From: cbbrowne@csi.uottawa.ca (Christopher Browne)
Subject: Re: Negative Income Tax (Was: Social programs)
Organization: Dept. of Computer Science, University of Ottawa
Date: Wed, 16 Dec 92 16:30:16 GMT

In article <craigen.46.724514935@ace.acadiau.ca> craigen@ace.acadiau.ca (DOUGLAS CRAIGEN) writes:
>   This all sounds good to me, but I fail to see why every scheme that has 
>been posted that gives any details (and it is the details of people's 
>schemes that I am the most interested in) seem to be centered on an annual 
>basis.  

I gather that you've never been involved with payroll accounting...
You would NOT suggest "monthly" if you had.

If the job of reporting were done on a "monthly" basis, there would
essentially be twelve times as much verification work required.
(Well, maybe only 10 times as much.  But still a LOT more work.)

>If we have a simple enough policy, there is no reason why it 
>couldn't be automatically conducted on a monthly basis by the bank 
>computers.

This makes the banks into financial reporting agents of the federal
government.  It's horrendously more complicated than you suggest.
You'd have to:

   a) Convince them to agree to do the work,
   b) Increase bank charges quite significantly because of all of the
      added work,
   c) Move to an entirely cashless society in which all financial
      transactions MUST be reported to the government immediately
      after they take place.

Do you want to make the banks even MORE powerful than they already are
now?  And how does this affect the trust companies that aren't quite
banks?  This sort of thing is a serious move towards Orwell's "1984."

And by the way, it really throws away any advantage that there was in
using computers to do the job.  The computer can do a lot of the work,
but this would add new tasks for the humans that monitor the computer.

>These annual schemes are the pits for anyone whose income 
>fluctuates, as I am sure many low incomes do.  We already have had for years 
>a scheme where you typically don't get a good portion of your income til 
>April of the following year, and that after begging for it with a pile of 
>forms.  Some of the recent initiatives are even worse.  For example, I 
>have been working as a Sabbatical replacement and have been making good 
>money.  Job postings for next year don't look very good and I expect my 
>income to drop a lot.  My present child-care etc benefits are based on the 
>low income I had finishing off my Ph.D. so they are high.  By the time my 
>income drops, they will be based on my present high earnings, and will be 
>quite low.  If we are going to overhaul the system, lets make it respond 
>more quickly to a person's present needs.

You've got a choice:
Fast, correct, or affordable.

You can't have more than two of 'em, and if you get two, the third one
gets seriously abused.  If it's fast and correct, then the price will
be horrendous.  If it's fast and cheap, it will give a lot of WRONG
answers.  Correct and affordable?  The system would be slower than
molasses.

-- 
Christopher Browne                |     PGP 2.0 key available
cbbrowne@csi.uottawa.ca           |===================================
University of Ottawa              |  The Personal Computer:  Colt 45
Master of System Science Program  |  of the Information Frontier
Newsgroups: soc.culture.canada