Canadian Politics Today

Conservative Senator Hugh Segal on Poverty.

Everyone should listen to this type of thinking.  Canada could be a much better place as a result:

http://podcasts.tvo.org/bi/audio/2076107_48k.mp3

Is this more of that guaranteed income stuff?

Yes. Always sounds like a good idea until someone crunches the numbers and figures out that the level of taxation needed to support the program would crush the economy.

It's submitted as revenue neutral, and by a conservative with bona fides.

Did my own math a while back by looking at the government budgets. IMO, there is no way to make it work with a income level high enough to achieve stated objective with insane levels of taxation on people making more than 50K per year (top 25%). I doubt whatever numbers Hugh Segal came up with would stand up to serious scrutiny.

Where does the revenue come from?

This article focuses on the US, but delves into that question:

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/5/30/15712160/basic-income-oecd-aei-replace-welfare-state

Conservative and libertarian proponents tend to want to pay for it by eliminating the entire welfare state, including health programs like Medicare and Medicaid and social insurance programs such as Social Security. More cautious center-left or moderate libertarian proponents — who are loath to cut those aspects of the safety net, endanger people’s retirements, and let uninsured sick people die in the streets — tend to only propose funding through eliminating means-tested programs like food stamps and the earned income tax credit, as well as tax benefits such as the health care exclusion and mortgage interest deduction. The most ambitious lefty proponents want to finance the program entirely through new tax revenue.

A Canadian version of a guaranteed income would probably at the very least replace things like UI benefits, welfare, old age security, GST credit, personal income tax exemption and some other number of tax credits, and maybe more.  It would replace the many ways we already distribute a lot of cash to many people with a simpler system, and would probably also allow the government to cut a lot of bureaucracy and inefficiency.

The article I linked above refers to some research into how revenue-neutral guaranteed income is playing out in 4 countries.  There are winners and losers.  The elderly tend to lose the most under such a system.

The article also looks at research by the (decidedly right-wing) American Enterprise Institute on a guaranteed income achieved by replacing almost every US social benefit with guaranteed income.

Four researchers at the American Enterprise Institute — Matthew Jensen, William Ensor, Anderson Frailey, and Amy Xu — used three open source models of American tax and benefit policy to calculate the effects of a UBI funded by repealing "most welfare and transfer programs, including Social Security and Medicare," and "most base-narrowing features of the individual income tax system." They throw everything into the pot: Medicare, Social Security, veterans benefits, the standard deduction, every itemized deduction (including mortgage interest). Basically the only major program not repealed is the employer-paid health care exclusion, and that’s just because there wasn’t data available to model the change.

Getting rid of all those programs would finance a UBI of $13,788 for adults and $6,894 for children. So a family of four would get a whopping $41,364. Then again, if they received health insurance through Medicaid or Obamacare subsidies, they’d lose that.

They found that once again the elderly are the big losers.

The number they came up with-- $13,700 per adult and $6800 per child-- is pretty staggering.  As far as I can tell this figure was arrived at by taking the expenditures currently directed into almost every kind social benefit and instead redistributing that money as equal payments to every American. That really puts into perspective the vast sums of money already involved.


 -k

It's submitted as revenue neutral, and by a conservative with bona fides.

Well... by a self-described Red Tory from the Progressive Conservative era.

One of the issues I have with this is that it appears to completely ignore human nature. Ie, replace current welfare, pension, pogey, etc, with this new plan and it will be revenue neutral. Even if I accept that, which I'm far from sure of, I'm absolutely certain a lot more people will decide to go on this 'guaranteed income' thing by foregoing the shitty job they've been doing. Yes, I know that there's an incentive to work. But it's a lot LESS of an incentive than exists currently given welfare doesn't pay much. It's also an invitation to cheat by not reporting, or under-reporting income, especially if you can get work for cash.

If you can't find a job, the government should find one for you, and if you refuse, you get nothing.

How would the government find you a job?

Some people are legit disabled.  But i've known people on disability who are capable of at least simple tasks and/or part-time work, there should be gov programs to find them jobs also.

Would you hire a 52 year-old ex-con, who's been out of jail for 12 years, living a straight and clean life, no skills and limited by physical injury?   If you wouldn't, should the government be able to "make" you as part of their job-finding initiatives?

There are already government programs designed to help people find jobs.  But employers also have preferences for employees, including things like no criminal record, English and/or French fluency, certain skills or abilities and sometimes even how they look, though they're never so crass as to say so out loud.  How can the government find jobs for people no one wants to hire?

. But it's a lot LESS of an incentive than exists currently given welfare doesn't pay much. It's also an invitation to cheat by not reporting, or under-reporting income, especially if you can get work for cash.

He addresses this in the talk.

Rainbows and moonbeams? I'm not going to listen to him speaking for an hour to hear the background of this.

Ok, well your assertion that people will not work if they have a top-up to poverty level isn't true.