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posted by Fnord666 on Tuesday April 25 2017, @08:54PM   Printer-friendly
from the OBIPP? dept.

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:

related story:
Ontario is Starting a Universal Basic Income Pilot


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  • (Score: 5, Informative) by bob_super on Tuesday April 25 2017, @09:38PM (4 children)

    by bob_super (1357) on Tuesday April 25 2017, @09:38PM (#499612)

    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).

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  • (Score: 2) by mhajicek on Tuesday April 25 2017, @11:45PM

    by mhajicek (51) on Tuesday April 25 2017, @11:45PM (#499691)

    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)

    by jmorris (4844) on Wednesday April 26 2017, @02:59AM (#499809)

    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

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 26 2017, @02:40PM (#500055)

      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

    by TheRaven (270) on Wednesday April 26 2017, @11:05AM (#499931) Journal
    The problem is that it skews marginal utility. Sane UBI schemes integrate it into a progressive income tax system, so you get $X as your UBI payment, then you can earn $Y tax free, then the next $Z is at a low tax rate and so on, where earning more has diminishing returns. In this model, you're effectively paying a 50% tax in your first $X of earned income, after which the tax rate decreases. You end up with a very uneven distribution of taxation, where people on low to middle income jobs are paying a significantly higher proportion of their income in taxes than anyone else.
    --
    sudo mod me up