Then guys weren’t perfect but, you’re crazy.
A certified minimum income?
Giving people money is not income...unless you are Moslem.
I remember Libertarian, Charles Murray recommending this in his book: “In Our Hands : A Plan To Replace The Welfare State”.
He essentially proposed eliminating all welfare transfer programs, including Social Security and Medicare, and substituting an annual $10,000 cash grant to everyone 21 years and older.
Typical claptrap from the historically illiterate lot at the Atlantic. They should rename that bloody pub "The Atlantis".
Typical Republicanism - “we can implement socialism better than the Democrats”.
Oh, yeah. There's a Conservative idea, right there.
There is no conservative case for a guaranteed basic income.
What do they think the WELFARE STATE?
If we didn’t already have this, then some people would be STARVING, instead of doing nothing, sitting at home, watching their plasmas all day.
The best thing for this country is to eliminate all Federal involvement in subsidized programs whatsoever. It just opens the country to tyranny.
Worst idea ever. Too many people will be satisfied with a small income and all the time in the world.
I consider myself a hard working person, but 18 months of unemployment nearly ruined me. Sure, I didn’t have much money, but I woke up whenever I felt like it, enjoyed bike rides in the park and was free to do whatever I pleased. It was only the fear of losing my unemployment benefits that really pushed me to get a new job. Now, I’m back on a 50-60 hour week, but it took the fear of real poverty to turn around.
The same would be true of the many, many folks on the dole once they realized they would never starve.
In 1969, President Nixon unveiled the Family Assistance Plan, which was essentially a guaranteed annual income. But it languished in Congress and was finally killed in 1972 when California governor Ronald Reagan, among others, came out strongly against it.
Same difference.
Better than the welfare state we have now. If you’re going to hand out so much money to so many people for so many reasons, may as well just give everyone a flat amount and keep it simple. Not saying I like it, just that it would be an improvement.
Problem is, the system doesn’t want a simple solution. The complexity is there to employ as many as possible, magnifying the bureaucrat’s power. Give everyone a flat monthly check, and all kinds of exceptions for additional income will be invented, requiring the same voluminous bureaucracy we have now - just with a higher baseline cost.
And that’s the problem I have with flat tax (whatever flavor): just gets the government into even more of society, establishes a higher baseline, and will be “exceptioned” into something even more complex and costly than the IRS we have now.
“Last week, my colleague David Frum “
One need read no further.
I’m all for a universal handout as long as it is funded by voluntary contributors. If Charles Murray and crew can kick in enough to provide a check for everybody, that would be fine by me. But they won’t and they can’t.
I really like Friedman, and Murray, and Hayek, but I’m not a fan of the negative income tax, the basic income guarantee, or the other such schemes because they are funded by taxes that are exacted by coercion and threat of violence.
Still, these programs would be a vast improvement on the status quo. Most people don’t realize it, but the marginal income tax on lower income people can be thousands of percent. That is, when a poor person earns an additional dollar, he can lose hundreds of dollars worth of entitlement benefits. In my own case, under ObamaCare, the marginal income tax rate on going from 399.99% of poverty line to 400.01% of poverty line is 720,000%. That is, when I make one additional dollar, I lose a $7200 ObamaCare subsidy. At lower levels of income, people face a number of such hurdles that create severe disincentives to rise out of poverty. The existing system sucks even worse than a NIT or BIG system would.
Uh, how about NO welfare?
Yeah, right - give them a guaranteed income from the public treasury - the same people who can’t handle their own money now won’t be able to handle that either - they’ll end up in great financial difficulty, children starving, old people dying, houses falling down, and on and on, until we have to have some special programs for them, funded by the public treasury
These people call for a king and call it conservatism.
One guy has 10 bucks. The other guy has 100. I convince the guy with 10 that he deserves more, and I convince the guy with 100 to hand over another 10 bucks to the other guy for the sake of peace and justice.
So now the one guy has 20, the other guy has 90. And I, the arbiter who decides who gets how much, own both of them. The poor guy looks to me for more, and the rich guy is schmoozing me to keep me from taking even more. With one deft sleight of hand I have become their king.