That's an argument for "progressive" support, and against the threshold effect, not for basic income.
There should be no hard threshold, social support should be linear, and be reduced with the more money you earn. Like taxes but in reverse.
There should be no hard threshold, social support should be linear, and be reduced with the more money you earn. Like taxes but in reverse.
Aside from removing stigma from using the universal minimums it solves the problem of losing 3X your income when combining separate state food program, city housing, and medical programs. That remains a problem even when individual programs move away from thresholds.
Also, in the same way that a universal basic income removes a layer of bureaucratic overhead, having universal healthcare also removes the burden of middlepeople handling insurance claims.
Even 2 dollars a day of basic income would complete exhaust the government budget.
Fair, it's not just free money but it is a guarantee of at least 100 days of work a year.
https://www.uclg-cisdp.org/en/observatory/mahatma-gandhi-nat...
https://www.nrega.nic.in/netnrega/mgnrega_new/Nrega_StateRep...
There was nothing in the context that suggested that this this discussion was only about the poor in developed countries. After all, most of the world's poor actually live (unsurprisingly) in poor to low-medium income countries. Perhaps this is something that I should be mindful of in the future?
As someone born in a "third world country" I am obviously very interested personally in these problems. In the state I was born in, one out of three people is still below the poverty line (which is like 2 USD a day). To me it seems that for us it is much more practical to learn from whatever the fuck China is doing rather than a method whose primary appeal is ideological.
Some kind of support is needed in this case because none of the gains from all that efficiency are going to people who need money just to survive. It's probably not as important in places where it's still cheaper to hire humans than it is to install a robot in most cases.
I suggest Kolkata. The sight of frail old ladies barely covered by a single tattered sheet of cloth living on the footpath and begging for your alms has a way of communicating the reality of the world that nothing I can write could ever possibly match.
Even if you find yourself less fortunate compared to other people in your country, please have some empathy for the scale of problems in other, less developed countries.
Can you clarify what you meant by this? To me it seemed that you are implying that somehow the poor in third world countries are better off than the poor in first world countries because they still have their 2$ a day jobs.
My comment was quantitative, strongly implied by the math. If I were going to make a qualitative statement, I would say life sucks for almost everyone on this godawful planet in different ways. You're trying to parse out a judgement of those relative conditions in me saying UBI might not be a universal solution to the hell-sphere theory of life on Earth. I don't know why.
> It's probably not as important in places where it's still cheaper to hire humans than it is to install a robot in most cases.
The reason universal basic income does not work in India is not because people here still have their $3/day jobs. It doesn't work because there is simply not enough wealth here to restribute, so the problem here is still one of creation of wealth.
In an ideal world, somehow all the major programs are carefully co-designed to not do this, but given that they might come from different levels of government, have been designed at different times and have their phase-outs "legislated in" in ways that's hard to fix.
> There should be no hard threshold, social support should be linear, and be reduced with the more money you earn. Like taxes but in reverse.
UBI is a combination of two things:
(1) Gradual phase-out of support (I think this is your “progressive support”), and
(2) Recognizing that this isn’t just metaphorically “like taxes but in reverse” but it is largely identical (but for variations of definitions applied that do more to increase administrative costs than to advance any programmatic goal) functions performed by the tax bureaucracy, so that having multiple separate welfare bureaucracies assessing and measuring slightly different definitions of income and a few different add-on requirements for each program is mostly waste compared to having one common definition of income and one common benefit program for programs.
https://sharedsystems.dhsoha.state.or.us/SNAP_Estimate/frmEs...
In Australia, we have a lot of outsourcing and automation ("robodebt" was a recent scandal, where automated overpayment clawbacks were sent out to thousands of people, sometimes incorrectly). This hasn't improved matters.
The problem is not particularly connected to "public servants" - it's clearly possible to screw up this kind of thing whether private/public or in-person/automated. It's a matter of policy and attitude, not the delivery method.
If you build a system with the intent to humiliate and deter its users, it will waste everyone's time regardless of who provides it and how.