- Re: Has Universal Basic Income ever been trialled on the scale you propose? Archived Message
Posted by Sinister Burt
on April 27, 2020, 4:30 pm, in reply to "Has Universal Basic Income ever been trialled on the scale you propose?"
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IANAE(conomist), but i'll waffle anyway: There are bound to be adverse effects - but i'm sure many of these can be easily addressed through the usual means if a government has the will (like they could have been addressed at any point before the crisis). The TINA neoliberal hegemony has had a huge effect on what seems possible, but governments have been much more interventionist in living memory and it worked fine (more or less) - i'm thinking of FDR specifically. I'm not the fan boy of UBI for usual lefty reasons (how can it be good if milton friedmann came up with it?; it could let them cut other services; gives a free pass to capital etc) - but it's something that could have been done easily right now (eg via the tax credits mechanism) - it was the obvious option in the current situation, but sunak couldn;t do it for purely ideological reasons - something like this would have given a certainty to the bottom end of the economy, which sunak and co can't countenance even when there isn;'t a virus. (not to patronise, you know as much/more than me about any of this): It's worth thinking about what we mean when we say 'economy' - if welfare is sorted and vital productive industries are protected/nationalised, the 'real' economy can be fine, inasmuch as noone goes without what they need, even if capital has collapsed (leaving aside for the moment how many poorer people have been tied to the financial system via things like pensions/mortgages). This is what welfare is supposed to be - enough to be comfortable even when there's nothing else - the cost of doing this on a national scale is unimportant imv when you consider how governments can print money when they like, or borrow at such tiny interest rates as to be effectively the same - or we can just write it off wholesale as an emergency cost, like they did in the banking crash. |