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Category Archives: Basic Income Guarantee

The case for and against a universal basic income in the United States – Vox

Posted: May 13, 2017 at 5:47 am

What would happen if we gave everyone free money, every year, forever, with no strings attached?

This is a concept known as a universal basic income, or UBI. The idea is to guarantee everyone some minimum amount of money so that no one has to live in poverty. And while it might sound a little crazy, the idea is being tested around the world with pilot studies in Canada, Finland, the Netherlands, Kenya, and even one in the United States, based out of Silicon Valley.

In the most recent episode of the Weeds in the Wild podcast, we explored a Kenyan pilot experiment run by a nonprofit called GiveDirectly. Theyre giving everyone in a small village around $22 a month for the next 12 years. We talked about how it might shape policies overseas.

In our reporting, we also talked to two people about something slightly different: what a universal basic income might mean here in the United States.

Bob Greenstein has been working on poverty-related policies for 45 years. Hes with the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

Andy Stern is a former national union leader.

Stern and Greenstein both like the concept of universal basic income and think that people could be trusted to spent a basic income appropriately.

But when it comes to making an American universal basic income a reality, the two have examined the same set of facts and come to fundamentally different conclusions. We spoke to Greenstein and Stern on different occasions, but we asked each of them questions about arguments the other had raised. Weve put them into a kind of dialogue, so that they can address each others claims.

Greenstein is skeptical of the idea. He worries, given his experience in the United States, that creating something like a UBI here would mean slashing other important safety net programs. And he doesnt think its worth the trade-off:

UBI would replace virtually every program in the federal budget focused on low- or moderate-income people.

No food stamps. No Medicaid. No low-income housing. Forget child care. Head Start. Job training. Pell Grants to help people attend college.

You're going to have more deep poverty, homelessness and things like that. That's not what UBI proponents favor, I know. I've had discussions with people where they say, Bob, that's not what we're calling for! I know!

But what they're calling for? I don't see it in the US politically. I share the goals; I just dont think you can get there from here. And I want to focus on progress we can make.

Stern argues that the US is losing jobs to automation and new technology, and is only going to lose more. He says we need to start getting very creative about ways to solve the problems that job loss will create. A universal basic income might mean cuts to welfare, Stern admits, but he argues that it would be an effective way to build bipartisan support, or crossover.

I think it's politically unfeasible in a ... world that, at the moment, politically, is controlled at a federal level by Republicans that we're going to hold on to the things that Bob says we need to improve upon.

I think you need crossover. And I think Bob is right that if you gave the Republicans a free rein, they would cut too many programs and hurt too many people, but I don't think that's the starting place for the discussion.

I am for getting rid of some of basic welfare as we know it. I would get rid of EITC [the earned income tax credit], food stamps, [and] unemployment insurance, and substitute cash for it. I would never touch, you know, Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security. So I'm taking about half of the existing welfare programs and repurposing them for a universal basic income.

The two also disagree about whether it would be possible to fund a universal basic income even if you did make cuts to welfare as we know it. Stern has a plan to offer $1,000 a month to every citizen between the ages of 18 and 64. He estimates it will cost around $1.7 trillion, and believes we could find that by shuffling around our tax code:

I think paying for things is always important. I say that there's $500 billion as part of the 122 current cash transfer programs that could be repurposed for this.

There's $1.3 trillion in sort of corporate tax expenditures, which mostly go to [the] middle and upper middle class. Therere tax breaks, you know, for things like charitable deductions or your second vacation home that most working people don't ever get to take advantage of...

People who've lived in other countries understand that we're the only country in the OECD that doesn't have a value-added tax of any level. You know, that would raise a tremendous amount of money.

So to me it's about political will, not a question of is there enough money in the United States.

Again, Greenstein doesnt believe thats politically feasible. He told us that a radical shift like this is unlikely to pass, especially since it involves the government giving cash payments to people without jobs. Policy change, he says, is incremental:

Yes, I know that UBI supporters, some of them, say, No, no, we'll do huge taxes on the rich. Well, we haven't done a really good job of getting them through. You completely lose the right side of your left-right coalition when you do that.

And besides, we're going to need very substantial tax increases in the years ahead just to shore up and prevent insolvency in Social Security and Medicare, to deal with other big problems like crumbling infrastructure, climate change...

If I thought the political culture in the US was like Western Europe, where you have much higher levels of taxation, and more universal support, I'd love that. I'm for that. But that's not the real world in the US.

The political culture and history of the US is very clear that policymakers and the general public do not support big cash payments for poor people who don't work, who don't have jobs, who aren't employed.

I dont agree with that! Ive spent years fighting that!

I have really learned in 45 years in the trenches that there is not the same kind of support in this country. I wish there were!

Wishing doesn't make it so.

I've been working here on poverty and budget issues since 1972, and what I've really learned is: Change comes incrementally in this country.

It's unglamorous. It's frustrating. It's imperfect. The name of the game is just to spend year after year, decade after decade, working as hard as you can.

Stern thinks the loss of jobs to automation is going to change what is and isnt politically feasible:

I think technology is gonna destroy the labor market as we know it, and it's going to create a desperate need to find solutions in order to provide social stability.

Wealthy people, historically when there were riots in the 60s, you know were able to respond in order to in some ways protect themselves. But now their kids, middle-class kids, are going to be affected.

So I think there will be a growing political movement that includes middle-class people involved.

And, Stern adds, the policies Greenstein is fighting for may not be any more feasible than a UBI in the current political climate.

We're about to lose some of the most basic programs we had, like Medicare, potentially. I dont think there's any proof that it's any more politically feasible to hold on to what we have than to build on a big new idea.

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The case for and against a universal basic income in the United States - Vox

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THE NETHERLANDS: Social Assistance Experiments Under Review – Basic Income News

Posted: May 9, 2017 at 3:25 pm

Researchers in several Dutch municipalities are preparing experiments to test the effects of the removal of conditions on social assistance. Although not testing basic income per se, the experiments will examine one of its key attributes (the reduction of conditionality).

This year, popular sources have occasionally continued to report that the Dutch city of Utrecht is preparing to launchor has already launcheda pilot study of universal basic income (sometimes continuing to cite a now-outdated article published in The Atlantic in June 2016). In this light, it is particularly important to clarify the facts surrounding the Dutch social assistance experiments.

It is true that researchers have proposed experiments in several Dutch municipalities that will examine the effects of reducing conditions on welfare benefits, including the removal of job-seeking requirements and a lessening in the amount benefits are reduced with income. However, as explained below, these experiments will not test a full-fledged basic income. Moreover, at the time of this writing, none of the municipal social experiments have been launched: those in Groningen, Tilburg, and Wageningen are awaiting approval from the Dutch Ministry of Social Affairs; meanwhile, the experiment in Utrecht has been delayed indefinitely, having been denied approval by the Ministry.

Background: The Participation Act, Motivation, and Design

The Dutch Participation Act, enacted in 2015, imposes conditions on recipients of social welfare that are intended to promote their reintegration into paid employment. For example, beneficiaries are typically required to complete five job applications per week, attend group meetings, and participate in training activities in order to continue receive cash assistance.

Researchers at Utrecht University School of Economics, such as Loek Groot and Timo Verlaat, have criticized the conditions and sanctions imposed by the Participation Act from standpoint of behavioral economics. Research in behavioral economics has demonstrated, for example, that performing tasks for monetary rewards can crowd out individuals intrinsic motivation to perform such tasks. Furthermore, deprivation and fear of losing benefits may engender a scarcity mindset that impedes rational decision making. Drawing from such findings, researchers like Groot and Verlaat have hypothesized that reducing conditions on welfare benefits would better promote individuals reintegration and productive contributions to society (see, e.g., Utrecht University and City of Utrecht start experiment to study alternative forms of social assistance, last accessed May 6, 2017; note that the start date mentioned in the article, May 1, is no longer accurate).

The social experiments proposed in Utrecht and other Dutch municipalities have been designed to test the above hypothesis: randomly selected welfare recipients (who agree to participate) will be randomly assigned either to a control group or a treatment group, one in which reintegration requirements on receipt of benefits will be removed. (Although the exact design of the experiments has differed between municipalitiesand between versions of the proposalall have included a treatment group with the elimination of job-seeking conditions. Proposals experiments have also included groups with different interventions, such as, in several recent versions, increased reintegration requirements and relaxation on means-testing; see below.) These treatment groups will be compared to a control group, as well as a reference group composed of individuals not selected for the experiment, with respect to outcomes such as labor market participation, debt, health, and life-satisfaction.

Meanwhile, however, researchers must grapple with another consequence of the Participation Act: the law limits the extent to which they are legally permitted to test alternative welfare policies. For one, as mentioned in a previous Basic Income News article, the Ministry of Social Affairs has required that the municipal officials overseeing the experiment must check after six and twelve months to determine whether experimental subjects have made sufficient efforts to find paid work. At these times, if an individual has been found to have undertaken too few employment-promoting activities, their participation in the experiment must be ended. This constraint reintroduces some degree of conditionality even for treatment groups in which the requirement to participate in reintegration activities has been lifted from social assistance.

In addition, the Ministry has also requested that experiments include an additional treatment group in which stricter reintegration requirements are introduced. The experiments proposed for the municipalities of Tilburg, Wageningen, and Groningen, are currently under review by the Ministry, include such a treatment group; the initial (and unapproval) design of the Utrecht experiment did not.

Relationship to Basic Income

Largely for political reasons, proponents of the Dutch social experiments have avoided the use of the term basic income (basisinkomen in Dutch), with researchers in Utrecht calling their proposed experiment by the name Weten Wat Werkt (English: Know What Works). (In the Netherlands, basic income is often associated with the stereotype of giving free money to lazy people.)

This avoidance is apt, however, since the experiments have indeed not been designed to test a universal and fully unconditional basic income. The designs of the experiments have either not been finalized or are still pending government approval (see below). Regardless, however, it seems certain that any of the experiments (if approved) will test policies that differ from a basic income in several key respects. First, the population of the experiment is not universal; participants are to be selected from current welfare recipients (as is also the case in Finlands Basic Income Experiment, launched on January 1, 2017, which has also been designed to test the labor market effects of the removal of conditions on welfare benefits for the unemployed).

Furthermore, within the treatment conditions themselves, the benefit will remain means-tested and household-based (rather than individual-based), in both respects unlike a basic income. In all designs proposed to date, participants within all treatment groups will have their benefits reduced if they take a paid job during the course of the experiment. However, the Tilburg, Wageningen, and Groningen experiments, as currently planned, will include a treatment group in which benefits would be reduced at slower rate (50% of earned income instead of 75%).

In the latter respects, the Dutch municipal experiments bear more similarity to the Ontario Basic Income Pilot than Finlands Basic Income Experiment [1]. While the Finnish pilot is indeed investigating non-means-tested benefits paid to individuals, the pilot studies in Ontario and (if approved) the Netherlands will continue to work with programs in which the amount of benefits depend on income and household status; however, in all cases, many conditionalities on benefits will be removed in some experimental conditions.

Despite these differences, some view the Dutch social assistance experiments as a possible step toward a full-fledged basic income. Moreover, as seen above, the experiments have been motivated largely by arguments from behavioral economics that have previously been invoked in arguments in favor of the unconditionality of basic income (see, e.g., the 2009 Basic Income Studies article Behavioral Economics and The Basic Income Guarantee by Wesley J. Pech).

Status of the Experiments

In contrast to some rumors and media presentations, none of the proposed social assistance experiments in the Netherlands has yet been launched.

The experiment in Utrecht, which had earlier in the year been to declared to have a launch date of May 1, has been deferred. According to a statement about the experiment on the City of Utrecht webpage, The Ministry of Social Affairs and Employment has indicated that we need to do the experiment in a different way. We are discussing how we can conduct the study.

Researchers are currently considering alternative designs of the experiment that will bring them into compliance with the Participation Act, and no new start date has been announced.

Meanwhile, the Ministry is reviewing experiments proposed in Tilburg, Wageningen, and Groningen, with an announcement expected later in May. As previously mentioned, these experiments have been designed to avoid conflict with the Participation Act, as had been one concern with the originally proposed design of the Utrecht experiment.

Basic Income News will publish a follow-up article of the Dutch municipal experiments, including further details on their design and implementation, after their final approval by the government.

Thanks to Arjen Edzes, Ruud Muffels, and Timo Verlaat for information and updates, and to Florie Barnhoorn and Dave Clegg for reviewing this article.

Photo: Groningen, CC BY 2.0Bert Kaufmann

[1] I am here using these terms as proper names given by the respective governments, despite the differences between the experimental programs and a basic income as defined by BIEN.

Kate McFarland has written 418 articles.

Kate has previously worked as a professional student, but is currently taking a mid-career retirement.

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Former Greek Finance Minister: Universal Basic Income Is Now A Necessity – Mintpress News (blog)

Posted: May 7, 2017 at 11:48 pm

Yanis Varoufakis and Noam Chomsky discuss the concept of a basic income guarantee also known as a universal basic income.

(Photo: Russell Shaw Higgs/Creative Commons)

Published in partnership with acTVism.

In this video, former finance minister of Greece, professor of economics, author, and founder of the Democracy in Europe Movement 2025 (DiEM25), Yanis Varoufakis, argues why the Basic Income is a necessity today. His arguments take into account a macro socio-economic, psychological, philosophical and moral perspective. In addition to the speech, Varoufakis addresses a wide range of questions from the public.

All of these questions and much more are addressed in the video:

About Yanis Varoufakis:

Yanis Varoufakis is aprofessor of Economic Theory at the University of Athens, founder of the Democracy in Europe Movement 2025 (DiEM25) and former finance minister of Greece.

As finance minister of Greece he resigned shortly after he found out that his prime minister decided to cave into the austerity program of the Troika that the majority of Greece rejected in the historic OXI vote.

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David Green, GETTING PAID TO DO NOTHING: WHY THE IDEA OF CHINA’S DIBAO IS CATCHING ON – Basic Income News

Posted: May 6, 2017 at 3:34 am

Hong Kongs newspaper of record, South China Morning Post, recently covered the surge of interest inUniversal Basic Income (UBI) in the Asia Pacific.

The author, David Green, points out the positive data that has been demonstrated thus far from cash-grant experiments, such as in India.

South Korea has had interest in basic income since the youth dividend was implemented in Seongnam city. BIEN held itsCongress in South Korea last year.

The article notes that Taiwan is seeing increased interest in the idea of basic income since the first Asia Pacific focused Basic Income conference was held in Taipei.

The headline references Chinas dibao program, which is a cash-grant minimum income guarantee.The dibao has many differences to UBI as conceived by Basic Income Earth Network (BIEN). Primarily, dibaois not a universal cash-grant (dibao is means-tested and only given to those that are under the dibao poverty line).

Due to dibaosmeans-tests, the article notes there are an array of issues withChinas minimum income guarantee, primarily that it does not reach the poor.

Tyler Prochazka, features editor of BI News, was quoted as advocating for China to create special economic zones to test a UBI.

David Green, GETTING PAID TO DO NOTHING: WHY THE IDEA OF CHINAS DIBAO IS CATCHING ON, South China Morning Post, April 14, 2017.

Tyler Prochazka has written 61 articles.

Tyler Prochazka is a Fulbright scholar completing his Master's in Asia Pacific Studies at National Chengchi University in Taiwan. He is the features editor of Basic Income News and a coordinator for UBI Taiwan. Tyler launched the first Asia-Pacific basic income conference in 2017. Facebook.com/TaiwanUBI @typro

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Basic Income pilot critical for reducing food insecurity: health unit – www.muskokaregion.com/

Posted: at 3:34 am

Basic Income pilot critical for reducing food insecurity: health unit
http://www.muskokaregion.com/
This week's announcement to offer a strong, progressive form of basic income is exciting, said Associate Medical Officer of Health Dr. Lisa Simon. The rationale for a basic income guarantee is solid. There have been several basic income projects ...

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Basic Income pilot critical for reducing food insecurity: health unit - http://www.muskokaregion.com/

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Community pitching together puts Lindsay on the list for Basic Income Guarantee pilot – Kawartha Media Group

Posted: April 27, 2017 at 2:05 am

Community pitching together puts Lindsay on the list for Basic Income Guarantee pilot
Kawartha Media Group
LINDSAY Mike Perry jokes that giving Kawartha Dairy ice cream to government officials might have helped bring an important basic income guarantee initiative to Lindsay. And several people are saying that without Perry's leadership, it wouldn't have ...

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Province chooses Lindsay as one location to launch Basic Income Guarantee pilot project – Kawartha Media Group

Posted: April 25, 2017 at 4:59 am

Province chooses Lindsay as one location to launch Basic Income Guarantee pilot project
Kawartha Media Group
On Monday (April 24) Premier Kathleen Wynne announced Lindsay will be one of three 'test' locations for a new initiative aimed at lifting people out of poverty the Basic Income Guarantee (BIG) pilot program. "One income used to be enough," said Wynne ...

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Guaranteed income won’t help women: Opinion – Toronto Star

Posted: April 21, 2017 at 2:22 am

"The original basic income experiment in Manitoba demonstrated that the basic income payments encouraged more women with young children to take more time off paid work to provide unpaid care work," writes Kathleen Lahey. "It is well known that it is precisely womens long-term absence from paid work during lengthy parental leaves that exacerbates gendered pay and income gaps." ( Dreamstime )

By Kathleen Lahey

Thu., April 20, 2017

The basic income guarantee (BIG) as being framed in Ontario today may well be a conversation-changer. But in reality, it will change the conversation away from meeting the biggest demonstrated labour market and income equality challenge in Canada right now ensuring that Canadas increasingly well-educated female, indigenous, racialized, refugee, and immigrant populations have equal access to equal pay and affordable, flexible, and accessible care resources.

The original basic income experiment in Manitoba demonstrated that the basic income payments encouraged more women with young children to take more time off paid work to provide unpaid care work. It is well known that it is precisely womens long-term absence from paid work during lengthy parental leaves that exacerbates gendered pay and income gaps.

The only other labour market disincentive effect that Manitobas experiment had was to encourage young men to stay in their education programs longer. Thus, the Manitoba experiment showed it actually increased gender-based economic inequalities at that time.

Why would Ontario, with one of the highest levels of highly educated and motivated women in paid work, want to set up a program to undercut those womens chances of achieving economic gender equality in their lives?

Especially because Canada provides less child care support than any of the other richest countries in the world (the OECD countries), it is urgent that large budgetary allotments, such as the $8 billion the BIG experiment would apparently cost Ontario, be devoted to meeting care needs in Ontario, and to ensuring that all paid work in Ontario is gender equal in all dimensions.

If women are offered between 75 per cent and 100 per cent of a poverty-line income, no strings attached, it will make it all the more financially difficult for them to opt instead for paid work that involves high costs for care, high gender income gaps, and harsh levels of income and social security taxation.

At 75 per cent to 100 per cent of poverty level incomes, the BIG would also place pressure on recipients to join the shadow economy to avoid large clawbacks of the BIG allowance. It would reward all the wrong choices for a country that holds gender equality as a fundamental and core value.

Canada as a nation already spends at least $24 billion per year to subsidize the unpaid work of single and potential second-earner parents, a vast sum that could, if redirected, easily provide the funding for universal care programs in Canada.

Comparative research makes it clear that countries that want to, and need to, take advantage of all the talents of all adults in their labour forces actively prioritize child care funding to make sure paid work can pay for all adults, not just for those who can rely on women to provide the bulk of unpaid care work.

An OECD study demonstrated that a second-earner parent earning two-thirds of the average Ontario wage could expect to spend 78 per cent of their gross earnings on taxes plus child care (Toronto, 2012), leaving just 22 per cent of their gross pay as take home income net of all taxes, subsidies, and child care costs.

The same study showed that single parents would only take home 6 per cent of their gross earnings after all taxes and care costs are taken into consideration. The entire Canadian and Ontario tax/transfer systems are heavily weighted against enabling women to make paid work pay.

If Ontario wants to optimize the talents of its highly educated and motivated labour force, it will build out its social security system, provide meaningful paid work incentives for those who can move off of social security into decent paid work that can finance lifelong economic security, and establish better income safety nets for those facing unemployment, disability, and unexpected economic crises.

And it will also increase its contributions to post-secondary education so it does not continue to disincentivize those who have to mortgage their futures to student loans in order to someday earn an economically secure wage.

Given the importance of increasing the productivity of all members of Canadian society, the BIG will clearly make it even harder for paid work to pay for any adult who is singled out by tradition, finances, family resources, or workplace discrimination to be the family caregiver.

Kathleen Lahey, professor and Queens national scholar, Faculty of Law, Queens University, specializes in tax, fiscal policy, equality, and property issues.

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Universal basic income can work only if welfare schemes are phased out: CEA Arvind Subramanian – Financial Express

Posted: April 19, 2017 at 10:01 am

Universal basic income (UBI) will guarantee all citizens enough income to cover their basic needs and would be easier to administer than the current anti-poverty schemes, which are plagued by waste, corruption, and abuse. (Reuters)

The radical idea of giving free money under a universal basic income plan to reduce poverty can work in India only if the plethora of welfare schemes are phased out, Chief Economic Adviser Arvind Subramanian has said. Subramanian who had mooted the idea of universal basic income or a uniform stipend paid to every adult and child, poor or rich, in the annual survey of the economy this year said such a move will have to be completely financed from within and implemented at a mass scale. Universal basic income (UBI) will guarantee all citizens enough income to cover their basic needs and would be easier to administer than the current anti-poverty schemes, which are plagued by waste, corruption, and abuse.According to The Economist, Indias proposal to give every citizen a cash transfer using the digital platform Aadhaar could reduce absolute poverty from 22 per cent to 0.5 per cent. The Indian setting is completely different in two three different ways. One is that this is not going to be donor-financed at all (like in some African countries). It is going to be completely financed (from) within, Subramanian said in his appearance at the Center for Global Development, a top American think-tank.

So the issues that come up, relate to is do we have the fiscal space to do? Secondly, if it happened this is going to be kind of a scaled-up version. Its not going to be 80 villages, what is the impact and then we think about scaling up. It will be a scaled-up kind of a thing, he said, observing that this was something that does not necessarily need to be implemented by the centre like one scheme.

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States can start on their own, noted Subramanian, who is currently in the US to attend the annual Spring meetings of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. Observing that providing UBI would amount to between four and five per cent of GDP, he said the Indian government cannot afford that. So the only way it can work is to potentially we can phase down some of the existing programmes, otherwise it does not work, he said.

Then you get into the political economy of questions like can you phase down other subsidiesthe fertilizer subsidy, the employment guarantee scheme. Can you phase those programmes politically or now? When you cant phase it down an extra four-five per cent of GDP is not very meaningful, he said. Subramanian also noted that some people think that India has built in a reasonably well social welfare programme in terms of giving away subsidised food. Would this undermine that? And the third big question is, is the infrastructure to implement thisthe whole biometrics, financial inclusion, and mobile, he said in response to a question.

India currently has 1.1 billion people covered under biometrics. At the same time 250 million have banking financial accounts and about 60 per cent of those are linked to the AADHAAR numbers, Subramanian said. In terms of mobiles, 250 million people have smart phones, 300 million people have regular phones and 350 million people have no phones, he noted. Ideally one would like to have the biometric number, bank account and mobile phone linked with each other, he said. That is the kind of dream, we call it the JAM (Jan Dhan-Aadhaar-Mobile) infrastructure. At the moment, it is very patched in the way it is developed, he said.

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Noting that in principle nothing prevents a state government from going on its own, Subramanian said, what some of the states, which are thinking about it seriously, do want is federal money for this. The states might ask for untied money from the Centre, he said. That is the kind of conversation that is beginning to happen, because that would make it easier for the state governments to finance this, Subramanian said.

One of the starting points for this in India is the various social welfare schemes, like the employment guarantee scheme, the food or kerosene subsidy are very leaky and they do not do a very great job in reaching the poor, he said. UBI can easily be an improvement on that, the chief economic adviser said. Responding to a question, Subramanian said that it would be very difficult to phase out the existing subsidy programmes, because of the potential political opposition to it. Thats true across the world, very difficult to withdraw entitlements, he said. So unless you phase down existing programmesyou cant really (implement UBI)because the magnitude is so big, he said.

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Martin Sandbu, Money can buy you work – Basic Income News

Posted: April 12, 2017 at 8:35 am

Martin Sandbu last week offered a defence of universal basic income (UBI) in his Financial Times newsletter, Free Lunch. The article is part of a week-long series on automation and its economic effects.

In this piece, Sandbu addresses the question: which policies can help those who face reduced demand for the labour they are used to providing when robots, automation and other technology come in? He argues against protectionist policies and those responses that would, he claims, hinder the advance of automation, like a robot tax.

He then weighs UBI against a job guarantee, citing another Financial Times article by Diane Coyle favouring the latter. Agreeing with Coyle that jobs are valuable to individuals beyond the income they provide, Sandbu argues that a UBI would in fact fare better in the long term in ensuring access to employment:

[T]he fact that UBI leaves job creation to the private sector means it can meet the goals of the job guarantee proponents better than the job guarantee itself. It is important to recognise that one function of UBI is to create demand for jobs that serve the UBI recipients themselves because thats what they will be spending their money on.

Sandbu also recently spoke about UBI on the Financial Times podcast, Alphachat, and has written favourably about basic income in the past.

Martin Sandbu, Money can buy you work, Financial Times, 6 April 2017.

Reviewed by Kate McFarland

Photo: Martin Sandbu, Financial Times, at Norges Bank Symposium, CC BY-ND 2.0 Norges Bank

Genevieve Shanahan has written 17 articles.

Genevieve is a graduate of University College London, with an MPhil in philosophy. She currently works at the Grenoble Ecole de Management, assisting with research on young people and work in Europe, and otherwise reads and writes about basic income.

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