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The Liberal premier of Ontario announced details of the Ontario Basic Income Pilot. The provincial government issued a press release saying
Three regions will take part in the study. Pilots will start in late spring in Hamilton, including Brantford and Brant County; and in Thunder Bay and the surrounding area. The third pilot will start by this fall [autumn] in Lindsay.
The Basic Income model Ontario has developed will ensure that eligible participants receive:
Up to $16,989 per year for a single person, less 50 per cent of any earned income
Up to $24,027 per year for a couple, less 50 per cent of any earned income
Up to an additional $6,000 per year for a person with a disability.
[...] The three test regions will host 4,000 participants eligible to receive a basic income payment, between the ages of 18 to 64. By late spring, people in these areas will begin receiving information about the pilot and how to participate. The province is partnering with these communities and other experts to make sure that the Ontario Basic Income Pilot is fair, effective, and scientifically valid.
additional coverage:
- Canoe (editorial)
- The Globe and Mail
- globalnews.ca
- The Guardian
- Business Insider
- BBC News
- Canadian Press via City News
- Reuters via NASDAQ
- Toronto Star
- CHCH-TV
- CBC
- CNN Money
related story:
Ontario is Starting a Universal Basic Income Pilot
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 25 2017, @09:05PM (19 children)
less 50 per cent of any earned income
That's poverty assistance, a welfare payment, not basic income. Basic income is guaranteed income regardless of circumstance.
So basically this is a plot to discredit basic income by paying welfare and calling it basic income.
Nice try.
(Score: 0, Troll) by Ethanol-fueled on Tuesday April 25 2017, @09:09PM
And it will go to the Muslims, so that they don't riot, pillage, and rape...
Oh, wait.
(Score: 3, Informative) by bob_super on Tuesday April 25 2017, @09:13PM
One of the side effects of basic income (or this) is that you just give people a chunk of money without employing a hundred thousand people to figure out who deserves a bit and who doesn't.
At a big enough scale, even this flawed experiment would show those savings.
(Score: 2) by draconx on Tuesday April 25 2017, @09:16PM
Indeed, that's certainly what it seems like on the face of it.
The only think I can think of is if the $17K payout is completely tax-free, and this reduction was done as a way to fit the pilot project into the current income tax framework more easily.
But it is more likely that the Liberals just fucked it up.
(Score: 2, Disagree) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday April 25 2017, @09:20PM (2 children)
Six of one, half a dozen of the other. There is no functional difference between basic income and welfare.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 25 2017, @10:15PM (1 child)
That is because you are dumb and can not see it. The basic income plan would remove a huge amount of required oversight with investigators and general bureaucracy overhead. Please keep showing us your massive level of ignorance, it is a nice counterpoint to your arrogance.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday April 25 2017, @10:41PM
Removing bureaucracy from welfare is like putting a bandaid on the Titanic after it hit the iceberg. I don't want more efficient welfare paid for by theft, I want no welfare paid for by theft.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Tuesday April 25 2017, @09:25PM (9 children)
Basic income is guaranteed income regardless of circumstance.
I don't follow what you're complaining about.
totalIncome = baseIncome + (earnedIncome / 2)
Regardless of how much you earn, baseIncome should always be the same, shouldn't it? Or are we making assumptions about taxes? Maybe my definition of "basic" is too naive.
The Basic Income model Ontario has developed will ensure that eligible participants receive:
Up to $16,989 per year for a single person, less 50 per cent of any earned income
ISPs have trained me to be extremely suspicious of anything involving "up to." Zero dollars a year is "up to 17k."
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Tuesday April 25 2017, @09:30PM (1 child)
Oh. Or do they mean,
if(earnedIncome < 16989 * 2)
baseIncome = 16989 - earnedIncome;
else
baseIncome = 0; // you don't need it anyway
Probably should RTFA huh.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 0, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 25 2017, @09:34PM
Let's make basic income look bad by giving it to folks who never learned basic math.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 25 2017, @09:32PM (1 child)
Plus sign, minus sign, what's the difference, I don't even.
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Wednesday April 26 2017, @02:45PM
Up to $16,989 per year for a single person, less 50 per cent of any earned income
baseIncome + (earnedIncome / 2)
Plus sign, minus sign, what's the difference, I don't even.
Point out where I'm wrong. Or if we want to get pedantic, I'll expand it out:
baseIncome + earnedIncome - (earnedIncome / 2)
There's your minus sign. Ya happy now?
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 5, Informative) by bob_super on Tuesday April 25 2017, @09:38PM (4 children)
I think his point might be that your minimum wage job now pays 50% for the first $17k. You'd better be making a lot more than that, to have an incentive to bother to get out of bed and put the kids in daycare.
"Normal" fixed UBI doesn't discourage you from working if you want, because everything extra lands in your pocket (minus taxes). Any assistance that decreases with rising revenue does have a "is it worth working" cost.
In this case, the menial jobs would have to go up in salary to attract people on UBI, or go to people not getting the UBI (hence the need for full-scale experiments, as border effects WILL apply).
(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Tuesday April 25 2017, @11:45PM
Around here an entry level wage full time job is about break-even with transportation and child care costs. If my wife got a full time job she'd net about $20 / week after taxes and expenses. That's a no brainer even without cutting the takehome in half.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 2) by jmorris on Wednesday April 26 2017, @02:59AM (1 child)
Don't worry, you would be paying 50%+ on the rest too, where do you think the money is coming from to redistribute? These rules are only for a pilot program anyway.
I ran the numbers for here in the U.S. and I get it requiring about 22 1/2% of GDP to fund that 16, 989 per adult in the U.S. Or about half of all government (local, state and federal combined) intake. The current welfare state is indeed large, but we also spend a good chunk of that on poorly maintained roads, killing brown people with expensive smart bombs, poorly educating our children, etc. More importantly a large part of the income redistribution portion of the public fisc is related to medical care which isn't included in this basic income crap so it wouldn't be getting replaced by switching to UBI.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 26 2017, @02:40PM
The tax brackets scale, so a much larger portion would be paid by the highest earners. At say 150k / year you are likely getting no benefit from UBI. At $1mil you are paying back at least $300-500k in taxes. Such tax ratios sure worked well back in the day. You "ran the numbers" lawl
(Score: 2) by TheRaven on Wednesday April 26 2017, @11:05AM
sudo mod me up
(Score: 2) by driven on Wednesday April 26 2017, @01:33AM (1 child)
I also question what a pilot project of 4,000 is going to prove. It's one thing for a small number of people to get this additional income. When lots of people get it then stores will react by raising prices. Then the poor will still be poor.
(Score: 2) by Scruffy Beard 2 on Thursday April 27 2017, @02:12AM
..or they can react by shipping more goods in, increasing the GDP.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 26 2017, @02:49AM
So basically this is a plot to discredit basic income by paying welfare and calling it basic income.
And it'll succeed for the elites wildly. UBI will never happen. Humans would rather kill each other first.
Well, I shouldn't say never. It's always possible that in a million or even a few hundred thousand years, humans might have evolved into a species that has other priorities than bloodsports.
I think the Drake equation looks at filter events wrong. It's not nuclear war that's the filter event or whatever; that can be survived. It's evolving from a species that is merely technological into a species that is finally able to supplant their animal instincts with rationality, despite absolutely no known natural selection pressure to do so.
Humans are the apex predators of the planet. At a population exceeding 7 billion, I'd call that a huge success. Can humans be anything more than apex predators?