to think we could solve poverty by simply giving everyone money?

[aufaniae]

This article makes a compelling argument for giving everyone a "mincome".

Why we should give free money to everyone

The basic idea is that poverty costs society money, and that it's cheaper, and of great benefit to society if everyone has a basic income, no questions asked - so no one ever drops below the poverty line. The intro says.

"We tend to think that simply giving people money makes them lazy. Yet a wealth of scientific research proves the contrary: free money helps. It is time for a radical reform of the welfare state."

They actually did a study in Canada where a whole town was on a mincome for some years, and it seems it was a great success.

I must say I find the idea compelling. What do you think?

(Please have a look at the article before responding if you can, there's some surprising and thought provoking stuff there).

What does that mean? I dont know that reference.

Monty Python sketch Billy where the titular 4 men, retired, prosperous, compete with increasingly ludicrous stories about their poverty-stricken youth.

Ah! Thank you whowas

Yes suzanne you may have a point there.

I'm still not convinced that anyone in the UK lives in absolute poverty. Therefore the only difference would be we all get a state hand-out and taxes increase to leave us financially the same. The marginal rate of tax would increase to above 50%, thus introducing a similar disincentive to work as there is now with benefits tapering off. There would also have to be a higher marginal tax rate for the lower paid than the rich.

Sorry - conclusion is how does this benefit anybody?

There could be a lot of side effects to something like this. I've just noticed that sharing a house wouldn't drop your income so there'd be some incentive there to make use of empty rooms.

On the other hand if you leave an abusive partner you still have your own income from day 1 so you don't have to be trapped by money alone.

As for poverty bringing out the best in people etc I don't think that's true any more than when they used to say 'money can't buy happiness'.

A richer person isn't necessarily happy, but being poor grinds you down. Counting every penny to make it last, choosing between heating or better food. The despair when something breaks and you know you just don't have the money to replace it, on and on, day after day. We should be looking to wipe that out just as we aim to eradicate diseases.

I'm interested to hear what these jobs are that are made up, just to get people to spend their lives working. I know of no such job.

The UK and world is full of them, MorrisZapp!!

<a class="break-all" href="https://www.google.co.uk/url?q=www.theguardian.com/society/2013/sep/18/nhs-records-system-10bn&sa=U&ei=KzYTU_zFO4fxhQeL3IGADg&ved=0CCQQFjAB&sig2=PNFAbLliHPd4NNHFYC_NMA&usg=AFQjCNFYRvz23kilUmrQLu4dpNXzfAf29g" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Vast NHS software projects wasting 10 billion for nothing, that's 500,000 person years of "work".

People who clean our stairs weekly. Every month would do find and at half the rate they charge, ie 8x less expenditure.

Security guards at supermarkets. We just need a society where people don't steal. Or just shoot identify and ban people who nick stuff.

Police similarly.

A great read for planned obsolescence in general: The Waste Makers

Computers and software are deliberately built and marketed to a life cycle.
Most PCs from the mid 90s suffice for browsing and word processing; but no we have to have the latest tablet.

If everyone used linux, say, where would all the billions spent on Microsoft go ?

Similarly cars;
Ever wondered why you keep seeing those old land rovers ?
It's because they're made of a sensible non-corroding material: aluminium.
Car industry wouldn't want their cars lasting forever, so they generally don't use aluminium.

6 years ago my North Face shoes, lasted 2 years. The current ones last 9 months.
They are virtually identical, just poorer quality. The person making them isn't working any less hard
So twice as many people needed to produce a given number of shoe-years.

Umbrellas [a pet peeve]: I had an umbrella I bought in China (just down the road from Kunming train station as it happens ) for the equivalent of 75p.

It lasted 10 years.

I've bought 10 umbrellas since averaging 3-4 months and 10.
Do the maths; 300 for 10 years of umbrella use or 75p ?
A factor of 500.
[I have now found a 15 brolly which lasts 3-4 years. Yay]
But that's a fuck of a lot of people employed producing crap umbrellas, when they could just as easily produce umbrellas to the recipe of my beloved Kunming rain-machine.

Yes those jobs "are made up", yes "just to get people to spend their lives working" producing obsolescent products.

There are many, many more, it is the lifeblood of capitalism.

caroldecker how much does running the benefits/pension system cost. As I said earlier it will be huge, but it will be even more than any official estimate will tell you because they won't include everything. As well as all the obvious costs consider that we have educated, skilled people constantly working on new benefit legislation and others running it. Their time, their skills, their offices full of assistants all wasted. Their education is wasted, their whole careers spent working out who gets what.

That could all be replaced with one automatic direct debit.

It's not the only point, but it's one of them.

Also WW2:

Half the workforce are at war, and a vast proportion of the remaining workforce spend all their time producing weapons with clearly no peaceful civilian use, leaving a virtual skeleton of the workforce to produce food and products, teach, administer, etc.

How can a nation do this if it needed all the workforce to do a 40 hour week just to "tick over" in peacetime ?

Doesn't add up.

Carol Decker, would you not say Mark Wood, who starved to death after ATOS cut his payments declaring him
"fit for work" was living in poverty?

There are lots of people living on similar sums because non-medical staff at ATOS have declared them fit for work in error, and without even consulting their GP.

IIRC 60% of appeals are overturned, for people deemed fit to work, and these are vulnerable people we're talking about. What about those who can't navigate the appeals process and have no one to speak up for them?

Unemployment was built into the old system. Absolute destitution is built into the new system. It's not that people are falling through the cracks, it's an inevitable outcome of the Tory's policies and will get a whole lot worse under Universal Credit.

The safety net has been taken away. Educate yousekf, please, this is happening in our country, now.

Thousands have already died after being declared "fit for work". Real, absolute poverty is alive and well in the UK.

Could you live on £40 a week? How about if you had complex physical and mental health problems?

Achyfox, quite.

Great points Achyfox!

The level of waste and inefficiency is quite mind boggling, all to keep us yoked into the capitalist/consumerist treadmill

There are some sad stories of individuals with complex issues, but any state system will fail them - there are no more suffering today than previously and to say so is disingenuous at best and lying at worst.
Whilst I want to avoid arguing about any individual tradegy to score points, Mark Wood was significantly underweight prior to having benefits cut as he was suffering from an eating disorder.

"there are no more suffering today than previously"

Where on earth do you get that from? Do you believe the government rhetoric that no one will be worse off under Universal Credit? It's spin.

They are pushing vulnerable people into destitution. Are you not aware of this?

I'll ask you again, could you live on £40 a week? How is that not poverty?

I also don't want to go over Mark Woods' death too much as there is also another thread on this, and it's desperately upsetting.

However, shifting blame from the govrrnment and ATOS by saying he already had issues is abhorrent IMO. of course he had issues, he had complex MH problems. In any civilised society, the safety net is meant to protect people like this. Thousands are having their payments cut, people ate dying, Mark Woods is not the first and he won't be the last, sadly.

If someone who's depressed commits suicide after having their money cut, would you say "oh well, they were depressed"? If vulnerable people are pushed into abject poverty, it's no surprise that those vulnerabilities, physical and mental health problems are exacerbated is it? That doesn't mean the government is less responsible, not at all IMO. People are dying as a result of their policies, right now, in this country. You can carry on telling yourself that we live in a civilised country and nothing has changed, but the person lying here is you; you are lying to yourself IMO.

Haven't read the thread yet, but I just read the whole article - fascinating! Thanks for sharing, aufaniae Definitely worth a pilot.

Accepting the idea that we should all have a basic living without having to work is quite a big jump, the phrase 'free money' sounds like an oxymoron to many people.

We are so used to thinking of money as something that has to be earned or deserved, the idea that everyone deserves a decent standard of living just because they exist can be hard to accept.

We no longer live in a subsistence economy where everyone has to pull their weight or be left to starve.

I'm not sure if such a radical idea can really take hold against the weight of pressure from those at the top who benefit from the existing set up.

So many of the existing structures of power would change, and people with power tend to hold onto it grimly.

Then again, you cant fool all of the people all of the time, idea's and belief systems can spread more rapidly these days.

money for everyone, Amazon reviews

No country or society seems to have come up with a system that worked for everyone. Money is just a token. It's worth nothing really. Being hard up isn't any fun. I've been hard up but not poverty stricken though it did seem like it at the time. Like car failing it's MOT being a major disaster and cause of stress.

I don't have the answers. I don't think anybody does. But our society has become consumer led. So people need/want more and more money. The real answer is to go back to a far more simpler way of living but that's never going to happen.

aufaniue where is your evidence that we are worse off than under a Labour administration?

AchyFox, those jobs are there to keep people spending. Not to keep people working.

You can't just dismiss jobs or projects that you disagree with as being made up. If supermarkets didn't need security guards for instance, they'd hardly employ them for fun. They're a company, not a public institution.

The poor are always with us, no matter how you did it I'd bet about 10 - 15 % of the population would still find a way to be destitute.

^ This ^

"The poor are always with us, no matter how you did it I'd bet about 10 - 15 % of the population would still find a way to be destitute."

I agree with this (except for the figures maybe) however i think there should always be conscious efforts to prevent and/or end it happening. I dont agree that saying there will always be poor people is a good enough reason not to try and help fill empty bellies and warm homes.