The only person I know getting this money was already semi-retired after selling their house in London and retiring to the Irish countryside, and basically just noodles around on the guitar now and then.
The UK has this with lottery funding for athletes - it started really positive - but is now a lottery funded gap year for private school kids
Correct, the programme is FOR artists. How could this possibly work otherwise? By somebody stating they intend to become an talented artist?
How else would you gauge merit if not through their portfolio of prior work?
We're not objectively deciding what is art and what isn't, up front. Who decides what counts? Who's to say an AI generated self-published vomit novels on Amazon aren't as valid as anything else.
>Who decides what counts?
Clearly for this scheme the people approving the applicants and those setting the criteria for those reviewing the portfolios.
A better line of questioning might be who decided on these people and what makes them qualified to judge but you'll find yourself going down a 'Who guards the guardians' conundrum.
Your comment reminds me of when some member of the audience challenged film critic Robert Ebert on who made him the 'boss' to decide which films were good and which were bad.
He simply answered with the name of the owner of the building since he authorised the production of his film review show.
Seriously though, having a basic income that is not basic was bound to give issues.
The whole point is that paying everyone a fixed $X amount regardless of anything else is extremely easy to manage, so you can drop all the bureaucracy that builds up around welfare. But, yes, in practice it also acts as a progressive income tax of sorts even with an otherwise flat tax rate (which allows for further simplification) because delta between UBI check and taxes is going to gradually decrease as income rises and eventually becomes negative.
That said even with just personal income tax it's viable. I once crunched the numbers on what it'd take to have everyone in US receive the current federal min wage as UBI payment, assuming a flat surface tax (i.e. relying solely on that UBI check to make it progressive), and it was somewhere in the ballpark of 50%.
Of course, you can get there much easier if you go for the sacred cows such as capital gains. Raising that to the same level as regular income alone would bring a lot of tax revenue.
We could also start taxing AI, since it is (or at least positioned by those deploying it) the immediate cause why so many people are going to find themselves out of jobs.
Maybe the issue is with the definition of the profession of artist, that's it's too vague and fluid allowing anyone to claim to be one without much hassle.
But then if you have a strict definition of the artist profession, everyone will rush to conform to the bare minimum of that in order to score those benefits.
So maybe then the core issue is with the welfare state that unfairly picks winners and losers instead of being "universal".
Artist have exited way before the welfare state has. They were poor and had patrons who supported them if they loved their work. So then why do we need the state to subsidize this now? Do we have proof this leads to higher quality art?
Frankly we don’t know the selection criteria for the program this year. It will be only released in April.
But we know the selection criteria for the pilot program, and for that this was not true.
> So if you gave up art because you had bills and kids and needed to support yourself or a family, you're SOL.
Again we don’t know the full program’s eligibility criteria yet. Under the pilot program there were two separate streams. Those who were recently trained, and those who were “practicing artist”.
Your hypothetical “artist who gave up art” might fall into the “recently trained” stream and thus be eligible.
Or if they gave up on art a long ago (more than 5 years), there are ways they can get back to it. They can start practicing their art on the side again, produce a portfolio of work and thus become eligible again. They don’t need to be full time artist for this.
> The only person I know getting this money
In the pilot program they randomly selected 2000 participants from those who where eligible. So to get the money in the pilot program you both needed to be eligible, have applied for it, and be lucky enough in the lottery.
Because of this lottery whoever is getting it today is not representative of who is all eligible for it.
The article also mentions that overall the program had a positive impact.
If you ask pensioners if they should get higher pensions, they'll say YES. If you ask students if they should get more subsidies, they'll say YES. If you ask unemployed people if they should raise unemployment benefits, they'll say YES. If you ask people on minimum wage if they should raise the minimum wage, they'll say YES.
Everyone is quick to be very generous when it's from other peoples' money without accounting for the second order effects of those decisions, which is especially a big problem of the extended welfare state, since everyone pays taxes and so then everyone wants more and more subsidies so they can feel they're getting their money's worth out of the system, or else they feel cheated.
Personally, I want people on the high end of earnings (such as myself) to be taxed more so that a basic income scheme like this can be available for anybody who wants it. Charge me an extra $300/month and give it to some random 24 year old so that he can smoke weed and play his guitar. He'll get more use out of it than I will.
One day, that kid will decide that living in a crap shared apartment is getting a bit old and he'll grow some ambition, get a real job, and eventually start earning enough to help sponsor the next round of deadbeats.
Wow! You’re optimistic!
The data shows that having at least one patent on welfare is a strong predictor that a child will grow up to spend their life on welfare. Having both parents on welfare almost guarantees it.
Having single young men on welfare is one of the worst things a society can do for young men. They’d be much better off spending four years in compulsory service and learning to be useful.
I'm sure there will be plenty of people with low enough ambition that they'll just stay there, subsisting. But I don't doubt they'd be doing that in their mom's basement without basic income, so I imagine that society will survive just fine.
I’m 110% on board with that. It’s exactly one of the functions of family: communism is a perfectly function system of governance up to the level of the family.
> basic income
I’m 120% not on board with that. Men need to work, especially young men. WPPP - Work / Protect / Provide / Procreate. There is nothing worse for a society than idle young men with time and money in their hands.
I’m voting for Compulsory Service before I’m voting for Basic.
You work to earn your keep.
The extent of "anybody" is the detail that contains the devil.
Anybody who? Citizen? Asylum seeker? A person who obtained asylum or other forms of protection? A 'tolerated' person who was not deported? (Duldung in Germany.)
Europe is already politically ablaze, and one of the factors of this blaze is "too many foreigners from the Third World as recipients of welfare". If you introduce any basic income scheme that doesn't totally exclude non-citizens, you can expect the people smuggling gangs of Libya and Turkey to advertise it tomorrow as a next pull factor for their business.
Here's how it works: You take 1000 Euros in taxes from a productive German/West-EU citizen, and then redistribute that to 5 migrants giving them 200 Euro each, so you lose one angry voter but you gain 5 happy new ones.
The government is using your tax money to buy and replace your votes, this way the mainstream politicians cemented in the status quo parties, can keep making your life miserable with no accountability or repercussions for them and their careers, because your votes now become irrelevant.
And for good measure, in case the citizens vote for the so called "extremist" parties that promise to counter this obvious scam, you just slander them as nazis/$-FOBES/Putin-supporters with no proof, and form a 'cordon sanitaire' around them to take away their democratic representation, or just ban those parties altogether from elections so you can rule undisputed while masquerading as democracy.
You know you CAN donate money to the government any time you want, right? Do you do that? Practice what you preach, don't hide behind "oh if only the government made me do it."
> One day, that kid will decide that living in a crap shared apartment is getting a bit old and he'll grow some ambition, get a real job, and eventually start earning enough to help sponsor the next round of deadbeats.
This is the critical problem you and others like you make: assuming that everyone is a reasonable, honest, ambitious person just like you are. Many people -- not all, but a big enough proportion to be a problem -- aren't. And when we make it possible to actually make "do drugs and play videogames all day" a viable lifestyle, there's loads of people who will take the government up on the offer. And remember, they can vote themselves UBI raises.
You know we can also advocate for higher taxes, given that it's astronomically more meaningful for everyone to give ten cents than for me to give a few dollars, right? Or did you think this was an insightful, valuable addition to the discussion that no one has ever suggested before? Is this the comment section of a local newspaper? Good god.
> there's loads of people who will take the government up on the offer.
Prove it. How many are loads? What, specifically, do you think UBI actually amounts to?
And you can ALSO voluntarily pay more in taxes while doing so. It's called leading by example. Warren Buffet and Bill Gates get called out on this and they do the same thing; "oh I'm just one person, my extra tax money is but a drop in the ocean, so why bother." If you and everyone else saying "tax me harder" actually put up, it might amount to something! And at least it would make people respect your position a bit more.
> Prove it. How many are loads?
Well let's see, anyone who's lived their entire life on welfare (we have families of multiple generations who have done so at this point) would qualify. So would all the homeless people more content to live on the street and do drugs than go to rehab.
> What, specifically, do you think UBI actually amounts to?
Enough for people with low ambition to live on! And their vote counts just as much as the productive members of society paying for them.
You're just repeating the same fundamentally silly thing I argued against like saying it louder will make it somehow less childish and silly. Did you have an actual point here, or do you think "people's respect" has any slight value in the context of the discussion?
> Well let's see, anyone who's lived their entire life on welfare (we have families of multiple generations who have done so at this point) would qualify. So would all the homeless people more content to live on the street and do drugs than go to rehab.
So you have no actual clue, but you think hand-wavy bullshit that feels good will suffice for numbers. Fantastic. I'm glad you have such strong opinions on things you clearly know absolutely nothing about.
> Enough for people with low ambition to live on! And their vote counts just as much as the productive members of society paying for them.
Is "low ambition" angry-posting on social media? Do you think vibe-coding React bullshit, or whatever, is "productive"? Do you think engineers at Meta, busily finding new ways to make teen girls depressed are "productive"? Or is this just more stuff you have convinced yourself is true because it makes you somehow "better" than other people?
In Ireland their best chance of having their own place is emigration or waiting for their parents to die.
https://ifs.org.uk/publications/health-related-benefit-claim...
You can argue that nobody is systematically abusing the system but numbers go up. To those paying the taxes to support these benefits that sort of growth looks like abuse.
Yes, but for 'tax payers' everything looks like abuse until they benefit from the services for which they pay taxes. The favorite hobby of people whose identity is shaped by being a taxpayer is to complain about paying taxes.
edit: found it https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45590900#45591439
Lacks real courage. Not committed. Next!
Joshua Citarella (Doomscroll podcast) often talks about the practicalities of producing art.
In 1970's a (starving) artist worked part-time job (eg waiter), enabling them to focus on their craft most of the week.
Today, typical artist has to hustle, juggling 3 jobs, and can only focus once per week on their one day off work.
Further, "entry level" jobs are unpaid / underpaid. Such as internships at a museum or newspaper. Ditto teaching positions.
Consequently, only affluent persons are able to break into the creative disciplines (production of culture). Trust funds, nepotism, and other lottery winners.
--
I, for one, enthusiastically support heavily subsidizing both creative and caring work. All those "not-for-profit" gigs and unpaid labor. They're the grease that keeps society working. Despite not being tabulated in someone's payroll accounting system.