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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.
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.
If it was actually a basic income you would be getting it, too. The point of UBI is to bring equality of opportunity. $20k a year is a meager living, but it's good enough that you can take some risks with it and actually try to do the entrepreneurial dream we're all told about.
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.
And yet we never run out of other people's money to bail out banks, GM, or get new toys for the military.... (eyeroll)
Mostly random stuff.
That isn't how UBI is supposed to work. This "pilot program" fucked it up on purpose by making it needs-based.
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.
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."
It's not a justification, it's a question: How comes that there's always money to save the rich from having to go a year with less than a million bucks to blow on shits and giggles, but never any to save those that actually need it to survive?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
The bank bailout was paid back, with interest. So not doing it would have saved nothing.
Military boondoggles like the F-35 may be stupid, but they are in no way whatsoever an "alternative" to UBI.
Each spending proposal should be justified on its own merits, not on a scale of relative stupidity.
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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