Swiss voting on basic income of £21,000 a year!

michaels

With a basic income would you also have a minimum wage?

michaels

HornetSaver wrote: »

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-36443512

Seems a bit high, doesn't it?

If the UK were to adopt a measure along those lines, the gross cost would be somewhere in the region of £1trillion per year, which is comparable to, if not slightly greater than, the entirety of current government spending.

Obviously the upside is that you could justifiably eliminate all welfare spending, including the state pension, you could probably privatise the NHS (make it free for children; assuming the model was done correctly every adult could afford it) and in theory could abolish the minimum wage.

But given the downsides of inflation, disincentive for low-skilled people to work in unfulfilling jobs, and the sheer size of the cost even after those savings, I don't see how it could work?

It's been an interesting hypothetical question for years, one I've seen discussed at least twice on these boards, but given that a developed country is actually taking it seriously I felt it warranted a new discussion.

After Brexit could we have monetary and fiscal union with the Norwegian sovereign Wealth Fund and Switzerland please?

Generali

michaels wrote: »

After Brexit could we have monetary and fiscal union with the Norwegian sovereign Wealth Fund and Switzerland please?

You could be the poor cousins having the Swiss paying for golden motorways to the moon.

zagubov

This is quite remarkable considering that Scandinavia and Switzerland have always had such glaringly opposite social and economic policies.

(Although they coexist well in EFTA (a free trade organisation that the UK invented).

cadon

People need to work.

No one wants to work.

Paying people to work solves that problem. If everyone received a basic income, nothing would get done.

Maz

Articles from the Independent -
http://http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/switzerland-set-to-vote-on-universal-basic-income-a7064086.html

HAMISH_MCTAVISH

michaels wrote: »

After Brexit could we have monetary and fiscal union with the Norwegian sovereign Wealth Fund

The Norwegian Sovereign Wealth Fund is quite big, but to put it in perspective, had it been the UK's Sovereign Wealth Fund we'd have spent it all just to cover the deficit between 2008 and 2014.

HornetSaver

michaels wrote: »

With a basic income would you also have a minimum wage?

That would largely depend on whether the basic income were enough to survive on.

Speaking personally, no I wouldn't have one. Skilled jobs would always pay, and for unskilled jobs - except for a couple of areas that are seen as vocations, such as caring - the decision would become whether to pay more or to automate.

People need to work.

No one wants to work.

Paying people to work solves that problem. If everyone received a basic income, nothing would get done.

If that argument were true, most of the world would be communist and making no effort to move away from it. The fact is that capitalism is the dominant form of economic management, because a large majority of people are willing to do whatever is necessary, within the law, to better themselves and their families. That mindset and working go hand-in-hand.

Nonetheless, it's of course true that basic income would mean a higher percentage of people choosing not to work. But the type that would do anything to avoid an honest day's work for an honest day's pay are people we'd do perfectly well without. We already pay some of them a bunch of benefits that most hard-working people won't get, and that cross-section would be the biggest losers of basic income.

In any event, there's a simple, undeniable case for basic income - one which, lack of nuclear war or extinction event permitting, will see it implemented not too long after the likes of Clapton sadly depart us. We are not too many decades away from the point where the correlation between private sector job numbers and economic performance will loosen to the point of having little relationship at all. Why? Due to continuous (though gradual) improvements in automation and productivity. I'm being conservative here and not anticipating a revolution - simply saying that if things incrementally improve we will get to the point where basic income makes more sense on every measure than welfare states which dwarf today's, and a myriad of other spending programmes which working people should be able to afford for themselves.

Switzerland are rich enough to fund this measure, though voters will almost certainly reject it because other conditions are not in place (managed immigration, the fact that the relationship between job creation and economic prosperity is still very firmly in place, the fact that the initial level is too high - start it low and then tweak it so that it's high enough to survive but low enough to ensure that only those with no ambition to do anything else would attempt to live on it).

CLAPTON

BBC reports that the swiss voted against the basic income proposal

antrobus

CLAPTON wrote: »

BBC reports that the swiss voted against the basic income proposal

Yup. Final results were NO by a margin of 77% to 23%.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-36454060

Mind you, I'm not surprised. The proposal was to pay everybody 25000 CHF a month, which I think is about 21k a year in real money, without any hint whatsoever as to how it was going to be paid for.