Left and Right Unite! – For the UBI Fight!
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Andrew Yang on the campaign trail promotes his version described by a critic as “A handout bribing them to be quiet”
“Yang’s proposal would see each American receive $12,000 per year, although current government benefits received would be subtracted from the individual amounts. To put this sum in perspective, the median household income in the US is over $60,000…paid for by a new VAT, essentially a [regressive] sales tax, [where] for the poor and middle class, it’s a higher percentage of their income.
Criticism of Yang by a supporter (?) for his disastrous performance (failure to put emphasis on his automation issue) in the recent multi-candidate TV debate:
https://gizmodo.com/automation-should-be-a-major-2020-issue-andrew-yang-fa-1835939592
A white nationalist on the consequences of Yang’s UBI proposal:
Even granting that UBI would tend to depress wage levels, it would also provide basic security to the unemployed and people with precarious employment. This would make more of a difference in the US than in the UK because unemployment benefit in the US is conditional on the circumstances in which you lose a job and lasts only a limited time (often only 6 months, never more than 2 years). Our attitude toward it should not be wholly negative or dismissive.
But what UBI proposal? There are so many different versions.
And can we determine in advance the unintended consequences? …oops, that is a contradiction in terms…
Having received the papal blessing, UBI is being promoted as a remedy for the economic devastation inflicted on workers by COVID-19
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/may/03/universal-basic-income-coronavirus-shocks
We beat the Grauniad to this, with this article and a talk on Discord:
The Compass proposal is just a stunt to publicise this reform, as if in the present state of finances the government is going to pay everyone an extra £60 a week (over £3000 a year) even those who kept working ( and billionaires who live off profits).
Not that the proposal is that generous. It would only bring up what a single jobseeker would get to the level of the basic state pension. In giving people a cheque for $1200 (£950) Trump was paying them the equivalent of £60 a week for 4 months.
The Compass proposal also mixes UBI as a reform of the poor law with the old failed Keynesian policy of the government trying to stimulate growth by increasing consumer spending, which was what Trump was trying to do too.
YMS, some in the SNP have been promoting UBI for quite a while, but never ever quite fully committing itself to it. Our Socialist Courier blog as far back as 2017 reported that Glasgow and Fife local authorities were intending to carry out an experiment with it. Never happened, AFAIK, but I may be wrong.
The Institute for Public Policy and Research has warned “our modelling shows that far from being an anti-poverty measure, a UBI could increase relative child poverty in Scotland.”
https://socialist-courier.blogspot.com/2018/05/ubi-no-panacea.html
The Joseph Rowntree Foundation also projected a similar consequence
https://socialist-courier.blogspot.com/2018/04/ubi-or-not.html
The proposal for a universal basic income must be one of the silliest reforms ever conceived. Its proponents seemed to have never heard of Speenhamland and so don’t realise that they are proposing a wage subsidy to employers, which would result in all wages tending for fall by the amount of the basic income, in the Scottish proposal by £5,200 a year.
Rutger Bregman in his Utopia for realists (ah, the Chapter is online:
Likewise:
Speenhamland, automation, and Basic Income: A response
Torry, Malcolm
Renewal : a Journal of Labour Politics, 2018, Vol.26(1), pp.32-35“[Speenhamland] … was an extension of poor relief to the working poor. The supplements paid out of the rates guaranteed a net income. They were definitely not a ‘Basic Income’. The difference is crucial. A guaranteed minimum income is a minimum income level below which a household’s income is not allowed to fall, and the payment made is designed to bring a household’s net income up to the specified level. The modern equivalents are Working Tax Credits and so-called Universal Credit. In Speenhamland the supplement paid out was designed to fill the gap between the worker’s earnings and a specified minimum income that was related to the size of the family and to the price of bread. The supplement was a means-tested benefit.
“A Basic Income is entirely different. It is an equal payment to every individual of the same age. The difference is clear. The Speenhamland payments fell if earnings rose, and rose if earnings fell. A Basic Income remains the same whatever the individual’s earnings. This means that the effects are very different. The Speenhamland supplement functioned as a dynamic subsidy. It rose if wages fell, so employers who cut wages knew that the supplement would make up for the wage cut. A Basic Income would be a static subsidy: that is, it would not rise if wages fell, so both employers and employees would know that if wages fell then employees’ families would be worse off. Both collective bargaining and the National Living Wage would be even more important than they are now, and the effort to maintain them would intensify.”
If anything, a basic income is worse than a guaranteed income…
Yes. A guaranteed income scheme already exists in Britain — the tax credit scheme. At least this is a subsidy only for employers paying the lowest wages. A basic income scheme, as a government handout to everyone, would be a subsidy to all employers.
How can its advocates be so naive or economically ignorant as to think it would have no effect on wages. Even the government realises that their income support scheme has this effect and is why they have introduced minimum wage legislation as a way of reducing the subsidy to employers.
Actually, Rutger Bregman is the best of them as he sees it as the basis for a new society, a “utopia”, taking account of the fact that enough could be produced to ensure that everybody could have enough of what they needed, and not just a reform of the poor law. He should take a step further and become a socialist.
Book Reviews: ‘Utopia for Realists’, & ‘A Place of Refuge – An Experiment in Communal Living’
I think he has since written a new book which might be worth us reviewing.
Here’s Bregman’s new book, Human Kind. It’s about “human nature”:
Paul Mason has been touting this bizarre article:
https://www.ubilabnetwork.org/blog/the-marxist-case-for-basic-income
“First we have those, like the New Economics Foundation (NEF) and UCL’s Institute for Global Prosperity (IGP), who see basic income as too individualistic. They want to meet people’s needs, but needs as they define them and as they provide for them; this is why they prefer the idea of Universal Basic Services (UBS), for it maintains existing power structures and it enables a centralised definition of public good. Historically this was the position adopted by the Fabians, the Left eugenicists and ultimately by Lenin himself, and we might think of it as aristocratic Marxism.”
That totally misses the UBS case, and betrays certain prejudices on the author’s part (and how liberals would attack a concerted UBS case).
Another term being used
“minimum vital income”
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