Scrap Benefits and pay every adult, working, non working or retired, an unconditional basic income of £15,000 a year? Discuss

[CorruptBstard]

Hi

Ok Mumsnet, what do you think of this?

Pay every adult in the uk £15,000 a year, with no conditions attached, so that every adult is free to use their time to do stuff, just for the love of it.

This basic income would cover basic needs for food and shelter, if people wanted to earn more money they could go and work for someone else or start a business of their own

This would abolish poverty in one fell swoop.

Wheres the money coming from to pay for it?

well apart from scrapping all "state benefits", we could also scrap income tax and fund it all by taxing money every time its spent.

ie Government gives me £5. I pass that £5 round a group of 10 friends. By the time the £5 comes back to me, it has been "spent" 10 times. Creating a turnover of £50. If the government taxes that spending at 20%, it raises £10 in tax. Making a profit of £5.

Thoughts?

If you recieved £15,000 a year unconditionally, what would you do just for the love of it?

The 'squeezed middle' are not feeling squeezed because of the ever-diminishing crumbs thrown at the poor and unemployed in the form of welfare. They are feeling squeezed because they their wages have stagnated for three decades whilst the cost of living has steadily risen.

They are feeling squeezed because wealth has been siphoned off from the middle-classes and poor and up towards the top 5%; that's why we now have wealth inequality which is greater than it has been since the 1920s.

If the government really cared about 'fairness', it would have implemented the mansion tax. It can further help the poor and middle-classes by cutting VAT, raising the tax threshold, reduce transport costs by nationalising the railways, build houses and put in place rent controls, amongst other things.

A mansion tax penalises those who work hard and buy a house rather than pissing their innome up a wall. Wealth taxes never work and the result is there is less for the poor.

This government is aiming to cut the tax threshold so no one pays tax if they earn under £10,000 a year. They are also curbing rail fares and building houses. Rent controls mean no places to rent - I remember when the rent acts were in place and there was virtually no rented property.

johnnyvoid.wordpress.com/2012/10/09/george-osbornes-benefit-bullshitting-hides-his-true-agenda/

The lie that people are better off on benefits than in work exposed.

Xenia I can't work out if you're being deliberately offensive or if you have no common sense at all.

You post implies that all people need to do is work hard and they'll have a house, and that anyone who doesn't has made a choice to "piss their income up a wall".

Are you aware that that's offensive as well as grossly inaccurate?

Leithlurker, great link, thanks for that.

auf-

RE: Xenia, it's ideology. I don't think she cares whether it's offensive or not. I do believe she believes the garbage she's saying.

xenia-

A mansion tax penalises those who work hard and buy a house rather than pissing their innome up a wall.

What on earth are you talking about? Most people work hard and save but now can't even afford to get on the property ladder because houseprices are so high and wages are so low.

Wealth taxes never work and the result is there is less for the poor.

In the same way that an internal combustion engine will never work?

This government is aiming to cut the tax threshold so no one pays tax if they earn under £10,000 a year.

They need to raise it further. This is a Lib Dem idea, btw, not a Tory scum idea.

They are also curbing rail fares

No they're not. They're just limiting the rate of increase. They should nationalise the railroads. All essential public services should be publicly owned and run.

and building houses.

Yes, they are finally doing that - after two years of anti-Keynesian austerity measures and finally realise they have crippled the economy.

Rent controls mean no places to rent - I remember when the rent acts were in place and there was virtually no rented property.

Does not follow. Many countries use rent controls and don't have a problem of 'virtually no rented property'.

The Tory scum won't enact rent controls because a substantial minority of them - largely disproportionate to the population - are rentiers themselves.

Housing campaigners target Tory landlords

By Norma Cohen, Economics Correspondent

More than a quarter of Tory MPs are private landlords too self-interested in keeping house prices high to take steps that could help first-time buyers get a foot on the housing ladder, according to a group campaigning for affordable housing.

PricedOut, a group that has urged tougher tax treatment for buy-to-let landlords, reviewed public documents listing the financial interests of all MPs and found that 83 out of the Conservative party?s 305 elected representatives are making money from private tenants living in properties they own.

That makes Tory MPs more than twice as likely as Labour MPs to be profiting from rising house prices and rents, the group found. Only 12.5 per cent of Labour MPs owned rental property portfolios while 15 per cent of Liberal Democrat MPs did so.

Among Tory MPs, PricedOut has flagged up James Clappison as the prince of property, highlighting the 26 rental properties he owns across East Yorkshire.

?Not only do MPs enjoy their taxpayer-funded second homes, many of them also have a portfolio of rented houses, too,? said Katy John, spokeswoman for PricedOut.

?First-time buyers desperately need house prices to fall to more affordable levels, but landlord MPs at the very top of the property ladder have a vested interest to not let this happen,? Ms John said.

In particular, PricedOut is campaigning to end tax breaks under which private landlords can offset the cost of interest on the mortgage used to buy a rental property against the monthly takings from tenants.

Typically, buy-to-let landlords put smaller down payments on properties and are more likely to have interest-only mortgages, than those who buy homes to live in themselves.

That means that monthly mortgage interest payments will be bigger than for owner-occupiers with homes of a similar size, creating a larger shield against a tax liability on the collected rents.

www.ft.com/cms/s/0/ad1a739c-0f1c-11e2-9343-00144feabdc0.html

The left are rather rude, aren't they?

If I am trying to find common ground I would certainly argue interest rate interference by the state since 2001 is not letting free markets work and had interest rates been left to rise freely we might not have seen such high house price inflation. It is ludicrous that someone like me without any savings and £1m of divorce debt has "never had it so good" with tiny tiny interest rates and my neighbours who have worked very hard all their lives have no debt and live off interest on savings have suffered. I would argue that is caused by interference by the state in interest rates. Hayek would have agreed with me.

My point on mansion tax was to try to compare two people on equal incomes - one who saves nothing and then is not taxed and the other like me who has paid masses of tax over 30 years, works 50 weeks a year and only has a house as an asset. A mansion tax would be very unfair and we now know it is off the agenda. It would also send out a signal that the UK just wants benefits claimants and is jealous of and does not want the rich. If the rich are deterred the poor suffer. The poor can only live on benefits provided by the rich. If you annoy the rich too much you just lose money that would go to the poor. You have to keep a consensus going.

On private rented property I am not a landlord although I have been a couple of times in the past in the 80s and one of my many glorious failures was selling both flats for 50% less than we paid for them - never let it be said property is risk free.

If you introduce rent controls then people will not invest in property and generation rent will have to live with their parents. We need much much less state interference not more.

Cameron - wonderful:
?Did you hear what Ed Miliband said last week about taxes? He described a tax cut as the government writing people a cheque. Ed?Let me explain to you how it works. When people earn money, it?s their money. Not the government?s money: their money. Then, the government takes some of it away in tax. So, if we cut taxes, we?re not giving them money ? we?re taking less of it away. OK??

'The left are rather rude, aren't they?'

I like your understatement.

I suppose when you lose all arguments you are left with nothing but expletives or may be it's just a class issue.

Yes, abuse is the stock in trade of some, but it is not to do with working class, it is a sign of no class.

Xenia-

?Did you hear what Ed Miliband said last week about taxes? He described a tax cut as the government writing people a cheque. Ed?Let me explain to you how it works. When people earn money, it?s their money. Not the government?s money: their money. Then, the government takes some of it away in tax. So, if we cut taxes, we?re not giving them money ? we?re taking less of it away. OK??

Yes, this is utterly meaningless, and it shows he's playing to the gallery and small-state ideologues are precisely his audience.

Let me explain to you how it works: when people earn money, they do so within the context of the nation-state. The nation-state provides for the army to keep out foreign invaders, the police to protect you from thugs, the courts to judge and sentence people for alleged crimes, laws to enforce contracts, without which no trading would be possible at all, roads and public transport to get people around, an education system to educate the workforce, a health system to keep them healthy, and dozen other things which keep the machinations of society running.

All these things cost money. The money you earn is money earned within the context of the state providing all these services for your benefit, without which, you would not even begin to be able to earn any money at all.

So no, the money you earn is not all your money. If you want to keep all your money, go buy yourself a desert island, and then build your own mud hut to live in, without any of the services of the state, and then see how you get along. If you want to live in society, you have to pay for its cost.

Secondly, Cameron himself knows full well that taxes are required to run the state. The debate isn't over whether taxes are just, but how much taxes are just, and who pays what proportion - that is the debate. For him to announce that when people earn money it's simply 'their money' is a rhetorical move and grossly oversimplifying things for the sake of people like you who have an ideological problem with the state and for paying for communal services.

Xenia-

The 'free markets' don't work. It's incredible that anyone in this day and age still believes they will necessarily produce a better outcome than where the state intervenes.

ttosca, you should have watched the Romney Obama debate, it was to a great extent about free markets versus big government. Nearly all the pundits said that Romney won. He had a great line where he said that Obama had given government aid of about $90 billion to 'green' companies (which is equivalent to about 50 times the annual aid to the oil industry), and he then listed the 'green' companies that had gone bust. He said something like - talk about governments picking winners and losers, you pick losers.

He wanted less government picking and more free market and private enterprise, which is what has built the United States to be the greatest economy on earth. Fox News had good analysis of it, with the usual faces - Giuliani, Karl Rove, Sarah Palin etc. Shame you don't watch Fox.

When Xenia works 50 weeks a year and 7 days a week, she doesn't work for teh government or for you. What she earns is due to her labour. The government then takes a proportion of her earnings in tax. Cameron is right that if taxes are lowered, then the government takes less of her money. It doesn't give her money back.

That $90 billion was from the pockets of hard working Americans, and was then handed over to 'green' companies, and Romney told us that some of them were backers of Obama. Some of that money was lost ands wasted as some of the companies went bust.

We need to pay taxes for essential services etc., but not to prop up pet projects and backers of political parties.

There was an economist in the 60s or 70s (can't remember his name) who advocated that at 18 every person should get £100 per week from the state for the rest of their life. Paid for out of high taxation of earnings, as jobs wouldn't be necessary to pay for the basics.

I've trotted the idea out on here occasionally, but it's never got anywhere.

15k a year between us would be more than we have to live on now, btw, so it would more than double our income if dh and I got that each. I'm all for it!

It would never happen, and if it did it would lead to the breakdown of society. It would remove all incentive to work and high earners would see it as unfair. Cameron touched on the whole incentive thing today i.e. that it is not right that people who don't work get housing benefit but that many workers don't.

Work is fundamental to society because it contributes to the well-being of others. Removing this incentivbe and taxing workers to pay for it would end in tears. The losers would eventually be the non-workers.

Ttosca "Let me explain to you how it works: when people earn money, they do so within the context of the nation-state. The nation-state provides for the army to keep out foreign invaders, the police to protect you from thugs, the courts to judge and sentence people for alleged crimes, laws to enforce contracts, without which no trading would be possible at all, roads and public transport to get people around, an education system to educate the workforce, a health system to keep them healthy, and dozen other things which keep the machinations of society running...The 'free markets' don't work. It's incredible that anyone in this day and age still believes they will necessarily produce a better outcome than where the state intervenes. "

Pure lefty ?big state? crap.

It is perfectly possible to live in our society without contributing half of your total income for the big state to 'wisely' spend on your behalf. The unemployed, pensioners and the disabled do it all the time. What you are saying is that only the proles who have a job need to contribute. As for the list of things you suggest that are essential for our society to flourish, again, you are talking out of your arse. That you have the chutzpah to dare to suggest that our armed forces exist only for territorial defence is to conveniently overlook the fact that it is our armed forces, backed by the full weight of state authority, which are more likely to be the foreign invader - see Afghanistan, Iraq, Serbia (Kosovo), Suez and countless other conflicts. In fact, since 1688, I can only think of Bonnie Prince Charlie, Napoleon and Hitler who seriously thought about invading us.

That the police and the judiciary are always on the side of the law abiding is moot.

Contracts were being exchanged back in Roman times so I wouldn't claim them to require a big state solution with consequent high taxation.

Public transport shouldn't, in my opinion, be subsidised at all - if you wish to travel you should pay the full fare - it should certainly not require subsidisation by penalising people for the 'crime' of having bought a big house as the LibDumbs are suggesting.

If we are to be coerced into paying for education and health care then they should be provided to a decent standard in the most cost effective manner possible. That the privately provided solutions consistently outperform the government run ones (to say nothing of the superior healthcare and education systems of rival countries) is scandalous.

As for your final polemic about the free markets not working and how state control is the answer please compare and contrast the perennial food shortages of the Soviet Union with the free world, or Mao's China with the free world, or North Korea vs. South Korea, for that matter. State planning, such as you advocate starved an estimated 43 million people in the 20th century; by contrast we had the supermarket (though there are plenty on the left that would vilify this development).

Your comment stinks of ill thought out 'sixth form socialism' pining for a thoroughly discredited system. Useful idiots like you need to get it into your thick heads that the state is your enemy - without the force of the state behind them the Hitler?s, Mao's, Stalin's and even Blair's of this world would have remained relatively harmless. Give them the power of the state to suckle from and nightmares get born.

People tend to do better when markets are free. I am not saying I believe in no interference ever on anything but we have got the line in the wrong place at present. Even the housing issues come from state interference in interest rates. High house price inflation is at least in part caused by the state trying to keep rates lower than otherwise they would have been.

It is not very fair to the left if I quote the book I am currently reading about North Korea as that state has been particularly bad economically at its control and started a lot of projects just stopped mid stream but even China has only started to do better since it let people keep the fruits of their labours.

The bottom line as Cameron said in my quote above is we earn money which we own and can do what we like with. It would not be very hard for me to move to a lower tax state and the Government is aware of that and therefore has a difficult balance to keep people here who generate wealth so that they can pay the 50% net takers the rest of us support. It is not even a recent thing. I had relatives in the 1920s who went to work in India and others in Canada and the US. Even earlier relatives left other areas, some Ireland for the UK. People have always moved where there is work or better prospects. Anyway due to our rather wonderful UK, our respect for the rule of law, our tolerance and lots of other things we are a country where many want to live so as long as we can not decline too badly and get a few more incentives for hard work again I am sure all will be well.

Xenia-

People tend to do better when markets are free.

No they don't. Neo-liberal privitisation and deregulation since the 1980s of public services and the financial sector has resulted in almost all the proceeds of growth going to a tiny minority at the top. The vast majority have seen their income and wealth stagnate or decline. You're a free-market ideologue.

I am not saying I believe in no interference ever on anything but we have got the line in the wrong place at present. Even the housing issues come from state interference in interest rates. High house price inflation is at least in part caused by the state trying to keep rates lower than otherwise they would have been.

It's caused mainly by the lack of houses.

It is not very fair to the left if I quote the book I am currently reading about North Korea as that state has been particularly bad economically at its control and started a lot of projects just stopped mid stream but even China has only started to do better since it let people keep the fruits of their labours.

Good grief. North Korea is a totalitarian dictatorship. Have fun read that, but your comparisons are irrelevant.

The bottom line as Cameron said in my quote above is we earn money which we own and can do what we like with.

The bottom line is that you can only earn money - it is only made possible - within the context of the state, and all the services which it provides. So, no, not everything is you earn is or should be yours. Not only is it morally right that you pack back a portion of what you are given in the form of services, but it is necessary for the continuation of the state and economy to function.

It would not be very hard for me to move to a lower tax state and the Government is aware of that and therefore has a difficult balance to keep people here who generate wealth so that they can pay the 50% net takers the rest of us support. It is not even a recent thing. I had relatives in the 1920s who went to work in India and others in Canada and the US. Even earlier relatives left other areas, some Ireland for the UK. People have always moved where there is work or better prospects. Anyway due to our rather wonderful UK, our respect for the rule of law, our tolerance and lots of other things we are a country where many want to live so as long as we can not decline too badly and get a few more incentives for hard work again I am sure all will be well.

You need to get a grip. First of all, there is no correlation between income or personal wealth and 'wealth generation'. If this were the case, we'd all be rich, seeing as the richest 10% so-called 'wealth generators' own nearly half of the world's wealth. A lot of personal wealth is also gained through predatory tactics which actually put people out of jobs and raise the prices of commodities.

Secondly, the UK is already is more deregulated, more 'free-market' and has a more 'flexible labour market' (ie. crap workers rights) than most of the EU. The UK is not suffering financially because it is a quasi-socialist state. In fact, the lackadaisical approach to financial regulation is what put the UK is especially deep shit when the financial crisis hit.

You think the high income earners have a monopoly on 'hard work'. They don't. You can incentivise 'hard work' by raising the minimum wage and allowing people on poor and middle-incomes to keep more of their money. The 50% tax rate was for people earning over £150,000 per year. Do you realise what percentage of people earn this amount?

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_in_the_United_Kingdom

Less than 1%. So it's obvious that your concern is really for a tiny minority of people, rather than the vast majority - 99%, who earn less than £150,000 and pay the lower rate of income tax. If you were really concerned about these people, you'd concentrate on promoting ways for the 90% who earn less than £40,000 to keep their money. The top rate of income tax is a red herring except for the very wealthiest.

The UK is doing better than Greece and Italy etc because of its policies, not worse because of them. We all know that when Lawson reduced upper rates of tax to 40% (they were up to 99% in my childhood at the very upper rate) the economy did really well and the tax take went up. Thus charging the rich less tax so they seek to generate wealth here not elsewhere means more money for the poor. The poor don't like to hear that but it is so.

Good grief, try to come up with a better argument than 'UK policies' means the UK is 'doing better than' Greece, Italy, etc(?).

That is a meaningless statement. Which policies? And how is it 'doing better'?

Germany, Russian and Brazil have larger economies than the UK. Germany and France are both in the EU, and both are comparatively more social-democratic compared with the UK. They have stronger labour laws and higher taxation rates. Germany has a larger GDP than the UK, and France comes a very close 4th after the UK with roughly the same population.

www.therichest.org/business/largest-economies-in-europe/

The UK has fared worst since the financial crisis, with Osborne's policies putting the UK in to a double-dip recession. France and Germany both experienced better growth rates.

While Italy has a much larger public debt, it's deficit is much smaller -3.9% than the UK's 8.3%.

So your attempt to link lower taxation rates on income with 'doing better', without any discussion about which policies, or any context whatsoever, or defining what you mean by 'better' is completely nonsense.

'Better' because we are not chucking rocks at one another on a daily basis, nor have we had an unelected junta graciously foisted upon us by the winners of the 2012 Nobel Peace Prize.