Decency for All: Universal Basic Income, Smart Universalism, Provident Funds and Primarily Taxing the Super-Rich

Abstract

This chapter jumps deeper into the world of normative social policy, offering, discussing and explaining major social policy solutions for abandoning inequality and poverty once and for all, first on a country scale, and then, one by one successively, hopefully reaching a global scale. Universal basic income schemes, provident fund schemes, and lots of smart universal benefit and services schemes are the mainstay of this 'new' social policy. At the same time, the financing of the welfare state is being shifted away from the poor and the near-poor themselves, and that entirely. With the new social policy proposed in this book, from now on, social policy (i.e. the government) is not taxing the poor and the near poor anymore (also no social insurance contributions, none of them to be paid by the poor and near-poor). From now on, the welfare state and social security, all of it, is being financed by strongly (in the strongest meaning of the word strongly!) taxing the wealth of the super-super rich, with a one-time, marginal net wealth tax (backwards in time), and strongly(!) taxing the yearly income (without any deductions and exceptions) of the super rich and especially all sorts of capital income instead.