Slashdot Mirror
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.
Nope, it doesn't. Believe it or not some people are not 100% selfish.
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.
Because we don't need everybody working all the time in order to get our needs and wants met, perhaps? Maybe?
Who is "selfish"? Is the guy who wants to keep the wages he earned in his paycheck "selfish"? Is the guy who wants benefit money for doing nothing "selfish"?
Maybe labeling people "selfish" and then thoughtlessly dismissing their concerns isn't really a useful way to analyze policy preferences.
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.
That's a good snarky response, but I actually really hate when these discussions get boiled down to "selfishness". First, because it has a tendency to turn into the same old discussion where one side is moralizing and the other side is presenting some kind of counter-intuitive argument about how "selfishness" is actually a productive impulse. It's boring
But more than that, I think it throws the the discussion off track from the real reasons to do something like this. They are probably looking at a "minimum income" to replace other forms of welfare because they believe it's a better policy. It may be easier and cheaper to administer. It may be more economically efficient. There may be real, practical benefits to a policy like this.
To give a simple sort of example, I'm in favor of providing free vaccines to common illnesses to poor children, even if it means slightly higher taxes for me. There are selfless humanitarian reasons to support that kind of thing, but my motivations are not really all that selfless. I have three very selfish and practical reasons why I support it: (a) If I'm ever poor and have kids, I will want to get vaccines for them even if I can't afford it; (b) Paying for vaccines today is cheaper than paying for the illness tomorrow; and (c) Vaccinating everyone else in society cuts the chances of me or my loved ones becoming sick.
So going back to this plan, I'm in favor of whatever country I live in providing an effective social safety net for a few different reasons. First, I may find myself in a bad position sometime in the future, and I may need that safety net myself. I never have, and I hope I never will, but I possibly could. Beyond that, there are various reasons to think that having a good safety net can be good for society, as well as good for the economy. It removes some of the motivation for hopelessness and crime. If removes some of the hindrance on business to provide those needs for their workers. If it helps get workers back on their feet, enabling them to be productive, then that will help the economy.
I know there's a sort of "common wisdom" that says you need extreme, brutal poverty as a possible consequence in order to motivate people to work, but I just don't really believe that. I don't think that kind of suffering helps anyone. I don't think increasing income inequality and rampant poverty are good for the economy. I know a social safety net costs money, but I would support a good one, funded with my tax money, for some very selfish reasons.
Nobody knows what all the costs are in doing this.
In theory, it could be cheaper than the current welfare system, because administrative overheads are lower, and incentives are better. Since everybody gets it, there is no eligibility test, and no application forms. You get the same amount whether you work or not, so there is less disincentive for employment. But there could be unintended consequences. Taxes may go up, giving companies an incentive to locate elsewhere, and the wealthy an incentive to emigrate. If the benefits are generous, they may pull in non-working immigrants from the rest of the EU.
Surely if the job is not wanted but necessary, it is worth paying more for it. Supply and demand.
You don't get to force demand by threatening someone with starvation or incarceration for not doing that job.
Someone has to clean the toilets. Your CEO may think it a lowly job, but how much would you have to pay THEM to do it? Vastly more than they are paid for their current job. Surely therefore the job should not be minimum wage. It's worth more than that.
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
We need to start looking at welfare in a different way. We will soon enter an age when we don't need "full employment" for everyone to have all the goods and services that they need. The late-stage capitalism where the more things are automated, the harder working people have to work, is just not sustainable. The only reason we have that situation today is to support the supply-side perversion of capitalism. It's already groaning under the weight of supply-side economics, and the burgeoning disparity of incomes and wealth is the evidence. When you have more than 40% of the US work-force making less than $15/hr, and 80% of people not having enough savings to retire on by age 68, social and economic disruption is going to occur.
Rich people can hire only so many servants and drivers and people to wash their cars and be nanny to their kids. There are only so many people needed to service the robots. Only so many people needed to do the dirty work. And those are just the low-paying jobs. The middle-income jobs have already started to go. How valuable you think your ability to program Java is going to be by 2017? Or for that matter, by this Christmas?
So, we can decide that a guaranteed minimum income is something we need, or we can decide to become a society where 67 year-old beggers fight with 25 year-old beggers who fight with 12 year-old beggers as they line the streets. As someone who's spent time in such countries, let me tell you, it's not that great to be a well-off person in a place where everyone else is dirt poor. It might appeal to the big-L Libertarians in the crowd, but for the other 99%, it's not a pleasant proposition.
You are welcome on my lawn.
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.