Low income households receive a housing allowance as well.
https://www.kela.fi/web/en/housing-benefits-amount-and-payme...
Well, in the context of the experiment the people would have been able to garner state support through a bit more complex social security / social services schemes so it's not entirely about that they have more resources available, but also how they were given those resources and how many needless strings were attached to those.
I agree on principle to your point, but it's not as blatant as if the people had been living in abject poverty and then given money beyond their current financial means.
Think it's safe to say they'd have been a lot less likely to be happy if they lost them in favour of the UBI alone...
You could line up knowledgeable opponents and proponents, and you would probably find their reasons vary wildly. They also come from all over the political map.
But I agree with you. It seems odd to me that people are worried about an income harming people on average, or even affecting employment. We already have plenty of people with passive incomes, and they don't generally become depressed bums. They're called rich people.
It's kind of significant, yeah. As a general rule, people on income support in Australia and the UK tend to be harassed, stressed and moderately unhappy people despite the free money.
There's a lot of evidence from looking at lottery winners and people with significant disabilities that suggests that people have some base level of happiness they trend towards.
Happy fun people who have catastrophic accidents and end up paraplegics are really unhappy for about 6 months and then start rolling with it and end up being happy fun people who make light of their situation and enjoy life despite the wheelchair.
Debbie downers who win the lottery are super-happy for about 6 months and then become rich unhappy people.
A persistent long term increase in net happiness is a notable result. Maybe not earth-shattering, but certainly not necessarily to be expected either.
The experiment had an appropriately-matched Finnish control group on standard unemployment benefits. The UBI group received four fifths of those benefits plus an extra unconditional EUR560 per month and were according to the preliminary results about 4% less likely to report themselves as stressed
Obviously the caveats about the experiment being short term apply, but that's not a significant result, that's a disappointing result.
It depends on how it is implemented and the numbers involved.
One proposal [1] would be to give everyone $US 10K per year starting at age 21, and not having income taxes start until you have an income over US$ 40K.
This allows one to get get enough for the bare necessities (shelter, food) "for free", but if you want to have a life that's more than just subsistence living, you would have to work--but you get to keep a lot of that upfront.
If you want a 'fancy' life, then you'll have to work more, and there would be personal income taxes. Presumably there would be corporate and sales taxes as well.
I don't know enough about the math to know if it is practical.
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/08/why-are...
That sounds a lot like the Fair Tax plan that was all the hubbub a decade ago but never got off the ground.
That doesn't make sense. A downward redistribution (which UBI is) is going to inflate prices of goods with disproportionate low-end demand and deflate those with disproportionate high-end demand somewhat, but in any plausible scenario it will still (before considering any effects of reactive production shifts) increase the buying power on the low end and decrease it on the high end, even after the effects of price level changes.
* https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/9/20/16256240/m...
> If, however, you funded a UBI with graduated taxation, you would effectively be redistributing wealth from the wealthiest to the population in general. Depending on the tax code, people somewhere in the middle of the scale would receive about the same amount in UBI as they pay in tax increases.
* https://www.quora.com/Wont-a-universal-basic-income-raise-in...
For the second article, he notes that if UBI is done via printing money, then it could.
When you think about the money spent on nursing homes, daycare, juvenile justice or even kids who extend college due to the need to work, society pays a big bill directly or indirectly.
My family does well, but we realized that expenses like daycare, summer camps, etc made it such that having one of us take a sabbatical would only cost a few hundred bucks a month, and be a better outcome for our family. Not many folks have that luxury, and imo we are all worse off for it.