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Universal basic income to be tested in Wales

bbc.co.uk

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Re: Universal basic income to be tested in Wales

#61

Post by sokoloff »

LatteLazy wrote: post #39
notahacker wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. So far we've repeatedly tested that if you give people in an area a small sum of money paid for from central government funds for a couple of years, they won't change their habits much but will be a little better off financially, which should be of absolutely no surprise to anyone. A real pilot would - as a minimum - be making the local tax rises and welfare cuts necessary to make the scheme revenue neutral, wh…

I'm the root commentor but I hope you don't mind me piling on. It's pretty well agreed that the trial in Finland worked: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2242937-universal-basic... Id welcome a trial that included paying for it. That said, I don't think it would make a big difference. The UK (I'm a brit) spends enough on welfare to just give everyone £5000 pa (including kids) at the same price. We could just star…

All topical comments are welcome everywhere IMO.

If the average is £5K and many are receiving £0, it must be the case that some are receiving much more than £5K in benefits. If you normalize everyone at £5K, what happens to those who were previously receiving some multiple of that? (I’m presuming that £5K is an insufficient amount to meet what society has previously considered their need for support was.)

In essence, you’d be proposing a UBI for ordinary UK citizens to be funded by those who are currently receiving welfare [over £5K]. That would be unpopular with proponents and opponents of UBI I think.

(If half or more of that £5K is in staff and overhead and you were willing to dismantle those organizations as soon as it was clear UBI “would work”, this might be workable. I don’t know how much is direct benefits vs overheads [including eligibility and fraud checks, which would be dramatically reduced under UBI].)

Re: Universal basic income to be tested in Wales

#62

Post by kebman »

gandalfian wrote: post #40

In practice the UK already pays the price for a universal basic income. Most poor people get some sort of tax credit and/or housing benefit. What we don't do is allow people to use it to rise out of poverty. A disabled lady thought saving some of her disability was the responsible thing to do, despite further impoverishing herself, once she built up some savings she was prosecuted for fraudently claiming benefits whi…

The laws are like that, because someone feels that it's not in their interest that people actually get out of poverty. The logic behind that interest is simple. You can't make people dependent on you if you simultaneously give them the tools to achieve independence. And these guys love dependent people, because it gives them power. However this attitude is ruining most Western societies.

Re: Universal basic income to be tested in Wales

#63

Post by ItsMonkk »

Housing can’t be both affordable and a good investment. The price of a home should therefore equal its replacement cost. If the market value of the home with the land is $1 million, but the cost to build the home is $200k, raise taxes on the land until the new market value is $200k. Tada, Land Value Tax.

Why am I mentioning LVT in a Universal Basic Income thread?

What should we do with the money we earn through a LVT? Give it away through UBI.

Win-win.

If you want to start with a smaller LVT and work your way up to equalization over a period of 20 years, that's fine.

Re: Universal basic income to be tested in Wales

#64

Post by helsinkiandrew »

The trouble with these pilot schemes is that they involve too few people and are too short to make any firm conclusions.

Elections and different politicians with different viewpoints can be elected half way through and other financial implications arise - like COVID, or in the case of the Finnish pilot a change to the unemployment benefits system that made making comparisons difficult.

The true benefits and costs of UBI are probably only evident after decades or even generations.

Re: Universal basic income to be tested in Wales

#65

Post by rundevilrun »

secondcoming wrote: post #35
bjackman wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Part of the reason for this lack of interest in the actual outcome is that state benefits are one of the main battlegrounds in the UK's culture war. A lot of the Tories' base comes from the ideological position that poorer people don't deserve to receive aid at the expense (via taxes) of richer people. Whether or not UBI achieves any of its stated aims is totally irrelevant once you see things that way. All the argum…

> All the arguments about disincentivising work are, IMO just convenient filler Not sure, I've read articles online about companies in the US struggling to hire because people are being paid more by the government. The counter to this is that companies should pay more. Undoubtedly some could afford to do this, but others... the mom & pop outfits... may not be able to.

if a company is unable to pay people a wage with which they are able to live comfortably the company should not exist

Re: Universal basic income to be tested in Wales

#66

Post by mytailorisrich »

Drakim wrote: post #12
mc32 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> Look at the difficulty the service industry has now hiring people It's easy to hire people, you just have to offer better wages. The issue is that they can't find anybody willing to work for the wage they are offering, which is very different from not being able to find people to hire. > it’s not like they are using this time to pursue productive hobbies Any studies on this?

> It's easy to hire people, you just have to offer better wages.

There is nothing easy in just offering better wages, not least in industries where the bulk of the costs are wages and where productivity is often low.

Re: Universal basic income to be tested in Wales

#67

Post by the_lonely_road »

ghaff wrote: post #41
XorNot wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This has always been my problem. If we're going to test UBI, then we really need to run a test over a reasonable time-frame (20 years) or so and commit into it. So we move some people off the existing schemes we have, onto UBI and let that study run. I suspect the ideal candidate group would be older, poorer people (say, in there 40s) who we would otherwise expect to coast onto a pension later. It timeframes it nicel…

>ideal candidate group would be older, poorer people (say, in there 40s) Perhaps. That helps determine if older people who don't make a lot of money anyway will just decide to stop working. However, perhaps the bigger question is if it's offered to younger people, will a lot of them simply never get a job after school and, by the time they realize they need more than UBI, it's too late.

This website is filled with 30 and 40 year olds who rerolled the life dice into successful tech careers so it’s not too late.

Obviously a large part of that is the boom in tech so I don’t know how reasonably those people could have become doctors or air traffic controllers with their famously long start up time and forced retirement ages respectively.

The more interesting cohort for me would be 25-35 year olds (with special emphasis on females) wondering if it would be enough to convince large swathes of new parents not in professional track careers to exit the workforce and care for their own children instead of using daycare. This would be a real net positive for society if it occurred in my opinion.

Re: Universal basic income to be tested in Wales

#68

Post by cm2187 »

janandonly wrote: post #6

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…

I’d argue what is happening in the US is already a country wide test. People are taking the benefits rather than going to work for marginally more. It is not a good outcome for society. And high benefits countries like France know that very well. Lots of harder job openings there are never filled even though the country has a permanent large unemployment. I like the idea of UBI on paper but I feel it is counterproductive in practice.

Re: Universal basic income to be tested in Wales

#69

Post by miltondts »

sokoloff wrote: post #37
bjackman wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Part of the reason for this lack of interest in the actual outcome is that state benefits are one of the main battlegrounds in the UK's culture war. A lot of the Tories' base comes from the ideological position that poorer people don't deserve to receive aid at the expense (via taxes) of richer people. Whether or not UBI achieves any of its stated aims is totally irrelevant once you see things that way. All the argum…

I have significant sympathy for that base’s point of view. It’s one thing to say that we must provide a social safety net for the most vulnerable, whether temporarily or permanently so. It’s quite another to say “work should be optional and the basics of life should be provided for all [via the work of others]”. I think you’ll find a few people who object to my 2nd paragraph, but extending the argument to the 3rd is…

What do we do when automation reaches most jobs?

Create artificial jobs to keep people busy?

Now that I think about it, that seems to be what we have been doing for some 30-40 years now.

By artificial jobs, I mean jobs that if they disappeared, life would go on pretty much the same. This was in fact quite visible during all the lock-downs. Many many people no longer worked and all the essential and many non-essential things where still produced.

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