If our taxes actually funded any of the spending of the federal government your plan would be quite a good way to proceed. However, since there is no function of the Treasury that applies taxes forward to spending (currency creation or borrowing) it would just be another way of counting apples to determine how many oranges you have. Do we really need even more dysfunction in how we fund our society?
Congress creates currency when it spends to provision itself or fund programs to benefit the private sector and it cancels that currency when it taxes. End of story, well almost. If it spends $1 and taxes $.90 the dime remains in the private sector and is recorded as a “deficit”. The accumulation of deficits is reflected in the category we mislabeled as “debt”. It should be titled as “private sector reserves” because it is our national savings and the currency we use to transact commerce, not something we owe. The nation’s obsession with paying down the debt is akin to a worker being irate at his employer paying him/her too much and demanding a pay cut while taking on more personal debt to survive.
The extremely wealthy understand this, for the most part, and that is the incentive behind their aversion to taxes, not greed. Would you hand over any significant portion of your income without objection if you had to watch it being torched in front of you? I don’t think anyone would, which is why the budget and taxation processes are made purposefully complex. Those above the mean income would never give up their tax payments and those below would demand more spending in their favor if they fully understood the process. There is also a considerable number of people who want the influence and power to regulate and tax of the federal government to be “drowned in a bathtub” that benefit from the great national misconception.
This is why the move from a gold standard to a fiat currency was accomplished mostly without fanfare or change in policy, despite it being one of the most monumental changes in our nation’s history. It’s time to pull back the curtain and take a close look at the Great Oz of our fiscal reality, and UBI could be the vehicle making that happen. Sadly, in today’s political climate it will likely come as an emergency response to another deep depression that has always happened when America gets within shouting distance of a balanced “budget” because our leadership fails in the job of managing the “economy” instead. Don’t worry about them though. They will be fine.
