Finland experimenting on giving citizens free money (USD 660) as basic income

What it shows is that the Department for Welfare and Pensions is the biggest spending department in the UK - spending £166.98bn in 2011-12, which is Of that huge sum, £159bn was spent on benefits - an increase of 1.1% on the previous year. That is 23% of all public spending.

Is that 6060 USD a year? A month? je suis confused

I don't watch vids posted by anyone as a matter of principle, waste of time in most cases even if not necessarily with this one. The idea has been doing the rounds for a while and we've all heard about it, very popular among the Left and opposed by the Right.

What is the idea, the net gain to be expected in societal terms? Are we talking about giving everyone a lump sum and close off the Social to the most accute cases of need, we'd have to look at the figures and terms in the first place. Without a minimally defined vision of what this 'universal income' would be traded for, it is impossible to have a serious discussion.

So let's say we have it in the UK, what do you stand to loose with UI? Housing benefit would have to go, really.

ps, actually... we may need to think about this UI thing.



https://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2013/jan/08/uk-benefit-welfare-spending

That is a few years back but we get the picture. So how much of that would be deemed unnecessary after the introduction of this UI notion?

our government [and also the general public] HATE people on benefits

they'd probably be riots or something if this scheme came to the UK, ... it's not going to happen.........

Ironically many true ideological libertarians, as opposed to conservatives and people who just hate the poor would happily see a negative income tax band for the lowest earners which is essentially the same thing.

its 660, i mistyped

Actually much of the right supports it. Milton Friedman was one of the first mainstream advocates of it.

Also the Adam Smith institute, a right wing think tank, supports it. https://www.adamsmith.org/blog/a-neoliberal-case-for-a-basic-income-or-something-like-it

Like i said earlier, it is a waste of time to talk about it as a free-for-all jackpot, what Friedman or anybody else makes of the idea depends very much on the terms. Everyone agrees that it would be a massive jolt to society for the idea to go universal, so much would have to change that without a sketch of what the bargain would be... I don't know if it would be a good or bad idea. We are not talking about just adding it on and leave all else unchanged, are we?

What would you be prepared to let go of, any cuts to the welfare state at all? It will never happen, in my opinion, but we can wonder about it.

Universal income is coming to Europe, it is just a matter of *when*. And it will be a great thing for everyone, especially the risk-takers such as inventors and researchers who make economic growth possible.

Assuming we keep our borders closed, of course; this kind of economics cannot work when you have billions of the world's poor scrambling to share your stuff too.

I don't think it's all that unfeasible to be honest. We basically already have a UBI for pensioners in the state pension (I know it's not quite the same, but it's not that far off). I don't see that extending a similar concept to lower ages would introduce any problems which don't already exist. OK, so you keep child benefit, and the welfare system doesn't completely die. Oh well, it'd still be a huge simplification.

I'm also not sure I agree you necessarily need to tax loads more to generate the income needed to pay for it. You could, if you were so minded, reduce spending on public services and reason that people should have enough to pay for the basics. I'm not saying that's a perfect solution, but it's certainly an option.

Finally, the reason it would generate inflation is because it would generate economic activity at the low-end of the economy. I'm not so sure this is a bad thing. And anyway, the sort of rate rise which you know I favour could be used to mitigate inflationary pressures.

Well, no. Firstly, the point is that that's more difficult to administrate than just giving it to everyone. Also, your way is less redistributive. Normally that wouldn't bother me but essentially the point, to me, of a UBI is that if you're going to have a state which aims to redistribute wealth and provide welfare you might as well do it on an efficient basis.

So if you gave everyone the UBI, but removed the personal allowance (say), maybe with a slightly higher basic rate of tax, most people would be better off, but the poorer you are the more better off you would be. If you just lowered taxes and increased unemployment benefit the poorest workers wouldn't see much benefit, and may see a greatly reduced incentive to work.

This is actually an important point, because people often say a UBI would reduce incentives to work. Universal Credit is a (flawed) attempt to grapple with the problem that for those moving into work, removal of benefits mean that they face eye-watering effective marginal tax rates. If it's not conditional on whether you work or not, your marginal tax rate is always just the tax rate, so the unemployed face no more an incentive to not work those of us in full-time work face to not take overtime.