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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 12 2020, @12:33AM
There's a tax you're forgetting. D) Property tax, and particularly tax on the value of land (not improvements). That is to say, Georgism. [wikipedia.org]
Georgism proper is an interesting idea I can't quite bring myself to endorse*, but there's no doubt a UBI program supported by a partial land-value tax is far better than a UBI program supported by income tax etc..
*It strikes me as asymptotically correct in urban areas, but rather problematic in rural areas. An acre of land in Manhattan is quite valuable ($5M is the figure I recall), and almost all of that value is precisely because it's an acre of land in Manhattan. It's not unreasonable to play the "you didn't build that" card and suggest that the community as a whole is both more deserving of the profits resulting from that value than some rent-seeking landlord, and that it can make better use of them (i.e. maintaining all the infrastructure that makes cramming 100+ people per acre even survivable).
But an acre of shitty farmland in the Midwest may be worth only a few thousand, and may gain that much more value (to its present owner) because it was part of great grandfather's homestead. And the grow-or-die dictate you get when you combine returns to scale with a full Georgist land-value tax, seems to all but guarantee you'll find yourself selling the family homestead to be rolled into a larger, more efficient operation with no connection to it (your choice is whether to go broke paying taxes trying to keep it, or accept reality and sell quick). That certainly is an economically efficient outcome, but I still find it morally troubling.