Milton Friedman sob uma diferente perspectiva - Negative income tax

Part of the confusion arises from the name and the ideological origins of the program. Milton Friedman's 1962 book Capitalism and Freedom made a surprising concession to the socialists. He said we need "a floor below which no man's net income...could fall," a program also called a guaranteed national income. It should be provided through a "negative income tax," said Friedman, an odd phrase for an outright cash subsidy administered through the tax system. We might as well call a tax a "negative wage."
But Friedman failed to consider how this system would work in the real world. People undertake adaptive strategies to get on and stay on the dole whenever it's available. That the program is cheap to administer makes it all the more dangerous. Refuting Friedman, Henry Hazlitt showed that the only way to get people off welfare is to stop the payments.
Nonetheless, Friedman's idea eventually made it into law.
So much for getting people off welfare. It has become an instrument for recruiting new dependents, and massively redistributing income. One does not have to be working to get it. Neither does one have to be poor. A worker can get payments included in his paycheck. As the fastest growing single item in the welfare state, it is becoming the guaranteed national income socialists have long dreamed about imposing.
The only way to reform this program is first to expose it as the welfare redistribution program that it really is. It should not be called the Earned Income Tax Credit; it should be denounced as the Unearned Income Transfer Payment, and immediately abolished. So long as that solution is not contemplated, the program will grow without limit, drawing more and more people into the ranks of the government s dependents. Such is the price of intellectual compromise