I think what he means by negative income tax, isn't the same as workman's compensation, it's more you get money 'back' in your refund in the thousands of dollars when you only paid in the hundreds of dollars. I know people that say they're getting a big tax refund, when really they're just getting money that they never paid into the tax system back. That's hardly a refund, just by the definition of the word.
Correct, the Earned Income Credit and the Child Tax Credit are the most commonly used "refundable" credits that can result in a refund in excess of taxes withheld, commonly called a negative income tax because specifically with the EIC there is a range where each next dollar of income earned results in an additional credit, so the government is paying you for making that next dollar. It's been around on the theoretical side since since Nixon, was originally implemented in 1975, but the largest expansion was part of the Clinton-era work incentive reforms in 1993.
Worker's comp is state-level unemployment and disability insurance - OASDI is the rough Federal equivalent and is paid for via a 2.9% payroll tax split between employee and employer.
A taxpayer's "refund" is generally the excess of what the taxpayer paid in or what withheld on their behalf over what their liability was. Many people who rave about large refunds are really only getting their own money back that they could have kept from each paycheck, but they don't know how the W-4 works. Some taxpayer's receive additional cash on their tax return via refundable credits.
This last year was interesting in that the temporarily expanded child tax credit was pre-rebated monthly from August to December 2021, to the tune of $300 per child 6 and under, and $250 for children over 6. The credit was only expanded from $2,000 to to $3,600 ($3,000 over 6), so a portion of the pre-expansion credit was paid, meaning some people are filing 1040s right now are short $200 bucks a kid compared to last year on the return, and will likely be more upset about a smaller refund rather than taking a second to realize they received $1,800 (or $1,500) in cash already.
The CTC expansion was the first functional iteration of universal basic income in the US at the Federal level, a policy goal of the Democratic Party that they partially slipped into the budget, and partially hid from their own supporters. Basically no one is talking about that, either against OR on the side of supporting it. It's bizarre political theater that one of the mostly hotly debated tax policy issues of this century came and went under the radar.
That's all well and good if you're attending an economics convention where everyone speaks your language.
The US school system should do a better job at teach kids useful things, and US adults should be more civically involved and able to talk about important concepts that affect their lives. I fought for my education and apparently got more from it than the average person who gets it handed to them. Every US citizen is a taxpayer, and every US citizen should know the structure of the systems they pay into.
That's a interesting conundrum - when people don't utilize the hand-outs and hands-up given to them, who is to blame for unequal outcomes?
My argument for less Federal government and more state and local government is that it increases the number of people involved with the system, and makes the system more accessible and less mystifying to people. Term limits at every level would help eviscerate the permanent political over-class that runs this country from top to bottom. Ordinary people will in general make decisions as well as so-called "experts" because the "wrong" answer is most often wrong because it's not timely, not because it's a bad decision. More people making more decisions should average out to a better answer, and limit the impact of bad answers to smaller groups.
