Opinion of Universal Basic Income

[parochial boy]

I am yet to encounter a construction of UBI that does not either a) condemn some poor people to basically starve or b) bankrupts the budget in a way that is totally unsustainable to finance even with higher taxes. Most cases I've seen for it have seen confused to me.

From my understanding, it's contested, but there is no conclusive evidence that, when applied, UBI does lead to people choosing not to work. Some correlates have been noted with a reduction in number of hours worked, but largely among new mothers and teenagers; so you could argue that was a good thing

Also, the argument also posits that UBI would not disincentivise work as getting a job would not mean losing means tested benefits as happens in the traditional welfare system. Which could be an incentive for people to find jobs - they get more money.

[parochial boy]

From what I remember of the Swiss Basic Income referendum, although there wasn't any explicit level of pay out being put forward, the cost of paying every adult CHF 2500 ($2500) and every child CHF 625 ($625) a month would have come to about CHF 210 billion, or around 33% of GDP.

Now obviously this is at the generous end of the levels of UBI being put forward, and there are basically two ways of looking at it.

The first is the generous option, where you are effectively looking at replacing the classic welfare state with UBI, so a pay out cost that is at least partially funded by the reduction in pensions, unemployment benefits and the like, which, especially pensions can already cost 20-30% of GDP. Of course, a UBI would still involve tax hikes (not really a problem for those of us who generally think redistribution is a good idea), but in a lot of cases, the idea would be to increase taxes such that, for a good number of people, the UBI payment is effectively cancelled out by the increase in taxes.

With a less generous UBI payment, if you were keeping the traditional welfare state largely intact (perhaps replacing a portion of unemployment benefit with UBI payments), this still wouldn't "condemn" people to starve, and they would still have the incentive to return to work, as they wouldn't lose their full unemployment benefit, as is the case under a traditional mode.

[parochial boy]

Something proposed by Yanis Varoufakis is the idea of a "Universal Basic Dividend"; whereby, when companies publically list themselves, a portion of the share capital would be transferred into public ownership, and the dividends used to pay a universal income to everybody.

The theory is that, wealth is created collectively (and often directly through state subsidies, innovations and the like), and therefore a portion of the economy should be owned collectively and the resulting wealth divided between everyone.

It would also bridge the gap between automation and every body losing their jobs. People who currently stand to lose from automation would suddenly have something to gain from it, as higher corporate profits would be directly linked to the universal dividend.

Seems like a pretty good idea to me, although I await for someone to tell me why I'm an idiot and I don't understand.