Slashdot Mirror
Dutch City To Experiment With Paying Citizens a "Basic Income" (theguardian.com)
BarbaraHudson writes: The Guardian is the latest to report about experiments with a basic income, in this case in Utrecht. The idea has been around for more than 2 centuries, and has become a bit of a hot-button topic on slashdot. It seems to be gaining political support now that job insecurity has become the new normal. "To those who say it is an unaffordable pipedream, Westerveld points out the huge costs that come with the increasingly tough benefits regimes being set up by western states, including policies that make people do community service to justify their handouts. 'In Nijmegen we get £88m to give to people on welfare,' Westerveld said, 'but it costs £15m a year for the civil servants running the bureaucracy of the current system. We will save money with a "basic income."' Horst adds: 'If you receive benefits from the government [in Holland] now you have to do something in return. But most municipalities don't have the people to manage that. We have 10,000 unemployed people in Utrecht, but if they all have to do something in return for welfare we just don't have the people to see to that. It costs too much.'"
Wait and see.
People, especially those that have little, tend to spend locally. In other words, drive the local economy as long as they have money. That they don't is exactly the reason our economy is in the slump it is in: People cannot spend.
Our economy depends on consumption. Local consumption to boot because another thing that is true for our economy is that it is highly dependent on the tertiary sector, i.e. services. Services are really tough to export. But also rather hard to import. Services are also the first thing people cut down on when money gets tight. For obvious reasons, if you're running out of money, what are you going to pay for, food so you can eat another day or the plumber to fix that dripping faucet? My guess would be that the faucet has to keep dripping for a while longer.
I'm really interested to see how this works out.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Their main argument being "the sky is falling if people get into long term unemployment". Newsflash, Guardian: There ain't enough work for everyone anyway. Yes, I can understand that we all like to have more people fighting over the few jobs available so the race to the bottom continues, but somehow I cannot sympathize.
Then their example of how new moms got back into work as soon as they were forced to. Well, duh. And duh again that mothers valued staying with their children in the earliest moments of their lives higher than money. Who would have thought that? They really want to tell us that this is comparable to ANY other situation? Seriously? Are they so detached from any kind of human emotion to seriously consider this a sensible example?
Oh, wait, they even admit it. Quote: "It is hard to see why this lesson would not apply equally to a basic income scheme." Yup. Sums up pretty well how much they know about human nature.
Sorry, but to take this drivel serious, I first have to have a sizable portion of my brain removed. It should include the areas for emotion and logic at least.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
You cannot affect the rich with the interest rate, and that's where the money is concentrated today. They have various other means of stashing money available, none of them being in any way directly influenced by the interest rate. They are also not the ones to consume. They want to invest. Problem is, to make investments viable, someone has to consume.
And those that would do that cannot due to a lack of funds. So either we find a way to give them the means to fulfill their role in our economy or we watch the economy grind to a halt while clinging to our money as if that shit meant anything as long as it can't move about.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Ah yes, even as a 'right winger' myself, I wonder if you realise just how silted and contrived that 'article' is.
What is basically boils down to is the story you will hear from both sides of the political fence these days -
'For your own good, we know best - and we need more control! trust us! fear each other!'
People have forgotten that there are two axis to politics, left/right, and Totalitarian/libertarian.
Do we so quickly forget the second axis because the labels are 'harder'?
You can certainly have left and/or right totalitarian regimes, and we seem to be busy constructing quite a few at present.
You can also have left and/or right Libertarian regimes.
(For the Americans in the audience, Libertarianism is confusing to you I know, it has very little to do with your liberal party, or
your odd view of political/religious matters, so try and allow for that).
That article is a pretty simple attack in support of the new Totalitarianism - what a surprise. The message is 'You need us, your
government, to force the nogoods to do the right thing, or they will take advantage of you! give us more power!' Because apparently
society itself is incapable of social pressure - oh how times have changed, apparently.
On the idea of basic income? why not, the transition would be the problem - but I doubt we will see it in any major implementation for
a long long time, because governments worldwide are on a power trip right now, and giving up an area of control of their people is not
part of that playbook now, is it.
One of the more interesting parts however of a solid basic income package, which hardly ever gets mentioned, is removal of minimum
wage. This frees up a whole pile of minor jobs which are simply not economic (looking after the neighbors kids after school, mowing lawns,
etc) and are often now done under the table.. minimum wage becomes much less needed, as there is less 'force' for people to have a job
at any cost.
But hey, it doesnt help grow state control, so good luck with that. We are better worrying terribly about the reds under the bed - oh sorry, I
mean ISIS, or whomever they choose in another year or so.
Uh, guys? I'm politically liberal and in favor of a basic income, but it really doesn't work on a small local scale with open borders. Utrecht says it's cheaper to pay their 10,000 unemployed people a basic income than to administer a draconian welfare bureaucracy, but if you're handing out money with no strings attached, a lot of unemployed people from around the EU are going to move in to take you up on the deal. How does the cost/benefit look when you're trying to support ten times as many unemployed people as you had before? Sure, the idea is that some of them will get back on their feet and start contributing to the tax base, but that's not going to happen if you can only afford to pay them 1/10th of a basic income, or if you up the taxes on their potential employers by a factor of 10.
To keep this from happening, you need to either restrict immigration into the basic income zone -- which you can't do in the EU -- or implement it on a large enough scale that the tax base can handle the immigration spike, and national, cultural, and language barriers limit the size of the influx.
You can do this across the EU or US. Doing it for one small European city is just madness.
a whole pile of minor jobs which are simply not economic
Why are they not economic? I challenge the base assumption. Why should a simple job such as mowing lawns be paid a starvation salary? Why can't someone who mows lawns for a living not make enough money for a simple life?
I will tell you why, the real reason: Because then the minimum-wage jobs would need to move upwards in salary. Someone who does something a little more qualified than mowing lawns would have to be paid slightly more. But that means the tier above that also needs to move up.
In other words: If you would cut out starvation salary jobs, and enforce minimum wage, all salaries would have to increase.
And now magic happens: People who couldn't afford to pay the cleaning lady or the lawnmower man a decent salary now can. Because they are making more money as well.
All this additional income will, of course, have to come from somewhere. There are two possible sources. One is inflation - which would create a self-reinforcing cycle because then you would have to raise wages to compensate for inflation. The other is less profits for those who own the companies, i.e. who make their money not out of salaries.
Guess who has in the past, is currently and will in the future spend millions and millions to both politicians and media to ensure that real minimum wage with no loopholes and exceptions doesn't happen.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Tax euros predominantly come from the middle class, not from the happy few who can afford to spend large sums on gaudy frippery. And that's where the downsides of this scheme will be felt. In principle it sounds simple. Instead of giving only unemployed people €800 / month, we'll simply give everyone that amount, but if you have a job we'll take most of that back in taxes. Where do those taxes come from, though? A 65% tax on the first €2400 of your wages (the tax in that band is already at 35%, not counting the deductible)? Doable, but keep in mind that not everyone makes that much, so taxes for higher earners will have to be increased even further.
In the Netherlands, the marginal tax burden is enormous. In some specific cases (single earner, two child household), the difference between gross minimum wage and the "modal" income is over €16,000 a year. However the net difference is... only €1,800, because of taxes and no longer being eligible for additional benefits. Which is due to another important issue: the complexity of the Dutch benefits scheme is not in the base stipends like dole money, state pensions or workman's comp. It's in the Byzantine maze of extra measures piled on by the state or the councils: child support, health care subsidy (health care is not provided; you need insurance but low incomes get a subsidy to pay for it), rent subsidy, tax breaks for the chronically ill, waiving of certain local taxes for low incomes, transport subsidy, aid in kind, and so on. Many of these measures are not to compensate for low incomes but to account for differences in composition of households. None of this will disappear with a universal basic income.
So why work at a minimum wage or even a better-paying job? You'll be better off just taking the basic income and all it's additional benefits, perhaps doing a few odd jobs on the side, off the books, for a couple of hours a week. The rest is leisure time. And that's the real issue: even if we could make the scheme work at current levels of unemployment, some people will decide that getting up every morning to sit in traffic and work at a sucky job for 40 hours a week isn't worth it. Already economists complain that the gap between the dole and minimum wage is too small to encourage people to find a job; in some cases the gap is negative due to losing many of the aforementioned additional benefits. Opponents to this scheme argue that no one will want to work anymore; proponents argue that people will still find fulfilment in the work itself and will want the extra cash, however small the amount. And the truth is probably somewhere in the middle... and that middle part will have to be paid for. It will be expensive. And it will be paid, as always, by the middle class.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
This is nonsense. What Utrecht and Nijmegen are doing is simple welfare reform. It has absolutely nothing to do with basic income. I don't get how The Guardian failed to see that. Why these politicians keep calling it "basic income" is completely beyond me.
For real basic income, look at Finland; they're actually doing it.
0x or or snor perron?!
Really? Janitorial jobs are going away? Retail jobs are going away? Supermarket jobs are going away? Restaurant jobs are going away?
Better floor waxes means fewer waxings
So fewer janitors polishing floors
Robot window washing systems
Means fewer washers entering your doors.
Automatic checkouts mean fewer cashiers
At grocery stores, and soon at Sears.
Your fast food will be faster than ever, you'll say
Because robots are handling it all the way.
Robots now harvest a lot of crops
Migrant workers will just get the slops
You say make them work for jobs they don't know
Hope you're not not in the nursing home where they go.
Basic income is coming your way
Just in time as the robots hold sway.
Burma shave
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.