This basic income experiment has plenty of flaws.
Many people get DOUBLE that from government as benefits anyway, so the premise of that experiment is flawed. The disintensives for smallish amount of work still continue.
Finland has additional benefits for rent, additional benefits for supported children and increases to standard unemployment benefits for having to support children.
This isn't really the basic income as most people understand it. It really doesn't replace benefits bureaucracy with something more streamlined that deals away with disincentives.
By disintensives I mean the situation in which reduction of benefits and cost of getting to work eat the salary and there is almost nothing left from the work if its a part time job.
This is not a basic income experiment. This is an experiment to redefine and simplify unemployment benefits.
Specifically, this experiment eliminates (much of) the problem that earning a few hundred euros will cut your unemployment benefits by the same amount. It allows people to take part-time jobs without being penalized. It's not perfect for the reasons you give and more, but it might be significantly better than what is currently in place.
The premise that one can find some universal income amount X and do away with all other types of benefits is a pipe dream anyway. For some, X will be enough to scrape by. For others, X will not be enough for their medical care necessary to survive for two weeks. There will always be a need for some extra needs-based benefits.
That would have been about the time that Don Brash was commissioned to write a report on how to grow the economy and his suggestion was to lower the average income... Two very different approaches.
Labour and the Green party have both shown an interest in UBI so it will be interesting to see if it comes up as policy during the elections next year.
Did they analyse an actual Guaranteed minimum Income trial or is this a paper exercise?
As far as I know the experiments that have been done (one in Canada and two in the US) concluded that only people in a few specific circumstances worked less (single mothers in particular I think).
The largest concerns about basic income are that it will reduce the incentive to work for at least some people, and that it is phenomenally expensive.
Why not solve both problems by simply eliminating income tax on lower income brackets instead? This is cheaper, easier to implement and less politically contentious (we already embrace the notion of progressive taxes, and who doesn't like a tax cut?). It also gives the money directly to those who need it most.
I suspect many people support basic income because they fundamentally believe in a world where you shouldn't have to work to make a living. They use arguments like helping the poor, or putting everyone on an even playing field, or the claim that tech will eventually destroy jobs anyway as Trojan horses for this agenda. I don't agree and I think most people would disapprove of basic income if you told them that it was intended to undermine the culture of working and earning to make your own living.
If you really want to help the poor and the working class, support the elimination of income tax on the lower income brackets instead of basic income. It is a simpler, better, cheaper, and less divisive solution.
You can't give people a tax break if they earn literally nothing. There isn't necessarily an economically sensible job for every single person, and it seems ridiculous to invent bullshit or demeaning jobs just so that people can work to eat.
I reject the idea that working any deadend awful job just to get by is somehow virtuous. I love what I do, and I would do it even if I didn't need to work -- but being able to say that is an extremely privileged position to be in.
We're automating away industry after industry. There already aren't enough jobs to go around, and that will only get worse from here on out. I have no idea what the future should look like, but we have to start by accepting that the value of working at a job to feed yourself is not irreducible or axiomatic.
The point of basic income is that it is universal. It is fundamentally a social welfare program, but it is designed to be a more effective one. By far one of the biggest problems of being poor and especially unemployed is lack of cash flow. This doesn't just get in the way of living a "luxurious" lifestyle, but it causes fundamental problems which can drastically reduce quality of life and often increases the cost of living. This is a well known problem, people with very little money end up forced buying things of low quality, and they end up getting less value for their money, they also find themselves in emergencies because they are unable to pay for essentials.
Moreover, there are huge problems related to improperly aligned incentives when it comes to traditional social welfare programs. With UBI the incentives are, however, very properly aligned. If you want to make more money, if you want to improve the quality of your life, then you can seek progressively higher paying work to do so. UBI merely sets a floor on the minimum level of quality of life that is possible. It does not destroy an incentive to work it merely destroys the coercion to work any job whatsoever in order to avoid starvation. Personally I think that's a good thing, not a bad thing.
Additionally, your point about elimination of the income tax on lower income brackets is tone deaf. This already exists today. The bottom 40% of incomes in the US pay essentially no federal income tax, with many people in those income ranges receiving money back from the federal government in the form of the Earned Income Tax Credit.
Australia raised the income tax threshold to AU$18,000 IN 2012 - https://www.ato.gov.au/Rates/Individual-income-tax-for-prior... It solves a completely different problem to a basic income. If I break both legs and can't work as a laborer any more, it does nothing for me. If I have a baby and daycare costs more than my available jobs, it does nothing for me. If I'm 56 and get laid off, or 19 and want to get a degree, it does nothing for me.
> Why not solve both problems by simply eliminating income tax on lower income brackets instead? This is cheaper, easier to implement and less politically contentious (we already embrace the notion of progressive taxes, and who doesn't like a tax cut?). It also gives the money directly to those who need it most.
My country already does that (no income tax below something like $14,000). That doesn't replace basic income - you still need to do something about people who aren't in work, so there are still a variety of benefits (disability, housing, unemployment), and that variety of benefits is still cut if you start working, so there is still the problem that someone working 5 hours a week is worse off than someone working 0.
Have you seen the concept of a negative tax rate? It's similar but geared to provide money to those that have lower earnings. Interesting concept like UBI.
The largest concern is that it ends up being a form of theft from workers in real terms.
The income receiving individual gets paid twice in real terms - consumption of goods and services provided by others and consumption of their own labour hours.
Those producing the goods and services end up with more money, but less in the pool to buy with it. More money chasing less output is inflation.
We need a system that allows the exchange of labour hours for goods and services, not compulsory handouts.
It will always be beneficial to work on UBI, that's the whole point. The only reason why someone wouldn't be incentivized is if the actual amount is extremely high. But the very fact that it's unconditional is the whole difference here as that makes it always valuable to do more work even just one hour more.
Giving tax breaks to people who make no money isn't helping the poor.
"Why not solve both problems by simply eliminating income tax on lower income brackets instead? This is cheaper, easier to implement and less politically contentious"
That doesn't work. It is already essentially done in the US and hasn't solved the significant poverty problems in the US. Quite the contrary it has likely made the situation worse. Studies show that when the poor don't pay taxes they end up being vilified by the middle class and viewed as leeches. "Why do we pay for free stuff for them", would be the rebuttal. This excepting the poor of taxes erodes the support for welfare programs, and tax cuts on a low salary can't make up for cuts to programs such as public education, subsidized health care etc.
Studies show the best way to reduce poverty is through broad non-means tested programs everybody gets whether they are rich or poor, because that allows the whole population to keep its support behind these programs as everybody benefits from them. It also allows resourceful people to demand quality and improvements. Examples of this is e.g. public education. Whenever education is segregated into public education for the poor and private for the well off, then public education is almost always shitty quality. When the middle class and rich also send their kids to public school, it tends to be of high quality as the powerful will pressure government to keep quality high.
There are some great examples of this from when black and white schools got desegregated. As soon as white kids got sent to black schools, those schools saw dramatic quality improvement as there became much stronger political pressure from resourceful people to improve those schools.
"I suspect many people support basic income because they fundamentally believe in a world where you shouldn't have to work to make a living"
I suspect that is what people against basic income usually suspect about advocates. You engage in a rather human logical fallacy. Assuming people supporting something primarily do it for their own benefit. I support legalized prostitution and drugs. Yet I am not a prostitute, john or drug addict. Wow how can I hold that position then? Hint I care about practical solutions to real problems in society.
I don't really believe in universal basic income but not for the reasons you state. I don't think the problem is that people wouldn't work, but rather that it could never be high enough to replace all the things a welfare system now takes care of.
Could somebody living in Finland comment on what 560 euros per month will get you?
Edit: Looking at some stats here [1] and it looks like 565 euros is enough to rent an apartment outside of city center. It also looks like one could potentially find something for 450 which leaves pretty decent money for food and perhaps a bicycle for transportation? Definitely not enough if you consider utilities though. That's some rough living.
It's possible to live with that amount (because schools and health care are basically free), but it wouldn't be nice of course.
Note that this doesn't really "cost" anything as the people in the program are already receiving generous unemployment benefits,
" The amount will be deducted from any benefits they already receive."
So the difference mainly is that you don't have to ask for this money or report it if you start to earn money.
I wonder how your other benefits are affected though (child support, living expenses like rent and utilities etc.) if you indeed get a job.
The bureaucracy is a nightmare here with unemployment benefits, so hopefully something good will come out of this project.
Single person food ~600€ / month (when you eat healthy, fresh, unprocessed foods)
Rents lower end 600€ at a smaller backwoods town, up to +2000€ in capital area.
It's pocket money and according to the article it decreases the other benefits you get, so I'm not really sure how much people actually gain in terms of their available assets. I guess it's mostly about getting that money without having to fight bureacracy that normally occurs with some gig based jobs etc.
That's about right. To live in Helsinki you'd probabaly need minimum 1000€ for a shared Apartment and food... With 560€ you might be able to live somewhere and scrape by.
This is fundamentally unemployment benefit paid to those out of work coupled with working tax credits paid to those in work.
Nothing new to see here at all other than the elimination of the ridiculous requirement to look for jobs that don't exist - because there aren't enough jobs.
Not enough jobs is still the issue, and nothing has been done to redress that. Nothing changes until the buyers market in labour is turned into a sellers market.
I don't see basic income working in its purest form but then again that is not what this is. This reminds me of the reforms done to the Norwegian pension system, which allows people to keep working after retirement without reduction in pension payments. This was to encourage people who are healthy to work longer than the standard 67 year retirement age.
To my knowledge this has worked well in Norway, and so I suspect a similar change can work well for the unemployed.
I think we are going down the wrong path with endless reports, and threats to get unemployed people back into the workplace. I think it would be better with stronger focus on positive encouragement.
I won't claim to fully understand the theory of guaranteed basic income, but as it has been explained to me it seems inherently flawed in its purest form. The whole point of a welfare system is that members of society will occasionally experience dramatic situations which can get very costly, whether from unemployment, serious illness or accidents. That means sudden spikes in money requirements. A socialized system can handle that as those spikes are evened out over a large portion of people. But a universal pay is constant to my understanding and thus won't fluctuate with need.
This all it can really solve is hindering people from lacking basic necessities like food, shelter and clothes. You can make a system which pays enough to handle every possible case unless you make the payment really high. A young healthy individual will require less basic income than a disabled person in a wheel chair with expensive medications and customized house and car.
Well if valley types have their way and automate 40% or more of jobs in the next ten years, then what actually is the alternative? This or major uprisings and violent clashes?
Universal Basic Income was first popularised (in a small way, and really only among economists) in the Triple Revolution report[1] given to Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964. It was a report on how the US might change in the near future, and it was the work of some very distinguished thinkers (there are at least 3 Nobel prize winners in the list of signatories). The three revolutions that made up the 'triple' were Civil Rights, Weaponry (specifically nuclear weapons), and Automation.
The first two came to pass in more or less obvious ways, but the third (automation) is only really happening now - there isn't much alternative if work is automated away unless you think having a hugely wealthy elite controlling everything while everyone else starves is a good idea.
Finland is one of the best places to adopt basic income.
We already have comprehensive and complex welfare system that creates pockets where effective marginal tax rate is above 100% (going to work part time reduces welfare, net effect is negative). In the lowest income service industry almost half of workers would earn the same if they were unemployed. Fears of people not working if they get the same money without working seems to be false.
There is already two groups of Finns that get kind of basic income. Underage children and old people. Underage children get unconditional sum of money (goes to parents of course). Old people have guaranteed small pension.
This test has many faults, (its only for unemployed, basic income would be for everyone) but it's unconditional like basic income should be. People get the same amount of basic income even if they find work, or work only part time.
Why limit the experiment to unemployed people? It would be interesting to see what people already earning a living do when receiving this no-strings-attached income.
Australia has some of the most liberal welfare payments in the world - anyone that isn't earning much (or doesn't have a job, or has never had one) can get around $250 per week. Forever. Very few strings attached. More money if you have kids, etc.
It's known there are tens of thousands (hundreds? millions?) of people who just don't want to work and sit around on it for their entire lives. A few friends did it for a decade after highschool, just surfed all day every day.
Despite all the naysayers and doomsayers about this kind of thing, Australia's economy and workforce is perfectly healthy, and has been this way for decades....
> Those chosen will receive 560 euros every month, with no reporting requirements on how they spend it. The amount will be deducted from any benefits they already receive.
It looks like they're doing it in a way that doesn't cost anything - its just a reshuffling of the current benefits.
Note that this is an experiment to observe the behavior of those who are on unemployment benefits when they get unconditional benefits. It is not yet universal income, even on a small scale (as it is conditional on the current benefit status).
Note that any "complete" welfare state more or less guarantees, that you will get X income (or at worst, incur a cost of X). Even if you refuse to work, society will make sure you aren't hungry. There is universal healthcare etc. So the money is already spent - a basic income only changes the dynamics by also offering it to those who work.
Offering it to people who work might reduce the number of worked hours, which would be a positive effect (might create more jobs, improve health etc). It comes at an increased cost of course - but that can be offset by increasing income taxes.
If money is distributed and taxes are not increased, then it is a form of stimulus. In that context, a Basic Income should be compared to central bank stimulus (artificially low interest rates etc). If you want to make absolutely sure that stimulus money ends up spent in the economy, as opposed to saved or transferred abroad etc - then a BI seems like a better idea.
That's pretty pointless... it has absolutely nothing to do with basic income. It's a limited time stipend. The recipients' behavior would only be identical if they were so dumb as to not plan more than a month ahead.
I don't understand, how do governments plan to have a long term sustainable basic income for citizens when AI and other technological developments put a large percentage of people out of jobs?
Probably the same as they dealt with it in every other decade of the past century that people worried about workforces disappearing overnight due to technological development, women entering new areas of the workforce, immigration and outsourcing: by paying unemployment benefit to people whose jobs were very gradually replaced and ignoring the doomsayers who insisted - despite all the evidence to the contrary - that in aggregate humanity wasn't ingenious enough to find new things that other people would pay them to do.
For example, tax the robot work equal to human work. But since the robots don't need money the salary paid to a robot is pooled to a "common bank account" and then distributed to humans according to some criteria by the goverment.
Haha lucky, seems like one of those "idealized situations"
If we automated everything, where does money/value come from.
I still don't completely understand how money works "it's a ledger, faith, gateway of energy" a doctor is worth more than a janitor (not arguing that)
Just when there are no skills involved, everyone's the same, would money still have a purpose.
Though I like the idea of basic income. I wouldn't mind that myself and I could remove the fear of being homeless from my mind and focus more on web development.
[+] [-] osmala|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] metafunctor|9 years ago|reply
Specifically, this experiment eliminates (much of) the problem that earning a few hundred euros will cut your unemployment benefits by the same amount. It allows people to take part-time jobs without being penalized. It's not perfect for the reasons you give and more, but it might be significantly better than what is currently in place.
The premise that one can find some universal income amount X and do away with all other types of benefits is a pipe dream anyway. For some, X will be enough to scrape by. For others, X will not be enough for their medical care necessary to survive for two weeks. There will always be a need for some extra needs-based benefits.
[+] [-] Nition|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TheSpiceIsLife|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] disordinary|9 years ago|reply
Labour and the Green party have both shown an interest in UBI so it will be interesting to see if it comes up as policy during the elections next year.
[+] [-] kwhitefoot|9 years ago|reply
As far as I know the experiments that have been done (one in Canada and two in the US) concluded that only people in a few specific circumstances worked less (single mothers in particular I think).
[+] [-] apatters|9 years ago|reply
Why not solve both problems by simply eliminating income tax on lower income brackets instead? This is cheaper, easier to implement and less politically contentious (we already embrace the notion of progressive taxes, and who doesn't like a tax cut?). It also gives the money directly to those who need it most.
I suspect many people support basic income because they fundamentally believe in a world where you shouldn't have to work to make a living. They use arguments like helping the poor, or putting everyone on an even playing field, or the claim that tech will eventually destroy jobs anyway as Trojan horses for this agenda. I don't agree and I think most people would disapprove of basic income if you told them that it was intended to undermine the culture of working and earning to make your own living.
If you really want to help the poor and the working class, support the elimination of income tax on the lower income brackets instead of basic income. It is a simpler, better, cheaper, and less divisive solution.
[+] [-] jclulow|9 years ago|reply
I reject the idea that working any deadend awful job just to get by is somehow virtuous. I love what I do, and I would do it even if I didn't need to work -- but being able to say that is an extremely privileged position to be in.
We're automating away industry after industry. There already aren't enough jobs to go around, and that will only get worse from here on out. I have no idea what the future should look like, but we have to start by accepting that the value of working at a job to feed yourself is not irreducible or axiomatic.
[+] [-] InclinedPlane|9 years ago|reply
The point of basic income is that it is universal. It is fundamentally a social welfare program, but it is designed to be a more effective one. By far one of the biggest problems of being poor and especially unemployed is lack of cash flow. This doesn't just get in the way of living a "luxurious" lifestyle, but it causes fundamental problems which can drastically reduce quality of life and often increases the cost of living. This is a well known problem, people with very little money end up forced buying things of low quality, and they end up getting less value for their money, they also find themselves in emergencies because they are unable to pay for essentials.
Moreover, there are huge problems related to improperly aligned incentives when it comes to traditional social welfare programs. With UBI the incentives are, however, very properly aligned. If you want to make more money, if you want to improve the quality of your life, then you can seek progressively higher paying work to do so. UBI merely sets a floor on the minimum level of quality of life that is possible. It does not destroy an incentive to work it merely destroys the coercion to work any job whatsoever in order to avoid starvation. Personally I think that's a good thing, not a bad thing.
Additionally, your point about elimination of the income tax on lower income brackets is tone deaf. This already exists today. The bottom 40% of incomes in the US pay essentially no federal income tax, with many people in those income ranges receiving money back from the federal government in the form of the Earned Income Tax Credit.
[+] [-] jacalata|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lmm|9 years ago|reply
My country already does that (no income tax below something like $14,000). That doesn't replace basic income - you still need to do something about people who aren't in work, so there are still a variety of benefits (disability, housing, unemployment), and that variety of benefits is still cut if you start working, so there is still the problem that someone working 5 hours a week is worse off than someone working 0.
[+] [-] Gustomaximus|9 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_income_tax
[+] [-] michaelchisari|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] neilwilson|9 years ago|reply
The income receiving individual gets paid twice in real terms - consumption of goods and services provided by others and consumption of their own labour hours.
Those producing the goods and services end up with more money, but less in the pool to buy with it. More money chasing less output is inflation.
We need a system that allows the exchange of labour hours for goods and services, not compulsory handouts.
[+] [-] ThomPete|9 years ago|reply
Giving tax breaks to people who make no money isn't helping the poor.
[+] [-] jernfrost|9 years ago|reply
That doesn't work. It is already essentially done in the US and hasn't solved the significant poverty problems in the US. Quite the contrary it has likely made the situation worse. Studies show that when the poor don't pay taxes they end up being vilified by the middle class and viewed as leeches. "Why do we pay for free stuff for them", would be the rebuttal. This excepting the poor of taxes erodes the support for welfare programs, and tax cuts on a low salary can't make up for cuts to programs such as public education, subsidized health care etc.
Studies show the best way to reduce poverty is through broad non-means tested programs everybody gets whether they are rich or poor, because that allows the whole population to keep its support behind these programs as everybody benefits from them. It also allows resourceful people to demand quality and improvements. Examples of this is e.g. public education. Whenever education is segregated into public education for the poor and private for the well off, then public education is almost always shitty quality. When the middle class and rich also send their kids to public school, it tends to be of high quality as the powerful will pressure government to keep quality high.
There are some great examples of this from when black and white schools got desegregated. As soon as white kids got sent to black schools, those schools saw dramatic quality improvement as there became much stronger political pressure from resourceful people to improve those schools.
"I suspect many people support basic income because they fundamentally believe in a world where you shouldn't have to work to make a living"
I suspect that is what people against basic income usually suspect about advocates. You engage in a rather human logical fallacy. Assuming people supporting something primarily do it for their own benefit. I support legalized prostitution and drugs. Yet I am not a prostitute, john or drug addict. Wow how can I hold that position then? Hint I care about practical solutions to real problems in society.
I don't really believe in universal basic income but not for the reasons you state. I don't think the problem is that people wouldn't work, but rather that it could never be high enough to replace all the things a welfare system now takes care of.
[+] [-] avenoir|9 years ago|reply
Edit: Looking at some stats here [1] and it looks like 565 euros is enough to rent an apartment outside of city center. It also looks like one could potentially find something for 450 which leaves pretty decent money for food and perhaps a bicycle for transportation? Definitely not enough if you consider utilities though. That's some rough living.
[1] https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/country_result.jsp?cou...
[+] [-] kisstheblade|9 years ago|reply
Note that this doesn't really "cost" anything as the people in the program are already receiving generous unemployment benefits, " The amount will be deducted from any benefits they already receive."
So the difference mainly is that you don't have to ask for this money or report it if you start to earn money. I wonder how your other benefits are affected though (child support, living expenses like rent and utilities etc.) if you indeed get a job.
The bureaucracy is a nightmare here with unemployment benefits, so hopefully something good will come out of this project.
[+] [-] ensiferum|9 years ago|reply
Rents lower end 600€ at a smaller backwoods town, up to +2000€ in capital area.
It's pocket money and according to the article it decreases the other benefits you get, so I'm not really sure how much people actually gain in terms of their available assets. I guess it's mostly about getting that money without having to fight bureacracy that normally occurs with some gig based jobs etc.
[+] [-] 1rs|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] neilwilson|9 years ago|reply
So you have 16% of the average wage.
[+] [-] neilwilson|9 years ago|reply
Nothing new to see here at all other than the elimination of the ridiculous requirement to look for jobs that don't exist - because there aren't enough jobs.
Not enough jobs is still the issue, and nothing has been done to redress that. Nothing changes until the buyers market in labour is turned into a sellers market.
[+] [-] jernfrost|9 years ago|reply
To my knowledge this has worked well in Norway, and so I suspect a similar change can work well for the unemployed.
I think we are going down the wrong path with endless reports, and threats to get unemployed people back into the workplace. I think it would be better with stronger focus on positive encouragement.
I won't claim to fully understand the theory of guaranteed basic income, but as it has been explained to me it seems inherently flawed in its purest form. The whole point of a welfare system is that members of society will occasionally experience dramatic situations which can get very costly, whether from unemployment, serious illness or accidents. That means sudden spikes in money requirements. A socialized system can handle that as those spikes are evened out over a large portion of people. But a universal pay is constant to my understanding and thus won't fluctuate with need.
This all it can really solve is hindering people from lacking basic necessities like food, shelter and clothes. You can make a system which pays enough to handle every possible case unless you make the payment really high. A young healthy individual will require less basic income than a disabled person in a wheel chair with expensive medications and customized house and car.
[+] [-] pmyjavec|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] onion2k|9 years ago|reply
The first two came to pass in more or less obvious ways, but the third (automation) is only really happening now - there isn't much alternative if work is automated away unless you think having a hugely wealthy elite controlling everything while everyone else starves is a good idea.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Triple_Revolution
[+] [-] paulddraper|9 years ago|reply
No scheme on earth could automate 40% of jobs in a decade.
> what actually is the alternative
As a proportion of total U.S. jobs, farming declined steadily 5% per decade from 1800 to 1970.
Imagine telling a youth in 1900 that in his lifetime, 35% of the nation's jobs would disappear. People will have nothing to do!!
[+] [-] nabla9|9 years ago|reply
We already have comprehensive and complex welfare system that creates pockets where effective marginal tax rate is above 100% (going to work part time reduces welfare, net effect is negative). In the lowest income service industry almost half of workers would earn the same if they were unemployed. Fears of people not working if they get the same money without working seems to be false.
There is already two groups of Finns that get kind of basic income. Underage children and old people. Underage children get unconditional sum of money (goes to parents of course). Old people have guaranteed small pension.
This test has many faults, (its only for unemployed, basic income would be for everyone) but it's unconditional like basic income should be. People get the same amount of basic income even if they find work, or work only part time.
[+] [-] chunsj|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hydandata|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dudul|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] grecy|9 years ago|reply
It's known there are tens of thousands (hundreds? millions?) of people who just don't want to work and sit around on it for their entire lives. A few friends did it for a decade after highschool, just surfed all day every day.
Despite all the naysayers and doomsayers about this kind of thing, Australia's economy and workforce is perfectly healthy, and has been this way for decades....
[+] [-] fulafel|9 years ago|reply
But true, it would be a better experimental setup to include all kinds of initial circumstances in the study population.
[+] [-] headcanon|9 years ago|reply
It looks like they're doing it in a way that doesn't cost anything - its just a reshuffling of the current benefits.
[+] [-] schemathings|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ams6110|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aswanson|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alkonaut|9 years ago|reply
Note that any "complete" welfare state more or less guarantees, that you will get X income (or at worst, incur a cost of X). Even if you refuse to work, society will make sure you aren't hungry. There is universal healthcare etc. So the money is already spent - a basic income only changes the dynamics by also offering it to those who work.
Offering it to people who work might reduce the number of worked hours, which would be a positive effect (might create more jobs, improve health etc). It comes at an increased cost of course - but that can be offset by increasing income taxes.
If money is distributed and taxes are not increased, then it is a form of stimulus. In that context, a Basic Income should be compared to central bank stimulus (artificially low interest rates etc). If you want to make absolutely sure that stimulus money ends up spent in the economy, as opposed to saved or transferred abroad etc - then a BI seems like a better idea.
[+] [-] lintiness|9 years ago|reply
i read this all time around here. money "saved" is usually invested, and that too stimulates an economy -- and probably more meaningfully long-term.
[+] [-] thescribe|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] duckingtest|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] known|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] arjunbajaj|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] notahacker|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ensiferum|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jfoldager|9 years ago|reply
I like this is not even proposed by a leftist government. The Scandinavian left-right scale maps outside the political spectrum of many countries.
[+] [-] ge96|9 years ago|reply
If we automated everything, where does money/value come from.
I still don't completely understand how money works "it's a ledger, faith, gateway of energy" a doctor is worth more than a janitor (not arguing that)
Just when there are no skills involved, everyone's the same, would money still have a purpose.
Though I like the idea of basic income. I wouldn't mind that myself and I could remove the fear of being homeless from my mind and focus more on web development.
[+] [-] chaosagent|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rmc|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] grzm|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|9 years ago|reply
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