Let’s explore the concept of basic income: Please let me know what you think
Over the next few weeks I will explore the concept of “Basic Income”. I would be most grateful if you would share your comments, suggestions and concerns with me about this topic as we unpack what it all means in a series of upcoming posts. In this first post we simply provide a backgrounder.
1. What is “Basic Income”?
A basic income is a regular payment that the Government makes to individuals or families in its jurisdiction, which is not contingent on recipients fulfilling specific criteria (e.g. proving that they are active job seekers).
Basic income comes in two basic forms: means-tested and universal. In its means-tested form, a basic income is paid only to those whose income from other sources falls below a predetermined threshold, but is not contingent on recipients’ willingness to work. It is often referred to as “guaranteed minimum income”. In its universal form, a basic income is paid to all, irrespective of income from other sources. The unconditional basic income is often referred to as “universal basic income” or a “citizen’s’ wage”.
The idea of a basic income has become more popular recently, and has garnered support from across the political spectrum. In Canada, Ontario is planning a pilot next year, and Quebec, Alberta, and PEI have also raised the possibility of running pilots in the near future. Internationally, Finland and the Netherlands are both staging large-scale pilots in 2017.
2. Background
a. Poverty and Inequality in BC
The levels of poverty and inequality in BC are high relative to the national average. BC has higher than average rates of poverty, with poverty rates up to 16% and child poverty rates up to 20%, depending on the poverty measure used. BC also has one of the highest levels of inequality in Canada, estimated to be second only to Alberta.
For those needing support, our current system of social programs has a number of shortcomings. The siloed approach, with a myriad of different programs with specific eligibility criteria, allows people to slip through the cracks in the system and leaves many unsure which benefits they are eligible for. It also has a substantial administrative cost. There is significant stigma in collecting welfare today, and many argue that the invasiveness of the current approach, with its stringent conditionality and reporting requirements, strips recipients of privacy and dignity. Additionally, the current system may provide a disincentive for many to join the workforce, due to how quickly the benefits are reduced as any income is earned.
b. A Shifting Economy
Unprecedented technological advance, of rapidly increasing pace, is set to have a significantly disruptive effect on our economy. To now, we have seen deindustrialization and the closure of industries, together with a boom and bust economy in British Columbia that almost defines much of provincial economic history. With increasing automation, forecasts suggest the potential for the rapid elimination of jobs across a wide range of sectors. Automated voice recognition software is already replacing many call centre workers, car assembly plants use more robots than people, and driverless cars and trucks are already significantly impacting the taxi and trucking industries. The effects of automation are predicted to be most strongly felt in moderate and low-paying jobs: Barack Obama’s 2016 economic report predicted that jobs paying less than USD$20/hour face an 83% likelihood of being automated, while jobs paying between $20 and $40/hour face a 33% chance. In the UK, one third of retail jobs are forecasted to be replaced by 2025. The effects of automation are predicted to spread to higher paying professional sectors as well, particularly the medical and legal professions. Technological advance has been attributed as a cause of increasing inequality by a number of economists because of automation’s effects on jobs and technology’s role in further concentrating the accumulation of wealth in the hands of top earners.
We are also heading toward what is commonly termed the ‘gig’ economy. We are shifting away from the 20th century model of permanent full-time work with benefits toward precarious contract-based work, which is spreading at an increasing rate to workers at all levels of education, trade, skill and profession. Contract-based employment means employers, with an expanding labour pool, can negotiate pay, usually with few or no benefits, outside of union negotiated packages. Examples today include Uber drivers, health care assistants, and sessional lecturers at postsecondary institutions.
3. Potential Effects of a Basic Income: Opportunities and Challenges
Perhaps the most transformational promise of a basic income is its potential to raise recipients out of poverty. Living in poverty takes a significant toll, and the elevated levels of stress that it brings are associated with higher levels of alcohol and drug abuse, domestic abuse, and mental health problems. Those living in poverty are more likely to have inadequate nutrition, use tobacco, be overweight or obese, and be physically inactive. The adverse effects of growing up in poverty on a child’s ability to be successful in school and integrate into the workforce contribute to generational poverty.
The moral case for tackling poverty is self-evident: doing so would have a life-changing effect on the lives of those currently living in poverty and dealing with the problems it brings on a daily basis. The financial cost is also significant: the adverse outcomes of poverty lead to increased use of public health care, more hospitalizations, and lost economic activity, among other effects.
A pilot project undertaken in Manitoba in the 1970s suggests that a basic income policy can have significant impacts on the healthcare system: providing a basic income to residents of Dauphin, Manitoba for 3 years reduced hospital visits by 8.5%. The decrease in hospital visits was attributed to lower levels of stress in low income families, which resulted in lower rates of alcohol and drug use, lower levels of domestic abuse, fewer car accidents, and lower levels of hospitalization for mental health issues.
A basic income could also provide a means to respond proactively to the changes we are just beginning to see in the labour market. As the effects of automation are realized, providing a basic income would enable those affected to retrain for new professions, attend or return to University or College, take entrepreneurial risks, contribute to their communities or other causes through volunteering and civic engagement, and invest time in their families.
A challenge in considering a basic income scheme is predicting its effects on the labour market, specifically the extent to which it might provide a disincentive to work comparable to or stronger than the disincentive often associated with our current social assistance programs. The Dauphin, Manitoba pilot study provides some initial information on this question: it was found that the negative effect on people’s willingness to work was minimal for the general population, but more pronounced for mothers with young children, and teenagers aged 16-18 who completed high school instead of leaving to join the workforce.
A recent report by the Vancouver Foundation advocates paying all youth ages 18-24 transitioning out of foster care a “basic support fund” of between $15,000-$20,000. Doing so, they estimate, would cost $57 million per year, whereas the cost of the status quo is between $222-$268 million per year, due to the range of adverse outcomes that affect youth in transition, including intergenerational poverty, criminal activity, substance abuse, lost educational opportunities, and homelessness. Thus they estimate that establishing a basic support fund for youth in transition would result in savings to the Provincial Government of $165-$201 million per year.
The cost of a basic income program is difficult to predict, and estimates range widely according to assumptions made about the characteristics of the program and its social and economic effects. In costing a basic income it is important not to ignore the cost of the status quo: the direct costs of unemployment, poverty, and homelessness as well as the costs of managing the adverse effects. Nonetheless, the cost of a basic income program to BC is potentially significant, and costs associated with different implementation options must be fully worked out and tested.
4. So what are your thoughts?
While I recognize that I’ve only provided cursory information to initiate this conversation, I would like to hear your thoughts on the idea of a basic income. Do you think a basic income policy holds promise as a potential way forward in BC, allowing us to tackle poverty effectively and prepare for a future in which the nature of work is vastly different from what we have known in the past? What are your concerns about the policy? How would you like to see it implemented? Thank you in advance for your comments.
73 Comments
I personally want to see the Annual Exception not to exist with Disability PWD benefits if People have a Self Employment Business. They should have the incentive to go beyond someone who is working for a Employer. I would like to see $25,000 allowable a year to someone who owns a Internet Shop, retail store and Ect to Invest in their Business. thanks
A basic income makes sense for many reasons including giving people enough security that they can more effectively engage in society as caring citizens. We also need to work to ensure there are good rental options and good food available to all. Paying for it might include taxing things that aren’t great, including air travel & other fossil fuel use, unhealthy food, exporting raw resources… Also finding less expensive ways to meet needs in healthcare, education…
Yank author here, so I can only speak to US implementation.
A UBI should be combined with a true flat tax on the federal level. The UBI should be fixed at the poverty line, for adult citizens only. States and charities would be free to add as they wish.
This combination would be highly progressive. Effective tax rates would follow a smooth curve from infinite negativity toward the flat rate, even though all earned income [not including the UBI] would be taxed at the same rate Since businesses would withhold accurate tax amounts, they could eliminate all employee tax filing.
To pay for this program, all safety-net programs would be reduced dollar for dollar, with no effective change for those receiving support. The flat tax will eliminate all tax deductions. In the US, these “tax expenditures” amount to about $1.2 trillion, most of which go to the top 30% in income, who itemize their deductions. Instead that money would be distributed evenly to all income earners and those not taking advantage of safety-net support. The result would be that every citizen would face the same tax, $X annually (distributed monthly) and Y% tax on all earned income.
Non-adult citizens and legal immigrants would receive tax rebates up to the UBI limit, based on taxes paid. Citizens would receive additional child UBI payments for each child below 21.
Citizens would be forced to become financially responsible for their actions. Someone convicted of robbing a liquor store for $500 would have to pay for legal defense, court, and incarceration costs along with restitution for the victim, out of future UBI payments.
The entire welfare bureaucracy can be scrapped by the federal government. Disincentives would disappear. Dependency would give way to personal initiative.
For any number of reasons, including those of other commentators before me, a basic income that allows citizens to live above the poverty line, has become a must in our society. In the absence of a basic income, poverty and resultant misery, depression, suicide, and violence is practically guaranteed to increase. One aspect of poverty that I have yet to see mentioned is the decision by Canadian-born women in their 20s and 30s not to have children or to marry because of their struggle to survive. Indeed, having pets, children, and owning a home in Canada is rapidly becoming a privilege limited to the upper classes and the rich. According to the Canadian Real Estate Association, within short span of less than 20 years, the only people who will own a house will be those who inherit one and can afford to maintain it. When I saw the Head of the Association interviewed on CBC, I was aghast. For as long as I can recall, property ownership is what made the difference between poverty and wealth and job creation. The last time I studied the subject, it still applied in the so-called third world, but perhaps it no longer applies as much in the first world. What kind of society will Canada become? One in which the most of the people are living much as the populations of Peru or some other country where the few enjoy life behind barbed wire walls while the majority subsist in survival mode? It’s time for Canada to act against the rising tide of impoverishment at home. As I put it to Justin Trudeau, “Do we not take care of our own?”
I support the concept of Guaranteed Basic Income as a solution to our failing social conscience and failing social-safety-nets in Canada.
First of all, from the stand-point of life-recovery, for those who are living with disability (both physical and due to mental health and addictions issues) the idea of Guaranteed Basic Income is a no-brainer.
From the perspective of considering that at least 60% of all mental health disability is due to issues of psychological trauma, trauma-informed care practice supports the allowance of a basic income to this group of currently marginalized citizens. To recover, and to have our best shot at recovery from trauma, we need to accept reality: Trauma delivered via psychological means, damages the internal functioning of the human brain, which is a situation that is magnified when anyone is under the chronic stress of needing to ensure survival needs are met, which impedes recovery to the point of societal sabotage. This is basic science, from the realms of Introductory Psychology.
Abraham Maslow (1943) stated that people are motivated to achieve certain needs, and that some needs take precedence over others. Our most basic need is for physical survival, and this will be the first thing that motivates our behaviour. Once that level is fulfilled the next level up is what motivates us, and so on.
With our most basic needs being survival needs, provision of financial allowance to support physiological survival (Food, Water, Clothing, and Shelter) frees the traumatized human mind to address our upper-level needs with more likelihood of success in our recovery journey.
http://www.simplypsychology.org/maslow.html
Secondly, again through the lens of psychological trauma in Canadian Citizens, best-practice in trauma-treatment comes to us from the work of Judith Herman who proposed a “Tri-phasic Model” for treatment of trauma:
“Judith Herman is a psychiatrist in the Boston area who has written extensive about traumatic response and therapy. She recommended an approach to trauma recovery that includes three stages. The Traumatology Institute (Ontario) most recommends this approach, as seen in the book Trauma Practice: Tools for Stabilization & Recovery (Baranowsky, Gentry & Schultz, 2010, 2nd Ed.)”
“Using a comprehensive three phase approach, the client is:
1). Given a sense of EMOTIONAL AND PHYSIOLOGICAL STABILIZATION prior to moving into;
2). Remembrance and Mourning, which we will now refer to as Trauma Memory Processing, and then;
3). Reconnection with communities and with meaningful activities and behaviors.
http://www.traumaline1.com/node/108
A Guaranteed, Basic Income, provided to persons living with mental health challenges, assuming that society has structured quality, trauma-informed treatments in community, takes care of the first levels of both our identified, universal, fundamental human needs, while also providing safety and stabilization with provision of Food, Water, Clothes, and Shelter.
Housing-First Strategies are built on these foundational principles as well. When we focus on issues of mental health, addictions, and resulting homelessness with provision of Housing First, we relieve stress in individuals so cared-for, allowing for the processes in the brain necessary to be able to focus on recovery from life to open-up.
It’s now a proven fact that when the human brain is under chronic-stress, let alone a traumatized brain under such stress, the higher-order brain-functions shut down.
In short, it’s biologically impossible to think clearly when our survival brain (the left-behind reptilian-brain) is shut down, which is the case in humans traumatized or who are living under the perceived threats that chronic-stress can impose.
Finally, support for a Guaranteed, Basic Income, finds support from those who study and recommend development of public-policy based-upon the Social Determinants of Health in Canada.
Our social structures and economic systems include the social environment, physical environment, health services, and structural and societal factors. Social determinants of health are shaped by the distribution of money, power, and resources throughout local communities, nations, and the world.
We currently measure societal success through economics and celebration of GDP. Social Determinants of Health, with key public policy initiative designed to support marginalized citizens from the foundation of these principles, supports the granting of an allowance that is the source of a Basic, Consistent, and Guaranteed Income for marginalized citizens.
We’ve been expecting a top-down trickle of prosperity from the wealthy to the poor. What we’re seeing under current economic models is frankly the opposite. We’ve growing inequality in Canada, with marginalized persons not even today granted an income to support basic needs. These groups in the population live well-below the established standard of living in Canada, and are in many cases granted currently an income that is half-that of determined levels of poverty in the country.
Key Social Determinants of Health are the following:
Income and Social Status
Social Support Networks
Education and Literacy
Employment/Working Conditions
Social Environments
Physical Environments
Personal Health Practices and Coping Skills
Healthy Child Development
Biology and Genetic Endowment
Health Services
Gender
Culture
Improving lives with the issue of a Guaranteed Basic Income, elevates the top-two determinants of health, and doing so, with clearly defined poverty-reduction and economic-inclusion initiatives drafted and implemented in public-policy, will improve health-outcomes over time for citizens, which in the long-run, saves us (the taxpayer) money.
From the stand-point of mental health, and serving the mental health affected Canadian Population currently marginalized, it is my sincere, studied opinion that a guaranteed income, along with development of quality, trauma-informed care and practices in community for provision of treatments to currently disabled persons in society, will frankly turn things completely around over time.
“We can’t solve (social) problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.” – Albert Einstein
Thank you for the opportunity to provide input. If I can be of any use, please contact me: Darren Gregory via the email address provided.
Thank you for your service to British Columbians.
Cheers.
There is an error in one of my paragraphs:
In short, it’s biologically impossible to think clearly when our survival brain is most active (the left-behind reptilian-brain) while the ‘thinking brain’ is shut down, which is the case in humans traumatized or who are living under the perceived threats that chronic-stress can impose.
More on Social Determinants of Health:
http://www.phac-aspc.gc.ca/ph-sp/determinants/index-eng.php
I am a huge advocate of this, not only to end the cycle of poverty, but it makes sense financially as well. Please do your best to get this implemented ASAP
I agree, lets move forward with this.
Only want to say that, in terms of budgeting one’s income, I think “entertainment” or “fun” money needs to be figured in, not only basic bills.
With technology advancing and jobs becoming more scarce, this is an idea that sort of has to come about. Remember the 50’s jargon about all the free time and prosperity we were all going to enjoy. It could have happened if our overlords had not become so inordinately greedy. UBI cannot come out of the pockets of the working class, however, but needs to be part of a redistribution of wealth from the 1%.
Count me as in favour.
Key points:
1. More rational distribution of the population: A guaranteed basic income will support smaller communities in BC where it is currently cheaper to live but there are no jobs. This will add a bit of balance to our current supply/demand for land in urban centres and potentially speed the development to critical mass of smaller urban centres.
2. This would also provide a hedge against automation, as you say.
3. Social Benefits: As we redefine work in the context of automation, a basic income gives rise to a new (or perhaps just expanded) category of labour: unemployed contributors to society. While difficult to think of a way that it would be efficient and would measure the impact, I wonder if there is an opportunity to encourage volunteerism and community participation through those receiving the basic income by having a bonus system – if you build the community, you get a different tier on the basic income scale.
4. Entrepreneurship benefit: it would be interesting to see if basic income increases entrepreneurship as the cost-benefit equation shifts in favour of entrepreneurship because the cost side of the equation is lower to taking a risk on a business given your basic needs will always be met.
Challenges:
-The main challenge is that this re-defines what the tax structure would look like. Those at the top will not give away their gains easily, especially corporations that are mobile. This policy seems to be a better national policy than a provincial policy in that context (it’s easier to move a business to Alberta than it is to the US).
-Tax evasion and fraud – depending on the flavour of basic income chosen, I wonder if we are likely to see a new industry in exploiting this. We already have too many investor-immigrants and others gaming the system by receiving their social benefits in Canada but making their money overseas. The richer our social benefits the greater the problem this poses, unless we can redesign the tax system simultaneously to reduce legal avoidance as well as evasion.
A basic income is an excellent idea. If everyone had a basic income to “pump” into the economy, it would prevent depressions and recessions.
I wish you were my MLA! Universal Basic Income is an idea well past due. It will allow people to focus on growth rather than survival. It can provide all the amenities for life (food, shelter, clothing) while maintaining the dream of self-betterment.
It’s a wonderful first step!
I support the idea of universal basic income. The minimum wage would also have to be addressed in conjunction with UBI, raising it to make it livable.
One of the benefits of a UBI would be the elimination of need for a minimum wage. With basic needs covered, no one would feel forced to take a job or an internship that did not provide opportunity for future growth. A minimum wage eliminates low paying voluntary contracts, even when both parties are freely negotiating in their own best interest.
I have lots of thoughts to share. First I believe that after all these years of technological advance and being told what is going on is somehow good for us the disparity remains and grows. A very large portion of those who live in poverty are children in Canada let alone from lack of resolve of this issue world wide. We are asked to embrace wold trade etc but I worry that the focus is currently just a different economic revolution that is set to maintain the disparity with a certain number of philanthropists seeing the extent to which they can earn money supporting the poor.. i.e. having used/abused/consumed and saturated first world markets, lets “help” third or “growing” countries to replicate the system that basically caused disparity and endless world economic growth that is more like an earth cancer than an earth care. On a micro level one can see that providing a living wage to all people would have the immediate impact of reducing extreme negative consequences of a current faulty system. We say that technology is, must and will take over human work..not only all the entry jobs for young people who are most unemployed, and not just the manufacturers whose jobs are being done by robots, and not even the jobs of information holders.. indeed technology is pushing toward less work and different work but to whose benefit. At a macro level, food and water, seeds and fertilizers claimed to better feed the world are a huge potential business with patented GMO and chemical/pharma rubbing their hands together, the privatization of food, air, land and water and the continuity of pollution and destruction. I listen to myself and think this is off the wall but listening to Bill Gates deciding that providing more technology not only of this but medical/ contraceptive/ vaccines/ phones and technology to train and engage small communities to buy into technology (sort of like weaning them in) as a solution to the disparity unfathomable disparity making people just another kind of source of income no different than gold. The larges corporations want people to believe and perceive they are being considered in order not to face the growing disbelief in giving up our individual power to politicians who cannot be trusted and no longer can convince us they are acting in our best interest. Sadly some, I will not mention, so blatantly liars, and an entire world campaign under OECD to reeducate children to be better next generation of technology and digital world economic growth that perpetuates the existing disparity into the new ball park. OECD will tell us they can no longer pay lip service to inequity and world wide as we see the 99% calling out in awareness, any number of strategic plans to address gender, economic disparity, energy conflict/war with different sources and no longer lip service to earth climate change, though we don’t see the serious commitment where profit making tempers the progress to the point that some say the world has already passed the tipping point of any viable return. So in thinking about local living wage for all at a minimum I have no doubt it would be a relief for many people who are smart, educated, motivated and who cannot find work. Perhaps it would undo some of the gender equity of single mom parents and it would increase livability for those who have no pension, who have mental health issues un supported or treated and those who are disabled and sick and maybe it would open the door for those folks who work very hard at poverty, because it takes a lot of work to live on less the enough… etc. I believe that the fantasy around our judgments of poverty and not wanting to work is a fallacy that stems in god/devil kind of power and control manipulation that simply distracts us from the fact that economics is all about money and not about quality of human life. So I would love to see for the relief not only of the extremely poor in the world.. but for all the world, not just BC to ensure that people have food, clothing, shelter, care and focus on clean food, air and land, ban the poisons causing us havoc and hit hard against a money making economic game that enslaves people and impose a redistribution that is based on quality of life and not a few rich owning everything and everyone else pretty much living in poverty and a few bobbing their heads above water (middle class) Go with the fair living payment to all and revamp this system that continues to pollute, exploit, create poverty, disparity and earth death. My question is do we want or need this digital age? Are we simply complying with it, bounced around like a plastic bottle in the ocean going with the flow? Yes to wages for all, for many have no jobs due to changes that reap huge profit for a few at the expense of so many. I feel like the OECD has an elaborate advertising campaign about how to have us perceive (to feel good about or comply without evident force or to persuade) that something is different but in reality it is a change an economic evolution to digital and technological world that keeps the most harmful dynamic in tact for those who have the greatest power. So yes, yes living wages for all.. but as someone noted inflation is taking off.. so will that wage simply increase the perception of wealth..will it not take a much bigger truly “transforming” almost revolutionary change to the keep us just from being soothed subsistence servants, in a world wide driven establishment that softens the most obvious harm, rather than experiencing true equity?
great idea! But, you better get a housing plan first because there will be a flood of “easterners” coming over the mountains.
There your platform Mr. Weaver, jobs building “green” housing and free money.
Let me put it this way. In 1971 the minimum wage was 1.65 an hour, a one bdrm apartment, west of main, was no more than 125 a month, a modest property to purchase in Kits was around 20G, a bottle of Rye was 5 bucks, a gallon of gas was 50 cents and guess what ? Unless we were rabid junkies we all got by. Compare that today, where 50% of all adult children still have to live with their parents. This is progress.. Where do you people come from. Mongolia ????
YES to UBI ……. but ONLY after the Minimum Wage is also a Living Wage. Otherwise it is just MORE of taxpayers subsidizing Corporations !
Thanks for posting Andrew, I remember studying universal basic income 6 years ago while attending a political science lecture in Ljubljana Slovenia. At the time I felt the idea would easily be brushed off as too “socialist” by the Canadian public, and opposition would point to the lack of incentive to work. From what I understand, there are few examples of places it has been implemented (Manitoba and the Alaska permanent fund come to mind) making the concept difficult to assess, however this topic appears to show up more on my news feed and I’d love to hear more politicians talk about automation and what it means for for all professions.
Freakanomics has a great podcast which dedicates an entire episode to this. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1wIPZNC6n8s
Link no longer functions.
The UBI was trialed in Dauphin, Manitoba years ago, proved to be a success on almost every level and was consequently shelved and ignored. Perhaps the timing was wrong – it was long before technology became the threat to employment that it is today. Now we are facing the certainty that jobs that sustain the working and middle class lifestyle will cease to exist within our lifetime. Whole categories of work have already disappeared and there is nothing to replace them. The future is truly frightening, the certainty of work that propelled us into a period of full employment and good wages after WW2 is gone, never to return. The combination of technological advances and global corpratism devoid of social responsibility is taking us down a road through uncharted territory.
We can eitheer ignore what lies ahead and deal with the chaos that will result or we can take measures such as the UBI that will not only improve the quality of life in the present but help to reassure us as we proceed into an unprecedented era of forced leisdure rather than forced labour.
In the short term it is absolutely imperative that a program is in place asap to help transition foster children who age out into poverty while they are still children. This should not be trialed or even considered as part of a UBI experiment. It is an urgent need to right a grievous wrong by a government that in it’s role as parent to the foster children of this province, is guilty of gross parental negligence. None of us would dream of throwing our children out on the street with a garbage back of their possessions and no means of support when they graduate from high school and yet that is what the Government deems appropriate. A living income coupled with job training or for those who have the grades, higher education, is the very least that should be available to children who through no fault of their own are dealt a rotten hand, often from birth.
I think it is an idea that should have been implemented years ago. Between the Universal Basic Income and the Legalization of Marijuana we might still be dollars ahead without looking at the other costs. It is an idea whose time has come.
I would like to see an economic analysis of the cost SAVINGS for this proposal. I suspect that by the time you get rid of all the various departments, programs, enforcement officers, etc. that we now use to ‘administer’ all the safety net programs (like welfare, EI, CPP, etc.), just providing a simple, basic income will save more money than it will cost.
This is an idea that is ripe, in an age where technology is displacing workers, and disruption is the new normal, and the benefits are primarily flowing to the top, we need a simple system to ensure every Canadian can meet their basic needs. We can end poverty and the stigma that goes with it in this country and set an example for the world. Let’s do this thing!
Our current system handicaps those with the lowest incomes in society resulting in higher costs for social services, poorer performance and outcomes of the youth in these low income situations, and a continuing burden on the taxpayers with no positive outcomes. There are more than one model of a basic income program turning these outcomes around, and given the drive by industry to reduce the workforce and to grow profits, a basic income makes more and more sense. Anything else is basically immoral, ineffective, and prolongs the societal inequality that is continuing to grow. I do not feel kindly towards those who consider a basic income program merely welfare…which as has been shown clearly, only costs society more overall.
Yes, we should try this. At best, it may alleviate poverty and allow people to live more fully and find right livelihoods. At worst, it won’t.
I’ve been promoting the idea of a Guaranteed income for decades.
It’s a NO-BRAINER solution to our system of illegal land ownership, and our corrupt monetary system where the banks charge us interest just to earn money.
Most people suggest an amount of money that is too small, with the ridiculous reason, so as to keep an incentive to work.
Stupidest reason ever, as we don’t need everyone working. That’s why we have machines.
Many jobs are taken, no matter how destructive to our environment or people, just so as to pay the rent.
It’s time to rid ourselves of the slave system we have, and to free people to the opportunity to share their gifts, talents and creativity with the world.
Many minds are too closed to see the Beauty and Potential in all people, and instead are brainwashed to believe that most people are useless unless forced to action.
Way past the time to Wake up, and SHARE the resources of this planet, so that all Beings have food and shelter, and the means to share their gifts and dreams.
Sincerely,
Treok Walker
bad enough now that we are supplying public money to losers to support the drug trafficers . NOT ONE PERSON should recieve tax dollars in any form without submitting to a drug test for illegal substances. use of illegal drugs is a conscious decision which should not be supported in any way
I believe a basic income is going to be inevitable in the near future. As more and more jobs become redundant due to robotics and mechanization the EI program will become unsustainable. It is also my belief the only fair way to finance such a program is for governments to tax any robotics that make a paying job become redundant. If a worker earns wages from a job and pays income tax on the wages earned at that job it makes sense to me that whoever owns the robot/machine that made that job redundant should be making up the lost tax revenue to the respective government. There are also a great many social benefits to a basic income scheme, for one thing all current social programs such as welfare, EI and OES pensions could all be rolled into one program with much lower administration costs. It would have to start out as a means tested program but I believe it would eventually have to become universal.