Posted: Dec 27, 2016 11:40 pm
Galactor - is there any information available from those local areas in the Netherlands that have tried it, describing successes and/or failures?
The Greens talked about it in our last general election campaign in the UK, but couldn't make the numbers add up. They were talking about a basic income of £72 a week, and the problem is nobody can actually live on that amount of money in the UK, so it's not like it would actually solve anything. It wouldn't stop people being made homeless, or children from being raised in poverty. And what modest difference it might make to the living standards of the poorest would come at the massive, basically wasted expense of also paying it to well-off people in work for whom it would make little difference.
Yet even for that amount, the cost was going to be something like more than three times the current social security and pensions bill. Completely unrealistic.
My feeling at the time was that it would make far more sense just to give an amount you can actually live on decently to those who are unwaged, plus increasing minimum wage laws etc. to keep working wages above that level. In a way that's exactly what the blair/brown government tried to do with welfare entitlements, though this would have the advantage of reduced bureaucracy.
Certainly mass automation in the future may change the whole situation radically, and make an unconditional basic income necessary. The people of the UK however will almost certainly react instead by trying to make sure they as individuals can stay employed, while continuing to blame an ever-increasing underclass for its own unemployment and letting it starve. By the time that underclass reaches critical mass, God knows what state we'll be in. Probably emaciated bodies desperately throwing molotov cocktails at the walls of the compounds of the 1%, and not even any pretence of a democratic government any more that could administer something like a citizens' income.
The Greens talked about it in our last general election campaign in the UK, but couldn't make the numbers add up. They were talking about a basic income of £72 a week, and the problem is nobody can actually live on that amount of money in the UK, so it's not like it would actually solve anything. It wouldn't stop people being made homeless, or children from being raised in poverty. And what modest difference it might make to the living standards of the poorest would come at the massive, basically wasted expense of also paying it to well-off people in work for whom it would make little difference.
Yet even for that amount, the cost was going to be something like more than three times the current social security and pensions bill. Completely unrealistic.
My feeling at the time was that it would make far more sense just to give an amount you can actually live on decently to those who are unwaged, plus increasing minimum wage laws etc. to keep working wages above that level. In a way that's exactly what the blair/brown government tried to do with welfare entitlements, though this would have the advantage of reduced bureaucracy.
Certainly mass automation in the future may change the whole situation radically, and make an unconditional basic income necessary. The people of the UK however will almost certainly react instead by trying to make sure they as individuals can stay employed, while continuing to blame an ever-increasing underclass for its own unemployment and letting it starve. By the time that underclass reaches critical mass, God knows what state we'll be in. Probably emaciated bodies desperately throwing molotov cocktails at the walls of the compounds of the 1%, and not even any pretence of a democratic government any more that could administer something like a citizens' income.