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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.
After all this time reporting on our robotic overlords, somebody realizes they don't get paid, desire no sleep nor suffer as many inaccuracies as us meatbags!
Eventually people will get off this train of consumerism for the good of economic growth, which in the end doesn't mean much for peoples real needs like shelter, food and water. All humanity needs to contribute is entertainment(our only true want) with our overlords taking care of the rest.
Not wanting to give out welfare isn't a selfish proposition. I've spoken to social workers who themselves say they prefer not to put people on disability or other welfare programs if they can avoid it, because those people tend to find a comfort zone there and tend to stay that way for the rest of their lives, and it ends up being psychologically damaging to the recipient because they lose the will to improve themselves, end up with depression, etc.
Not to mention, if everybody was that way, you'd start to see a gradual decline in GDP.
It's not as bad an idea as it might seem at first sight, at least if it's implemented correctly. If everybody gets a certain basic income and can then work to add more money to that income, that guarantees a difference between working and non-working people and therefore provides an incentive to work. Right now, in many European countries, you may actually make less money by working than by sitting at home unemployed. Certainly if you factor in daycare, transportation expenses, etc.
By just giving everyone the basic salary, then letting them earn as much as they like above that (paying tax on those earnings to pay for the basic salary, obviously), you greatly simplify the system. No need to check whether someone is really unemployed or not before sending them their unemployment benefits, just send the same basic salary to everyone. Apply a flat tax to all extra income, and this automatically emulates the older system of progressively rising taxes. Also, it becomes cheap for companies to hire people for smaller tasks, since there needn't be a minimum salary anymore. If someone wants to do some job for $200 a month (on top of his basic salary), no problem.
Of course I'm oversimplifying and there will be a few caveats, but still, it's not as stupid or communistic as it seems.
does that say that 1/5 is paying for it?
I'm a taxpayer in the UK and a small business person. This means I see more tax than most people, because I see corporation tax, employer's contribution and what comes off my paycheck and goes to HMRC. Most people are on PAYE, get a monthly paycheque and never have to actually consider taxes in any meaningful way.
I'm fully aware of my tax burden because I have to administer it.
I support minimum income, for a variety of reasons.
1. You essentially need it anyway even if by another name because we've collectively decided that on the whole it's better than having homeless starving people.
2. You can scrap minimum wage. That's a whole load of administration gone.
3. You can scrap jobseekers allowace with all that administration and crap.
2 and 3 combine to remove the benefit trap. At the moment these things interact in bad ways. For instance taking a short term job on JSA is generally a bad move since when the job ends, there's a delay in getting new payments, so you essentially lose money.
4. It will help lower exploitation of poorly paid workers, because they can realistically choose to leave.
5. It will reduce the friction moving between jobs because the out of work periods aren't as punishing.
6. It will help startups through the early, poorly paid years.
Fundementally most people want to work and the minimum income won't provide a good standard of living. If you want to live well, you'll need a job. It might not work, but I think it's worth a shot and offers to save substantial amounts on administration while improving the felxibility of the economy.
Seems like a win to me.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
"those people"
It is what is being done ANYWAY here in the UK, with the poorest so poor that they have to be given welfare to pay for the basics because the full salary they receive for their work is insufficient to pay for *necessities*.
And trying to catch benefit cheats (and the tabloid rags enraging people over fictitious and overblown incidence of living the high life by lowlifes on welfare) costs a shitload to police.
So pay everyone what would be needed to live on. Welfare payments have to be made to do this today, so it won't actually cost any more.
And you save on all the shit about policing welfare.
Additionally, the rich benefit from this scheme too: they get paid for what they pay in just as much as everyone else benefits! And increasing the minimum wage payout will benefit the wealthy too!
Lastly, it means that the job market and contract agreements between employer and employee are now REALLY contracts: a meeting of minds and an agreement on terms.
At the moment, you can be given the "choice" of starving on the streets (because welfare won't pay if you refuse to take the job) or accept the job offered. They will not change the terms, or the pay. So it isn't an agreement. It isn't a contract. It is a fiction of a contract, hiding a slavery term. Moreover a slavery that doesn't even place burdens of ownership on the slave owner.
If I can afford to say no to a job, because I can still at least live at the minimum, then I can agree or disagree. If i cannot say no, it isn't an agreement. It's ransom.
So, good.
Right now, wealthy people in the top 2% love America. They have it made.
The middle class struggles, and can fall from grace very quickly. Lose your job, your house, everything.
The lower class works multiple jobs, usually part time at each, to try and keep a roof over their head and food in their belly. In many ways, especially in their encounters with police, America resembles a brutal dictatorship. If they want anything better in life, they have to resort to crime, notably selling drugs.
This is not stable. It's a recipe for disaster. All it takes is one spark for a revolution to start. And we've seen it time and again throughout history. Look at Germany in the 1930s, or France in the early 1800s.
Now suppose everyone has a basic income. It's enough to keep you alive. But if you want nice things, you have to get out there and work for them. Now you don't have people stealing so they don't go hungry or because they're cold. Now prison isn't considered an improvement to their living conditions. Now the lower class has a stake in the success of American society. They have something to lose!
Nobody's talking about communism. But right now we have democracy for those on top, and a brutal dictatorship for the vast majority on the bottom. Hey, 97% conviction rate in the courts!
This could change things to democracy over socialism. People who are fed & sheltered & happy are far less trouble.
And they will want better things. And those who can work, will want to work. Not because they have to. Because they want to.
All the difference in the world...
If you had a minimum level of income, sufficient for you to share a small apartment with a couple roomates and buy low budget groceries and bus fare and the like, but nothing else, would you just say "I've got it made!" and never work again?
Believe it or not, the vast majority of people want to take steps to better their lives. They don't want to just sit around on their arse all day. They want to own things, they want to be able to do things - that's human nature. And people take on work to be able to afford the things that they want. People also work to avoid boredom and to have achievements they can feel proud of. It's simply not true that you have to threaten people with starvation to keep them working.
One of the biggest discouragements to people working in most conventional welfare systems is that when they start working they lose their benefits. In some cases, they can even end up poorer by working; it's a counterincentive. Under a basic income scenario, this never happens - all work is extra money. And at the same time you ensure that nobody ever starves in the streets. Having such a safety net also ensures that people feel more free to work toward their passions and take big steps that they might otherwise have been too afraid to take for fear of ending up in the streets. And society ends up a better place, even more productive, when people are working in fields that they enjoy. It's a huge benefit to general happiness - which of course should be the goal.
There's other benefits as well. Namely, it simplifies everything. Think of how many various social services are run for different people who have been disadvantaged by different situations. And all of the paperwork and review to see if people quality, and the effort to administer the programs, and ensure compliance, and this, and that. A large chunk of the existing welfare infrastructure can simply disappear if everyone has a minimum level of guaranteed income - X amount for each adult plus Y for each dependent child.
There's a lot of good reasons for such a program.
"99 dead duelists of Dios on the wall. 99 dead duelists of Dios! Take one's ring, pass it around..."
In every experiment they've tried until now, it actually causes more people to start working rather than fewer. There was a very interesting documentary about it by the Flemish public broadcaster, and it's available with English subtitles (if that doesn't play, there's a lower quality copy on Youtube). It does cause more people to become self-employed though, because they're less afraid of failure and hence are less likely to take on a job they don't like but accept anyway to have income security. And interestingly, those self-employed endeavours turn out to be often quite successful, simply because people are doing something like doing.
Donate free food here
As a retired person, I get both a small pension from my work, and Social Security. From my small income I purchase health insurance to supplement my Medicare. I have no savings (wiped out by "problems"). It's enough to live on. As a result, I already live as people in Finland/Utrecht do. I know a ton of retired folks in the same boat. Here is what I observe. Retired folks are as energetic as their health allows. There is an awesome amount of volunteering going on, and a bit of "small business" activities. I myself am a retired computer guy, and as such, get asked to fix a lot of computers. I ask for a "donation" of about $20 an hour for fixes that would cost them $90/$120 at any computer shop. Sometimes I fix things for free. I rationalize that I am helping poor old folks :), and also getting some money for an evening out for my spouse and I. I also maintain an number of community, club and museum websites as an unpaid volunteer. So I am in the category of "not needing a minimum wage". What I really see is this. People are as active as their health allows. There are a lot of social activities and game playing, such as dancing, musical jam sessions, theater presentations, variety shows, golf, pickle ball (like tennis), cards, bingo and water volleyball. Many of these activities require administration, and they are staffed with happy volunteers, who give an amazing amount of time. People into hobbies, such as my spouse who quilts, will work at them from dawn to dusk. People value life, their families, their communities and their world, and they do what they need to take care of their health. What I don't see is violence, drug use, laziness, or homelessness. I will concede that communities (I participate in several) of retired folks represent the result of a lifetime of a good work ethic. But what I don't see are bad results worried about by many. I read Marshall Brain's prescient "Robotic Nation" years ago, and the handwriting is on the wall folks, and I'm glad to see some early-adopter nations experimenting with our future.
On the contrary. As a person who's been on disability and started a business and now takes no services at all and pays taxes, you're missing two relevant points worth considering:
1) you're making a choice between starving 'those people' or feeding them like animals, but you can't really change people. Wealthy people do exactly the same behavior you object to, but apparently it's fine for them. It's actually good that people find a level and typically stay at that level of engagement, because it makes them predictable and you can make plans around them if you know what they'll do.
2) If you're doing the behavior you prefer, say starting a business and creating things and working, you must have customers and cannot take money only from other entrepreneurs because they don't have it. There has to be a base of people who are spending money rather than seeking to grow their capital, which is where the money comes from. If 'those people' don't exist, the money supply isn't there to start a business and you're dead in the water.
So, not wanting to give out welfare IS both a selfish and a deluded proposition. I've been self-supporting for years and I have to pay attention to the world out there in a way that salaried Silicon Valley libertarians perhaps don't. You guys get to make value judgements, I can't: I won't get paid if there aren't customers, where a lot of Slashdotters will get paid regardless, or will get paid in proportion to income inequality, not in inverse proportion to it.
I've seen a correlation in income not to capital or the stock market, but to the extent that 'welfare' is stepped on and austerity rules. If you are trying to run a business, which by definition is part of Gross Domestic Product, a well regulated welfare state is your best ally giving you more liquidity in your customer-base, and austerity measures are your worst enemy unless you specifically sell aviation jet fuel for hedge fund managers to flee the country to safe houses when everything comes crashing down.
Pro tip: that is a very small market and job opportunities there are effectively nonexistent.
Read some Mark Blyth, Slashdotters: or of course Piketty. There are experts in this field and your casual opinions might not be the last word in awesome, any more than your boss's casual opinions in code are the last word in effective.
I am entirely in favor of a basic income that you get even if you work at other jobs. I think that the automation and structural unemployment we are seeing is the first stages of automation being able to relieve humans of drudgery.
Unless the profits are distributed more evenly, then you just have more starving people and more money to the already rich. I don't even think the rich themselves care about that except for the fact that they are driven to drive up their "high score". To that end, raising that money should be done by putting in specific inputs at points in the economy where it is easiest to realize income from profits that are clearly due to automation.
If we do this right, we can have a solid economy where people still can and do want to work, but we reduce the possibility of people falling through the cracks.
Note, this is not "taxing the rich". While the rich do realize benefits from automation, there are many, many places where the money saved by automation is diverted. Anyone who believes you can simply upend rich people and shake the money out of their pockets to support this has no understanding of how you would really support such an income long term.
Some people in certain industries would likely lose some or all of their business/jobs. Just like the tax preparers might be out of a job if you made all taxation one flat tax that you got a bill for every month, there are businesses and other people that siphon off the largess afforded by higher production who do not show up in some Forbes of Fortune list of rich people.
This system should not borrow to fund a basic income system unless that borrowing is either for cash flow, or is done in a manner that does not encourage spending more than percentage of GDP that is produced by automation as determined in some scientific manner. The only reasonable theory backing basic income is that automation and efficiency removes drudgery which creates a surplus that can be used to support people who would otherwise work at drudgery. Borrowing to achieve some number and creating huge amounts of debt is the denial and possibly the falsification of that theory and is effectively taking money from people in the future for the comfort of people now.
Aside from how this is funded, my only other problem with any of this is that it would likely be administered by *the* government. I'll grant you, it's the obvious solution, but it is very dangerous in the sense that you become even more dependent on the organization that you should be voting every few years to keep in check.
I think basic income and welfare should be administered by entities that are solely and totally devoted to only maintaining those services with no extra power and no extra authority except what they need to maintain the specific system. They have no army, they have no police. They can tax or raise money, but they use other groups to enforce it. The managers of that system are elected specifically for maintaining that system and while politics are probably unavoidable, it might give us the ability to dispense with clueless generalists and lawyers (ie. legislatures) from trying operate a system they don't understand.
In other words, I should have an option of experts on the economy and administration to pick from. Not careerist legislators. I want people who I can trust to give it to us straight and not allow us to pressure them into providing us bread and circuses that our economy cannot afford. I want to elect people who are good at their job, not just good at telling me what I want to hear. I should be able to have the choice to elect a person who I completely disagree with on foreign policy, but they are right-on with managing a basic income, and not feel nervous that they're going to nuke Iran or something.
While it should be a benefit of citizenship, it needs to be understood not as a "human right" but as the expression of human progress in production and economic growth. No one has a right to live. No one has a right to eat,
Only about %0.1 percent of the population cares about inheritance tax
You made that number up, right? You don't have a source for it, right? That's what conservatives always do.
Do YOU care about inheritance tax? WHY? FREE MONEY COMING SOON???
I care about the inheritance tax, just like Bernie Sanders does, because without it, the top 0.1% own as much as the bottom 90% combined. http://www.theguardian.com/bus...
I wouldn't care if the rich simply used their money to buy yachts, diamonds and cars, and fly around the world vacationing in their mansions and at five-star hotels, eating at five-star restaurants. I don't care about their enjoying luxury (even though Adam Smith thought that it was wasteful and the rich should be taxed more).
I care about the rich because they're using their money to buy influence (that is, bribe politicians), and run the country.
It's not enough for them to be rich. They have to create a fantasy in which they got rich because they were hard-working and deserved it (even though most of them inherited their money), and the poor are poor because they're lazy and don't deserve it. They have to destroy it for the rest of us. They maliciously enjoy making the rest of us suffer.
I think we have to take away the money from the rich to disarm them, because they're dangerous to the world. It's like taking nuclear weapons away from Iran.
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."
Since they are elderly, and have few work-gained skills, I would suspect they aren't a good employee for anyone at this stage in their life. Are you suggesting that as a society we should kill them, and have them executed for not being a good enough worker? Or are you simply suggesting to let them starve to death and die of exposure? What exactly are they supposed to "give back" to earn their benefits? And what should we as a society do if they refuse?
This.
Costs of an "everybody the same" system could be much lower. Less overhead for inspectors, services, etc.
Any employment would benefit the unemployed immediately (starting to work 1 or 2 days a week is actually a financial loss to somebody on welfare).
Some people will game the system (probably the same that are currently gaming the welfare system), and these will more likely go unpunished.
For a community as a whole, this may actually be cheaper than trying to go after these hopeless cases.
It's not clear whether it'll work, but it might. The Dutch Utrecht-experiment will be interesting.
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Believe it or not, the vast majority of people want to take steps to better their lives. They don't want to just sit around on their arse all day. They want to own things, they want to be able to do things - that's human nature.
I don't think it's safe to say the vast majority. A majority? Maybe, it's hard to say, but I kind of doubt it, and I'll explain why. When I was taking business courses in college, I remember reading two conflicting theories about what motivates workers.
One of them went something like: Most employees are inherently lazy, and only by constant supervision, and proper discipline can you get them to continue to work most efficiently. This was the prevailing theory until about the 1940s
The other one went something like this: Most employees want to work, and if you give them more autonomy, more power to make their own work decisions, and more flexibility in work hours, then they are happier and more productive workers. (This theory largely prevailed after Henry Ford set a global trend of 40 hours a week, taking Saturday off, and giving higher pay to encourage his more productive employees to stay with his company rather than go elsewhere.)
Anyways what I'm getting at is this: Both theories are still employed to this day, and each different theory is applied to different types of work. For work on a massive scale that is highly time sensitive, the first theory prevails. For example, UPS is notorious for micromanaging their truck drivers (I recommend further Googling of that rather than explain it here) whereas companies like Google that are looking for creative and engineering talent needed to create the "Next Big Thing(TM)", and those people must have autonomy.
I personally think that the first theory represents the majority however, namely because it applies to some of the most numerous jobs in the world, such as fast food workers, janitors, etc, whose employers rely on them to do menial tasks, and do them quickly, but the quality of employees that they find at the wages they can afford are NOT the self motivated types.
In addition to what I said above, there's another growing demographic that's sort of the elephant in the room here: The basement dweller who spends his days playing World of Warcraft while his parents work. I've seen a lot of these, and IMO they're the biggest cause of the obesity epidemic. If you give these people free money, believe me, they don't move on unless they are literally evicted. I'm sure you guys have heard the horror stories about video game addiction where such and such person loses their job, their wife, and their house, while they were playing video games.
Personally, I don't believe in such a thing as video game addiction, because I've seen people do these things without video games (sometimes it's TV, sometimes it's drug abuse, sometimes it's the religious belief that "god will save me from myself", etc.)
And finally one more point that ties back to the theories about why people work: Both of the theories that I mentioned above stipulate that money itself does not motivate people to work harder; so for example, giving somebody a raise doesn't mean they'll be more productive (if you believe otherwise, I'm sorry, but all of the evidence so far says you're just wrong) but it does mean they're more likely to continue working for you instead of somebody else.
But why am I mentioning this? Simple: If you pay somebody money to do nothing, then they're also more likely to continue doing nothing.
Companies could relocate out, but entrepreneurs would abound!
Think about how amazing it would be if you could tell "the man" to go to hell, and go out and start your own company with your own ideas and initiative. Knowing that in the years it's going to take to build a market segment large enough to become significantly profitable that you, your spouse, and your children will all have their education covered, their medical expenses covered, and enough money to cover your mortgage and food.
I would have gone independent long ago if I had such a solid safety net.
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
I think that's pretty much the case.
That and they want to hold the threat of starvation over their heads to force them to do shitty jobs, that otherwise they would have to be paid more to do.
It's sad, and kind of sick when you watch the thought process play out in people who oppose this for those reasons (as opposed to other, non-sadistic reasons like cost).
"But, if you don't force people to work, they won't clean toilets!"
Not for $8/hour, no they won't.
"So society collapses!"
No, you just have to pay more than $8/hour for toilet cleaning work.
"But I make $15/hour in my respectable job. If you pay a toilet cleaner $20/hour they'll make more than me!"
Yes, because your respectable job is, what, a telemarketer? Yes, the guy cleaning toilets has a more important job than you, and should be paid more for doing it. I need clean toilets more than I need a call during dinner time trying to sell me a subscription to Ass-Wrangers Quarterly.
"But, but then...I'll be the one making the least amount of money!"
Yes, you will basically have the "minimum wage job." You want that $20/hour money? Go clean toilets.
"But that's demeaning!"
You were fine with it when somebody else was doing it. And with paying them so little they were only doing it because they'd starve otherwise. You were treating them unfairly, and you liked it. Sick.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
You know, I keep hearing this and it keeps boggling my mind.
It would never occur to me to stop doing things if I had free money. I'd do MORE things. I have a good job right now, but I'd really like to go back to school and study something else. If the government were supporting me and tuition were free, I'd definitely do that right away.
So why do so many people say that everyone would stop working? Is it because THEY'D stop working?
And have you noticed that the incredibly wealthy still work? I mean, Jeff Bezos has a whole lot of personal wealth. He could've quit ages ago. Half of silicon valley could retire somewhere slightly cheaper and never work another day in their lives? Why do they even bother to work? Is it because there's more to life than being the idle rich?
The people that seem to do the least are the ones raised in moneyed privilege. Trust fund kids. They want for nothing, so they do nothing. They've got nothing to strive for.
But someone on a guaranteed income--man, they're just paying the rent and affording groceries. It's hardly the high life. Based on my own life experience, they'd be happy to find something better.
So I have to wonder at the internal process of people that say, "Gosh, everyone would stop working." I don't meant to cast aspersions, but are you projecting? Is the reason why you say that about other people because you know that for yourself, you'd rather just sit on the couch and play console games all day? I actually won't judge you if that's what you DO want to do, but stop telling the rest of us that we have no work ethic independent of money.