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The problem with combining smaller towns in Finland has been, that the now redundant workforce in each town has been given a long period of dismissal protection

The problem with combining smaller towns in Finland has been, that the now redundant workforce in each town has been given a long period of dismissal protection. Five years has been quite common. And in Kuopio some people gained even 15 years of dismissal protection! We Finns may occasionally have great ideas, but then we manage to execute the great plan in a bad way. How can the combined towns save a single dime, if they don't do the work with smaller workforce. So far those new bigger cities have been just losing money, because everything from health care to education has to be renewed.

scotty79 11y ago
One way basic income could potentially backfire is that rent could, and will go higher and swallow all the free money distributed to average people. In effect robbing the ones that rely on just basic income of opportunities to get a roof over their head and transferring most of the distributed wealth to property owners. I think introduction of basic income must be accompanied by laws that highly penalize owning unoccupied apartments to prevent that scenario.
- chongli 11y ago
  Just pay for basic income by levying progressive property taxes. Right now, most societies have very regressive property taxes. The wealthy (who own vast amounts of property) pay very, very little tax on all of it while small homeowners pay very large property taxes. You could even pin the basic income to a % of revenues. If landlords started raising the rent to try and capture the basic income, their property values would skyrocket and then they'd pay a higher tax rate which would bring in more revenue to support basic income. This would effectively create a feedback loop until the landlord class would no longer be able to afford to raise the rent.
ptaipale 11y ago
I would contradict you by saying that in my opinion, the performance (execution) of plans is in fact reasonably good, and I think is a lot better than in many other countries. But: even if municipalities are allowed to dismiss workforce, they won't. It appears that no public servant wants to have his/role and power diminished. In fact, it seems that the larger a municipality is absolutely, the higher proportion of its workforce will be in public administration. The highest cost of public administration and municipal services per head is in Utsjoki (a remote and poor area in the North with extremely disadvantageous geography), and Helsinki (the largest municipality with lots of well-to-do people and very high income). The lowest cost of public administration and most efficient organisation of services is in municipalities whose size is somewhere in between; record lows are in small communities where each and every inhabitant is committed to what they see is a common good. Another factor for people not wanting to have their municipality merged into a larger one is the track record of previous mergers, where local services of the old, smaller municipalities where wiped out simply out of pure spite (I'm looking at you, Hämeenlinna, and how you managed Lammi and others.).

scotty79 11y ago

One way basic income could potentially backfire is that rent could, and will go higher and swallow all the free money distributed to average people. In effect robbing the ones that rely on just basic income of opportunities to get a roof over their head and transferring most of the distributed wealth to property owners. I think introduction of basic income must be accompanied by laws that highly penalize owning unoccupied apartments to prevent that scenario.

chongli 11y ago
Just pay for basic income by levying progressive property taxes. Right now, most societies have very regressive property taxes. The wealthy (who own vast amounts of property) pay very, very little tax on all of it while small homeowners pay very large property taxes. You could even pin the basic income to a % of revenues. If landlords started raising the rent to try and capture the basic income, their property values would skyrocket and then they'd pay a higher tax rate which would bring in more revenue to support basic income. This would effectively create a feedback loop until the landlord class would no longer be able to afford to raise the rent.

ptaipale 11y ago

I would contradict you by saying that in my opinion, the performance (execution) of plans is in fact reasonably good, and I think is a lot better than in many other countries. But: even if municipalities are allowed to dismiss workforce, they won't. It appears that no public servant wants to have his/role and power diminished. In fact, it seems that the larger a municipality is absolutely, the higher proportion of its workforce will be in public administration. The highest cost of public administration and municipal services per head is in Utsjoki (a remote and poor area in the North with extremely disadvantageous geography), and Helsinki (the largest municipality with lots of well-to-do people and very high income). The lowest cost of public administration and most efficient organisation of services is in municipalities whose size is somewhere in between; record lows are in small communities where each and every inhabitant is committed to what they see is a common good. Another factor for people not wanting to have their municipality merged into a larger one is the track record of previous mergers, where local services of the old, smaller municipalities where wiped out simply out of pure spite (I'm looking at you, Hämeenlinna, and how you managed Lammi and others.).