Posted on 02/23/2017 12:41:38 PM PST by Lorianne
Of all the ideas to pull people out of poverty, one of the more contentious is also the simplest: governments should just hand out monthly checks to the poor, no strings attached.
That’s exactly what the Canadian province of Ontario plans to do, and it’s already causing a ruckus. The Liberal Party currently in control of the provincial government aims to roll out a pilot for a “universal basic income” program in what could be three cities in the spring of 2017. While it has yet to identify the guinea pigs, hints of what the system will look like can be found in a discussion paper authored last August by Hugh Segal, a former member of the Canadian Senate and now head of the University of Toronto’s Massey College.
(Excerpt) Read more at qz.com ...
Really stupid. The first effect is a huge decline in the purchasing power of the currency. This renders the amount given worthless, spurring the government to increase the amount, which causes further decline in value of money, which leads the government to increase ..... [repeat until everybody but the ruling elite is poor]
Why limit themselves to just a free “basic income” for everyone who doesn’t want to work? Wouldn’t it be better to just give each person in the U.S. a trillion dollar coin for not working? Then everyone who doesn’t work would be RICH and not have to exist at just a subsistence level.
Furthermore, everyone could buy anything they wanted and no one would ever have to work again. The coins could be made from a base metal, so they would be cheap to make, and a few extra ones could be minted for the government itself, so taxes could be completely eliminated and yet government could still function. It’s such an elegant solution I don’t know why it hasn’t been implemented yet.
BTW, when I get my trillion dollar coin for not working I’m going to buy a pony and the Denver Broncos. Oh, and then I’m going to buy my own private jet airplane and then the Mona Lisa, and then ... why heck, I’ll be so rich I won’t even need pony food stamps to feed my pony anymore.
Let me guess, the Underpants Gnomes were called-in as consultants.
this would require confiscatory taxes on the working people.
This is “atlas shrugged”
Canda is stuck on stupid if they do this.
Sure you do. In America it is called Welfare.
It takes place in every Town, City, County and State in the U.S.A. now.
As is typical, Leftists invert cause and effect. Money is a measure of capital as in goods and services. You can’t print up money and have capital magically appear; its like moving the needle on the gas gauge on your car and expecting the tank to fill up.
bump
Even Milton Friedman supported the idea of a negative income tax, which amounts to the same thing.
If you are going to provide a safety net, how you do it matters a great deal. It's far better to figure out a way to do it that doesn't need the huge bureaucracy to administer.
Also, the issue of what happens to people when more and more productive activity is replaced by machines is a real one, even if it's still on the horizon.
Well, the law of unintended consequences took hold and within 8 months the price at the pump had shot up and the supply was short. The governor signed a law to suspend the price controls. Epic liberal fail.
The same type of thing will happen with this free basic income idea. Liberals never learn.
They plant money trees
Who was it that referenced the greatest invention ever the printing press (creation of wealth by printing money) as solution to deficit indebtedness.? Another bright idea lightbulb lopside.
“...to be PAID FOR by .... who???”
All their new Illegal aliens who’ve left the US for Canada recently?
Handouts don’t work -
We have record numbers of people on the dole and it hasn’t done a thing to pull the O’conomy out of the toilet.
Maybe if they give people enough to buy yachts, airplanes, Lamborghinis, and McMansions.
The good old saying from the USSR , “We pretend to work and the government pretends to pay us “
Alberta, we can add an extra star to our flag for you... and maybe your friends in Manitoba and Saskatchewan too. Or you can just use Massachusetts’ star when we trade them to Canada.
It could work a lot better than many posters here seem to think. (But, the Ontario experiment likely won’t work at all — given the track record of the current government.)
First, it wouldn’t need to cost any extra; compared to the existing social-welfare mess. Everyone gets a payment — but, most of it would just be taxed back. Existing welfare programs would be cut back or eliminated (ideally).
Most importantly — unlike the existing welfare programs everywhere — it wouldn’t penalize working. You would keep what you earned (less taxes, of course).
Of course, “liberals” will find many ways to mess it up; and ensure that it becomes a costly boondoggle. For instance, with the “basic income” already provided, there would be no reason for a “minimum wage” — let alone increasing it to $15/hr. Everyone would be guaranteed sufficient income to live — and whatever they earned by working would be gravy. In that way, human workers could compete with robots or foreigners. However, we all know that “liberals” would insist on having the “basic income”, plus all existing welfare programs, plus a job-killing minimum wage.
Done right, a “basic income” scheme could save money — and (even more importantly) preserve the work ethic. Done by “liberals”, it will be a disaster. (BTW, I’ve used scare quotes around “liberal” — because that word doesn’t mean what American “liberals” want you to believe it does.)
I don’t think we’re at the economic level of the Star Trek universe yet when this would be feasible.
Eventually we’re going to need it or something like it. As automation picks up it’s going to put millions of people out of work and it’s very unlikely the economy is going to create millions of new jobs elsewhere.
That means that we’ll have huge productivity gains, with corresponding increases in profits, but the free market will have few, if any, ways of getting that money back into the hands of now-unemployed workers. One way of funding it is in taxing automation technology or robots specifically.
These UBI studies are the first efforts at trying to design programs that will manage the disruption caused by automation. They seem way preferable to the alternative, which is expanding a traditional welfare and ineffective job-retraining programs with a corresponding increase in bureaucracy.
Sure - because printing paper money is a valid equivalent to producing real goods for trade. </s>
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