Universal Income.

Aged pensions are means tested in Australia, but replacing them with a UBI payable to everyone (emphasis on the U) will mean, as I posted before, a $300b or so cost to Australia’s economy per year.

This is insanity.
 
lionking said:
Aged pensions are means tested in Australia, but replacing them with a UBI payable to everyone (emphasis on the U) will mean, as I posted before, a $300b or so cost to Australia’s economy per year.

This is insanity.
Click to expand...

How much is the UI in that example?
 
lionking said:
Total cost of the age pension now is about $50 billion.

https://www.aph.gov.au/About_Parlia...tary_Library/pubs/BriefingBook45p/WelfareCost

So $250 billion extra cost.
Insanity.
Click to expand...

That's a bit unfair. Presumably most of the other welfare spending wouldn't be needed, so the extra cost is likely to be more like £100 billion (current welfare bill is around £200 billion from your link).

I'm not saying your objections are wrong, but it does make me think less of your argument when you have to make stuff up to make things look worse than they would otherwise.
 
ThatGuy11200 said:
It's the same in the UK. Originally, it was just for the poor. Then the Conservatives whined and complained that it wasn't fair for the poor (figuratively speaking) millionaires.

It is still means tested though, so the poorest get more. I just used to scoff, when doing people's tax returns, seeing a millionaire receiving a paltry £90 - or whatever it was back then - every month.
Click to expand...

In the US we would have to give the millionaires a larger pension than the poor because it wouldn't be "fair" unless it were a percentage proportionate to the receiver's wealth. That's how things work here. In fact, we'd probably have a cutoff where if someone were too poor they wouldn't get a pension because giving them one would encourage people to be poor.
 
If this is just a shell game to make millionaires not feel left out when poor people get money I really, really, really fail to see the point.
 
When the millionaires are the gatekeepers of policy, attending to their reaction to the proposal seems essential, if unfortunate.
 
Darat said:
How much is the UI in that example?
Click to expand...

Matthew Best said:
That's a bit unfair. Presumably most of the other welfare spending wouldn't be needed, so the extra cost is likely to be more like £100 billion (current welfare bill is around £200 billion from your link).

I'm not saying your objections are wrong, but it does make me think less of your argument when you have to make stuff up to make things look worse than they would otherwise.
Click to expand...

Woah. Are you saying that UBI should replace welfare payments like child care, aged care and disability care? I’ve only seen it argued that it replace pensions and unemployment benefits.

This is an appalling suggestion. People with disabilities have specific, high cost needs so they will be worse off under a UBI. I would have thought that any UBI plan would also take account of special needs.

If your scenario is the case, UBI is both ridiculously costly and heartlesss.
 
One of the things a universal income would replace would be the tax-free income allowance. You'd be taxed on all your income above the UBI level. Millionaires will obviously pay far more in tax than they'll receive in UBI, why shouldn't they get it? It's like saying why should a millionaire get a tax-free income allowance of £12,000, they don't need it.

It makes everyone feel part of the same society, it removes the inevitable edge cases where someone gets the UBI one day then doesn't the next because their income went up a little, and it massively cuts back on bureaucracy. Just give the UBI to absolutely everybody and the normal tax system will recover the money from the wealthy.
 
It is interesting to consider the pros and cons of UBI in a country that has fairly robust social safety measures in place already. The simplicity and low overhead to implement UBI does seem appealing compared to all the means testing and management heavy types of traditional welfare, but I suppose there's less of a dire need in places that already have a functional welfare system.

It's an interesting contrast to the United States, where covid has only shown in stark relief how totally inadequate our welfare system is to prevent people from slipping into poverty. It's a very different context to consider UBI.
 
LionKing said:
People with disabilities have specific, high cost needs so they will be worse off under a UBI. I would have thought that any UBI plan would also take account of special needs.
Click to expand...


You are of course absolutely right. UBI can't replace absolutely everything, and disability allowances are one obvious situation where people will need more than the basic UBI amount. That would include the disability of old age of course.

As far as childcare goes, most proposals I've seen start paying UBI to citizens at birth, thus giving the parents extra income to look after the child. The child rate is a set fraction of the adult rate, and indeed the last one I saw had two different bands for minors before they received the adult allowance.
 
lionking said:
Woah. Are you saying that UBI should replace welfare payments like child care, aged care and disability care? I’ve only seen it argued that it replace pensions and unemployment benefits.
Click to expand...

Some but not all. I don't think there is a set-in-stone definition of what it would replace. But that doesn't mean it's just open season to pick the worst possible definition and complain that it's insanity.
 
Thinking about it, I don´t see any practical difference between UBI and what we have in some European countries such as Spain, the "guaranteed income". Over here, every adult is guaranteed a minimum income of ... 470 Euros. It´s not much, but I guess that´s what we can afford at the moment. Only those in poverty, with incomes lower than a certain threshold, not on the dole etc. can apply for it. What´s different about this system and UBI? In UBI you would also give 470 Euros to everyone else but then take it away in taxes... Isn´t it the same thing? And I´m skeptical about the reduction in bureaucracy, because you still need to control for a lot of factors, number of children, disabilities, disemployment... many cases when the amount would need to be higher... In the end you have the exact same thing that we have now.
 
Abooga said:
Thinking about it, I don´t see any practical difference between UBI and what we have in some European countries such as Spain, the "guaranteed income". Over here, every adult is guaranteed a minimum income of ... 470 Euros. It´s not much, but I guess that´s what we can afford at the moment. Only those in poverty, with incomes lower than a certain threshold, not on the dole etc. can apply for it. What´s different about this system and UBI? In UBI you would also give 470 Euros to everyone else but then take it away in taxes... Isn´t it the same thing? And I´m skeptical about the reduction in bureaucracy, because you still need to control for a lot of factors, number of children, disabilities, disemployment... many cases when the amount would need to be higher... In the end you have the exact same thing that we have now.
Click to expand...


It does seem similar, but I think your system is more bureaucratic, and it lacks the ability to level society by removing any stigma from having to apply for a breadline benefit.

You don't have to control for the number of children. Children get UBI too, on an age-related scale, which takes care of that. Disability allowances will have to remain of course but that's a relatively narrow group. The intention would be that there would be no need for unemployment benefit as it would be possible to live on the UBI. If it isn't, it introduces a whole lot of other problems and it isn't really UBI any more.
 
Belz... said:
No it's to save on bureaucracy and make it more politically acceptable.
Click to expand...


Mainly to save on bureaucracy (you get the money back, and a lot more, through the tax system, so it's not really giving money to the wealthy), but also to avoid the cliff-edge discrimination where one day someone is eligible and the next day they're not because they earned a bit more. That's bureaucracy too of course, determining when that has happened and when people pass in and out of the UBI bracket, but it also breeds resentment.

Knowing that as a citizen you are entitled to this money is a powerful cohesive force for society, and seeing it taken away because you earned "too much" is a lousy feeling, even if you know you don't need it.

Just make sure the tax recovers the money. It'll be less paperwork anyway.
 
Abooga said:
Thinking about it, I don´t see any practical difference between UBI and what we have in some European countries such as Spain, the "guaranteed income". Over here, every adult is guaranteed a minimum income of ... 470 Euros. It´s not much, but I guess that´s what we can afford at the moment. Only those in poverty, with incomes lower than a certain threshold, not on the dole etc. can apply for it. What´s different about this system and UBI? In UBI you would also give 470 Euros to everyone else but then take it away in taxes... Isn´t it the same thing?
Click to expand...

Basically, yes. That's why I pointed out upthread that your assertion that Spain's economy would collapse if it introduced UBI was untrue.
 
lionking said:
Aged pensions are means tested in Australia, but replacing them with a UBI payable to everyone (emphasis on the U) will mean, as I posted before, a $300b or so cost to Australia’s economy per year.

This is insanity.
Click to expand...
Yeah, it's insane you don't understand that it goes right back in to the economy it came out of. It's not a cost.
 
Squeegee Beckenheim said:
Basically, yes. That's why I pointed out upthread that your assertion that Spain's economy would collapse if it introduced UBI was untrue.
Click to expand...

Well, it would collapse if the UBI were 2000 Euros (or somethind like that, something "significant") instead of 470... It´s at the brink of collapse already, so...
 
Last edited:
Rolfe said:
Mainly to save on bureaucracy (you get the money back, and a lot more, through the tax system, so it's not really giving money to the wealthy), but also to avoid the cliff-edge discrimination where one day someone is eligible and the next day they're not because they earned a bit more. That's bureaucracy too of course, determining when that has happened and when people pass in and out of the UBI bracket, but it also breeds resentment.

Knowing that as a citizen you are entitled to this money is a powerful cohesive force for society, and seeing it taken away because you earned "too much" is a lousy feeling, even if you know you don't need it.

Just make sure the tax recovers the money. It'll be less paperwork anyway.
Click to expand...

Just a note that the opposite cliff edge is equally addressed. A well compensated person who looses their job suddenly doesn't have to think about filing for unemployment or being ineligible for benefits due to their prior high income. Yes, poor rich people, but a lot of hospitality workers found themselves going from comfortable pay to nada very quickly last year and that cliff is an issue.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Back
Top Bottom