3 ms·

In Talking Politics this week, Helen Thompson pointed out that UBI is a solution for every crisis - it does not diminish the potential upside for UBI (or Land T

In Talking Politics this week, Helen Thompson pointed out that UBI is a solution for every crisis - it does not diminish the potential upside for UBI (or Land Tax reform also mentioned in the podcast) but UBI and Land Tax are such disruptive changes to our social contract that it can be brought up in context of every crisis - I guess like Covid it affects everything. The point being if you think UBI will be positive, it will be positive across its whole range of impacts, and that range of impacts is soo huge it can be brought up in almost any context. Edit: UBI and Land Tax are big enough we should consider them on their own merits, not look for "opportunities" to bring them into the conversation.

nabla9 7y ago
I'm strong supporter of UBI in my home country (Finland) and I think it would work in in Nordics and likely in EU too. I don't think it would work in the US because it's sold in completely different premise. US has the least developed welfare system and the plan seems to be just replace it with small sum of money. In Nordics UBI would be in addition to free healthcare, education etc. and funding it would not be a problem. Unemployed already get benefits. Even small housing allowance would probably remain to discourage segregation due to income differences. It's the combination of welfare that low income workers get that creates high effective marginal tax rate that UBI neatly solves. It would create incentives for working and reduce bureaucracy.
- GordonS 6y ago
  > In Nordics UBI would be in addition to free healthcare, education etc. and funding it would not be a problem I was interested to see some numbers on this, so I did some quick and dirty googling. It looks like Finland has about 4.5 million people, and currently spends around 4,491,000,000 EUR/year on around 370,000 people - around 13,500 EUR/person. I'd guess that would be a reasonable amount for a UBI program. Scaling that up to 4.5M people means a huge number, 60,750,000,000 EUR/year - which I believe is larger than the entire yearly budget for Finland. Sounds like funding UBI would actually be a pretty big problem.

nabla9 7y ago

I'm strong supporter of UBI in my home country (Finland) and I think it would work in in Nordics and likely in EU too. I don't think it would work in the US because it's sold in completely different premise. US has the least developed welfare system and the plan seems to be just replace it with small sum of money. In Nordics UBI would be in addition to free healthcare, education etc. and funding it would not be a problem. Unemployed already get benefits. Even small housing allowance would probably remain to discourage segregation due to income differences. It's the combination of welfare that low income workers get that creates high effective marginal tax rate that UBI neatly solves. It would create incentives for working and reduce bureaucracy.

GordonS 6y ago
> In Nordics UBI would be in addition to free healthcare, education etc. and funding it would not be a problem I was interested to see some numbers on this, so I did some quick and dirty googling. It looks like Finland has about 4.5 million people, and currently spends around 4,491,000,000 EUR/year on around 370,000 people - around 13,500 EUR/person. I'd guess that would be a reasonable amount for a UBI program. Scaling that up to 4.5M people means a huge number, 60,750,000,000 EUR/year - which I believe is larger than the entire yearly budget for Finland. Sounds like funding UBI would actually be a pretty big problem.