Tuesday , March 19 2024
Home / John Quiggin / Livable income guarantee

Livable income guarantee

Summary:
I’ve been working on the idea of a Livable Income Guarantee for some time. This is a version of the participation income idea put forward by the late Tony Atkinson. ANU has just published a policy brief on the idea, written jointly with Tim Dunlop, Jane Goodall, Troy Henderson and Elise Klein. It’s not the ultimate theoretical ideal for ideas like Universal Basic Income or a Job Guarantee. Rather, it’s a policy that could be introduced now, within the existing fiscal framework. The key elements are permanently setting the unemployment benefit (whatever it’s called after Jobseeker) equal to the age pension, and subject to the same income and asset testsexpanding eligibility to encompass a wide range of contributions includingvoluntary workchild carefull-time studyartistic

Topics:
John Quiggin considers the following as important:

This could be interesting, too:

Peter Radford writes Weekend read – The trouble with words

Dean Baker writes In a free market, drugs are cheap, government-granted patent monopolies make them expensive

Lars Pålsson Syll writes I heard there’s some good shit on TV tonight …

Dean Baker writes Is “greedflation” over?

I’ve been working on the idea of a Livable Income Guarantee for some time. This is a version of the participation income idea put forward by the late Tony Atkinson. ANU has just published a policy brief on the idea, written jointly with Tim Dunlop, Jane Goodall, Troy Henderson and Elise Klein.

It’s not the ultimate theoretical ideal for ideas like Universal Basic Income or a Job Guarantee. Rather, it’s a policy that could be introduced now, within the existing fiscal framework. The key elements are

  • permanently setting the unemployment benefit (whatever it’s called after Jobseeker) equal to the age pension, and subject to the same income and asset tests
  • expanding eligibility to encompass a wide range of contributions including
    • voluntary work
    • child care
    • full-time study
    • artistic and cultural activity
    • starting a small business
  • replacing current compliance enforcement with an approach similar to that used in the tax system, with self-assessment backed by auditing

The estimated cost is $18 billion a year, and a range of financing options are included.

John Quiggin
He is an Australian economist, a Professor and an Australian Research Council Laureate Fellow at the University of Queensland, and a former member of the Board of the Climate Change Authority of the Australian Government.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *