That a universal basic income looks like a pretty cool idea unites many of both left and right. There are always those who come up with reasons why it ain’t so, of course. The Adam Smith Institute has a handy guide to answering these nine most popular arguments against a UBI:
1. Such a system removes the incentive to work
2. People are more likely to find work meaningless when it is no longer their main source of income
3. Such a scheme would be too costly to be feasible
4. Giving everyone money would lead to excessive inflation
5. A basic income would worsen poverty and inequality
6. There are political implications – excessively high levels of UBI/NIT would be promised by politicians to garner support
7. Increased costs from higher levels of welfare tourism
8. Basic income makes people more reliant on the state
9. Introducing basic income could create a ‘slippery slope’
Those are just the questions of course, the answers are all here.
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I disagree, but never mind. As it is controversial, and as economists will support any daft theory just to have something to feel clever about, why don't we let someone else do it and see if it works. If it does not work, if it does not produce whatever the claimed result is supposed to be, let's admit it. Not carry on for 150 years saying it wasn't done properly in all the examples.
No, that wasn't a misread, the usually pro-liberty Adam Smith Institute is marshalling arguments in defense of having the government disburse money to people for doing nothing!
Emma Weber's paper is an exercise in sophistry, manufacturing arguments that creating a massive new entitlement can be done in such a way as to prevent unanticipated side-effects. Removing the incentive to work? Not "if a system...was carried out correctly." Sorry, if benefits are reduced as the individual works more, the effect is a higher marginal tax rate. Reduce the benefits gradually enough not to be a disincentive, and you have dealt in the well-to-do. Don't reduce the benefits at all and it's free money for everyone.
But Emma tells us that those poor people we are paying, we really didn't need their labor at all. And loot from the government will free them to improve their skills and rejoin the labor market at a much higher level? Only, they won't. The US "Great Society" has now had families living on "entitlements" across generations. They did not take the money and freedom from pressure and create a million new Microsofts; they just kept taking taxis to dine at the Seven-Eleven. Many exhibited the entitlement mentality and protested and Occupied that they weren't given even more. One of them blew up a bomb at the Boston Marathon.
Later on, it becomes clear that Emma is defending UBI as an alternative to the existing welfare system. But you don't solve the problems of socialism with complete socialism!
She and Tim and the rest of the Adam Smith Institute laudably argue that the individual is best able to decide the most appropriate use of resources. But this doesn't apply to stolen resources; there is no shortage or need to conserve. Massachusetts has been wrestling with documented cases of its stigma-free welfare-by-debit-card used for tattoos, lap dances, and restaurants in Puerto Rico — trying to write rules against this, although cardholders can simply go to the ATM for cash instead. The only way you can get more programs through some legislatures is with payment-in-kind rather than cash. Emma writes that there were cases in Kenya where gifts of cash were wisely spent. There are always a few, and welfare caseworkers learn and repeat these as proof that their careers, frittering stolen loot around, are valiant. Some recipients have pride, but enough welfare can kill this too.
By #6, Emma is hoping that the program be set at a revenue-neutral level (despite the obvious tendency toward mandate-creep, where US caseworkers are now coaching "clients" to exhibit mental instability). "Removing politics from the payments" will work as poorly as removing politics from the government grade schools. Emma writes that it is not even a problem if people immigrate to receive the Universal Income...because migration is healthy.
Trump has achieved 3 million fewer food-stamp recipients, though he has completed no action except frequently disparaging welfare recipients. A few years of portraying welfare dependency as positive could undo this. This was the essence of the Obama Economic Malaise.
That ASI can assign an intern to write a paper defending a given position, even putting more people on The Suck, doesn't mean you have to publish it at the end.
The kind of person who hangs around here will be familiar with this extract from the other RK:
In the Carboniferous Epoch we were promised abundance for all,
By robbing selected Peter to pay for collective Paul;
But, though we had plenty of money, there was nothing our money could buy,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "If you don't work you die."
I am a fan of both RKs but did not know this quote! The whole poem is at http://www.kiplingsociety.co.uk/poems_copybook.htm
The kind of person who hangs around here will be familiar with this extract from the other RK:
In the Carboniferous Epoch we were promised abundance for all,
By robbing selected Peter to pay for collective Paul;
But, though we had plenty of money, there was nothing our money could buy,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "If you don't work you die."
If I wanted to go to Dublin, I should not start from here.
In theory, I like the UBI but there is no believable version that does not subject a significant number of innocent children to unecessary poverty.
If I wanted to go to Dublin, I should not start from here.
In theory, I like the UBI but there is no believable version that does not subject a significant number of innocent children to unecessary poverty.
The government already gives people money for doing nothing, it's called the state pension. An no, you do *not* get the state pension because you've paid in. You get the state pension regardless of whether you have been rich enough to pay taxes in your previous life, and regardless of whether you've worked or not in your previous life. You get it in return for being alive and over a certain age.
The amount of (UK) state pension depends on how much you've paid in. The minimum is £126 a week, rising to £164 if you've paid NI contributions for 30 years (roughly speaking - this being gummint there are, of course, many, many complications).
Fascinating that an economic think tank can produce a report that ignores the nature of the society it's reporting on. Sure the rebuttals are valid. if you had an homogeneous society there was some sort of consensual agreement on how that society should function. However, the ASI ignores that there has been a concerted campaign by the governing classes to undermine that society. You're simply not going to get the citizen to cough up the taxes to fund a CBI for the large numbers in the country who aren't citizens of the same country, in any meaningful sense. You want to spark off a civil war, you've probably chosen the issue would ignite it.
Fascinating that an economic think tank can produce a report that ignores the nature of the society it's reporting on. Sure the rebuttals are valid. if you had an homogeneous society there was some sort of consensual agreement on how that society should function. However, the ASI ignores that there has been a concerted campaign by the governing classes to undermine that society. You're simply not going to get the citizen to cough up the taxes to fund a CBI for the large numbers in the country who aren't citizens of the same country, in any meaningful sense. You want to spark off a civil war, you've probably chosen the issue would ignite it.