State handouts for all? Europe set to pilot universal basic incomes | World news | The Guardian
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/j ... ic-incomes

That'll put the cat amongst the flying rodents.

so £1300 (from the article) per person in the UK

So how much would that cost - and how much will my tax be increased to pay for it

So if people don't have jobs where does the money come from..... the rich...... Oh wait, they'll just move abroad so they aren't liable for any extra tax.

I've seen stuff about minimum income before and I hadn't seen any suggestion of levels quite as high as suggested in the article.

Going by the figures published by the office of national statistics (here).
We spend ~ £74bn on unemployment (£3bn), housing benefit (£27bn) and family benefits (£44bn) with a population of ~68 million. Of that 68 million approximately 20% are children or young teenagers. Divide the two (excluding the children and young adults) and you get £1360 per annum. If you take the entire welfare budget (£258bn in 2014/15) you get £4742 per annum or approximately between £113 and £395 per month at current levels of taxation so well short of the £1300 figure.
Interestingly the top end figure is about 4/5th of the current state pension (£119.30 per week or £516.97/month).

It's not clear from the ONS page whether those figures include the administration cost of delivering all the benefits (I must assume they do however). A minimum income system would result in vastly less administration cost and also a rather large amount of redundancies in the civil service which would presumably, in turn, be additional money to spend either on the minimum income or something else.

It's certainly a radical idea and I've seen it suggested as one way to explain how the Federation works in Star Trek.

There's nothing to say they do. The welfare budget is one thing, all the people who actually work for the DWP & related are actually civil servants and their wages are a different budget entirely. So unless they've specifically accounted for it - and they don't say they do, so we have to assume they haven't - then the actual 'total cost' of welfare in the UK is considerably higher than that.

In fact, the major claim for universal income - other than the basic principle 'fairness' - is that it massively saves on administration costs. Of course if we did bring it in we'd end up making a lot of civil servants redundant, so you'd have to account for that as well.

I do quite like the idea of relating a guaranteed income with some level of 'social good work'. The problem is then of course the schemes would need running, so you're back into administration costs again. In any case though, the chances of it happening in the UK any time soon are pretty non-existent. Not while we have the government and press we do, plus a fair portion of the PLP far closer to Cameron than Corbyn.

John McDonnell: Labour taking a close look at universal basic income | Politics | The Guardian
http://www.theguardian.com/politics/201 ... ass-report



Of course Labour will assume the Tories will crucify them over it, when the truth is the Tories are seriously wounded on this and so much more. There's never been a better time, so it's Labour's to lose. They should remember how quickly things turned around media-wise for that plonker Ed when he started talking about day to day costs.

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-36454060

Bollocks. Love how quickly they decide on stuff though.

Indeed, a much more impressive version of democracy.

Minimum wage currently works out at around 1k a month. Isn't it ironic we are saying people cannot live on that kind of money? It would need to go up to significantly more than basic income for people to consider working nights , weekends and manual work.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

While some (and that number is the clincher) would not work don't forget that you get this irrespective of if you work or not - so if you work on min wage you will get the Universal Income (£1300 say) plus the £1000 from your job - so you would go from substance living to a "reasonable" wage
Would the universal income be taxed? (I assume so - its just income) so it would count as £15600 income and would push some people into the 40% bracket but they would still be better off (assuming no changes in taxation to pay for it)

I'd suspect that if it went through then it'd be exactly the tax free allowance.

Not sure - while it is silly to pay it out with one hand and then claw it back with the other it would bring a lot of people into the "Government Machine" which they might find useful as part of the surveillance state
It might help cut down on the black economy

It'd be a clever move.

If you want the "free" money then you have to be registered, this means (for example) you'd be on the electoral roll and councils should be able to tell who's where for council tax etc.
People would pay more tax (as all other earnings are then taxable) but you'd still be better off overall. In theory this would gap between the divide between the poor and average earners.

I hadn't clicked that it was on top of salary.


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

I don't know whether it was from here or another forum but it has been suggested that if you scrap benefits but then give everyone a minimum amount, it "evens" things out. Those who are unable to work get money to help. Those unwilling to work get money too. Those who work earn it as extra on top of income.