I have been reading a lot on universal basic income. It's essentially just the government giving every citizen a set amount of money, but there are A LOT of different systems and little details. I think as automation continues, this will become a very popular topic world wide so I wanted to see what everyone here thinks of it. My take on it is this: Scrap the welfare state and its complicated web of benefits, which also means laying off all those bureaucrats who administer the system. Give every citizen enough to get by (10K-20K per annum maybe.) Also get rid of minimum wage. End the governments involvement in "job creation." Job creation for job creations (and vote gaining) sake is terrible, it's not a great way to allocate resources. Jobs should be ADDING VALUE to the economy. Then you have to tweak taxation a bit too, perhaps increase consumption tax and decrease income tax. These are VERY rough details though, I'm just a run of the mill office drone who likes to day-dream. What I see if this could ever be implemented is a system where work is optional, and you can do whatever work you want to do. You can take the time to develop yourself, not just working for others. Undesirable jobs would suddenly become high-paying jobs, and "ghost" and easy jobs would either disappear or be paid peanuts, but people would do them and not have to really worry about how much they make. Some of you will see the merit in this, and some of you will think I am off my rocker.
Giving EVERY citizen 10-20k per year would be several trillions a year spent total just on this one thing. Most people don't need it, and any responsible citizen not needing it should not want such a thing. Better to give working people tax breaks, and I also think that the grossly excessive government spending less overall on things like crony capitalism w/contractors, and govt employee pensions, excessive benefits and pay should be greatly reduced... and reducing the size of govt itself significantly would go a long way. There's so much fraud, waste, abuse, etc in the govt itself it's disgusting. That's one reason why I don't like higher taxes. I wouldn't mind so much if I could halfway trust the people in Washington with my tax dollars.
Rough math time, these #'s are for Canada. We have a population of 35 million, but we'll cut out <18 year olds so say 34 million. 34 million people at 15k a person is about 500 billion. We only collect 300 billion a year so you are right it is an excessive amount. BUT my province collects another 150 billion which gets us closer to that #. But only about 50% of this is spent on the social safety net system (I am guessing that includes administrative costs, site I was on didn't really say) So that leaves my idea 60% in the hole (sounds about right for a government program, ha.) I agree most people don't need it, but the dream would be those people would donate that money to the causes that THEY care about (instead of having the government decide where the money goes and losing some of it to government waste in the process.) I know UBI is a really tough idea to get right even on paper. What I always like about it is I feel it would be good at eliminating all that waste you are talking about JR. It's nice and simple and there is no hidden agenda or patchwork of programs that benefit some and not others. Plus it cannot be abused because everyone gets it. Plus we can eliminate the entire section of the government that administer the system, a handful of people and some good computers can run the whole thing. I only see governments moving in one direction. They are taxing more and they are spending more. Eventually this is going to have to come home to roost. Hopefully we can come up with a solution within my lifetime.
My understanding is that there are several similar methods, but that the preferred one is a negative income tax. I don't really know all the details, however, from what I understand it is really important that if a new scheme is adopted it doesn't create a disincentive to actually working. One of the problems with the current progressive taxation schemes is that there are threshold where you actually lose money when you get an earnings bump, I believe the negative income tax schemes address this, where UBI does not.
A buddy of mine was talking about this subject awhile ago. He was suggesting that income tax should be abolished and the government should raise the sales tax of everything else. That alone would teach people to be thrifty shoppers. It may or may not work out numbers wise, but it did spark interest in my mind.
