AUTT-UBI Fiscal Calculator

📖 Detailed Description

This interactive calculator is the computational companion to the academic paper:

Kriger, B. (2026). Response to Automation-Driven Labour Displacement: Adaptive Universal Transaction Tax and Request-Based Universal Basic Income. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18706752

What is the AUTT?

The Adaptive Universal Transaction Tax is a proposal to replace all existing taxes — income tax, corporate tax, capital gains tax, payroll tax, sales tax, and VAT — with a single, tiny, automatically collected levy on every electronic financial transaction. The rate is typically between 0.3% and 1.5%, and it adjusts in real time to meet the government's budget target.

The key insight: vastly more money moves through the banking system than any country's GDP. In the United States, approximately $450 trillion passes through electronic payment systems each year — about 16 times GDP. A tiny fraction of this flow is more than enough to fund the entire government. No one fills out a tax return. No one gets audited. No corporation hires an accountant to minimise its tax bill. The levy is collected automatically by the bank at the moment of the transaction — invisible, unavoidable, and negligibly small.

What is Request-Based UBI?

The Universal Basic Income is a regular cash payment to every adult resident — no conditions, no means test, no bureaucratic application. "Request-based" means you simply ask for it; you don't have to prove anything. But because many people with adequate income won't bother to claim it, the actual cost is much lower than the theoretical maximum. Canada's CERB programme in 2020 showed this: 8.9 million out of 20+ million eligible people claimed it — a take-up of about 45%.

The UBI is not charity; it is the dividend of a modern economy's transactional intensity, distributed to all its participants. Combined with the AUTT, it creates a system that is mathematically more progressive than any existing tax-and-transfer system: the lowest income decile receives net transfers exceeding 159% of their income, while the highest decile pays less than 0.4% of theirs.

Country Presets

The calculator provides one-click presets for six economies, calibrated from BIS payment statistics, IMF fiscal data, and national accounts:

• 🇺🇸 United States: GDP $28.8T, Budget $6.1T, V_T $450T → required τ ≈ 1.36%
• 🇬🇧 United Kingdom: GDP £3.5T, Budget £1.2T, V_T £60T → required τ ≈ 2.00%
• 🇩🇪 Germany: GDP €4.5T, Budget €1.9T, V_T €80T → required τ ≈ 2.38%
• 🇫🇷 France: GDP €3.1T, Budget €1.6T, V_T €55T → required τ ≈ 2.91%
• 🇨🇦 Canada: GDP $2.1T, Budget $0.9T, V_T $120T → required τ ≈ 0.75%
• 🇯🇵 Japan: GDP ¥4.2T, Budget ¥1.8T, V_T ¥250T → required τ ≈ 0.72%

Input Parameters Explained

GDP — Gross Domestic Product, the total value of goods and services produced in a year. The traditional measure of economic size — but transaction volume is much larger, because every dollar of GDP passes through multiple hands.

Government Budget (B) — How much the government needs to collect each year to fund all services: defence, healthcare, education, infrastructure, pensions, and the UBI.

Taxable Transaction Volume (V_T) — The total value of electronic transactions subject to the AUTT, after exempting financial-sector plumbing (interbank transfers, derivatives, repo markets, exchange-based trading). Typically 15–25% of gross transaction volume, but still 10–20 times GDP.

Cascade Multiplier (m) — When you buy a loaf of bread, the money doesn't stay at the shop. The shop pays the baker, the baker pays the flour mill, the mill pays the farmer, the farmer pays the seed company. Each transaction is taxed. The cascade multiplier captures how many hands the money passes through on average. Values: 2–3 for simple goods (groceries, rent), 4–6 for manufactured goods, 7–10 for complex electronics or luxury goods.

UBI Take-up Rate — What fraction of eligible adults actually claim the basic income. Not everyone will: people with well-paying jobs, retirees with adequate pensions, and those who simply don't bother. The Canadian CERB precedent suggests 35–45%.

Annual UBI per Adult — The yearly payment to each claimant. $24,000/year ($2,000/month) is roughly the US poverty line — enough for food, shelter, and basic needs, but not luxury. This preserves the incentive to work for a better standard of living.

τ_max Ceiling — A constitutionally enshrined maximum rate the AUTT can never exceed, changeable only by supermajority. This hard ceiling prevents governments from ratcheting up the rate and is published in real time — visible to every citizen.

Elasticity (ε) — How much transaction volume drops when the tax rate rises. At ε=5, a 1% rate reduces volume by 5%. Empirical evidence from existing transaction taxes (UK Stamp Duty since 1986, French FTT since 2012) suggests real-economy elasticities of 1–5.

Consumption Rate — The fraction of household income spent on goods and services (as opposed to saved or invested). Lower-income households spend nearly all their income (90–95%); wealthier households save more (consumption rate 25–50%). This is why the AUTT alone would be slightly regressive — but the UBI more than compensates.

Current Effective Tax Rate — Your total tax burden across all taxes: federal income tax, state/provincial income tax, payroll tax, sales/VAT tax, property tax, and excise duties. For the US middle class, the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy estimates this at approximately 26% (2024).

Output Panels Explained

Required AUTT Rate (τ) — Simply the budget divided by the transaction volume. If the government needs $6.1T and $450T flows through the system, the rate is 1.36%.

Effective Cascade Burden — The actual tax embedded in the final price of goods, after money has passed through m intermediaries. At τ=1.36% and m=3, the effective burden is 4.1% — far below any country's VAT rate (10–25%), and far below the combined current tax burden (25–40%).

V/GDP Ratio — How many times the transaction volume exceeds GDP. Higher ratios mean the tax base is larger relative to the economy, allowing lower rates.

Spiral Stability (ε·τ*) — The critical safety check. If the tax causes people to significantly reduce transactions, revenue falls, forcing the rate higher, causing more avoidance — a potential "death spiral." The product ε·τ* must be below 1 for stability. At operational rates, it's typically 0.01–0.10: nowhere near danger.

UBI Fiscal Impact — Maximum cost (if every adult claims) vs. projected actual cost at the specified take-up rate. The surplus/deficit shows whether the system is sustainable.

Household Comparison — The most personally relevant output. It compares your current total tax burden against what you'd effectively pay under AUTT — typically a reduction from ~26% to ~1–3% of income.

Cascade Visualization — A demonstration of cumulative extraction. The government never takes more than τ from any single transaction, but as the same money circulates, the cumulative effect grows:

Key Insight: Why This Works

Traditional taxation tries to measure each person's and each company's income — a task requiring enormous bureaucracy, invasive reporting, and endless opportunities for avoidance. The wealthiest 0.1% often pay lower effective rates than the middle class, because entity-based taxation can always be gamed by those who can afford lawyers and offshore structures.

The AUTT sidesteps this entirely by taxing the flow of money through the banking system, which is: (a) automatically measurable, (b) impossible to avoid without leaving the banking system, and (c) vastly larger than income alone. The obligation falls on ~1,000 licensed financial institutions — not on 100 million taxpayers.

The result for a median US household earning $80,000: current taxes take ~$20,800 (26%); AUTT cascade costs ~$2,000 (invisible, embedded in prices). The difference — approximately $18,600 per year — is liberated capital. Add UBI of $24,000, and total household resources rise from $59,200 to $102,000: a 72% increase.

Across 67 million middle-class US households, aggregate capital liberation is approximately $1.17 trillion per year — a massive economic stimulus that generates additional transactions, additional AUTT revenue, and enables even lower rates in a virtuous cycle.

Limitations

• Transaction volume estimates are based on aggregate payment statistics and may over- or undercount. Phase 1 calibration (one year at 0.1% alongside existing taxes) resolves this empirically.
• The cascade multiplier is treated as uniform across goods; in reality, different products have different supply chain lengths.
• General equilibrium effects (changes in labour supply, savings, firm structure, international capital flows) are modelled in the paper's stylised GE framework but not fully captured in a simple calculator.
• Property tax may be preserved at the municipal level; the household comparison assumes full replacement for simplicity.
• Migration, remittance, and international trade effects are discussed in the paper but not modelled here.

Formulas and Cross-References to the Paper

Technical Implementation

This calculator is a single-file HTML application with no external dependencies beyond Google Fonts. All computation runs client-side in JavaScript. It can be hosted on any static web server, downloaded and run locally, or embedded in any web page. The source code is open and may be freely modified.

Citation