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Canada's Ontario Government Ends Basic Income Project (www.cbc.ca)
Lisa MacLeod, Progressive Conservative member and Children, Community and Social Services Minister of the Legislative Assembly of Ontario, said Tuesday that she would end the city's basic income pilot project, calling it expensive and "clearly not the answer for Ontario families." Few details are available as to how the project will come to an end, but MacLeod said her government will end the program "ethically" for anyone who is currently enrolled. Slashdot reader kenh shares an excerpt from a CBC.ca report: Close to 4,000 people were enrolled in the basic income pilot program in Thunder Bay, Lindsay, Hamilton, Brantford and Brant County. The pilot project started in April 2017. It was originally set to last three years, and explore the effectiveness of providing a basic income to those living on low incomes -- whether they were working or not. Under the project, a single person could have received up to about $17,000 a year, minus half of any income he or she earned. "A couple could have received up to $24,000 per year." People with disabilities could have received an additional $6,000.
We ran out of other people's money.
2 possibilities: Conservatives are afraid social programs will let the poor improve their lot so they structure them for failure or Conservatives fear someone will cheat the system better than they do
"clearly not the answer for Ontario families."
Except it isn't clear that this isn't the answer. That's why this was a pilot project in the first place. Ontario should just spend the money (which is a drop in the bucket compared to the overall budget) and prove whether this works or not. If it fails then move on and try something else.
... Unless of course you don't care if UBI works or not you just oppose it on philosophical grounds. Then the best thing to do is cancel the pilot.
What you did is not a basic income. It's a garden-variety welfare program, with all the stupid overhead that comes with it, that you called a basic income. This way you can point to this bad joke and use it to discredit anyone actually advocating a basic income. You are deceitful garbage and I hope one day a mob of homeless push you into the sea.
Doesn't "minus half of any income he or she earned" replicate the biggest problem with existing welfare programs, and defeat any purpose of the trial?
This is not basic income.
50% marginal tax rate for a minimum-wage worker is a massive disincentive for formal work.
It is a huge incentive for cash-in-hand work. Or for using your time for non-taxable work.
Minimum wage in Ontario is only $14/hour, so this drops it to $7.
Do you work for $7/hr, or use that time to find clothes in thrift stores, do all your own repairs and maintenance, etc. ?
You can save a lot of money buying quality second hand goods, and DIY, at the expense of time.
This idea that we're heading towards a society where people won't need to work, or where jobs won't exist, is as old as society itself. There is no free ride. There never was, there never will be. The labor market is ever evolving and ever present.
Indeed, the program imposed a 50% income tax on working participants: for any $1.00 they made working, the "basic income" was reduced $0.50. That defeats the point of the whole programme.
While this is true, improvements in productivity mean that it has become (and will continue to become) much less expensive to sustain the life of a person with no or little input from them.
I would rather replace the ugly ball of entitlement programs we have now with a UBI. Many are badly designed and incentivize people to avoid getting off welfare, not to mention the administrative overhead. Replacing current programs with a UBI would give everyone around $7,000 annually. That would be sufficient to subsist if doing nothing else.
However, just as with any other program, a UBI can be badly designed. If we want to implement one it needs to ensure that bad behaviors are not incentivized. Reducing payments for working is one such example. Letting parents siphon off any income from their children would be another.
I am a proponent of some form of UBI, not because I believe that it is morally right or good for us to redistribute wealth, but because since we have already decided to do that to the current degree, we may as well do it as sanely as possible.
My other reason for supporting it is that I suspect it would also lead to reductions in abject poverty and crime, the externalities of which likely start costing a significant portion of such a program when you factor in the economic activity that must be directed to dealing with the problems caused by such. I cannot verify it, but I recently read that some city was spending some tens of thousands of dollars per person on dealing with the homeless in the city. Think of how much is spent on the criminal justice system as well. If a UBI can lead to reductions in those problems outright it reduces the cost and size of government further.
This idea that we're heading towards a society where people won't need to work, or where jobs won't exist, is as old as society itself. There is no free ride. There never was, there never will be. The labor market is ever evolving and ever present.
There'll always be an endless demand for things we could want done, but it does not mean there'll be an endless supply of capable workers. I know people who are on mental disability today who'd be working 100 years ago doing "Take ax. Chop wood." kinds of work. And there's far more who can't even make it through high school without dropping out, who could be a burger flipper or taxi driver but hardly a doctor or engineer no matter how many scholarships and free tutoring you give. They're not bad people, many are honest hard working men and women but they're not made for complex abstract problem solving. Unfortunately their kind of jobs are rapidly being automated and the halo jobs they create are usually advanced development/maintenance/repair work. And we're trying to automate that too.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Oh, I see. Yes. Instead of UBI, we can just gas anyone who is not smart enough to design a robot. Much better idea.
Replacing current programs with a UBI would give everyone around $7,000 annually
This is only true if Social Security and Medicare spending are absorbed into UBI. So current SS recipients, who paid into the system for their entire working lives, would see their monthly checks dramatically reduced so able bodied young people could receive the same check that they do.
Do you seriously think this would be politically acceptable? There would be a firestorm of protest, and wholesale defeat of any incumbent that supported it.
If you leave SS out, then the numbers don't work. At all.
Let me prefix this by saying that I don't necessarily support implementing a UBI system. However, I have yet to see anything called a "basic income" or "universal basic incomie" pilot program actually do things at all correctly. As other commenters have suggested, these pilot programs seem to be designed so that they must necessarily fail and be examples the politicians can point at and say, "See? We tried it and it failed." I'm not convinced UBI can actually work, but it definitely won't work if it isn't done right.
To do UBI correctly, it has to go to everybody. And it has to *replace* any income support programs. That is, it has to replace government programs such as (un)employment insurance, government pension plans not funded completely and directly by member contributions (because everyone would get UBI, the pension plan wouldn't be required, would it?). There also can't be any clawback because someone earned some money outside of the program. Doing that just adds administrative cost to the program and discourages recipients from working. Also, every person should get the same amount regardless of age, marital status, etc., though maybe with a minimum age before it kicks in. Otherwise, you recreate existing complex administration processes.
Now, here's the absolutely critical component. This UBI must not be set at a level where the recipient can afford a car, nice television, nice house, 127 cats, and the like. It should provide for *healthy* subsistence in a reasonable market and require careful management of money to do so (which encourages those who won't work to move out of the expensive cities like Vancouver or Toronto and those who want a nicer standard of living to work). It needs to be set such that if you want a nice living, you have to earn additional money, on which you pay taxes. (Also, under a proper UBI system, only the UBI itself would be income tax exempt. There would be no need for low end tax brackets under such a system.)
Limited pilot programs just aren't going to demonstrate anything because they're not going to work exclusive of existing income support programs and are going to potentially unbalance the labour force because the people getting free money can work for less. (That's probably why the clawback had to be there in this case.) To truly demonstrate whether such a system can work, it has to be tried at a fairly large scale and *existing* income support programs must be suspended for anyone participating in such a test.
Now I do understand that there is always going to be someone who isn't well served by such a program. But that's true of all the current options, too. If you're going to insist that it has to be perfect for everyone, then are you willing to give up all the existing social programs that you currently benefit from on that same principle? I thought not. So let's not create strawmen out of extreme edge cases since *every* system has those.
If it works in theory, try something else in practice.
UBI doesn't scale to everyone
Yes it doesn't, you have misunderstood how it works.
You don't take tht exact system you have now and give an extra $58,000 to everyone.
What you do is give $something to everyone, remove most benefits (generally excludig medical) and then bump up taxes. The median person sees no change in net income.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
A flat tax plus a UBI creates an automatic progressive tax curve, so you wouldn't be raising the tax to fund the UBI on the normal tax curve.
If you want to give everyone $1000/mo, calculate what is $1000/mo divided by the mean income. Fund that UBI by taxing everyone that resulting fraction of their income, flat, everyone pays the same percent. If you do that, people making the mean income pay nothing and get nothing in net; everyone below the mean income benefits some in net (the more the further below the mean their income); and everyone above the mean costs some (the more the further above the mean you are). In the US, around 75% of people make below the mean income, because of how incomes are right-skewed, and the bulk of the 25% above it don't make very much above it, so an UBI funded this way benefits more than a supermajority of people, and costs most of the remainder fairly little. Because the vast majority of wealth is held by a tiny tiny fraction of the populace, who are the ones who drag the mean so far above the median (creating that skew), and so are the ones most affected by it.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
Ultimately Ford is a fiscal conservative and leans social libertarian. If you think he's a Trumpette then you're doing a fine job of regurgitating the NDP, and left-wing media's talking points. Safe injection sites don't help the poor, they hurt them, increase crime, and spill over into other neighborhoods. Ask BC how it's working out. 15 years of the Liberal Party of Ontario has left ALL of the social assistance programs broken. Gutting and cutting of disability. The average wait for low-income housing in most places is now 7 years. But keep going and telling everyone how it's all Ford's fault, not McGuinty or Wynne.
In Ontario, ODSP will cover a large part of your apprenticeship. If you're low income, ODSP will give you the money for training. UBI should be placed at two levels: People on disability, and for people who were fucked over by Workmans Comp. Oh, and in Ontario, workmans comp has fucked over tens-of-thousands of people under the Liberals leadership, including doctors who didn't see the injured workers but denied them anyway. Yeah the guy missing an arm and leg is gonna get right up and go back to work.
Om, nomnomnom...
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Put some numbers to it. Mean per capita income in 2017 was $50,392. So to fund a $12K per year UBI you have to add a 24% flat tax (ideally you should be able to offset that by cutting the progressive tax because of the other welfare programs you can cut, but let's ignore that -- particularly because this program wouldn't replace all of them.).
Assuming two-adult households, no UBI for kids, and no change to earnings (which would not be true, see below), here are some numbers for pre-UBI income and net UBI income (income plus UBI less UBI taxes).
$0 -- $24K
$10K -- $32K
$20K -- $40K
$30K -- $47K
$40K -- $54K
$50K -- $62K
$60K -- $70K
$80K -- $85K
$90K -- $93K
$100K -- $100K
$110K -- $107K
$120K -- $115K
$150K -- $138K
$180K -- $161K
$200K -- $176K
$250K -- $214K
$300K -- $253K
$400K -- $329K
$500K -- $405K
$800K -- $633K
$1M -- $786K
$2M -- $1.55M
$3M -- $2.3M
$5M -- $3.8M
$10M -- $7.6M
$20M -- $15M
$50M -- $38M
Not bad. Of course, the big wildcard is the assumption that people stick with their current jobs / incomes. We don't really know what would happen there.
We're probably safe to assume that in the short term some people would stop working and live on their UBI while they go to school to move themselves up the income ladder. Others might quit their current jobs and start businesses. It seems likely that there would be some changes at the bottom of the pay scales (I'm assuming that the minimum wage would be abolished with enactment of a UBI) as employers might be able to pay less because their employees would need less... but maybe not too much less because employees would feel more freedom to walk away from jobs they dislike.
Some percentage of the low-income population might well decide that the UBI is enough for them and just choose not to work any more. I don't think this group would be large, but we can't really know.
Assuming UBI is not available to unemancipated teens, it would have some interesting effects on teen employment, since young adults eligible for UBI would in many cases be willing to work for less than ineligible teens. I assume teens would still be paying the UBI tax.
We really need some large-scale, long-term UBI tests to find out how people really respond, what decisions they make. And these tests need to be performed in different areas, in different cultures, because there's no reason to believe that every culture will react the same.
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