this post was submitted on 27 Jul 2025
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[–] MHLoppy@fedia.io 1 points 6 days ago

I unfortunately can't find the article that discussed the idea, but someone (an economist? a think tank?) brought up the idea of raising/broadening GST, but then then just giving everyone a flat amount back. In their modeling it halved the net revenue from the GST change (though it was still a good chunk of money), but made it financially neutral for people at lower incomes.


Edit: Again drawing from uni-assignment-land, I really like the PBO's discussion of Australia's tax mix: https://www.pbo.gov.au/about-budgets/budget-insights/budget-explainers/tax-mix/characteristics-different-taxes

Chapter 3 in the PDF has a great discussion about tradeoffs of different taxes, with both Figure 3-1 (near the start) and Table 3-1 (at the end) having some great insights if you're not well-versed in those design tradeoffs (i.e., almost everyone). Here's a copy of that first chart for easier reference: https://fedia.io/media/a9/3c/a93ca8c1bc7fea26f47b9063d55a175d04c0a846d69a4a66d240808675841e34.webp

Of course efficiency (which this figure shows) doesn't mean equity (which the chapter also discusses), hence ideas like the flat offset to balance it out.