right" could join forces in order to achieve something like this.

Almost without exception, proposals such as yours fail to anticipate outcomes in what might best be described as an adversarial gaming environment, in which your proposal is only "Game On..." and then the gaming starts. The outcomes are always far from what was anticipated by the designers.

For example, millions of illegal immigrants would likely return home but manage to continue getting their checks...

[BitBustah]

Can't believe so many of you guys are against UBI.  Don't you realize that automation has been taking jobs away from humans and its only becoming stronger.

One of the biggest problems is technological innovations are mostly funded by government programs but private corporations use it to make a profit.  For example: internet, cell phones, gps

UBI will reduce crime drastically and give an overall benefit to our society.  We lose a lot of brilliant minds that have great potential due to poverty.

[Quickseller]

Can't believe so many of you guys are against UBI.  Don't you realize that automation has been taking jobs away from humans and its only becoming stronger.

UBI is difficult to implement in a global society with immigration. Today the incentives are great for someone to leave Indonesia and come to BitcoinTalk (temporarily) in order to take advantage of earnings opportunities. If BitcoinTalk were to start giving UBI to everyone, there would be an even greater influx of people who are not contributing (and are harming).

An alternative to UBI with the advent of automation would be public works programs coupled with a high tax rate on certain businesses.

[BitBustah]

That is a fair point quickseller, immigration would indeed by a massive problem if the United States was the only country to implement it.

I've read people talking about a robot tax when automation becomes really advanced.  I'm really curious as to how this will play out over the next few years.  Its in the interest of the ownership class to not let things get to out of hand or the guillotines will be brought back.

One of the earliest replacements will be drivers, Truckers will be replaced with self driving automobiles soon.

For people saying that new technology creates jobs, this isn't like the introduction of computers and the internet.  There won't be as strong of a need for human workers but this should be the goal of humanity.

[Netnox]

Can't believe so many of you guys are against UBI.  Don't you realize that automation has been taking jobs away from humans and its only becoming stronger.

One of the biggest problems is technological innovations are mostly funded by government programs but private corporations use it to make a profit.  For example: internet, cell phones, gps

UBI will reduce crime drastically and give an overall benefit to our society.  We lose a lot of brilliant minds that have great potential due to poverty.

UBI supporters tend to be lazy welfare rats who want free money while sitting at home. Automation is not taking away the jobs. If you have the necessary skills, then it is quite easy to get a job nowadays. Check the unemployment rates that we have now and what we had two decades back. Also, the fact that immigration to the US is increasing just confirms that there is no shortage of jobs here. Just a few days back another caravan of 20,000 Latin Americans started their journey to the US.

[theymos]

Damn, I guess I shouldn't enter the Democratic primary on this platform. And I was getting all ready for the debates...

If you tax $18 trillion worth of property at 10% and 14.3 trillion worth of sales at the same percentage rate

It's 10% property tax and 55% sales tax.

Everybody needs a place a place to live, or to do business.  The property owners are just going to pass on the costs to their tenants.  Regardless of whether you own the property, you'll be paying the tax.

Correct, which is why it's included in the real-UBI calculation. It's a wealth tax because someone just sitting around doing nothing on his property still has to pay tax, which is rather abhorrent to me, but it's still a lesser evil compared to income tax IMO.

The annual premiums for an unsubsidized health insurance plan is between $4700 and $12,800 per year (for a single person), depending on, primarily the deductible. At the low end, someone should expect to pay about a total of $5,000 in healthcare costs per year, per person. This would include the cost of health insurance and a small amount of out of pocket expenses. This amount would be for a generally healthy person.

Health care costs are too high due to over-regulation. That should be fixed separately.

The annual food stamp benefit is around $2,000 per person (based on a 3 person household).

The EITC is ~$3,500 with one child, or about $1,175 (rounded up to $2,000/year) per person assuming two parents and one child. It is ~$5,800 with two children, or $1,450/person with two parents. Budget assumptions need to be at least 1 child/person, otherwise the population would shrink, which would cause other budget problems.

The above three programs alone are valued at approximately $9,000 per year, and it is not uncommon for a working family to be eligible for all three of the above programs.

For someone that is not working, or only earning a very little amount, the additional government benefits will far exceed the UBI amount. Most states pay between $300 and $500/week in unemployment benefits. Assuming a $400/week benefit per working adult, or $200/week/person, (based on two working adults and two children) works out to $10,400/year. Someone on SSDI will receive ~$14,800 per year, or ~$7,400/person (based on two working adults and two children).

My UBI is per citizen, including children. So a family of four would get $49,960/year, blowing most existing welfare programs out of the water. I think that the only people who could get less would be some disabled/unhealthy people.

But if you want to increase it more, you can. Here are some example numbers for different UBI amounts:

Pre-tax-adjustment UBI	Post-tax-adjustment UBI	Total UBI cost	Property tax	Sales tax
12490	20608.50	6.3T	10%	55%
17490	33580.80	10.3T	12%	80%
25000	64250	19.6T	15%	142%
35250	167437.50	51.2T	25%	350%

(Although over-100% salex tax might sound ridiculous, in practice today's taxes are probably above 100% if you took all of the payroll, corporate, income, gax, etc. tax and concentrated them into the point of sale.)

The problem with UBI when the majority of a population can work is those on the low end of the income spectrum will effectively be subsidizing those who are "rich". The purpose of welfare programs is to help the needy when they are most vulnerable, not to give money to everyone, regardless of need.

When rich people get the UBI, you can think of it as sort of progressive tax, like how even if you make $1 million in a year, you still pay 0% income tax on the first dollar.

For the sake of argument, and not based on any data, let's say that people own 35% of their yearly income in base-land-value (or this is represented in increased rent/other prices), and that they spend yearly amounts wildly-guessed below. Then you get:

Income	Spending on goods	Total tax	Effective income tax rate
1	12000	-14,008	-
10,000	12,000	-13,658	-137%
20,000	12,000	-13,658	-67%
30,000	15,000	-11,308	-38%
40,000	20,000	-8,208	-21%
50,000	25,000	-5,108	-10%
75,000	27,000	-3,133	-4%
100,000	30,000	-608	-1%
250,000	35,000	7,392	3%
500,000	45,000	21,642	4%
1,000,000	100,000	69,392	7%
1,500,000	150,000	114,392	8%
10,000,000	200,000	439,392	4%
50,000,000	250,000	1,866,892	4%
100,000,000	300,000	3,644,392	4%

You can see that it approximates a progressive income tax with a Friedman-style negative income tax. The progressiveness breaks down a bit at the truly high end (beyond what anyone seriously claims on their income taxes...), but this could perhaps be addressed by increasing the property tax overall and/or making it progressive at the very high end.

The biggest owner of land is the federal government, which cannot raise money by taxing itself. I haven't looked into your figures closely, but I suspect the claimed revenue from a property tax is overstated.

The Net Present Value of any asset is the current value (discounted value) of all future cash flows the asset will generate. If an asset will incur additional costs it did not previously incur, then its value will decline, all else being equal. Imposing a tax on real property will cause its value to decline, so you would need to either impose a higher tax rate, or budget for less revenue.

Government land isn't included. It's from that Federal Reserve document using figures from tables B.101, B.103, and B.104.

The average local property tax is 1.2%, and that includes improvements as well as base land value. IMO 10% wouldn't destroy the economy. (I'd actually originally wanted to do exclusively property tax, but it ended up not being enough revenue at reasonable tax rates, so I added sales tax. If it was like a 50% tax on total real-estate value, then I agree that land values would drop catastrophically.)

I didn't include land improvements because I think that assessments of this are rather invasive, and it also discourages economic development. If you do include improvements, then it's a total of $51.8 trillion.

[coolcoinz]

I'm not even going to touch the US numbers, but here in the EU we have VAT, which is similar to what you're proposing. The rates are set individually by every country but usually are around 20% with the exception of some products that have much lower rate or are exempt (like baby products). It's rather fair and doing well in the way that people aren't protesting against it. Try to increase taxes on fuel, housing, or alcohol and it's a different story.

I've always had an issue with the income tax because it's extremely unjust. You work hard, you pay more. You live on welfare, you don't pay anything. A system that punishes productivity should never exist in any society. Personally, I'm against welfare and therefore against UBI. If you gave 50k USD to every citizen, you'd have a zombie apocalypse problem, with zombies being the third world migrants. You'd need ships patrolling the coast day and night and sinking their rafts.
To give you an idea of what you're proposing, a yearly minimum wage in Uganda is $100. YEARLY, and this is just one of the countries with such problems. Pakistan, Bangladesh, Liberia, Eritrea and others are not far from it. If they caught wind that Americans are giving away $50k a year to every family, they'd literally kill to get on that train.

[coins4commies]

I'm looking for the "left" in this and can't find anything other than far right libertarianism.  

As for UBI, I don't understand why any capitalist wouldn't support it either.  Its a major bandaid but they need to realize that its their last hope to extend capitalism through this century.  The alternative is a complete collapse of capitalism or socialist overhaul.  

[darklus123]

Removing Income tax is  really indeed a big help for everyone, Currently in the Philippines I find it fair that Filipinos will no longer needs to pay their Income tax if they are only earning less than or equal to the doubled minimum wage. And the government also adjusted the tax that an middle class Filipino should have to pay.

We should not removed the minimum wage, instead keeping it high enough to sustain a life is actually the best thing to do. Or yes as you have said a good alternative would be the UBI.