Posted on 02/08/2019 8:14:09 AM PST by Olog-hai
A nationwide experiment with basic income in Finland has not increased employment among those participating in the two-year trial, but their general well-being seems to have increased, a report said Friday.
The Social Insurance Institution of Finland, or Kela, said “it was not yet possible to draw any firm conclusions” from the first half of the experiment, where about 2,000 randomly selected, unemployed people aged 25-58 got tax-free income of €560 ($636) a month with no questions asked.
Finland is looking into ways to reshape its social security system and became in January 2017 the first European country to launch the trial, which will end in 2020.
Proponents say that universal basic income can empower people to start new businesses, knowing that they would continue to receive monthly income no matter how well their new venture does. Critics say it would merely reduce incentives for people to look for work. …
(Excerpt) Read more at apnews.com ...
Giving people free money makes them happier?
I
did
not
know
that
RE: creates happiness, but not jobs
So, no job equals greater happiness?
Well, if the goal is to be happy in life, let’s all quit working then...
$600 a month - in Finland?
Wouldn’t pay for fish and chips. Hardly a minimum basic income. Maybe a beer subsidy.
See https://economics.stanford.edu/sites/g/files/sbiybj9386/f/djprice_jmp.pdf
and
https://basicincome.org/news/2017/12/basic-income-guarantee-experiments-1970s-quick-summary-results/
This crap was tried in the US in the 70 and again in the 80s.
I thought the Finns were smart people. I see they’re not.
If they had listened to me they wouldn’t have tried this stupid thing.
First: You cannot test a UNIVERSAL basic income with 2,000 people. Universal is not = 2,000. Universal is all. 2,000 is not all. Clear?
Obviously, no one is going to find any negatives with this. Just as I said. The recipients are going to tell stories of how they can now eat out 3 times a week, instead of 1, and how they stopped feeding their dogs cheap food. No one will have any complaints. The people who don’t receive it won’t notice anything. At this level it’s not going to affect taxes at all.
Apply it to the entire population, and the immediate effect is to dilute the value of currency. More money, same number of products, currency loses value. Second, taxes rise to pay for this. Money is taken from paychecks to give to people who are working and who are not working. Third, the incentive to work is lost, leading to a drop in productivity. Fourth, the amount given is not enough, and there are calls for increasing it to 1200 a month, which is soon not enough, and they want 2400 a month, and on and on.
This is a stupid proposal. That explains why they are actually going to implement it. My predictions will be soon verified.
ALERT ALERT ALERT ALERT
This is an Associated Press story. Do not take its presentation of facts at face value.
ALERT ALERT ALERT ALERT
Cool. Where do I sign up?
Redistributionism (universal guaranteed income) + budget deficits + confiscatory taxation + government borrowing + creation of money out of thin air/inflation + government spending = capital decumulation = economic decline & decay = mass poverty
Prob is when everyone’s on it, prices will go up.
“Finnish”?
I thought they just started this?
Prices for what? If everybody is drawing a paycheck for doing nothing, there will be no goods or services being produced for consumption.
WOW! it created happiness! religions, governments and philosophers have been trying to create happiness since the beginning of humanity, and are still trying!
You mean that $600 dollars a month created happiness? Well, then, how about making that $1200 a month? double happiness.
No. Make that $2400. No. $4800. Aww gee, let’s go to $48000 a month. That should make people really happy.
A bit of sense: suppose a government gives everyone $1000 a month. It will have to collect $1200 a month from everyone, on average, to pay for it, taking into consideration administrative costs. Oh, make that $1500 because a lot of people aren’t working at all. Sorry, change that to $3000 because a few million people stopped working and just live off the money. Oops, while I was talking a few more million people quit their jobs, so now we’ve got to take $5000 a month from anyone who is working. We just did, and now ten million more people quit because they can make more money after taxes with less stress by quitting their jobs.
So we have only a million people who are still working and we are taking 110% of their pay. Predicting they will be quitting their jobs real soon.
3 years is not enough to measure happiness. Many would be happy doing their own thing for fun for several years. After that they won’t be so happy any more when they realize there is no purpose or value to their lives
Let’s see....if you give the average person $600 a month with no strings attached, will they:
a) Sweat and strain and do the hard work of starting a small business that is more than likely to fail?
b) Sit at home all day watching television and drinking beer?
In other news... Water is wet.
When I was a kid we had a neighbor, a widow lady.
She was on welfare. She spent a minimum of thirty-five
dollars a week playing the lottery.
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