Basic income
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It seems the Basic Income idea has been holed below the waterline:'
Quote:The Green party’s flagship economic policy, the £72 a week “citizen’s income”, would hit the poorest hardest unless it was made more complicated by including a means-tested element, the leading advocate of the policy has conceded.The Citizen’s Income Trust (CIT), which has given advice to the Green party and been repeatedly cited by the Greens, has modelled its scheme and discovered it would mean 35.15% of households would be losers, with many of the biggest losers among the poorest households.
That is, calculated on a cost neutral basis, but even working in some extra benefits, it bwoiuld need a basic tax rate, apparently, or 30%.
Philip Collins in that article in Friday's Times (where he got Thomas More wrong) makes a couple of other points:
Quote:You would never have known it from Ms Bennett's account but the citizen's income is, in large part, a replacement for a means-tested welfare state, not a supplement to it. The Citizen's Income Trust has calculated that if we gave £56 a week to people aged under 24, £71 a week to those between 25 and 65 and £142 to the over-65s, the total cost would be £276 billion. Means-tested benefits would be abolished to the value of £272 billion. Add in your saving on fraud and the reduced costs of administration and you're in the black.In other words, the proposal is another case of what we said about the Beveridge Report: that it's about "reorganising poverty".And
Quote:To the extent that immigrants taking benefits is a problem (which is hardly at all), that would also be impossible under a scheme that, as the name suggests, grants an income only to UK citizens.So, maybe UKIP will soon be adopting it too.
Paul Mason puts his knife in to the concepthttp://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/feb/01/paying-everyone-a-basic-income-would-kill-off-low-paid-menial-jobsWe await our ex-member LU and basic income advocate to eventually comment
I wouldn't say he's putting the knife in. In fact he seems to rather like the idea seeing it as a sort of "transitional demand" After all, he was once a Trotskyist (in "Workers Power" of all things) but maybe he's more into what Andre Gorz called himself "revolutionary reformism", i.e, proposing and campaigning for reforms that are supposed to undermine capitalism, basically an attempt to justify a gradualist, reformist approach. That was in the 1960s when capital accumulation was proceeding at a much faster rate than today, which made reformism seem feasible (even though still not a way to socialism). A reform like "basic income" that would bring some benefit to workers, cost billions but not bring much benefit to capitalists or the capitalist economy is just not on the agenda. Today reformists have to spend all their time trying to stop previously acquired reforms being taken away.
Ah, it seems the Greens *haven't* ditched the policy, just weaselled it:[quoteCaroline Lucas]“The citizen’s income is not going to be in the 2015 general election manifesto as something to be introduced on May 8.“It is a longer-term aspiration; we are still working on it. The aim is absolutely, to be able to give everybody a guaranteed, non-means tested income, because that means that you can get around the poverty trap.“When we come to publish our manifesto in March, you will see the workings out that we’ve got. This is not a policy for the next general election, it is lifting the living wage to £10 an hour by the end of this parliament … challenging the austerity of the other parties . . . what we need to be doing is investing in jobs rather than cutting jobs.”[/quote](My bold)http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2015/02/green-deputy-leaders-contradict-caroline-lucas-citizens-income-will-be-manifesto
Interestingly, the Adam Smith Institute are visiting this idea:http://www.adamsmith.org/news/press-release-reform-tax-credits-with-a-negative-income-tax-says-new-report/
Quote:Instead of cutting tax credits, the government should replace major means-tested benefits – including tax credits and Jobseeker’s Allowance – with a single, individualised ‘Negative Income Tax’ payment that is withdrawn as earnings rise.This would guarantee a minimum income floor and top up low-paid workers’ wages while still ensuring that everyone has a strong incentive to work.The government should merge this into the tax system and abolish the Department for Work and Pensions to save up to £6bn in administrative costs.That would, of course, mean giving benefits to the asst rich, but it seems the right are interesting in basic income. I suspect the argument would be the levl. Obviously, with 'universal credit' the Tories are already working toward something like this.Obviously, as Socialists, we'd like to go furtehr and see an end to the administrative waste of the HMRC (yes, lets outflank Tories on Tax!)
Below I think is a link to a radio four prog on an early 1894 full blooded albeit 'Liberal' capitalist advocating the minimum wagehttp://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b068tz6d Adam Smith wasn't in fact quite the Arch neo conservative he is believed to be by Neo Adam Smithist Wealth of Nationsby Adam Smith 1776Book 1, Chapter 8Of the Wages of Labour"Is this improvement in the circumstances of the lower ranks of the people to be regarded as an advantage or as an inconveniency to the society?The answer seems at first sight abundantly plain. Servants, labourers, and workmen of different kinds, make up the far greater part of every great political society. But what improves the circumstances of the greater part can never be regarded as an inconveniency to the whole. No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the far greater part of the members are poor and miserable. It is but equity, besides, that they who feed, clothe, and lodge the whole body of the people, should have such a share of the produce of their own labour as to be themselves tolerably well fed, clothed, and lodged."it is an important chapter as it includes "that original state of things" or "simple commodity production" and thus the suibject of chpater one of capital. Which Bamboozled proffessor michael Hienrich "[02] In that original state of things, which precedes both the appropriation of land and the accumulation of stock, the whole produce of labour belongs to the labourer. He has neither landlord nor master to share with him. " http://geolib.com/smith.adam/won1-08.html
yes, Smith was nominally an egalitarian, his account of the differences of wages was that unpleasant work paid more than pleasant work, thus poorly paid workers supposedly had easier jobs. Also, the invisible hand is supposed to achieve equality, that it fails is a different matter. Also, Smith as a moral philosopher is interesting with his principle of sympathy (which is considderably better than 'do as you would be done by' e.g. http://philosophyofsocialcognition.pbworks.com/w/page/16442005/Adam%20Smith%E2%80%99s%20concept%20of%20sympathy )
Our comrade from across the water, has posted an article from 1938 Socialist Standard about the Basic Income.http://socialiststandardmyspace.blogspot.com/2017/09/notes-by-way-will-forty-fall-for-it-1938.html
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