Posted: Dec 08, 2015 7:12 am
Beatsong wrote:Personally I wouldn't have a problem with the idea of paying a basic income to the poorest 10% or 20% of the population, that IS enough to eat and pay rent (or combined with building enough social housing to house them), with some kind of tapering mechanism to make sure it's still advantageous to work. I don't believe in the whole thing about having to starve people to give them an incentive to work, there aren't enough full time jobs to go around and developments in technology mean that's only going to become moreso. I think it's time to challenge the idea that it's so terribly important everyone works economically all the time, rejoice in how much wealthier we've become as a society and just accept using some part of that wealth to keep people from destitution regardless. Confined to those who need it, that could actually be achievable.
I agree with a lot of what you said, almost all of it in fact - a good post! The problems we have all exist at the lower income end of the scale, particularly at the spectrum of income where people are having to make cost-benefit decisions of whether they can afford to work because of the benefits they lose. That is absolutely bananas and solving it is one of the attractive features of Finland's proposal. The criticism tends to be that rather than focusing on that few percent of the population basic income applies across the board, and so creates problems with areas of the system that currently work fine.
Fundamentally all people's level of need and the amount of support they require (at times in their life) can be drastically different. The sick, the disabled, the abused, people who've been deprived of education all NEED to have higher levels of support. 800 Euros a month is never going to allow those people to get by, although in some cases more now and (possibly) less later might.
To not have targeted and conditional benefits seems grossly inhumane to me. Similarly you're going to have "cost of living" issues in all sorts of other areas. Currently housing benefits (at least in the UK) reflect the actual cost of living in the area you live. A flat rate creates a problem there. Maybe you can live in Aberdeen on £130 a week, but London? Fat chance.
Of course if you start making all these changes the system costs more and more and becomes harder and harder to fund and becomes less and less simple - and more like what we have now. Perhaps testing will show that it can be funded and can have positive consequences, if Finland goes ahead we might well find out.
The one point you make that I disagree with however is that there aren't enough jobs to go around and that technology is making this more the case. History has shown the exact reverse, For example, in 1841 22% of people worked in agriculture and fishing (and that itself was a huge decline from earlier history) today less than 1% do. The destruction of the vast proportion of jobs in a necessary area of economic activity simply pushed labour into other areas of economic activity. Countries throughout Europe (and the west in general) have constant large influxes of migrants specifically to fill jobs that otherwise would be empty.
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THWOTH wrote:There may be an inflationary cost to pay, but the Fins can only really do this while their GDP outstrips their public spending, or else they'll just be borrowing money from their children and grandchildren unto the seventh generation - and beyond.
Do you mean GDP here, or do you mean tax revenue? Government spending is one of the figures that is added together to derive GDP, GDP is (barring pathological malfunction) necessarily at least as large, and in all real cases exceeds government spending by a long way (even in a communist country like Cuba).