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Finland Prepares Their First Tests Of A Universal Basic Income (futurism.com)
Finland is getting ready to launch their first pilot program with a Universal Basic Income -- one of several countries which are now testing the concept. An anonymous reader quotes a report from Futurism.com:
Finland is about to launch an experiment in which a randomly selected group of 2,000-3,000 citizens already on unemployment benefits will begin to receive a monthly basic income of 560 euros (approximately $600). That basic income will replace their existing benefits. The amount is the same as the current guaranteed minimum level of Finnish social security support. The pilot study, running for two years in 2017-2018, aims to assess whether basic income can help reduce poverty, social exclusion, and bureaucracy, while increasing the employment rate.
In January a basic income program will also begin testing in the Netherlands, according to the article, which points out that Y Combinator has also launched a test program in Oakland, California. And there's now also calls for a Universal Basic Income in India, where one social worker argues it's "sound social policy," while pointing out that it's already being implemented in other countries. "In Brazil, it targets the poor and has been a way out of poverty; in Iran, it has substituted for subsidies and citizens receive about $500 a year..."
In January a basic income program will also begin testing in the Netherlands, according to the article, which points out that Y Combinator has also launched a test program in Oakland, California. And there's now also calls for a Universal Basic Income in India, where one social worker argues it's "sound social policy," while pointing out that it's already being implemented in other countries. "In Brazil, it targets the poor and has been a way out of poverty; in Iran, it has substituted for subsidies and citizens receive about $500 a year..."
Yeah, we all know that neighbor who's sister's daughter's friend knows that One Poor Person who blows all their cash buying a $600 cellphone every other week. They're all like "well I could pay for rent; or I could get a rose gold iPhone to replace my regular gold iPhone. I sure wanna get evicted." That definitely happens, like, all the time.
You are an over-entitled fool. Give people money and they spend it on what they need. That does mean food and housing, and while the long-term poor who have lived without longer than with may not have guidance to do that at first once the reality of a steady support sinks in and guidance is provided (it already is available at employment centers, which most of that group already attend often).
The problem with the current system is that if you decide to start working they take away your benefits so people give up and they just take the benefits and don't work. I don't think we would have as many problems if we had guaranteed basic income versus all the social programs that we have now. With guaranteed basic income people will be allowed to look into different career paths and look into having a job on top of receiving the benefits and nobody could complain because everyone would be receiving the same amount of money. If they spend it then they're out and there is no other social programs that they can fall back on. The problem right now is that if you spend all your welfare you still have food stamps and lots of other charity organizations that will give you food and get the housing and pay electric bill which is why people don't manage their money properly.
It certainly would help to provide a basic income as long as people are free to work and earn extra money without loss of that basic income. There are a couple of difficulties as those that work in low paying jobs will resent people earning about what they earn without working. In the US there is a larger issue. We need the public to be able to spend money on more than just the bare basics of life. Businesses need buyers. The US now has way too many people who have to stretch every penny. That excludes them as buyers for numerous products and services. As employment becomes more and more an unusual thing due to technology replacing human labor, more and more people are excluded from the buyer pool. That means less employment and less taxes and more public expenses dealing with the displaced etc.. The one and only thing that can hope to work is to provide an income that not only covers all the basics but also leaves money left over to spend on things that are not basic needs. If we do not do this we will surely face a total economic collapse and a loss of our nation. It is also obvious that we will have to price control some items such as medical care and medications or no amount of income will help to bail us all out of the impending collapse.
As a guess, it's probably not means-tested. If they get a job, they keep getting the UBI money.
Post failed at the unnecessary failed and self-interested ideology. There is no connection between your "points" in reality. Government is the only force representing the interests of all people and is the only force to represent any interest against those of the wealthy and powerful. Dismantling ('defunding', etc.) official government leads to default government by the interests of the wealthy, which is normally called for what it is: slavery and feudalism.
If we reduce government spending and reduce the tax rates (which government employees hate), then we would also be making an impact on poverty, as well as empowering the people.
Because people without money or jobs are struggling to pay their taxes?
Or are you some sort of nutjob who thinks the only reason these people are poor and/or can't find work is that rich people, by paying taxes, are prevented from giving charitably and/or creating jobs for them?
It simply doesn't work like that. There is no correlation between countries with lower taxes and a decrease in poverty.
You need a mobile with data plan to be in job search now. Recruiters don't wait, and neither do employers. The days of leaving messages are over. Guess what happens if/when you don't answer immediately and comply with every command/requirement? They move on the the next candidate.
So you are of the opinion that the poor are generally just as irresponsible in their spending as the wealthy, the only difference being how much they start with?
"That does mean food and housing"
And what they need does include entertainment, social connection and interaction, and VARIETY of foods. This may not be required to produce the physical meat of the body but it is a requirement for proper mental function.
There needs to be sufficient regulation to prevent free-marketeering from trying to milk the free money supply.
More generally, it is necessary that the universal basic income is sufficient not to force those on it into defacto poverty.
The two are related in the sense that, with an unregulated free market, if you pump money in but no more material resources, more money is chasing those same resources, pushing prices up.
In general, though, removing the anxiety about putting a roof over your head and food on the table should be considered a necessity if you want to get the best out of your workforce in a modern technologically driven world: the more you brain has to worry about the basics, the less brain there is left to think about productive things.
John_Chalisque
I had a potluck roommate at my university who was of meager means. He wasn't sure if he'd be able to stay in school, but then a $10,000 federal loan came in for him to cover his schooling expenses.
Guess what he did, even before the money had hit his account?
Shopping spree. Bought a gaming console with a number of games, movies, new clothes, went out to a load of restaurants...you get the picture.
By no means am I suggesting he's the brush with which we can paint the entire low income population, but it is safe to say that some people will be foolish with those funds and we'll be faced with the question of how to deal with them then.
Only if you ignore all the evidence that says that people actually use cash to improve their lives and not spend it substantially on drugs or alcohol.
These people have no money yet they walk around with expensive cellphones..
That is not a problem limited to "the poor". 47% of Americans cannot come up with $400 to meet an unexpected expense.
I know many people like that. Some of my well paid co-workers will tell me they have to "wait until payday" for a purchase or even to go out to lunch. My sister, who makes $80k and owns a house, occasionally needs to borrow money from me for some minor expense, like fixing a flat tire on her car, because she has already spent her paycheck. She has zero savings, and no financial cushion whatsoever, yet she just got back from a Mediterranean cruise.
I couldn't live like that. The stress would drive me nuts. When I was 18, and got my first paycheck, I invested half of it in an index fund, and my savings have increased monotonically since then, even through college (I worked part time and had a military scholarship).
To give money, you have to take it in the first place. And when you take it, the opportunity cost means that that money cant be used to pay someone to produce something as well as consume. Instead you are taking money, taking a cut to support the bureaucracy that administers the money and basically you are paying somebody to not do anything at all. You are subsidizing non productivity and unemployment. When you tax something, you get less of it. When you subsidize something you get more of it. It's pretty simple.
You mean your biased, opportunity based, convenience samples collected by untrained observations with unchecked internal bias on interpretations? Yeah, the research with carefully planned survey analysis is better.
Base income to increase employment rate? How is that supposed to happen?
Robots are replacing humans left right and center at an ever increasing rate.
Base income is there to mitigate the effects of increased machine productivity and preventing a rare few from being the only ones reaping the benefits of increased productivity. That's what gouvernments should be seeking to do. But I guess shit will have to hit the fan before anything happens addressing that problem.
Somebody didn't get "basic income". I hope they'll learn before it's too late.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Two things people also need to keep in mind when talking about what "Finland" does. First, the US is already spending considerably more per capita than any other country on social welfare (as well as education and healthcare). So, the problem is that the programs we have don't yield results commensurate to what we spend. Second, the way European countries finance their social welfare states is through massively higher tax rates on the middle class, often nearly twice as high as in the US.
So, a basic income to replace the current welfare and social safety net, and giving individuals to spend their government welfare as they see fit, would be great. But that's just not in the cards. Do you seriously think that a Congress that doesn't believe individuals are qualified to make decisions about mortgages, payday loans, health insurance coverage, or which school to attend is going to give welfare recipients a couple of thousand dollars per month and tell them to spend it as they see fit? And do you seriously believe that the millions of people who currently work on delivering and supervising welfare-related benefits are going to just quietly give up their jobs?
To give you flip side on this, if you have been denying yourself for years it becomes very hard to work up enough enough willpower to abstain when you get a windfall. I have this problem but to a lesser degree (I would have bought myself a pizza, and the stupid overpriced dessert). Perhaps having a feeling of security regularly would make it so it wouldn't go to his head? Also a basic income is very different from what I am assuming is a lump sum of money?
The key is in the word "universal". These are just trials, but the idea is you to pay every man woman and child no matter their wealth or employment status. Considering very little of current welfare budgets actually reach the people who need it - ironically enough it's all wasted on a massive bureaucracy designed to keep people from accessing welfare - many economists believe it could reduce government expenditure while boosting the economy.
We are also looking at a world where automation replaces more and more jobs. If we don't come up with something soon angry mobs will run riot and capitalists are going to be swinging by their necks. Of course, instead of addressing inequality we could always start to militarise the police and reduce basic freedo... oh wait.
They already allow the banks at the top of the chain to just wish money into existence so they can make even more money demanding interest on it. Why not wish the money in at the bottom of the pile where it will actually fuel the economy that keeps the country running rather than the non-productive swapping of game tokens?
At some point you can't pay a person's health costs as there's no cure for entropy. At a certain point people will have to accept that they're going to die and the best that can be done is to make them comfortable, or as much as is possible. It doesn't make much sense for society to bear the cost of treating cancer for someone who is in their 80's. If that person has a bunch of money saved up and wants to try to use it to prolong their life, that's their own business, but at some point no amount of money will be able to impede death.
If we're going to move towards a basic income and universal health care, we have to be pragmatic about it. A basic income based off of the current government spending on social programs is certainly possible, but it's going to be a subsistence income and it likely means moving or finding a roommate (or several) if you want to subsist in the more expensive parts of the country. Health care costs in general could be brought to manageable levels if the population as a whole were healthier. The dysfunctional system in place is only partially to blame.
So someone works their whole life, and because they're smarter than you, or more frugal, or more disciplined, you'd prefer a system where the money they've saved is simply taken away from them until they're back down to having only what you have, so you won't hate them any more. That about sum it up? Or are you of the naive position that once you only take things away from "wealthy" people, that the same framework would never be used against people who are simply better off in any way than someone else?
The best feature of UBI is not making it conditional and then eliminating minimum wage. Maybe a person wants just an extra $2/hour over their UBI, they can do that, no problem.
However, with just a select group on UBI, having no minimum wage allows the UBI group to undercut the non-UBI group (who certainly won't be willing to work for $2/hour), so phasing this program in in an ethical way is non-trivial.
Leave the false imagery aside and try to form a coherent position first. Your argument relies on assumptions and assumptions on assumptions that the poor in society (any of them) are there due to some moral or character flaw which could have been prevented with a bit of ingenuity and work. That is false, proven so by thousands of years of human history if you ever care to study it. The poor are there because of inefficiency in knowledge and physical transfers (both types have costs which in most cases must be paid prior to any service). The poor are poor not because of lack of Puritan work philosophy but because they lacked the advantages that allowed others to avoid most obstacles. Bad health from lack of care in childhood, poor food in childhood, etc. Bad education because of the above, or because of under-funded education systems, or simply being prevented from attending school by war, civil or international, famine, general unrest, etc. Apparently, your environment failed to equip you with empathy or intelligence enough to understand that on your own.
In case of Finland, social security benefit requires a bunch of paperwork done every few months in-person at the social security bureau or w/e. Those are run by municipalities/cities, not the state, and are pretty inconsistent and hard to deal with. The paperwork includes receipts of all of your bank accounts to see you aren't receiving money from anywhere else. It also gets revoked immediately if you start receiving money from elsewhere, and collected back retroactively if you make enough in a year (same applies to unemployment benefits).
Source: Am Finnish
The other thing you'll see with the poor is they're used to everything going to shit. It's tough to plan ahead and stick to the plan when you've spent your entire life having shit fall apart around you. When things are going well you don't expect it to last, so you live for the moment.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Please, Honest days work for an honest days pay and you might have a point. But the fact is the leading employer in the united states in Walmart, 50 years ago it was General Motors. One job paid a living wage where everyone made a decent living and you didn't second guess that the degenerate on the corner was a lazy degenerate. Now, the top employer forces you to pull government subsidies to survive. I understand that some people have an iron will and can become a millionaire making $20,000 a year. but that is the execption, not the rule. Most studies have conculded that $74000/year is required to comfortably live in america, and still have money for savings and a vacation. The median household income is $50,000(ish) That is the problem. Our wages have hardly doubled since the 70's yet the cost of living has almost quintupled.
The US already accepts different tax brackets, this is just another tax bracket at the low end, one where you get negative tax rather than zero tax as the lowest rate. The only other difference is that the IRS sends the "refund" check in 12 installments rather than one.
Only the poor or the mega rich would fall entirely into that bracket
Nullius in verba
I raised two children without netflix, sat tv or cable. It can be done. We used to play games like monopoly and uno and go on trips to the library to borrow books. I have no problem feeding people, even people who wont work. There is no reason for people in the US to go hungry but as to all the other bullshit I say they can work for it. Free cell phones? Fuck that, we're damn near 20 trillion in debt with no real effort to do anything to even slow it down. Sooner or later it'll stop and when it does people will find out what poverty really is.
Not as well as it could since they don't implement the basic income.
Even so, it doesn't work half bad even with the right doing it's best to monkey wrench it.
Are you kidding? Wall street is flying high on wish money. It's the rest of us (who aren't allowed to wish money into existence) that can't make ends meet.
Nobody says that it never happens. But it does not happen enough for lost money to outweigh the amount of money you need to spend on checking that it does not happen. Your anecdotes do not help and you are suggesting that what you said in your anecdotal evidence is a problem, no matter how much you try to deny it. You are using exactly the same arguments every opponent of UBI is using: "Even one fraudster would be too much, we must not let those people steal, that would be the end of the world!" UBI might have drawbacks, but not what you are suggesting. We give them the money. If they don't buy food, they will be hungry. Next month their primary need will be food, not shopping. So they will go eat. If they keep getting the money, eventually they will learn to balance their spending on their needs.
Another point is that once you have a bunch of guys getting money on a regular basis, there is opportunity for someone to help them out, as the unreliability of those guys and the uncertainty of them being able to get the income is lifted. Maybe all they want to do is sit around and play console games. Fine, if 4 of them get together, they might have enough money to get an apartment, big TV, xbox and play games all day. I don't mind. Good for them. At least I don't have to work with some stupid unmotivated punk at my workplace that will just slow me down. And at least they are not in the streets stealing. It is a win win win. In few years some of them maybe get bored and learn some useful skill, do something productive. Who knows. It is a small price to pay for the other benefits.
For example in US mothers often go back to work as early as 2 weeks after giving birth. Can you imagine that? I cannot. How much better would those kids do in life if they could stay home with them on basic income for a year or two? Can you imagine how much smarter those kids will be in 20 years? How many problems that can lift in just one generation? What about the fathers? Not finding a job is no longer a reason to join gang, sell drugs, go to jail. So maybe you got almost no money and live on basic income, but you got now two people raising that kid.
What about veterans? What about disabled people? What about mentally sick? There will always be some punk like you arguing with that one kid that bought xbox. FFS. I've had enough of you guys.
If programs would be read like poetry, most programmers would be Vogons.
Don't need a place to live either. You can just sponge yourself down in the McDonalds bathroom too.
Life is so cheap. Too bad the cost of living isn't.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Not likely. Under either a flat or progressive tax structure, people who earned more before UBI will still be the ones earning more under UBI. Whether the net effect is lower or higher income for those people depends on the tax structure.
All my liberal friends think I'm a conservative, all my conservative friends think I'm a liberal.
The amount of homeless people is not an issue of just poverty, it's an issue of a lack of mental health programs. It is cheaper for the Government to dump people on the streets than own asylums. The US also has a huge amount of corruption so tended to get sued a lot when they ran asylums, because it was cheaper than inspections and accountability. You are conflating the amount of homeless to be similar to the rate of poverty I think, but it fails. Count the Homeless and people in Shelters in SF, then compare that to the institutionalized in some other city in Finland and you would have similar percentages.
TFA is reporting _BULLSHIT_, pure and simple crap. Replacing people's current unemployment with a check covered by a new name is NOT Basic Income. Giving EVERYONE a check every month is what Basic Income is. So the PILOT is a crock of shit meant to appease people who somehow think it's a good idea for the Government to hand out money they confiscate in taxes and print to appease a populace who lacks employment options. People will also say "See it works!" and demand more wealth confiscation and checks from the Government because "look"!
The dishonesty here is simple and open, and meets everything else about the claims promoting Basic Income. Sorry, but I have not seen any intellectual debate on the subject. I have read what I consider crap claiming the government should redistribute wealth in the US this way, but no sane economist agrees with this. Interestingly Milton Friedman is often cited as a source for BI, which neglects the majority of his arguments (that Welfare without immigration control will fail).
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
angry mobs will run riot and capitalists are going to be swinging by their neck
As a supporter of UBI, I find it to be very compatible with free market ideals. While it provides a social relief program, it also removes the minimum wage regulation that screws up the free market forces in unskilled labor markets. I prefer that when society wants a program, it uses societal programs (government and taxation) to provide the program; forcing employers of unskilled workers to carry that burden is unfair and counterproductive.
Also... I would agree that crony capitalism is a bad thing, but please refrain from using such a broad brush. Free market capitalism, combined with social programs funded directly by the government and sensible regulations, is proven time and time again to bring about better societies.
All my liberal friends think I'm a conservative, all my conservative friends think I'm a liberal.
What didn't work about Obamacare? Millions of people who didn't have coverage previously have it, and we have millions of assholes pissed off about just that. It's a win/win.
The poor being irresponsible with their spending is critical for our economy.
The most valuable thing you can sell is manpower. Why? Because it's 100% fiat revenue. For revenue from agriculture products, you need arable land. For revenue from production, you need raw material. For services, all you need is people. And if there is one resource we have no shortage of, it's that.
Services, though, are a fickle thing to sell, because it's the first thing people cut back on when times get tough. If money's tight, do you get a haircut or do you get groceries? Do you get your dripping faucet fixed or do you buy fuel for your car so you can go to work?
So the poor having money to spend means the economy is running. They don't save, they spend. They consume. Consumption means selling, and selling means revenue. And that fuels our economy.
Our current economic problem is exactly that the poor don't have any money left to spend.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Actually you might see pressure to raise wages for low skill work now that people can choose to drop out of the labor force (without the bureaucratic issues and social stigma of being on Welfare) if the wages offered are not attractive enough. If someone just wants to make some pocket money its probably more attractive to participate in the "at-will gig" economy instead of accepting the constraints of a traditional job. Of course higher wages also means more automation resulting in fewer jobs which would pressure wages lower. I All we can be sure of at this point is that this is going to be a very interesting experiment