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Support For a Universal Basic Income Is Inching Up In Europe (qz.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Finland and the Netherlands are running modest pilots, and others are being considered by governments in France, Switzerland, and the UK, and by a host of nonprofits. To gauge public enthusiasm for the idea, Dalia Research, a Berlin-based market research firm, has been surveying Europeans' attitudes toward basic income since 2016. They've found a warm welcome. In a March survey, 68% of Europeans said they would vote yes in a basic-income referendum, up from 64% last year. The survey was put to 11,000 citizens in 28 European Union states and has a 1.1% margin of error. But not everyone is ready to see it implemented right away -- 48% said they wanted to test the policy first, while 31% advocated for adopting it as soon as possible. The 24% of respondents who opposed a UBI in both years were most concerned about the economic impact, including the expense, the risk of reducing the motivation to work, and the possibility foreigners would take exploit it. Those in favor of a UBI were most convinced by the promise of increased security and freedom, namely a reduced financial anxiety over meeting basic needs, more equality in opportunities, and the prospect of greater financial independence and self-reliance.
I suppose, it depends on how the question is phrased:
Would you like to be given money even if you do not work? Hell yah! Would you like to pay higher taxes so that some of it will be given to others even if they do not work? Hell no!In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Are Europeans suffering rising wealth distribution inequity as much as the US? It seems possible to me that as more people fall into lower wealth percentiles, they become more likely to have a positive view of UBI. Is this a real attitude shift, or merely people feeling they are being left behind? Or, are those even two different things?
For the record, as a convicted felon trying to make a new start making $8/hr, I have a very positive view of UBI, but I'm not very sanguine about the economics of it.
Although you could put in a minimal volunteer requirement.
In particular, some studies have shown that sole income providers do not significantly reduce their work even after getting a basic income, although people do reduce hours for second jobs - whether they be 2nd jobs done after normal working hours or second jobs done by a mother whose husband provides the main income while she takes care of the child.
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I'm actually all for UBI, provided they kill the minimum wage and a bunch of social programs along with it. It would increase efficiency overall, be a boon to small employers and their employees, and raise the standard of living for the lower 50%.
The problem will be when able bodied people decide to live only on UBI and nothing else. That's detrimental to society and a mechanism should be put in place to prevent that.
Smoking pot in your parents' basement and collecting a check from the government to pay for your weed and doritos is not a valid occupation.
Most European countries already have systems in place to make sure that people without income doesn't end up starving or homeless.
The cost is already there. The point of UBI is to reduce the administrative overhead.
Instead of figuring out who needs the extra support you give it to everyone wether they need it or not.
For those who didn't need it it will seem redundant that they are first taxed and then have the money given back to them, but in the end nothing much happened.
UBI isn't as radical as some people make it out to be.
Well... yes, of course everyone generally wants free money, right? Of course they're going to vote for it.
But someone please correct my thought experiment here to understand who will pay for it:
Suppose our society is just 100 people. We're going to give everyone $30,000 in basic income, for example. Where does it come from? Everyone pays $30,000 in taxes to fund the pool of money that pays everyone $30,000 each? What would be the point of that?
No, it must be that people at the top of the income scale are taxed (in a sliding proportion up the scale of course) to pay for the people at the bottom of the scale who aren't making any income that can be taxed? The guy making $1M at the top of society gets taxed 50% to fund 16 people at the bottom who get the basic income and don't have income to be taxed. The 2nd guy making $900k gets taxed 40% to pay for 12 people earning the basic income, etc. etc. and down the scale.
How else would it work?
So this is basically a large wealth transfer (which all taxes in principle are), not some utopian new idea that somehow pays for itself, right?
What am I missing? The role of corporations? The internet? What makes this different from just another kind of tax and welfare system, or somehow magically paid for because of today's economic dynamics? Scale it to a country's population size, and all we're doing is saying that the very wealthiest at the top can afford to pay this tax, and they're a very small portion of the population, right? (this tax is all the more affordable to the general population, the more the income inequality curve is distorted from a flat distribution - in fact in a flat distribution you cannot afford to pay a basic income)
Or am I missing something?
I mean, if it's not universal, than it's not a Universal Basic Income.
I could see doing it on a regional basis -- but you'd have to be kind of a hard-ass about it and be fairly committed to it.
Restrict it to only residents of the region at the time it started. Actually dismantle that region's regular welfare system, so you know exactly what cost savings you are gaining. I don't see either of those as being easy or palatable.
Which seems to be the major problem with a UBI -- you can model the shit out of it and say it makes sense, but until you do it -- and make it Universal -- you don't know.
And it still leaves a lot of uncomfortable questions -- what about immigrants? How long are they there until they're eligible? Diverse welfare payments are easier in that situation, because you can say "well, immigrants should get housing and job training, but not actual unemployment payments" or however you slice it.
FWIW, I think a negative income tax type of UBI makes sense, especially if it allows for marginal, low-wage employment without completely eliminating UBI payments (they should get zeroed out by taxes, but only once income rises above some level greater than UBI itself). I think providing people an incentive to work, even at low wage jobs (ie, more total income) makes sense, and would have a lot of positive impacts on working conditions. Low wage employers wouldn't be able to treat workers like slaves because homelessness and starvation wouldn't be the alternatives.
Rich people tend to want to live in nice places, and generally have the extra money to pay for that privilege. Living in a place with good schools, good health care, and a good safety net creates the type of society where the wealthy and upper middle class want to live. The lower crime alone which comes from these services is arguably worth it.
You don't see too many rich people leaving for third world countries just because the taxes are lower. You may see some middle class people moving to Thailand to make their retirement money stretch, but those with real wealth paying most of the taxes tend to desire well countries with the powerful governments necessary to run a modern society. And they have the money to pay for it.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
The poverty threshold, poverty limit or poverty line is the minimum level of income deemed adequate to cover total cost of all the essential resources that an average human adult consumes in one year. In the US, this is presented as an income level based on household size (number of dependents). For a single person household, the poverty line is $12,060 (2017).
Perhaps worth noting is that a single person household working a full-time minimum-wage job exceeds the poverty line (50 weeks time 40 hours times $7.25 is $14,500), so by definition a full-time minimum wage worker is not living in poverty. But if that same person has a child, then both are living in poverty, as the poverty line for a two-person household is $16,240. In a very real albeit statistical sense, children cause poverty.
An assumption of a UBI is that it provides sufficient income to survive on, so let's use the poverty line as the basis for the UBI. That is, a single person household would receive a UBI of $12,060; A two-person household would receive a UBI of $16,240; and so on. Note that even this basic assumption leads to perverse outcomes (e.g. two adults living separately would get $12,060 each, but if they live together they "lose" $7,880 in UBI), so at least some will avoid getting married, or even living together (or lie about living together, thereby defrauding the system) just to maximize their free money.
Using census data, there are 124.5 million households. The average household size is 2.54 people. Let's interpolate the poverty table to get an average expected UBI of about $18,497. Multiplying that out we can get the tab for providing UBI based on these assumptions, a total of about $2.303 trillion.
Coincidentally, that is almost exactly the amount of money we currently spend on all social welfare benefits programs, including Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, foodstamps, etc. A reasonable idea--indeed, this was put forward in a WSJ essay by Charles Murray--would be to eliminate all those programs in favor of the UBI. Of course, this ignores the howls that would arise from a populace deprived of their SS checks and foodstamps.
Exploring the notion of replacing the most basic welfare programs, e.g. foodstamps, section 8 housing, while not disrupting the SS and Medicare that the elderly view as an earned right. After all, the UBI based on poverty level should by definition cover those sorts of expenses. There will still be screams from people concerned about drug addicts not buying food for their kids and that sort of thing. So it seems unlikely that the overhead of those programs, let alone the programs, would be completely done away with.
So it seems almost a certainty that a UBI would be adjacent to at least SS/Medicare. Those totaled about $1.473T of the welfare expenditures, so add the $2.303 to the SS/Medicare $1.473T for a total cost of $3.776T. Perhaps the UBI reduces SS income dollar-for-dollar in an either-or situation reduces this a bit.
A worst-case cost would be adding UBI on top of all the existing programs, for a total cost of about $5T. Or perhaps the UBI in lieu of all other programs can actually be rammed through so that the cost remains a minimum of $2.303T.
Total federal revenues collected from all sources (taxes, royalties, etc.) in 2014 (last year available) was $3.27 trillion. So UBI would consume somewhere north of 70% of all federal revenues. And the math here assumes that no one receive UBI drops out of the workforce or reduces their taxable income at all--i.e., that revenues stay constant.
It won't even work then... UBI is basically going to make it profitable enough to not work and will require taxing the fruits of those who happened to have a job so much that they won't want to work anymore because the only clear what the UBI is (or less) anyway.. Who will work under those conditions? Few...Certainly not enough people to pay the bill for the poor who don't work.
How do I know? History.... Or if you prefer current events, Venezuela, where this idea had the best chance of working with all that oil money the government gets...
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
In Maine they added a welfare requirement to work/volunteer 20 hours per month. A large percent of the people dropped out. There are people that are too lazy to work.
What do you do when, say, 50 or 60 percent of the workforce is only capable of doing jobs that aren't profitable to pay people to do anymore? I don't think that you're going to be able to instantly break the cycle of "work--earn--consume" that has driven life since forever. Telling people who have spent their lives saving for retirement or amassing wealth that their money is no longer useful in the way it once was isn't going to go well.
In my opinion, most people who say people who want a universal income in place are lazy freeloaders who just want to sit around all day haven't worked with a large cross-section of humanity. They work as IT people, or developers/engineers, or doctors, or some other profession that requires a lot of education and are surrounded by smart people all day long. Out in the rest of the world, there exist people who can't handle anything more than a menial job. You don't just turn paper filers and customer service people into data scientists and biochemists. The job-replacement train ran out of gas a while back. It worked well when it was farming, then factory work, then corporate factory-style work like clerical/secretary work, then service jobs. Once those service jobs are gone, what high-salary, low-requirement job replaces them? Economies are built around consumers having a good job, taking on debt, spending, and keeping that cycle going. Universal income would allow this cycle to continue for a little longer, allowing employers to pay people less but keep them employed if they wished to earn beyond the minimum income. It basically buys us time to figure out how to deal with what could end up being massive unemployment and poverty for a formerly stable portion of the first-world workforce.
There are places in the US where you would make less money working than you would on welfare. And since basically any kind of income can disqualify you from welfare, not only is work discouraged buyt working your way up is discouraged as well. Basically, since welfare isn’t on any kind of sliding scale, it actively discourages working.
UBI would be abused. For sure. But if you’re not at risk of losing the income, then plenty of people will get part time jobs just to deal with the boredom.
Maybe a bunch of the rest of them will spend their free time making more minecraft videos for youtube. (Did you know that there are a lot of people who make a comfortable living just playing video games and recording them for youtube? Amazing. This one guy Mumbo owns a Merc!)
What I’d like to know is how much the welfare system, with all of its admin overhead, costs that doesn’t go to people’s welfare checks. Compare that to the admin overhead of just issuing everyone a check. Of course, different places have different costs of living, and that complicates things too, because it’s hard to work out what’s fair and equal.
> This is intended as a REPLACEMENT for other programs, like job insurance, retirement programs, family income programs, etc
To the first order, $0 is spent on "job insurance" and "family income programs". So you are basically talking about taking the budget from social security and redistributing that to all people regardless of age. The budget for Social Security is about $900B per year.
$900B / 325M people == ~$2800/year.
Should be easy to live off that, right? BTW, the average recipient of SS currently receives ~$14K/year, I'm sure it's totally easy for them to live off 20% of that.
Smoking pot in your parents' basement and collecting a check from the government to pay for your weed and doritos is not a valid occupation.
Why not?
And I'm somewhat serious. Yes, it offends your puritanical mindset, but what jobs are you creating for the folks who would lean this way? Used to be, half the population or more was involved in agriculture. Now we're under 2%, and we produce more food than ever before. We make so much food that we can't get eat it fast enough. We export food around the world. With a little better distribution and a bit of planning, we could feed everyone in the US handily, based on the food waste we throw out. We have technologically ended hunger, and are only waiting on the social and governmental structures needed to truly end it.
One major problem down. There is really no reason for that couch potato to starve, because we could feed them on our food waste at no real extra cost. Millions of them.
The rise of wind and solar and the massive uptick in natural gas is driving energy costs lower and lower. We used to employ millions and millions in energy-related businesses, but those are increasingly automated. And another major problem being mitigated. When it's trivial and inexpensive to keep the lights and heat on for that basement dweller, why would we not do that?
"Work or die" has been a reality for most all of human history. But there's no compelling reason for it to remain a reality. Give me UBI, and I'm not going to stay home. I want more. I might, however, take 6 months off to finish the novel I've been working on for years. I might see if I can push some of my hobbies and business ideas into real businesses. UBI would give me the safety net to take those risks. Will some people use it to sit in their parents' basement and smoke weed? Sure. And if they do, why should you or I or anyone else care? It's not like we don't have the resources to keep them alive.
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
The difference is, back then one earner could provide a middle-class life for a family. Nowdays, two earners barely provide a working class life, and that's with at least one working 2-3 jobs.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
I'd love to dive into the financials to see how it would work here in the states.
Above I posted a blurb where I did a quick google and got an estimate that our social welfare programs seemed to be on the order of about $10B/year in administrative costs. That's $30/person in the US. Not anywhere near enough savings to make UBI possible, even if you saved it all. Looks like we collect about $2.6T in income and payroll taxes at the federal level in the US every year. Divided by 360M people that's a bit over $7,000 per person per year.
If you give that to infants and children, that means a family of 4 would be in the $28k/year range, which is right at the poverty line. So if we spend most of our money, we can do it. We'd have about $0.5T left over for running the government and the military.
Needless to say, it would require a significant upheaval in society for us to do this.
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
Right now, in the US, we let 1.5M people live in the streets without letting it burden our conscience too much. I don't see any way that UBI would make that number any worse.
It is not an "all or nothing". The fact acknowledged by TFA itself is that people receiving assistance begin working less than they used to.
You mean less than 96 hours?
Oh, right, you're a child. You grew up with the eight-hour day. Sorry, I forgot, most people haven't had the adults educate them about work yet.
So let's start with how lazy and entitled you little shits are.
First off, back in the 1830s, your kind were already crying out about how utterly lazy they were and how the government should fix it so they don't have to work. "From six to six", they used to say. Twelve hours--twelve hours--and with two full hours of meal breaks! Not even twelve hours of straight work for six days a week (nobody worked on the Lord's Day), for a halfway-unreasonable 72 hour work week; they demanded sixty hours of work.
The French, the laziest people in the world at the time, achieved a 12-hour, 6-day work week by 1850. America started going downhill in 1868, when Federal employees--the most entitled employees, after anyone who's ever been marginally attached to the military--achieved an eight-hour work day. Most Americans still worked a good, solid 12-14 hour work day in 1905, until people like Ford started cutting back to 8-hour shifts and giving pay raises.
America didn't lose the war against laziness until the Adamson Act of 1916, establishing 8-hour days with additional overtime wages for railroad workers. After that, it was all over; the Fair Labor Standards Act was so ludicrous as to cut all good laborers down to 40 hours per week, except the good farm workers who still considered 50 hours full-time, and establish a mandatory minimum wage.
So that ship has sailed, and I don't see you out there working three full-time jobs like any real American would. You laze around for most of the week and complain just as much about too much work while you don't really work anyway; you may as well complain that other people might work 32 hours one day too, I suppose.
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Meantime, the stuff you really need like housing (whether you own or rent), food, and drugs are dramatically costlier than they were in the old days.
Wrong. Housing costs have barely changed when measured by the square foot and adjusted for inflation. Food is far cheaper today than it was 40 years ago. Drugs are also cheaper today if you buy the same drugs.
Finland, the Netherlands, France, Switzerland, and the UK already has systems in place to make sure that people doesn't starve or end up homeless.
Yes, they all have social welfare.
But nope, unlike Netherland and Finland who are or were actually running pilot experiment, Switzerland voted against.
Note that Switzerland practice direct democracy. i.e.: no mattter what, the population has always the final say on everything.
And in this case, democracy has spoken against UBI: apparently the population was indeed genuinely afraid of rise costs.
The cost is already there. Switching to UBI doesn't necessarily require higher taxes. Especially since you no longer need government workers investigating who is entitled to extra support.
That is the general idea behind UBI :
- keep giving out money as before, under welfare programs.
- except now you give out the money indiscriminately to absoluetely everyone.
- because you blanked give money to everyone, you don't need to pay that many people to take care of the minute details.
- saved money = extra money to redistribute.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Your free market healthcare system is a complete fucking joke. lol.
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.