Is one of the daftest arguments I have ever heard.
The point is, of course, that the Citizen's Income is a tax rebate, so however much tax the median/average/typical household pays in to the central pot to fund the CI, they will get exactly the same amount back. So for the vast majority of households, the gain or loss from running a CI is merely a percentage of the difference between their income/spending* and the CI level.
This gain or loss will always be lower than the gain or loss under the current bizarre combination of contributory and means-tested benefits (which are diametrically opposite concepts and cancel each other out) where the majority do the paying in and a sizeable minority receive the pay-outs.
For example, if we assume that the personal allowance for income tax and the NIC primary threshold are reduced to zero and rolled into our fiscally neutral CI (meaning = no change in tax rates), somebody in work pays £3,021 more in income tax and NIC (using 2014-15 rates) but receives £3,700 a year in CI and ends up £679 a year better off.**
How can anybody in their right mind say that they wouldn't be able to afford to be £679 a year better off?
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* Most working households pay more in National Insurance and VAT than in income tax. A sensible tax system would replace NIC and VAT (the worst taxes of all) with Land Value Tax anyway, in which case, the cost/benefit to an individual household of the CI system is the difference between the rental value of the home they choose to occupy and the rental value of the median home. The median household will always break even, and for most households it would be plus-minus a couple of thousand pounds a year.
** There are people who earn less than the personal allowance, of course. Under current rules they are entitled to Working Tax Credits and there will be some very marginal cases (i.e. those who do just over 30 hours a week, and how on earth they police this I do not know) who would end up £10 a week worse off - if they continued working exactly the same number of hours.
But they are relieved from the grief and hassle of filling in endless forms, having to worry their award might be clawed back, having to worry about what happens if their hours drop below 30 hours a week, signing back on to the dole again etc. That costs the taxpayer nothing, saves the taxpayer a few bob as we no longer need so many civil servants, but is worth a fortune to the individual claimant; if they spend another two hours working instead of dealing with/worrying about all this bureaucratic crap, they are ahead of the game, as is society in general.