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Universal basic income to be tested in Wales

bbc.co.uk

21–30 of 337 posts

Re: Universal basic income to be tested in Wales

#21
Anybody did take part in similar test here ?

I'm somehow in a false UBI situation, monthly jobless benefits, and while waiting for answers I volunteer (mentioned it a few times). I found the freedom very .. freeing and motivating (actually the system was slowing me down, politics as you know). So I really wonder how it is to live officially in this condition.

Re: Universal basic income to be tested in Wales

#22
post #5

[flagged]

By balls, you mean money. Look at the difficulty the service industry has now hiring people who would rather receive government relief and sit around the house than work a marginally better paying job—it’s not like they are using this time to pursue productive hobbies (pursuing their passions)... and look at the inflation and debt we’re incurring from free money

The service industry in America is having difficulty hiring because they aren't paying enough. That's all their is to it.

Re: Universal basic income to be tested in Wales

#23
post #5

[flagged]

By balls, you mean money. Look at the difficulty the service industry has now hiring people who would rather receive government relief and sit around the house than work a marginally better paying job—it’s not like they are using this time to pursue productive hobbies (pursuing their passions)... and look at the inflation and debt we’re incurring from free money

Haven't we spent the last decade bemoaning the lack of moderate inflation? Plus the primary issue with inflation is that it hurts people at the bottom, so UBI offsets that inherently.

As for the money, I am brit so I only know the British numbers. We spend about 300bn a year on benefits (in non covid times). That's £5000 per citizen (including kids) and doesn't count a whole bunch of other subsidies (free houses, local government spending etc). So we wouldn't need to raise much additional spending.

Of course, people would be more likely to take service jobs if they could keep their unemployment benefit (as they would a UBI). That's one of the big upsides of a UBI: no benefit trap like we're currently seeing (rightly or not).

And all this is without any uptick in any economic area (people accepting lower wages, getting educated/trained, increased consumption, lower crime etc).

Re: Universal basic income to be tested in Wales

#24

Interesting how political parties are for or against this pilot project before the results are known. What happened to gathering evidence first and then making up one's mind? There have been other projects in Canada, Finland,Kenya and the Netherlands, all with “positive” results. It is useful to ask what you are trying to achieve with an UBI? * lift people out of poverty? * save money on other social schemes, like pe…

> for or against this pilot project before the results are known

> all with “positive” results.

Call this lack of self awareness. Do you have any study that looks into the long term effect of this scheme with data. AFAIK, there had been multiple programs of UBI going all the way to 1960s[1] and each time government cancelled it for some reason, so calling it one word positive if got cancelled is bit of overreach.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income_pilots

Re: Universal basic income to be tested in Wales

#25
"We need to make an early start on designing the pilot to make sure that we have the best chance of operating a pilot that allows us to draw the conclusions from it that we would all want to see."

Not a very scientific attitude (I think this is a great idea btw, just that quote is quite cringe)

Re: Universal basic income to be tested in Wales

#26

Interesting how political parties are for or against this pilot project before the results are known. What happened to gathering evidence first and then making up one's mind? There have been other projects in Canada, Finland,Kenya and the Netherlands, all with “positive” results. It is useful to ask what you are trying to achieve with an UBI? * lift people out of poverty? * save money on other social schemes, like pe…

People usually don't particularly care for the truth, they care for what they think is the truth, and what support their opinions.

As for suggestions : It's pretty vague, but how about doing projects in things that you're interested in ? Like maybe creating a prototype for an energy drink, buy a lot of different ingredients to find new recipes, or buy tools for drawing and create a comic...

Or read up on a problem your city has, and work on it.

Re: Universal basic income to be tested in Wales

#28
post #8

The 'universal' aspect of UBI is critical, and many of the attempts to test UBI seem to miss this completely. Call it something else in that case.

Like the Oakland program which specifically excludes whites. Or basically every other program that only includes extremely low income people. I suppose it gets the results they want though, which is to show it helps the lives of the people, however as we have seen with this last year of unemployment checks, people just won’t go back to work if they can make almost as much for doing nothing. At our business getting people to return when unemployment was an extra $600 a week on top of about 60% of their wages was absolutely impossible. Bow that it’s still $300 it’s a struggle to get people back.

Re: Universal basic income to be tested in Wales

#29
post #5

[flagged]

By balls, you mean money. Look at the difficulty the service industry has now hiring people who would rather receive government relief and sit around the house than work a marginally better paying job—it’s not like they are using this time to pursue productive hobbies (pursuing their passions)... and look at the inflation and debt we’re incurring from free money

Can you provide some numbers about people taking benefits instead of working? I'm sure there are a small number, but unemployment in the US is currently within a normal range, so I don't see the impact you claim being possible.

Re: Universal basic income to be tested in Wales

#30
How do they test this for a subset of the population, while actually ensuring the at-scale harmful impacts don't happen when it is scaled up? One of the biggest concerns I've heard is inflation. If you test on a small group, you won't see inflation and you will think your test was a success.
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