Category: Basic Income

Robot automation will mean rethinking the social safety net to ensure American workers are protected against economic upheaval, a new White House report released Tuesday states. As companies switch to using artificial intelligence-powered machines instead of human workers, the U.S. government is considering how it should react to these changes. Other recommendations in the report include investing in A.I. to reap its benefits, and making sure Americans can train up for the jobs of the future.

Bad news for basic income fans, though. The report does not recommend the policy, which has become a common idea proposed by tech industry […]

Full Post at www.inverse.com

Promising Support

A small study was recently conducted to get an idea for how Americans feel about a universal basic income (UBI), a no-strings-attached, unconditional income given to individuals. The survey of 500 people was conducted by 50+1 Strategies and David Binder Research on behalf of the Economic Security Project . The results of the survey showed that 46 percent of respondents were in favor of the idea, along with 35 percent opposed and 19 percent undecided.

There has been a strong uptick in conversations about UBI recently, especially in the wake of some high-profile tests of the program being […]

Full Post at talfeed.com

Wherever you look, whatever you read and, to a degree, whatever you watch – whether it’s on the small screen or the big screen, drones, intelligent machines and robots appear to be the defacto workforce of the future.

As more and more jobs are replaced by technology – up to 45% of all of today’s jobs according to recent studies – people will have less work to do and will ultimately have to rely on more handouts from government. As a consequence, Elon Musk thinks that the implementation of a Universal Basic Income (UBI) is a highly likely outcome.

“There is […]

Full Post at www.globalfuturist.org

While sitting in his favorite hotel lobby in Bucharest, Romania, Opdyke was looking at his phone for the news for the day, while waiting around for none other than his girlfriend. He found a (supposedly) “non-partisan” article, written by an economist funded by the Economic Policy Institute. In the article, the economist claimed “higher wages are the solutions to America’s expanding reliance on payday lending.” Later, he found another article entitled “This robot-powered restaurant could put fast-food workers out of a job.”

By Opdyke’s estimation, these “two theses are mutually exclusive. They cannot coexist…I can promise, it’s not the position […]

Full Post at basicincome.org

I’m also not exactly sure how taxes are supposed to work in a system like this. How does Russia provide survival income for its citizens? There are poor people in Russia, even by Russian’s extreme definition of poverty. More than in the U.S. And consumption level on the edge of U.S. poverty is achievable in Russia only for upper middle class in large cities. It is like:

80% of U.S. poor have air conditioning. In Russia, air conditioning in households is a rarity. Because no built-in air conditioning exists anywhere (maybe just a few super expensive condos in Moscow where […]

Full Post at www.quora.com

Summary:
Re: Free Money for the Jobless Dear Sirs: Your article about Finland’s experiment in providing a free basic income to the unemployed fails to address the main question–what exactly is the cause of unemployment and what is the best way to eliminate it? The cause of unemployment is a change in the market, which, if not caused by government itself, is a natural occurrence in a dynamic economy. The great Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter coined the phrase “creative destruction” to describe the process whereby an advancing, wealth generating economy is constantly shedding old production methods for better […]

Full Post at austrian.economicblogs.org

A Canadian province is to run a pilot project aimed at providing every citizen a minimum basic income of $1,320 (£773) a month.

The provincial government of Ontario confirmed it is holding public consultations on the $25m (£15m) project over the next two months, which could replace social assistance payments administered by the province for people aged 18 to 65.

People with disabilities will receive $500 (£292) more under the scheme, and individuals who earn less than $22,000 (£13,000) a year after tax will have their incomes topped up to reach that threshold.The pilot report was submitted by Conservative ex-senator Hugh […]

Full Post at trueviralnews.com

Here is an interesting piece on why UBI is not an unequivocally good thing: Universal Basic Income: freedom for workers?

Excerpts:

What freedom is there in the wage system, the system of propertied and propertyless people, when the majority must sell their physical and mental faculties, their time with their families and friends, their freedom to be who and what they are, in order to obtain what they need? What justice is there in a system where those who do the vast majority of the work see little of the product of that labour? Where […]

Full Post at www.thecoli.com

A study population of 2,000 persons who will participate in the basic income experiment has been selected by random sample.They will be notified at the end of December.

The sample was drawn, with some exceptions, from among persons between 25 and 58 whom Kela paid labour market subsidy or basic unemployment allowance in November 2016 for some other reason than a temporary layoff. Those receiving earnings-related unemployment allowance were not included in the sampling.

The sample was drawn from about 175,000 persons, who make up the target population for the basic income experiment. A study population of 2,000 individuals was […]

Full Post at www.kela.fi