Spain approves national minimum income scheme | Hacker News Reader

Spain approves national minimum income scheme

independent.co.uk

47 pointspraveenweb10 comments

A warning: this is not a Universal Income for everyone type of thing. This is a monetary help for the poorest people to be able to live with some dignity.

I'm not criticising, just clearing things up because the headlines (here and elsewhere) make it sound like something that it isn't.

I don’t understand why they wouldn’t just call it an unemployment benefit.

It also applies to the underemployed or underpaid, they will top up earnings you might already have.

I wonder how many people will see their employers cut their wages since "the government will make up the rest".

Very unlikely. That would be suicidal publicity at this moment.

Anyone with such an employer would hopefully quit, now that they have the security of the guaranteed minimal income. Which means that this is to some extent a worker protection scheme: Employers will have to make menial, badly paid jobs more attractive since they will now be competing against "no work for the same money". In theory, at least. In practice things might devolve into more unreported employment, so workers could get both the full state minimum income and an unreported income on top of it.

This is one of the crucial differences to a proper universal basic income: The UBI does not discourage taking a job that adds income to the UBI. This kind of minimal income scheme does discourage taking badly paid jobs, since the total money you receive remains the same whether you work or not.

You would need to be unemployed to be able to receive this. And for some of this people this benefit has extinguised yet after a decade of economic war.

Moreover, not all works generate unemployment benefits. Many scientist's work for example would not qualify. Volunteers would not qualify also.

I'm reminded of the quote, "It always seems impossible until it's done." - Nelson Mandela

They will likely face consequences from the United States and other places for this, both from international finance (They will withdraw capital) and maybe other avenues, (covert funding of opposition parties, threats of sanctions) but they’re not in Latin America so at least there won’t be a coup.

Why do you think so? Why does the US care about essentially poor-people benefits in Spain?

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