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£10,000 proposed for everyone under 55
The government should give £10,000 to every citizen under 55, a report suggests.
The Royal Society for the encouragement of the Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA) said it could pave the way to everyone getting a basic state wage.
The idea sees two payments of £5,000 paid over two years, but certain state benefits and tax reliefs would be removed at the same time.
The RSA said it would compensate workers for the way jobs are changing.
The money would help to steer UK citizens through the 2020s, "as automation replaces many jobs, climate change hits and more people face balancing employment with social care", the report said.
Also at The Guardian and CNBC.
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UK's Royal Society of Arts Proposes £10,000, 2-Year Basic Income
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The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
TOO BAD YOU CAN'T BUY a voodoo globe so that you could make the earth spin
real fast and freak everybody out.
-- Jack Handey, The New Mexican, 1988.
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Saturday February 17 2018, @04:36PM (10 children)
Well generally the way loans are positively promoted is as a way of helping someone to get started in life, the best example perhaps being starting their own business. If loans weren't available, the person wanting to start their own business would instead need to wait a few years, working for someone else whilst saving what they earned. Once they had saved up enough, they could still start the business. The difference would be that the initial investment in their business would depend on what they could earn working for someone else as opposed to what a bank would be willing to lend them (perhaps based on some perceived future value of their new business).
It would probably slow up the growth of businesses but it would also reduce risk taking. Prices would generally have to fall to accomodate people living within their means. After a few decades it should all stabilize though into a new kind of economy.
Disclaimer: I am not an economist. (IANAE?)
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 17 2018, @06:38PM
Loans allow, on the basic level, capital to flow from where it's stored to where it's needed.
In pre-monetary days, this was a huge problem. Vassals paid food rent all the way up the chain, to the top where the king pretty much sat on a vast hoard of food. (Well, Saxon England here.)
There's a lot of research into this. Floating currencies are pretty much the way to go - what we need to do is rein in abuses.
Most of those abuses don't even depend on cash as a concept, so that by itself isn't helpful as an argument for doing away with our present monetary system.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Saturday February 17 2018, @07:20PM (8 children)
I was actually thinking car, home, and student loans. They're a lot more popular than small business loans, so they'd cause a much bigger change in the economic landscape if they were removed.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Saturday February 17 2018, @07:26PM (7 children)
Well it just means people would be a lot more dependent on the bank of Mom and Dad for a fair few years. It could possibly stop houses and cars becoming overvalued as well, or you'd end up with generations of people living under the same roof which historically has been the norm anyway.
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Sunday February 18 2018, @12:00AM (6 children)
Indeed but in the short term it would absolutely destroy the housing and automotive industries.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Sunday February 18 2018, @02:05PM (5 children)
Yes it would be kinder if it were a slow and gradual adjustment rather than an overnight cutting off of credit. Although economies can be very resistant to attempts at changing things smoothly so the policies would probably still cause some confidence and some overextended corporations to collapse. Houses are something people are always going to need. To a lesser extent, it's also true for cars. So the industries wouldn't die out completely. Hey, the extinction of the less fit industries might even free up some niches for new businesses that are more useful to humanity. ;)
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Sunday February 18 2018, @02:31PM (4 children)
My primary concern would be that people have been trained by easy credit to be utterly unable to save and home ownership would just go away for your average citizen while rents would soar making the path to home ownership even more difficult.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Sunday February 18 2018, @02:49PM (3 children)
Yeah saving would need to be made cool. Up till now the advertising was all about getting people to borrow, not save. Of course if you pay interest on savings then loans still exist because you're loaning the bank (or the state) money.
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday February 19 2018, @02:54AM (2 children)
I see a pretty big problem there though. If the banks can't loan money, they have no source of income to pay you any interest from.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Monday February 19 2018, @10:55AM (1 child)
Yeah they'd have to invest the money in equities instead.
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 24 2018, @05:12AM
What precisely do you think an equity is, other than a loan dressed up in other trappings?
On that level, co-ownership really amounts to a security behind a loan. Oh, sure, nominally you have a vote and all that, but it turns out that even muslim economics have effectively dressed up their anti-usury attitude to that of packaging things in terms effectively identical to those of loans.
The reality of the matter is that loans are, as a structure, not inherently pernicious. They make for an easy political target, because the average person is more familiar with being a debtor than a creditor, but they're basically not evil.