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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: 2) by Scruffy Beard 2 on Wednesday April 26 2017, @01:38AM (2 children)
Do you really want to go there? Ecology is often squeezed out in the name of economic growth. The fauna generally have no ability to sue for damages.
With Basic Income, you don't actually need minimum wage anymore. As an AC pointed out, a 50% tax on the working poor is not Basic Income.
Welfare depresses wages, because the poor are not allowed to turn down potential employment: else they risk getting cut off. mhajicek [soylentnews.org] pointed out that a minimum wage job can easily cost as much as it brings in.
Might as well stay home and play video games at that point.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 26 2017, @02:24AM (1 child)
What the hell does that have to do with anything? GPP was pointing out that the economy is basically what we call people dealing with each other. In the absence of people (say, after we wipe each other out with face-targeted nuclear devices) whatever's left isn't an economy, it's an ecology.
Granted, UBI on a society-wide basis does tend to render a minimum wage moot. However, to describe what's going on as a 50% tax on the working poor is disingenuous at best. "Here's a fat wad of cash! Oh, we'll give you a bit less if you actually have income." It's more like a means-adjusted UBI, which actually comports quite well with some of the proposals for UBI, in which it simply scales linearly with income tax as people earn more, thus rendering each incremental dollar (or pound or peso or whatever) of income equal up and down the income scale, but establishing a social floor. Speaking of which ...
Sure! You're right! Totally dead, spot on, not a hair off the mark! ... with what you're saying. What you're missing is the reason why the USA ended up with workfare programmes. It was Clinton's plan to save them in the teeth of growing middle-class resentment at the outlay involved in welfare. A politically toxic welfare programme is just living on borrowed time, at which point it does not adequately serve its purpose of being a social safety net.
Now this bums a lot of people out because they don't like, or simply refuse to believe that the average american (or brit, or mexican, or whatever) might get cranky about subsidising open-ended welfare, but the ugly fact is that angry middle class politics created welfare, not a conspiracy of moguls.
The upshot of all this is that if you can't come up with a UBI proposal that the middle class is willing to shoulder (because let's face it, that's where most of the taxes are borne, once you include the whole tax menu) then it's a dead letter.
(Score: 2) by Scruffy Beard 2 on Wednesday April 26 2017, @05:09AM
One way of implementing basic income is a negative tax rate below a certain income level.
The reason I was arguing that a 50% percent claw-back does not count as basic income is that the top (federal) tax bracket in the US is only 40% [bankrate.com]. In Canada, the top tax bracket is only 33% [cra-arc.gc.ca]
While both of those exclude state/provincial tax, a 50% claw-back is clearly punitive. That is to say, the working poor are actually punished for finding work: with all of the extra expenses that implies.