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Finland Begins To Shape Basic Income Proposal (yle.fi)
jones_supa writes: The Finnish social insurance institution is to begin drawing up plans for a citizens' basic income model. If eventually deployed after an experimental phase, the model could revolutionize the Finnish social welfare system. Under basic income all citizens would be paid a taxless benefit sum free of charge by the government. The proposal's director Olli Kangas says that the model would see Finns being paid some 800 euros a month in its full form, 550 euros monthly in the model's pilot phase. The full-fledged form of the model would make some earnings-based benefits obsolete, but in the partial pilot format benefits would not be affected, and housing and income support would remain as separate packages. We first mentioned this plan a few months ago, and at the start of the year touched on a program that tied a basic income program with the Fimkrypto cryptocurrency.
The problem with all these basic income schemes is that they will cause (or speed up) a gradual, but eventually overwhelming, shift in power from regular people to the super rich.
If you draw a simple diagram of how money must flow in the economy you will see that the only long-term sustainable way to fund a basic income scheme without creating massive inflation is by taxing the rich and/or the corporations that they own. This sounds great, until you realize that once the rich pay all the taxes and the rest of us pay virtually no taxes, the rich will effectively own the government. It will no longer seem corrupt when the government does their bidding. Kids will learn in school that the big corporation and their glorious and intelligent owners own the government fair and square and are the source of all of our wealth.
And of course, once the rich literally own the government the rest of us will pretty much have to settle for whatever they care to give us.
The current system is far from perfect, but it is a system where the government gets its money from the hands of regular people and therefore has to at the very least make believe that it is serving regular people.
I totally support something like this, and believe in the future, a basic income system will be inevitable in most modern societies. The current welfare systems are too complex, shaped by special interests, people exploiting loopholes, or gaming the system for benefit. There is too much abuse, wastage and a large chunk of the population feels a sense of resentment.
Shift to a basic income for all, and you now have a level playing field. It is more efficient, it is harder (or impossible?) to abuse, and no one can argue that laziness or poor health decisions or poor financial decisions are being rewarded. All, from CEOs to Rockstars to unemployed alcoholics are being given a basic income.
The two downsides to something like this :
1) It will be much harder to find individuals willing to do certain categories of high risk or menial labor. You would end up having to pay a LOT more.
2) Inflation for certain goods and services could eat away any gains that a system like this could bring. It is similar to how lowering interest rates does not increase house affordability or put more people in homes, instead it just causes house prices to go up and affordability to remain the same.
- Tempestdata
Well, it's not 800 Euros a month hot off the printing press; it's 800 Euros that were taxed out of the economy then put back into the economy in a different place. It'll surely effect the prices of many things, but net there's no more total money in the economy.
I suspect the thinking is that many of the things that people on the lower income end of the spectrum have relatively inelastic demand: housing and foodstuffs. Things that are discretionary purchases for those people are bound to become more expensive.
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I'm OP, and I'm one of those people who picks up trash in the street when I walk past it, and tries to keep my street (to the extent all my neighbours approve) tidy. I'd be happy to spend a few hours a week doing this in a more organised manner to benefit the community - perhaps as part of a team of volunteers and people doing community service enforced by the courts for non-violent crime.
As to picking up the trash as a full-time job, this is fairly well paid here - a lot more than 800 euro/month! And while I'm in my 40s now and probably don't have the physical strength to do it as a full-time job, in my 20s I'd happily have taken that for a few hundred euros more than the suggested basic income amount. If you have modern equipment and standardised bins, it's not that icky/demanding.
Now, there ARE genuinely unpleasant jobs related to stuff humans want rid of, like cleaning out sewers. Again, the answer is simple: pay people well for essential jobs. Even with the desperation factor, it's not like people are queuing up for these jobs - they literally require a strong stomach, good physical health and strength, and a reasonable amount of intelligence: life's not like a century ago where you can send poorly trained people with insufficient equipment into cramped spaces because quantity trumped quality. So, such people aren't the best paid in the world, but they are paid reasonably. And humans with the stomach to do that sort of thing in the first place are fairly adaptable anyway - after the first few weeks, something "icky!" can become fairly routine.
(There are examples which are "icky!" and which can be psychologically damaging, e.g. working in a slaughterhouse. But to have someone killing animals out of desperation is so utterly immoral that such a scheme becomes yet more valuable: a slaughterhouse then only employs people who wish to work there out of healthy interest in the meat industry. And I say that as someone who worked once on a small farm that provided animals for slaughter.)
Make everyone not working do 10 hours of community service a week.
It might not even be a bad idea that everyone is taxed 50 hours of community service every year so people become more involved in their communities.
And now to make your metaphor more realistic, let's count the loaves of bread that you acquire and those that the Finnish government takes:
1 loaf of bread is 1.77 euros.
In the fiscal year 2011 your first 8813 loaves of bread were tax free.
Of the next 4293 loaves of bread that year the government only took 279 (6.5%).
Of the next 8248 loaves of bread that year the government took 1443 (17.5%).
Of the next 17175 loaves of bread that year the government took 3692 (21.5%).
And every third loaf of bread from there.
Now, I don't know how much bread you eat, but I wouldn't go hungry because of those taxes. But I understand that whining about being able to get 1 yacht instead of 2 doesn't get the same sympathy...
This is the next step for a modern post-scarcity economy and society - the ultimate consolidation of wealth transfer into one basic package. I wish Germany would be this close to conditionless basic income.
But with Pegida, the ongoing Greece bailouts and the conservative right crawling out of their holes and popularising conspiracy theory bullshit and fascism once again, I'm afraid Germany is moving away from this sort of thing again.
It's a shame actually.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Except in this case it's really more like:
10 Government takes money from me at the point of a gun
20 An army of bureaucrats takes out their cut in exchange for processing the paperwork at $100,000/year plus pension
30 Whatever's left goes to some people who may or may not be starving, it comes with strings attached in the form of EBT vouchers that can be exchanged fraudulently for cash, piss tests, a requirement to waste employers' time by showing the umemployment they've filled out job applications for jobs they don't actually want, etc. etc. etc.
40 Goto 10
And what's on the table involves cutting out the middlemen, like this:
10 Government takes money from me at the point of a gun
20 An army of bureaucrats is summarily fired and gets $800/month the same as everyone else
30 I also get $800/month of it back, which is better than tne $0 I get back now
40 Goto 10
If you have a libertarian objection to UBI, might I remind you that none other than Milton Friedman endorsed something very similar in the form of a negative income tax.
The Fore people of Papua New Guinea subscribe to your principle. They share nothing outside their closely knit extended family clan. Absolutely no taxes and no sharing with anyone. No rules either, they will kill each other. That is why they remain small undeveloped brutal tribe in some land. They will never build a city. You are worse than Fore. You don't even understand how the mere existence of government and peaceful conflict resolution benefits you. Please leave America to civilized people like us and go live with the Fore.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Your money is actually the property of the US government, it is supposed to represent hard work, but there is no correlation whatsoever with hard work and there never has been. This is about equity, in Scandinavian countries equity is enforced via tax, the richest people earn ~10X the poorest. it's a kinder capitalism where the phrase "working poor" doesn't make sense - in other words hard work is rewarded by the tax system, luck and greed get you nowhere near as far as they do in the US.
Of course this idea would never fly in a nation where taxation is widely perceived as a form of armed robbery.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Most people I know would MUCH rather not work even if it is good for them.
I think it would be more accurate to say that most people would much rather not work at shitty, tedious, mind-numbing, soul-destroying, low-paying jobs that they hate.
I suspect that most people would happily work at a job that fit their interests, and that they found psychologically rewarding; the problem, of course, is that most jobs (and especially the kinds of jobs that are available to untrained/uneducated people) are of the tedious and mind-numbing variety.
On the optimistic side, computers and automation provide us with the opportunity to let machines to the tedious necessary work, freeing up people to find jobs that are more compatible with their own tastes. Of course, it's likely that many of the jobs that people would choose for themselves would not be particularly economically productive -- in a previous era, they would be referred to as "hobbies" -- but that is not a problem in a society where machines provide a surplus of wealth so that humans no longer need to be dragooned into service on threat of starvation.
If nothing else, being able to quit a job you hate without fear of starvation and/or homelessness frees people up to look for a different kind of employment that they would like better, and it frees people to get the education necessary to do that job competently. The endgame is a society with more people doing jobs they want to do rather than jobs that they are forced to do, and therefore a society where more people are enthusiastic and therefore good at their jobs.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
Wow, where do you get such a negative attitude toward taxes?
The US has 19 aircraft carriers, and is building 3 more.
Hard work and money are unrelated (in a US style economy).
That's not just a common-sense interpretation of the world around me, it's a mathematical fact. Somewhere on the internet is an economics paper written by a physicists. In it there is a thought experiment where every time anyone leaves the house in the US they take all their money with them. Whenever they meet another person they throw a random amount of money at them, and the catch all the money thrown at them. The resulting income distribution curve within this hypothetical economy very neatly mirrors the income distribution in the US, the smoking gun is that the size of an individual's pile is unrelated to the time spent outside the home.
On a common-sense level, if wealth was related to effort there would be no such thing as the "working poor" - who (in my experience as a past member) actually work a hell of a lot harder than you and I.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
I don't understand the concept that if I have a loaf of bread, that I worked all day for...
I may be able to help there...
Money isn't something tangible, like bread. Money is a game token. It's like D&D hit points. It has value in the context of game, because other players are playing by the same rules. My dwarven cleric has 43 hit points, and my American corporation has three million dollars. Same principle.
If you just bake a loaf of bread, nobody cares. But if you convert your bread into game tokens, then other players will expect you to play by the game rules. If the local game rules include a tax on your tokens, and you hide tokens under the table, then the other players might accuse you of cheating.
Now, I'm not saying our local game rules are perfect. Maybe they'd benefit from a revision. But if you start thinking of money as something real, rather than as a game token, you're going to get confused. You're speaking in terms of "stealing," when you should be speaking in terms of revising rules to improve the game.
On the separate question of whether our game rules should include tax, I'm not an expert. But I found a list on of countries by taxes as a percentage of gdp. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
For the most part, countries on top half of the list seem like nicer places than countries on the bottom half. There are exceptions, but overall it's hard to deny the trend. So I'm not sure lower taxes actually lead to a better-functioning game system.
Right now, I pay a lot of taxes. If I moved to Hati or Guatemala, house rules would allow me to accumulate tokens faster. But I'd rather stay here. Our local rules seem to make fo a better game, despite the annual drain on my tokens.
Somalia is such a rotten place due to European colonialism followed by socialism.
Just because dictators love calling their party "Democratic People's Republic" or "Socialist party" doesn't mean it is. Yes, the military dictatorship called itself "socialist party" but it was never socialist. That was never tried. And the fact that you have no idea of the basic government or economic system there speaks for itself.
Of course, Somalia still has taxes and government, it simply doesn't have a national government within the arbitrary borders drawn by Europeans.
Yeah, it has warlords and theft. Though this is in a thread about taxes being theft, so that may be appropriate.
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