Tag: guaranteed income

Disabled people in Ontario are much more likely to experience poverty than non-disabled people. Many have to live on sub-poverty payments under the Ontario Disability Support Program (ODSP) or the even more wretched income provided by Ontario Works (OW). Those that are in this situation are confronted by an ongoing process of surveillance, invasion of their privacy and moral policing. Those disabled people who are working, because of systemic discrimination, are less likely to be receiving living wages and are far more likely to be precariously employed. As anti poverty organizers, we fully understand the anger and desperation that […]

Full Post at socialistproject.ca

A former labor leader is urging unconventional political alliances in support of public policy to buffer workers from the coming automation age.

Andy Stern, the former president of the Service Employees union, has kept himself busy being a senior fellow at Columbia University and wading into sticky political debates. His just-released book, Raising the Floor , goes deeper into one of these debates, the clash over the idea of a “Universal Basic Income.”

Stern considers a Universal Basic Income, or UBI, the answer to rising inequality and the joblessness he sees coming from accelerating automation. He gets a lot right […]

Full Post at inequality.org

The entire Canadian and Ontario tax/transfer systems are heavily weighted against enabling women to make paid work pay. "The original basic income experiment in Manitoba demonstrated that the basic income payments encouraged more women with young children to take more time off paid work to provide unpaid care work," writes Kathleen Lahey. "It is well known that it is precisely women’s long-term absence from paid work during lengthy parental leaves that exacerbates gendered pay and income gaps." The basic income guarantee (BIG) as being framed in Ontario today may well be a conversation-changer. But in reality, it will change […]

Full Post at www.thestar.com

From Italy to India, the basic annual income is back in the news. Around the world, eight jurisdictions — including Kenya, Finland, the Netherlands, Uganda and California — are conducting experiments providing regular payments to cover basic living costs, regardless of recipients’ economic situations.

With welfare programs consuming billions of tax dollars without eliminating poverty, and with robots poised to seize more jobs and make more people redundant, governments are seizing the moment and launching test runs of different types of guaranteed annual income (GAI) programs.

Add Ontario to the list. This month, the provincial government will unveil a basic […]

Full Post at ipolitics.ca

A universal basic income will be politically unpalatable or solve our core problems. But the good news is that we may not need it…

Politicians like to solve big problems with ideas they can reduce to quick soundbites. Unfortunately, they’re often in the business of writing laws and raising support for their ideas while faceless bureaucrats are left to try and implement them on the ground. Even if those ideas become difficult to fully deploy (like the ACA), or backfire when they fail to achieve what they set out to do (like No Child Left Behind), they gain legislative […]

Full Post at rantt.com

Ontario is about to embark on a bold experiment in poverty reduction. A pilot project, set to begin sometime this spring, will measure the effect of replacing participants’ welfare and disability benefits with a guaranteed basic income.

The Ministry of Community and Social Services says it will announce details “soon” about which communities will be selected for participation, and how the pilots will be structured. It is taking into account public feedback based on a detailed discussion paper prepared by political strategist and former senator Hugh Segal.

During his nine years as a Conservative senator, Segal was a passionate advocate […]

Full Post at www.lfpress.com

Illustration by Matt Chase. The international junket jet set is said to be a bunch of billionaires telling audiences of millionaires how the middle class lives. Yet on January 18 in Davos, Switzerland, a man unlikely to be worth much money at all made the case for millionaires and billionaires to support a revolutionary system of financial redistribution.

The man was Guy Standing, a professorial research associate at the University of London and a longtime advocate of universal basic income. He was, of course, attending the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting, the uber-conference of the G-6 crowd. Seated on a […]

Full Post at www.institutionalinvestor.com

Photo: Shutterstock

Platforms like eBay, Uber, Airbnb, and Freelancer are thriving, growing the digital economy and disrupting existing business. The question is how to ensure that the transformations they entail have a positive impact on society. Here, universal basic income may have a role to play.

Few social policy ideas are as hot today as universal basic income. Social scientists, technologists, and politicians from both ends of the political spectrum see it as a potential solution to the unemployment that automation and artificial intelligence are expected to create.It has also been floated as a potential solution to the rise of the […]

Full Post at smartinvestor.business-standard.com