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from the Having-UBI-would-afford-more-time-to-spend-supporting-SoylentNews dept.
The fine folks at the CBC bring us the following report:
Participants in Ontario's prematurely cancelled basic income pilot project were happier, healthier and continued working even though they were receiving money with no-strings attached.
That's according to a new report titled Southern Ontario's Basic Income Experience, which was compiled by researchers at McMaster and Ryerson University, in partnership with the Hamilton Roundtable for Poverty Reduction.
The report shows nearly three-quarters of respondents who were working when the pilot project began kept at it despite receiving basic income.
That finding appears to contradict the criticism some levelled at the project, saying it would sap people's motivation to stay in the workforce or seek employment.
That's an interesting way of looking at it. An alternative viewpoint could be that over a quarter of the people who were working before the UBI trial stopped working. Unclear are the benefits that resulted from their new spare time — such as providing support to an ailing family member.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday March 11 2020, @01:27PM
For sure, free money means some things will be getting more expensive. No way in hell landlords will charge less than what people have in their pockets for rent.
On the other hand, right now we have a big divide between people who can pay and those who can't - so, you're looking at $800 down and $400 per month for a shitty apartment, vs $40 per night ($1200 per month) for a shitty hotel room, vs homeless shelters that are free if you're lucky enough to get one before the beds run out. With UBI (particularly UBI that's paid out in micro-increments like $0.025 per minute) I'd predict the rise of a new class of low cost housing in the range of $10 per night - it would look a lot like the homeless shelters do today, but would be supported by the users of the system's UBI rather than grants, donations, etc. With $1000 per month UBI every person "on the street" would be able to pay that $0.025 per minute, or about $10 for 8 hours. And, if they choose to work at the shelter, the shelter can afford to pay them for that work from the reliable per bed income...
Inflation is nothing new, and pumping an extra $1000 per month per head into the economy at the bottom end while taking it away across the scale isn't going to make it run away. I have always thought of UBI as a payroll tax, say it pays $1000 per month to everyone - always, but... when make any money above UBI, you pay a flat tax of - whatever keeps overall income taxes level with today's rates, just say 33%. So, by the time you're making $3000 per month above UBI, you're just paying back your UBI, but effectively keeping 100% of your income - another way of stating it would be people below $3000 per month income pay (receive) a negative income tax. By $6000 per month, your effective tax rate would be 1/2 of the tax rate - pretty close to today's average income tax.
Yang's proposal was to implement a VAT, which puts the burden on consumers - don't like taxes? don't buy anything, and a similar argument applies: those who buy less than the UBI level of newly taxed goods would benefit, while those who purchase more than that amount would be funding the system. I think this is a more politically palatable idea, but I question how it would go over in states that already have almost 10% sales tax.
There's a terrible political reality of: if the implementation is to be successful, it probably needs to roll out fast so it can't be squashed in the inevitable political backlash before it shows benefits, but... a fast rollout will have the biggest shocks to the economy - economically it would be much smoother to progressively ramp it up over 10 years or so.
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