Andre Gouin wrote,
>Let's take that number and play a little arithmetic with it. $9000. for a
>GAI for every one. That is 9 times the number that I selected as a for e.g.
>Mr. Martin's budget on tuesday predicts revenues of $151billions and
>expenses of $148billions. Now at $9000 for each of 30 million Canadians
>that comes out to $270 billions.
>
>Assuming that we scrap everything the government does now (not a bad idea
>to many I'm sure) i.e. saving about $150 billion we wind up with only about
>$120 billions new money to find.
Andre's arithmetic doesn't follow the example that Thomas Lunde was
referring to and it doesn't provide even the most rudimentary model of the
economy into which and from which all those straw expenditures and revenues
would be flowing. But more importantly, it's beside the point. The real
problems with a GAI are not the hypothetical dollar amounts that can be
generated from hypothetical arithmetic. The technical problem is to design a
tax system that generates revenues for the GAI without establishing marginal
tax rates that make it unrewarding to work. The political problem is that
there isn't a powerful constituency for a GAI but there are powerful
constituencies supporting current forms of state expenditure.
