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).

MyCat

I doubt it would be much fun scraping a living off of what is judged to be a 'mincome', the name implies it would be a minimum, so it would probably be enough to live in a tiny little flat, buy tesco market value and have not much left over, I would hardly call it daft to choose not to live like that.

I see no reason why the same people who to bother going into further or higher education so that they aren't stuck on minimum wage would have the same high expectations, while those who currently work for (near/)minimum wage would be happy to accept a rise in income, rather than a drop by quitting their jobs.

I think a lot of those children would not grow up in "poverty" if a lot more shitty parents and profligate bastard politicians wouldn't make them.

Of course, we all know people taking responsibility and pulling their weight rather than just endlessly gouging harder and deeper into what everyone else has, is both unattainable fantasy, and makes you practically Hitler.

Not that the tax man would let up on any of us in any case. :(

...always be poor (skint) no matter how much money they're given or earn. Others will try to manage the best they can. The difficulty comes when you have people who are struggling to pay for the basics and trying hard to manage and those who no matter what you give them seem to have nothing.

If you gave every baby a million pounds when they were born some would live on it comfortably. Others would have nothing left by the age of 18 and others would have tripled it!

We're not Scandinavia though are we.

Really, if humans really are so good at using their own money wisely without the state telling them what to spend it on, why impose taxes at all?

Just leave them to it, to make good and socially beneficial choices. I'm being daft of course but the logic seems similar to me.

Morris - the point is, the workers would get the same amount too & have the precise same rights.

Bear in mind, this amount would cover the basics of life, and presumably not much more.....a bit like benefits now. I think the vast majority of people would prefer to be working in order to have more than just a basic amount to live on.

Very, very few people on benefits want to stay on them.

This never happened in Soviet Russia, btw.

In principle, I think this is an excellent idea. I am clueless about the economy, though, so whether this would financially add up, I have no idea.

But I see no reason why we should support universal healthcare and education, but baulk at a universal right to basic living costs.

We don't have that now....benefits are a benefit, not a right.

Why impose taxes?

Because it's a hell of a lot easier than setting up a direct debit every month to pay the government, the police, the army, the judiciary......

"Because people are generally self interested."

Well, we could debate that, but lets not. Let's assume they are for the sake of argument.

The whole point of something like Mincome is that it benefits all of society. People who are self interested should welcome it, once they understand how it benefits them.

Poverty damages society (that's the one you and I live in). Would you not like to feel safer on the streets? To be at less of a risk of catching diseases?

Off the top of my head, let me give you a few ways other people's poverty has affected me (not meant to be an exhaustive list, just a few examples).

• I was burgled
• I was mugged
• I was pickpocketed
• I had to give my child a TB jab because I lived in London. TB is rising in London, studies show that's because of overcrowding due to poverty.
• I pay high premiums on household, phone and car insurance because of crime
• I pay council tax towards police who spend a huge amount of time dealing with the knock on effect of poverty
• there is a greater burden on the healthcare services I use due to poverty-related illness
• DS (probably) goes to school with children who witness more domestic violence and achieve less academically than would be the case if there was no poverty. This will affect their development and his too.
• my taxes are spent on petty bureaucracy to administer myriad benefits
• where I used to live (now-trendy Clapton) there were several desperate crack users on the streets begging for money. If there was no poverty, many of them would not have gone down that road and I would not feel so uneasy on the streets
• the riots happened in my neighbourhood (they might not have done if no poverty)

and so on ...

Can you not see it benefits you to live in a healthy society?

Completely agree. I've heard this before. Unfortunately it will never ever happen. The people with ALL the money need to keep things the way they are.

"The people with ALL the money need to keep things the way they are."

Well yes, that's the main problem! That and the fact that so many people have swallowed the lies that prop up our financial system, they can't see the wood for the trees and instead argue passionately against their own interests. IMHO.

I've always thought this was basically a good idea.

Getting the right level of income is tricky; enough to scrape a living, but no more to incentivize work.

Another problem is that rents will simply track the mincome level.
So basically you'd need some form of stepped rent tax to discourage high rents.

But I reckon it would work very well.

How would you encourage anyone to achieve anything? Train for years to become a barrister or a surgeon? We'd have no legal or health care system, amongst other things.

This isn't communism, where no matter how much you work or achieve your personal net result is the same as the person who does next to nothing.

I think this is where the confusion is.

White Dee, as a single parent says she gets about £200 a week in benefits.

Let's say I got the same, as my position is similar. That would cover my basic bills & food and not much else.

I couldn't run my car, go on holiday, buy new clothes, have evenings out etc......all the things that make my life nice and comfortable (and I am by no means rich).

Are we really saying that the entire nation would decide to lie in bed for the rest of their lives rather than go out and earn good money for the life they want? That we'd all be happy just to get the basics covered and bollocks to everything else?

I find that very hard to believe.

All the same incentives are there, it's just that everyone would have by right, a sum that guarantees a basic standard of living, above the poverty line.

This does away with the enormous costs of administering the welfare state & the benefits trap and associated stigma of claimants would be virtually non existent.

The only way to change this though would be through mass revolution. And that's just not going to happen. It's just not the British way. So - excellent idea but unfortunately complacency and inertia stands in your way!

Actually, rents wouldn't change much if at all, and the likely change would be slightly downward. There's a remarkably large amount of unused housing in this country. Most landlords larger than the one-or-two-house buy to let amateurs are pricing to break even at 85% occupancy. If everyone can afford a tenancy, it become a lot easier to afford lower rents because you can stay closer to 100% occupancy.

And we already have a fairly impressive minimum income in this country: the total cash cost of running the place, annually, works out at about eleven and a half grand per head per annum. Spreading the cash portion of that out as a guaranteed income for everyone from birth to burial wouldn't add much if anything to the overall cost. And, as it dumps cash into the hands of people with the highest marginal propensity to consume, it immediately generates a shitload of economic activity. Recessions become very nearly impossible (they're caused by contractions in the money supply).

The reform it really needs to make it work is tighter controls on fractional reserve lending by the banks, as that makes money supply a lot harder to control. Of course, less would be needed as there'd be a much lower demand for credit.

Didn't the Green party have this as part of their manifesto at one point?

I'd vote for it.

I think it's an excellent idea
Thank you for the article

"The only way to change this though would be through mass revolution." Or starting a new country maybe?

I'd be campaigning for this (along with the Yes vote) if I lived in Scotland

sunbathe that's interesting. I wonder if/why they dropped it, and if they maybe plan to reintroduce it as a policy at some point ...

Would make me seriously consider voting for them.

Add message | Report | Message poster HettiePetal Sat 01-Mar-14 01:52:03

But what you say makes no sense because let's say you get £200 to live on a week and so dose white d you may make the money cover most of your budget putting at the top of your list food, bills however white d may spend the £200 all on a night out so you can't gauntree basic standards of living

I wondered about this a lot when they talk of such things children going hungry my best friend is on income support has a teen and. A 6 year old she is a single parent and her children has never gone hungry never so why is it that other single parents with 1 child on the same money can't seem to feed there children .

We as a family live very well on 20k a year but many families in the would simply not be able to live on this because of so many factors.

There's a lot of solid thinking behind this. I think the real barrier to implementation in the UK would be housing costs. The same amount of cash will cover minimum basic food, transport, clothing and utilities (for a minimum sized flat) for everyone, and everyone has those costs.

But housing costs vary wildly. If you set the mincome at a level to cover the cost of a London flat rental for every person in the country, including all the people whose housing costs are actually tiny because already own their home or live in a very cheap area then the cost would be ruinous, some truly insane proportion of GDP. If you didn't set it at that level then the people who really needed to rent a London flat would have a mincome wholly inadequate to the task which defeats the object.....unless you topped up with Housing Benefit, which destroys one of the main advantages of the mincome.

Haven't read the link yet, but the idea as described is exactly what I've been thinking for years.

I haven't done calculations, but I believe it could be afforded with minimal net change to government tax receipts.

Let's say the income is £8000 a year. Anyone who currently gets more than that in benefits (including housing benefit) would be no better off, as there would be offsetting. Anyone who earns more than (does quick calculation in head) about £20,000 a year from working would be no better off, as the tax on the first £20,000 would increase to offset the £8000.

The minority of people who would be net beneficiaries would be a fairly small group. For example SAHPs in families not claiming benefits.

Another policy of mine is that benefits should be on a per-individual basis rather than per-household. This would remove the incentive the benefits system gives to the formation of single-adult households. This minimum income would move us toward that goal.

And what happens if this state money is issues and one spunks it on drugs or invests on a deal gone bad in the utopia do you get a stern talking to a more money or is that your lot.

I saw the figures on a thread on here, way back before the election where everyone was Lib Dem happy and the Lib Dems were querying something like this. It's something to do with the amount of tax that would be paid.

I learned about the idea of a Universal Benefit while doing a social policy degree and I thought it was fantastic then.

Unfortunately I don't think it will achieve widespread support because people (in general) don't like the idea of others getting money for nothing. I think more studies like the Canadian one are needed to persuade people :)