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Finland Considers Minimum Income To Reform Welfare System
jones_supa writes: The Finnish government is considering a pilot project that would see the state pay people a basic income regardless of whether they are employed or not. The details of how much the basic income might be and who would be eligible for it are yet to be announced, but already there is widespread interest in how it might work. Prime Minister Juha Sipilä has praised the idea, and he sees it as a way to simplify the social security system. With unemployment being an increasing concern, four out of five Finns are now in favour of a basic income. Sipilä has expressed support for a limited, geographical experiment, just like Dutch city of Utrecht is executing this autumn.
does that say that 1/5 is paying for it?
Nope, it's conceptually different. Most ideas of "welfare" are based on "We'll help you, but only when you're worthy, and the goal is to kick you off it" which in turn leads to a whole system to enforce those rules. Which means a lot of it goes to paying people to run that system.
Basic income, however, is simply the idea of making sure people have the money to pay for the things they need to live, and avoids a lot of the expensive infrastructure and management.
Didn't live in $town before January 1st, 2016? You're not part of the experiment. No exceptions.
-=This sig has nothing to do with my comment. Move along now=-
Because we don't need everybody working all the time in order to get our needs and wants met, perhaps? Maybe?
I know some elderly people who barely worked an honest day in their life. Now they expect to live on Social Security because it's what a "civilized society does." When I've brought up the subject and suggested that they are morally obligated to give something back for the nearly $10k/year they get from a fund that they never felt the need to contribute to they freak out about how selfish that suggestion is.
And that's why it won't work in the long run. It'll acclimate people to the idea that they have a right to public money just because they showed up, not because they're part of society and it's part of a set of reciprocal rights and duties.
The west has a very serious problem created by increased efficiency and automation: How to make sure enough wealth reaches all citizens to that they can live decently (ensuring freedom from social unrest) and spend locally (ensuring a working economy). The idea of a base-income for everybody is one possibility that has merit, in fact it seems to be the only one with a good chance of working. "Create more jobs" has basically been a failure, and nothing else suggests itself. The base-income for everybody may still be a failure, but it needs to be tried to see whether it works.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
In america we assume people are poor because they are lazy; its a very childlike answer to an enormously complex question. Further simplifying our approach, we generally only define wealth by financial terms. we base our welfare system in part on an inherent desire to punish the recipient for their perceived lack of participation and drive to accumulate money. a more appropriate analysis is to begin with the following assumption: a set of people will never contribute monetarily equal or greater amounts to a society in which they live. This may be due to a number of uncontrollable constraints like illness or ineptitude, but could also be a reflection of your society. Perhaps there is nothing worth doing in the case of the 'working poor' or perhaps there isnt any pay (and perhaps none is expected) in the case of many artists. The question is not how to motivate these people, but how to ensure they are sustained at a comfortable level proportionate to the societies acceptable living standards. In the united states our unspoken answer to this is death on skid row by preventable disease. in the USSR the answer was that everyone according to their means contributed at very least some working effort. artists would do art, the sick would work to get healthy, and others would contribute to foster the wealth of the society as they could, be it intellectual or monetarily.
Good people go to bed earlier.
Looks good on paper. But when enough people stop working and still expect a "basic income" check every month, it will quickly collapse. Further, the definition of "basic income" will suddenly include High Speed Internet, a car payment, a house payment, water, electicity ....
And as taxes rise on those still working, to pay for those that refuse to work, and they start to charge more, creating runaway inflation the cries for increases to "basic income" not being enough to live .... the death spiral of socialism will quickly prove that the idea looks good on paper, but doesn't function in reality.
Or, as my daddy used to say, "In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they are not"
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
Lets unpick this nonsense:
1. Taxes aren't "retard theft based welfare" they are the price for living in a civilized society. Yes, they pay for welfare - they also pay for the military, the police, the courts, infrastructure, and a whole other bunch of things that make it much better to start a business in Western Europe than in Somalia.
2. The idea that people need to be whipped into working is based on your own hatred of mankind rather than any economic or motivational argument. Simple threat is no motivator at all for tasks other than purely menial ones - and this is part of the reason the USSR collapsed and why totalitarian systems tend to be economic basket cases. Holding a gun to someones head is just about good enough when you are making them mine coal by hand, but it doesn't produce good C++ coders.
3.You compound this by demanding people do 40 hours a week of labour that you clearly consider demeaning. Again, you just don't like people. You admit you want to see people suffer. The welfare state does not exist for your personal schadenfreude - it exists to stop people falling through the cracks of society so that later on, when they pick themselves up again, they can contribute. The idea that people are just brutes who need to be kicked to make them do menial labour belongs in the 19th century, not in a modern technological society where most jobs involve complex mental effort.
Thankfully, people in the Netherlands, Finland and elsewhere are starting to listen to rational arguments about intrinsic motivation, benefit traps. Bitter curmudgeons like you are being rightly ignored.
I'm in the United States, for reference.
I'm assuming you've never been on the bottom economically.
I volunteered at a food bank for a few years.
The clients mostly consisted of:
1. Veterans on the streets because of mental problems.
2. Mothers/Grandmother's looking after their children's kids (many of the "children" and spouses were in prison for various crimes)
3. Drug/alcohol addicts with no options for treatment (because of no $)
4. People working minimum wage but not making enough to live
5. People with physical disabilities including disfigurement (someone with heavy facial burn scaring isn't likely to get a retail position).
Many of them wanted to and were capable of work and were very happy to take very occasional menial work at the church's events (dish washing for example). They just didn't have opportunities available. The average high school student would get the job before them.
Anyway, to me, there is an entire class of people that we shouldn't kick. I feel that welfare should provide these people with, at a minimum, the same level of services provided to our prisoners. People that have harmed society are treated better than those who are just unfortunate in the US.
For these people, time isn't money: Time is Food.
BlameBillCosby.com
There are a lot of people that have great wealth but keep working because they enjoy what they are doing. To suggest that everyone will just bail on work is not a good argument. Furthermore, consider how many people could continue education, or pursue arts, contribute to non-profits, etc. Our whole culture could shift in ways that we cannot fully predict with the security of a basic income.
um no. Archangel said it was unsustainable, not that there were not short term benefits. In the ole USA, almost 65% of the people on welfare at any given time will stay on welfare for 8 years or more. Children from welfare families are 7 times more likely to become dependent on welfare.
To me, teenagers working less is not a positive. The teenagers here in DC don't work and all they do is run around and shoot at each other. Homicides are up 50% this year. Using a small canadian town to extrapolate across large non-homogenous metropolitan areas is a mistake.
Here is a crazy idea if you don't work, you don't eat.
Yeah, that's what Lenin said. "Those who do not work, do not eat."
I personally see nothing wrong with letting people suffer as a form of motivation.
I see nothing wrong with making you suffer as a form of motivation.
I think we should take away the assets of the wealthy, in order to give them a motivation to work. If we just let people sit on a multi-million dollar investment portfolio, they won't have any motivation to work.
If the rich are so smart, when we take their money away, they'll just earn some more.
It's like a chicken. When you take away her eggs, she'll lay some more.
Tried and abandoned.
There were a number of problems with the Dauphin study. The biggest being that it wasn't sustainable.
To be viable economic policy needs to work in a closed system. The money given out through mincome needs to be matched by the money coming in through taxes. But the Dauphin system didn't work like that. Instead, the government pumped in outside money, without raising taxes to offset. So the people living in Dauphin got all benefits of socialist style government handouts, without the accompanying higher tax rate.
No one doubts that many thing improved during the experiment. Improving the quality of life in a small community by pumping in free money from the outside is easy. The hard part is making it work as a system.
What if you take everything way from a wealthy person and a few years later they are wealthy again? Do you take it all away again and keep taking it away until they learn their lesson?
I don't think people will be quitting their jobs to live on the 'free money'!
Indeed not. One thing that I have noted to be lacking is the idea that the minimum income payment could be tuned. Too many people unemployed? Research suggests too many people are happy sitting on their asses at home? Nudge the payment down a notch. By the same token, if you have too many people who are actively looking for work because living on the BIG sucks, and the result of too many people looking for too few jobs, resulting in lower wages(and jobs aren't coming in from outside because of cheap(er) labor), you might want to consider notching it UP a bit.
What? Increase payments? Sure - by increasing payments, more will be satisfied by it. This reduces the worker pool, increasing the bargaining power of the remaining workers. In addition, more money to the poorest means more purchasing of goods and services by them, which increases demand for workers to produce said goods and services.
I don't read AC A human right