Urban75 Home About Offline BrixtonBuzz Contact

Basic Income

BigTom said:
But now you need numbers.

You need to know how many wouldn't work. Too many and you don't have enough people working to tax to pay for BI

If you can't find a way to tax companies properly then it can't work.

You also need to know how companies would split their lowered costs between increased profits, further investment and lowering prices to know the effect on this side of the equation.

In principle, I think that if you can't tax companies properly then BI either can't be paid for or acts as a subsidy to business in much the same way tax credits do, but I'm not sure.

Also, do you have links for hayek supporting BI? I find this hard to believe as he was a total free market person, hated welfare state stuff as far as I know. I'm surprised Friedman did either, surely he'd see this as distorting Labour markets.
Click to expand...
I don't know how I would even go about working out those numbers. I'll do some more research as someone must have tried to calculate this stuff in the 70 years or so the idea has been around.

Here's a quote from Hayek's Law, Legislation and Liberty, Volume 3: The Political Order of a Free People

The assurance of a certain minimum income for everyone, or a sort of floor below which nobody need fall even when he is unable to provide for himself, appears not only to be wholly legitimate protection against a risk common to all, but a necessary part of the Great Society in which the individual no longer has specific claims on the members of the particular small group into which he was born.
Click to expand...

He then says he wishes this issue hasn't been mixed in with socialism as they are two completely different things.

Friedman supported a negative income tax, rather than a basic income as described in this thread. There's a lot of overlap on the ideas, though. They're almost the same, except that a negative income tax has the payments being reduced and then eventually removed as you earn more. He was in favour of it because he thought the savings in administrating the tax would reduce the benefits bill. He talks about it in his book Capitalism and Freedom in chapter 12: Alleviation of Poverty.
 
Fez909 said:
I don't know how I would even go about working out those numbers. I'll do some more research as someone must have tried to calculate this stuff in the 70 years or so the idea has been around.
Click to expand...

No, I don't know how you'd do it either, I don't know if you could tbh. I think this would have to be seen in practice to find out what it did.

Here's a quote from Hayek's Law, Legislation and Liberty, Volume 3: The Political Order of a Free People



He then says he wishes this issue hasn't been mixed in with socialism as they are two completely different things.

Friedman supported a negative income tax, rather than a basic income as described in this thread. There's a lot of overlap on the ideas, though. They're almost the same, except that a negative income tax has the payments being reduced and then eventually removed as you earn more. He was in favour of it because he thought the savings in administrating the tax would reduce the benefits bill. He talks about it in his book Capitalism and Freedom in chapter 12: Alleviation of Poverty.
Click to expand...

Cheers, I never read that by Hayek as I'd had enough of him from earlier works that I'd read, surprises me tbh. Friedman I can see now, I'm sure I've read Capitalism and Freedom but I don't remember that. Was a while ago and I didn't like them so I guess I've not tried to hang on to the memories.
 
I haven't found any numbers yet, but there have been some limited experiments with basic income done in a few places.

Manitoba, Canada had a scheme called Mincome which ran for a few years in the 70s. There was a small impact on the number of people in work. Around 1% of men chose not to work, and between 3% and 5% of women, with the higher percentage being new mothers. They chose to stay at home and spend more time with their children. Apparently adult education was more popular during this time, too. Students whose parents chose to work less tended to do better in education, and had lower dropout rates. Hospital visits were down 8.5% over this period, with car accident injuries down, domestic abuse down and work related injuries down.

From January 2008 until December 2009, the Basic Income Grant Coalition ran a pilot project for a GBI (this seems to be the more commonly accepted acronym, not BI as I've been using! The G is 'guaranteed', btw) in Otjivero - Omitara, Namibia. Before the scheme started, the village suffered from unemployment, hunger and poverty. After it was introduced, employment and economic activity went up, school drop-out rates went from 40% to zero, household debt fell, percentage of residents below the food poverty line fell from 76% to 37%.

The biggest problem looks to be the increased migration from other villages to this one, which hints at the problems a GBI would cause and has been mentioned in this thread. The migrants were not given the payments yet moved into this area anyway. This distorted the economic data collected as the income per capita reduced.
 
This guy does some back of the fag packet type calculations, and thinks it would be economically possible, but politically unpalatable. He even writes about a few ways this could be eased into existence rather than what he calls the "big bang" approach. I had thought the big bang would be the way it would have to happen, but it would obviously go wrong and so no one would take the risk.

The Universal Credit that the scum are introducing is a similar challenge in that sense. They've gone for a gradual roll-out with existing claimants being moved over in stages, and all new benefit claimants going straight onto UC. I still feel that's going to be a fuck up - in terms of a smooth change-over, that is. politically it's already fucked up.
 
Fez909 said:
Friedman supported a negative income tax, rather than a basic income as described in this thread. There's a lot of overlap on the ideas, though. They're almost the same, except that a negative income tax has the payments being reduced and then eventually removed as you earn more. He was in favour of it because he thought the savings in administrating the tax would reduce the benefits bill. He talks about it in his book Capitalism and Freedom in chapter 12: Alleviation of Poverty.
Click to expand...

thats not a million miles away from universal credit to be honest, it's main difference being that to qualify for UC you have to constantly prove you are looking for work/more work/better paid work. I suspect Friedman might have approved of that development.
 
smokedout said:
thats not a million miles away from universal credit to be honest, it's main difference being that to qualify for UC you have to constantly prove you are looking for work/more work/better paid work. I suspect Friedman might have approved of that development.
Click to expand...

Aye, Universal Credit is actually roughly the way a Basic Income would be distributed if such a thing existed. The amounts are all wrong, though, and the requirements to attain it should be abolished. But the general idea is the perfect vehicle for introducing a BI.

edit: just realised you're talking about negative income tax, but the point still stands.
 
8115 said:
I think it's a great idea but presumably the cost of it is the major disadvantage. Although by eliminating poverty you would save a fair bit.
Click to expand...

I think it's a great idea too, and would work better than handing out lakes of cash to the bankers.
 
Not read the whole thread at this point, but the idea that different housing costs make the citizens wage idea complex to implement could be countered with the free-market/free-movement-of-labour type argument that this would cause herds of homo-economicus to move to under-populated areas and bring prices into equilibrium. You get the same wage for being a citizen as everyone else, to get more out of it you'll move to cheaper areas and release more of your spending power in those areas, causing greater economic activity and more jobs and so on.
 
Last edited:
A citizens income would be fiercely resisted by some, what ever level it was set at.

And that's because the more universal you make a benefit, the less stigmatized it becomes, & the harder it is for turds like IDS or Frank Field to abolish it. Part of the reason the Tories are restricting child benefit to poorer households is to make it much easier for them in the long run to attach conditions to the benefit or scrap it altogether without fuss.

At the moment, the Tories would almost certainly be screwed if they tried to scrap CB altogether. Instead they means test it, and in 5 years time when they decide to mess around with CB some more, the home counties no longer give a shit as they are no longer receiving it.

It's evil personified, but It's a very clever strategy.
 
03gills said:
... the more universal you make a benefit, the less stigmatized it becomes, & the harder it is for turds like IDS or Frank Field to abolish it. Part of the reason the Tories are restricting child benefit to poorer households is to make it much easier for them in the long run to attach conditions to the benefit or scrap it altogether without fuss.
Click to expand...

Good point. We had an argument a couple of years back where I couldn't see the point of richer families getting child benefit - this, (combined with the silliness of paying for means testing when universal benefit combined with progressive taxation is so much more efficient) was the killer argument for me.
 
Citizen66 said:
Go to work and slog your guts out in order to feed, clothe yourself and cover travel costs for work the next week? Grim.
Click to expand...

Surely that depends on how you quantify basic needs. Feeding and clothing both fall into most people's understanding of basic needs I would have thought.
 
Strip away the 'keep up with the middle classes' hierarchical (sp?), unnecessary and often unattainable aspirations, people doing jobs they are passionate about, different work/vocations being equalised in terms of reward and social status, fewer experiences of being made to feel worthless, more time to pursue interests/personal development etc. I imagine they'd be a lot more 'content' people around.
 
What I don't even understand is how this isn't on anyone's radar in the UK. Aside from Urban, I've never had a conversation with or heard this mentioned by anyone in this country. The Swiss are about to vote on making it actually happen and we don't even know what it is?
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Similar threads

JimW
Short-lived Canadian experiment in guaranteed minimum income
Replies
0
Views
658
JimW
JimW
Idris2002
Marx and rising working class share of income in the 19th century
Replies
8
Views
1K
revol68
revol68
stuff_it
'Middle Class' it's basically just a construct isn't it...
18 19 20 21 22
Replies
654
Views
28K
JimW
JimW
ItWillNeverWork
Epistemological Holism and The Incompleteness Theorem
2 3
Replies
71
Views
3K
littlebabyjesus
littlebabyjesus
I
Are we all basically the same?
2
Replies
39
Views
2K
Blagsta
Blagsta
Back
Top Bottom