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?

"it is a transition to a more community minded society"
We lived in one of those until Mrs Thatcher started the 'commodification' (to put it nicely) ethic. If you believe giving everyone an annual bonus, while removing the few equalisers left to us, will create a less greedy community - you probably believe in Santa Claus as well.

Garlicbutt put it much better! I just didn't have the will to get that detailed.

Sounds like your proposal corrupt relies on a sickness/disability free society.

mer judgypants. i refer you to the answer i gave a few moments ago. if i give you £1 for a loaf of bread, you spend £1 on a loaf of bread. If i give you £1,000,000 to spend on a loaf of bread , you send £1,000,000 paying for one loaf of bread. £15,000 is what it currently costs to pay for basic needs of food and housing for 1 year. inflation only hapens if i give you double that to pay for your basic needs.

I fully accept that we disagree on this though. I accept you have a different opinion. Thanks for at least engaging in dialogue about it. This has been a very interesting discussion.

Changing it slightly. I realy am interested to know, what would you do "just for the love of it?"

Changing it slightly. I realy am interested to know, what would you do "just for the love of it?

If I didn't have children/caring responsibilities I would;

Eat nice food and good wine and shag the day/night away tbh

Only one of those is free/doesnt rely on needing lots of £££ unless of course it was moonshine and a nice salad of homegrown assorted tomatos and some nice goats cheese.

If this is all you're interested in, Corrupt, why not simply rename JSA to "Choice Benefit" and leave everything else unchanged?

... obviously removing the requirement to seek work.

I realy am interested to know, what would you do "just for the love of it?"

Ignorance of inequality again. I currently do what I CAN do just for the love of it. It's a massive contrast to what I did when I was healthy & rich.

I write, I do a bit of gardening, study a bit, sleep a lot.
I used to go to galleries and museums, travel, renovate & decorate properties, go for long drives and long walks, go to the gym, meet friends for lovely meals and drinks.

I cannot do any of those things now due to the combined effects of disability and a £15k income.

Your premise appears entirely false, I'm afraid.

AMBERLEAF nice answer ;-)

GARLICBUTT choice benefit it is then, without the requirement to "work"

As for Mr judgypants, moley etc I accept youre not convinced. It's been a really useful discussion though, especially for my campaign to become mayor of bristol.
I can see that the main issue is this rampant inflation question, very useful to know, so I'm just going to have go way and come up with a simpler explanation of why this won't happen.

Thank you all again.

Cheers ;-)

"what would you do "just for the love of it?"

When I was 19 I went to university. At the time, I was torn between which one of two degrees I would study for. One was a practical degree with decent employment prospects, the other was a History degree. With half an eye on future employment prospects I chose the practical degree and have sort of regretted it ever since. Assuming an income of £15k for life, I'd go back to university to do the degree I always wanted to do, purely for the love of learning.

Good luck with becoming mmayor of Bristol CorruptBstard. If you do work out a way around the whole numbers issue, please let us know.

Finally, may I suggest that you change your user name before standing for public office!

Thank you Mr judgypants I hope you do get the chance to go back to uni and study history just for the love of learning. I know we disagree about the possibility of giving a basic income, but it sounds like we agree on the possibilities it allows people if it were able to happen.

I think this is a lovely way to end the discussion. I feel like we've found common ground and I find that very heart warming indeed my friend

Thank you ;-)

As for the name, that was the whole point of standing. To protest our current politicians. I want corrupt self serving lying thieving bstard to be a name on the ballot paper. As a protest and maybe just to make people laugh so I've changed it by deed poll.

I had to have a policy though so decided on the basic income.1 because I could offer "free money" which seems appropriate for our fraudulent politicians of the times, but also because I truly believe in it, and if I can get any publicity and awareness of it as a concept ill be well happy.

As we both probably know, there's little chance of getting any media attention though, so I just use the whole campaign as a way of starting conversations as and when. This being one of them.

But in the election for mayor of bristol it will be possible to vote for Mr Corrupt Self Serving Lying Thieving Bstard. And his policy is to pay every bristol adult £15,000 unconditional basic income every year, funded by a local sales tax.

So Lets see what happens on November 15th 2012. When the people of bristol decide ;-)

a nice salad of homegrown assorted tomatos and some nice goats cheese.

Amber, have you actually got the Mumsnet Goat???
My tomatoes have been thwarted by this "summer". Maybe Corrupt will award an additional tomato benefit during bad years!

Good luck in the election.

Not wishing to open up another huge can of worms but if you levy a sales tax only on businesses within the Bristol area why won't people who are able to just shop a bit further afield do so? The only people who will be hit by this are those unable to avoid it - i.e. those without cars, much mobility or the ability to travel. Yes, you will be gifting them £15k, and you could argue that they could then afford to pay the tax, but common sense says that people will avoid tax given half a chance.

Why not stand on the ticket that you can't trust anyone who wants to be a politician 'cos none of them are economically literate enough to do anything other than piss your hard earned money up the wall, therefore, you will damn near abolish the local council. The only tax you will collect will be to pay for services for the sick, the elderly, the infirm and the disabled. You will also need to collect something towards emergency services and road maintenance etc. This should come to no more than 50% or so of current council revenue. Let the people keep the difference. Next, whatever you have left in the pot, privatise it. Privatise the libraries, refuse collection, planning departments, the whole lot. Lubricate up the system with the free market and turn this bloody country around one city at a time.

This approach has been taken elsewhere, New Zealand to be exact, please take the time (no more than ten mins or so) to read this. In my opinion, it details exactly the direction Britain needs to be taking to pick itself up, dust itself down and start moving forward.

Much better plan imo, Judgey.

I think others have pointed out that sales taxes penalise the poor MUCH more than the rich.
When I was rich, only about 10% of my income went on basic necessities. Now 90% of it does. By increasing sales tax, you make it harder for me to live. For the old me, it would only have been harder to buy as many extras as I wanted.
Cutting down on salon treatments is very different from cutting down on food & electricity.

Garlic ha! Yes...my MN benefits goat is tethered to my back fence waiting to be milked! ;o)

My tomatos are also looking a bit poor (unlike my grass which is waist high and gone to seed!) Too, hoping for a late bloom on them.

Disagree with Judgey's privatisation drive, btw, but it could be done with tweaks. When public services work, they work on a kitty basis. This is basically no different from the way insurance policies work, only without the need for providers to cream off profits. There are a few ways to set that up, including forms of privatisation which make every community member a stakeholder and/or co-operatives.

Heh, Amber, love to the MN goat I can send her a ton of rotted plants if you're short on feed

If she's still hungry when she's munched through my ever growing grass ill take you up on that. :)

garlicbutt "There are a few ways to set that up, including forms of privatisation which make every community member a stakeholder and/or co-operatives."

The organisation structure of a privatised entity isn't the important thing. The fact that there is a plurality of options for Joe Bloggs to consider when purchasing their goods or services is what matters - this is, obviously, known as competition. As an example, Tesco is a PLC whilst Waitrose is a partnership. Both fulfil the same function (i.e. to feed all those Joe Bloggs' out there) and are in competition with each other - how the owners of those two companies choose to arrange their remuneration / limit their liabilities is of no real concern to the customer.

Previous governmental privatisation drives have left the public sceptical of further privatisation. This is for the very good reason that although nationalised industries have been sold off, there has never been an element of competition in the way they have been structured once in private hands. Take, for example, railway privatisation. The privatisation of British Rail did nothing to increase competition because the only way to have real competition on routes between, for example, Bristol and London is to have a duplicate network built alongside the first. To say that the railway line between Bristol and London is in competition with the line that runs between Newcastle and Leeds is absurd. What this flavour of privatisation did was grant a company with a fixed term monopoly ? this is a very bad idea indeed. Similarly, British Gas, the various old electricity boards' and Royal Mail have been privatised but not subjected to any real competition. Unsurprisingly, the prices of using these services has shot up whilst the business standards have declined ? exactly what you?d expect from a monopoly provider.

This isn?t a polemic against privatisation ? quite the opposite in fact ? but I do believe that we need to think about how to create competition within as many government departments as possible. Privatisation is part of this but, at all times, it is worthwhile trying to figure out if there is a motivation to improve services (cost, quality etc.) or not. Far too often, that motivation has been missing.

I disagree that competition is always best. That's another discussion but I think it's worth stating that any absolute policy is flawed.

Bloody hell judgypants, there was me wanting to put a close to this thread as friends and you have to throw me that one LOL.

Ok first of all I'm obviously doing this with the aim of getting people talking and thinking about money, what it is, how its created, how it works, and more importantly raising awareness of the unconditional basic income so that its implemented nationally. Therefore making it a national sales tax. Secondly its not just a sales tax, its a tax on all transactions involving money or an exchange of money.

And my campaign for mayor of bristol is my main way of fulfilling these aims.

However, and here comes the next can of worms LOL, my policy for bristol means I will print local currency, the bristol pound, that can only be spent in bristol. the bristol pound will be exchangeable at the bank of bristol (the city council turned into a bank) for pounds sterling on a 1:1 basis, making 1 bristol pound worth £1 sterling.

This would keep the money circulating in bristol and keep tax revenue high.

Ok to preempt some of the probable criticisms.

1. What happens If everyone goes to the bank to exchange their bristol pounds for sterling?

Answer : the same thing that would happen if everyone went to their current bank to withdraw their cash in pounds sterling. There wouldn't be enough money and the system would crash.

But people don't all run to the banks at the moment because they trust (rightly or wrongly) that the money is there and is worth something. It's not of course "I promise to pay the bearer, on demand, 5 pounds of gold" became a lie a long time ago.

This would mean people start buying local goods, or they spend the extra time and money buying goods outside of bristol ie transport costs, journey time, to save a couple of pence on a tin of beans.

Finally because the tax is in all transactions involving money, the % in tax would he relatively small, especially when you think of the vast amount of money that is turned over on a daily basis, so I think what with the promise of an unconditional basic income, its more likely people will want to move to and spend in bristol rather than the other way round.

I would like to acknowledge as well that any system is just that, a system, it can't in and of itself solve any problem, the problem but also the solution is human nature. Greed being the biggest problem, but I also believe that whereas we all have the capacity for greed, we also have as much potential for the opposite, generosity and compassion.

Ok said quite enough and ready for the onslaught.

Tin hat on ;-)

Funnily enough I'm just having a conversation with my 15 year old who is mulling over the benefits of communism and explaining why he thinks it could work (if he implements it!)

Currently pointing out the downfalls and why greed and corruption will always take over!

Amber, that IS the only thing that spoils communism, isn't it: human nature! No ideology that ignores human nature is going to work with humans ... I guess that's why we tend to be keener on communism when we're young; inexperience (or naivety) about people.