Tuesday 7 August 2007

Citizen's Income aka Universal Benefits

Pleased to announce that the House of Lords, just like the House of Commons a couple of years back, has broadly supported the idea of a Citizen's Income to replace as much as possible of the UK's completely fucked-up welfare system.

Please also check out the brief "Introductory booklet" (I helped with the calculations at the back).

2 comments:

LFB_UK *The Legend* said...

Any chance you can put it into laymans terms lol cheers and a nice blog btw..

Mark Wadsworth said...

Sure:

The Citizen's Income Trust are purists. They say get rid of all tax allowances and tax breaks (even the personal allowance) and all (or most) benefits and just give everybody £x per week no-questions-asked and let them get on with it.

As it happens, "£x" could be set at current income support/pensions credit rates and we could keep a flat tax of 33% (22% tax plus 11% NI) and it'd be fiscally neutral. That is the interesting bit, not some woolly principle.

As a moderate, I'd say that people can choose between a much higher tax-free personal allowance (of about £9k in this example) or claiming the benefit.