Recently I was sent a link to an article, entitled "Europe's New Social Reality: The Case Against Universal Basic Income" which was long and not very interesting, but did contain this gem:
One of the most profound concerns around UBI is the impact it could have on diminishing the scope of existing social policies and the potential for new programmes. Most modest models of UBI – which offer guaranteed payments at relatively low levels – account for the withdrawal of many existing benefits and allowances, often with the exception of housing and disability payments.
As Figure 5.1 shows, the RSA’s model – drawing upon prior work by the Citizen’s Income Trust – proposes the abolition £272 billion worth of existing UK programmes and allowances. Thus in order to finance a very modest UBI, many existing structures of the welfare state would still have to be swept away.
So what is a feature of UBI, simplification of the welfare system, is being presented as a bug.
Preumably the author, Daniel Page, thinks that the ability of politicians and bureaucrats to tinker with and micromanage welfare payments is essential. There is also the "UBI is too expensive" KCN which is presented as a given, without any justification, apart from another paper based on the same KCN.
Tuesday, 6 October 2020
Killer arguments against Citizen's Income, Not (31)
My latest blogpost: Killer arguments against Citizen's Income, Not (31)Tweet this! Posted by Bayard at 13:44
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14 comments:
Agreed. Wankers. The "unaffordable" KCN clashes with the explanation of how it would be funded.
Please note with this new blogger template, you have to got to HTML mode and put a line break tag at the end of every paragraph and another line break for every blank line. I have inserted them for you this time.
The "very modest" KCN rankles as well. We (the CIT) set it at the same level as income support etc (or the tax saving from the personal allowance). So we proposed replacing a "very modest" income support with a "very modest" UBI, it's a like for like swap.
What else pisses me off is all the KCNs from people who've no grasp of welfare and tax systems, numbers or logic.
I always thought UBI was a "nice idea" until I delved into all this.
Having sifted through all the numbers and costs and rules and statistics and crap, I realised it was a perfectly sensible, realistic and affordable replacement for most of "the welfare state" with surprisingly few winners and losers.
Mark, thanks, I spent ages trying to get the line breaks in and eventually gave up.
I think this is their best nugget of wisdom.
"But the amounts cited – in the region of £70 per week – would continue to leave people powerfully reliant on the labour market. Critically, UBI offers no solution of transforming the labour market. On the contrary, it could give license to employers to offer lower wages and less secure conditions; the burden and expectation for employers to provide a decent wage would be weakened if everyone had another source of income."
B, if you're in html mode, do "less than sign"br"more than sign".
Benj, that's the trade-off.
Low UBI mean you can just about survive but will have to work to have "nice things", even if it's a shit job for shit pay.
High UBI means everybody can coast and nobody needs to work, so like under Communism, it all grinds to a halt. So nobody gets "nice things".
There is a middle ground optimum, and we have to find it.
B, yes, that's another well-known technique for damning an idea: this idea doesn't cure all known ills and solve all known problems, therefore it should be discarded.
Anyway, it's bollocks. If employers could get away with offering lower pay with less secure conditions (and how can you get less secure than zero hours, FFS?), they would already be doing so. What he actually means is that employers couldn't get away with offering lower pay and less secure conditions because everyone will give them the finger.
Now that 1/3 (and rising) working age households are on UC, it's like there's a basic income for those folk, but with a VERY high starting rate of tax (63% before taking into account employer NI etc). Why not junk the means testing and eliminate the personal allowance? Then it's 20% tax on first £1, rather than 63%. National Insurance will have to remain at ~£9k+ otherwise you have 32% on your first pound, which is a bad look
M, exactly, yet another bonus of UBI. Which is mathematically the same as Negative Income Tax.
And with UBI you must massively reduce the other set of 'benefits claimants'. All those bureaucrats operating the existing complexity whose labour is therefore denied to 'production' (benefits bureaucrats and not in any way productive) who will be released to find more rewarding productive work in wealth creating private business.
You'd think small state Tories would love it.....??
@B I like the option to give employers the finger. No market is free if you are forced to participate. UBI allows people to opt out of the labour market, with the quid pro quo that you move somewhere out of everyone else's way. LVT allows people to opt out of the land market - if you don't exclude others from non-marginal land, you don't pay tax
@MW
The KCN they make is that the UBI would enable employers to negotiate lower wages. The opposite is true.
Benj, don't get me started on these equal and opposite KCNs.
1. "UBI will enable employers to pay lower wages" (left wingers)
2. "UBI will reduce work incentives" (right wingers and moralists)
If 2. is true, employers will have to offer HIGHER wages. By and large, the two effects cancel out. If 1 is true (which it isn't), then so what anyway?
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