Universal income and feminism

[ConstantlyCold]

Bit of a thread about a thread.

There’s another thread about sahm’s and Feminism. The topic of universal income has come up. It could be hugely beneficial to sahm’s and low earners.

I can’t get my head around it myself. But I was wondering what people’s opinions are?

Would universal income benefit women? How would it work practically?

I like the idea, but I’m quite dubious about whether it would work in practice. As people said, the Finland trial is on a small scale, and there’s a limit to what it can tell us. Plus theyre not trialling a universal income, but (as I understand it) replacing certain benefits people were already receiving with a flat income stream. People are receiving other benefits on top of the basic income to bring it up to a liveable anount. This is a really interesting blog post from the Finnish team about the admin of the trial:

www.pqblog.org.uk/2018/03/what-experiments-in-finland-can-tell-us.html?m=1

I dont know how well it'll work in practice but I think we're going that way anyway. The current model won't be sustainable in the long run. We have to do something about our cost of living and low productivity.

Re the suggestion about taxing the robots - that has been seriously suggested (possibly by the Gates Foundation). The idea iirc is that companies would have to pay tax to cover the cost of the workers they are not employing.

Re the suggestion about taxing the robots - that has been seriously suggested (possibly by the Gates Foundation)

I’m sure I heard it on a radio 4 program a few years ago and maybe the Major of London suggested it too? I think that one could have legs. Especially if you tax the “service” robots, the companies can’t move those robots overseas. So self service checkouts, automated receptionists at hotels and driverless cars could all be taxed.

The single biggest tax or benefits policy that would make a difference to women's financial well being is universal, quality free at the point of provision / very low cost child care.

Everything else is just shuffling the numbers round and they still don't add up for very many women. Hence they fall into the position where they are better off not working, then they find that they cannot get work or have to take lower skilled / lower paid jobs than they would otherwise be capable of doing.

Obviously not all women have children and some women would stay at home regardless, but as a class women in the UK would benefit immensely

I wasn't trying to be silly. It was simply a poster had said above that children would get it too. So I assumed they meant the same amount. If people even need to get by with the bare minimum it would need to be quite high which would then make better off people quite a lot better off. And what about disability benefits. Would they be stopped. Can't see it would work at all in practice. Maybe in a few hundred years when robots have taken over.