Just wanted to say thanks again for the detailed and thoughtful response! It was just a thought experiment but thanks for making me think it through a little more. I was originally thinking "hey, some corporations already buy carbon credits, why not give people some tax credits and let the corporations buy those too". But the numbers totally don't make sense. I know it would never be workable, but the napkin math doesn't work either so the whole idea is basically nonsense. I always just sort of assumed that corporations don't pay enough tax and if you tweaked that formula a bit there'd be plenty of money for free health care and ice cream parties.

I do still think it's kind of a neat idea but at lower amounts, as you've pointed out, it also doesn't move the needle much because corporations don't actually pay that much tax in the first place compared to the size of the population of the US. Allocating a chunk of any real money to a 330+ M population really adds up quick too. I think the motivation (as one of the parent comments suggested) was to try and provide some kind of basic income but also to boost the "value" of a worker in some way so we don't all get replaced by robots and GPT3000. The bigger problem right now isn't employment though, it's wages and inflation, and this doesn't really help that much.

I did finally look at some tax revenue numbers instead of just wildly guessing. :) The bottom 50% of taxpayers (75M people) pay on average $650 in taxes and their total contribution is 48 billion, around 3% of the total taxes paid [0]. In 2019 revenue from corporate income tax was $230B, but that looks to be closer to 10% of the total federal revenue from income tax for that year on this other chart [1]. Interestingly those two sources don't match but whatever, it's close enough for government work.

So, even a 3k floating tax credit just for that bottom 50% segment instead of everyone would "cost" the system about $225B for those 75M people which is pretty close to the corporate tax revenue. So let's see what that would look like. If you doubled the corporate tax rate to pay for all this then you'd have $460B from corporate tax to start, then $225B credits are redeemed, leaving $235B. Of course, nobody is going to pay $3k for $3k of credits, so the exchange rate would probably converge to closer to the tax rate something like 10:1, and now you're talking about 300 bucks per person and another $25B in "cost" to the corporations to buy their tax credits back. So then you've effectively increased corporate taxes to $260B which is like +13% after all the credits are redeemed and you've only given half the population 300 bucks.

I think the amounts are definitely too low for anyone to care. Even at 10x it isn't that interesting and as you point out, you could 100x it and tax corporations at a 1000% rate just to get into poverty level universal basic income territory.

It would be a lot easier to just eliminate taxes on that demographic and maybe bump the corporate tax rate by 20% to cover it without all this credit reassignment nonsense.

Maybe the current system isn't the worst after all? Maybe I'll try to come up with a plan to fix the health insurance system in this country instead, it's probably easier. :)

[0] https://taxfoundation.org/publications/latest-federal-income...
[1] https://www.taxpolicycenter.org/statistics/amount-revenue-so...