Tag Archives: basic income

Michael Stephens | June 18, 2021 Research Associate Lekha Chakraborty, recently chosen to join the governing council of the International Institute for Public Finance, was interviewed for an Onmanorama podcast on the question of gender budgeting and the advantages of centering care work. Chakraborty argues policymakers in India should prioritize integrating a comprehensive care economy policy package in macroeconomic...

Michael Stephens | June 18, 2021 Research Associate Lekha Chakraborty, recently chosen to join the governing council of the International Institute for Public Finance, was interviewed for an Onmanorama podcast on the question of gender budgeting and the advantages of centering care work. Chakraborty argues policymakers in India should prioritize integrating a comprehensive care economy policy package in macroeconomic...

Free is good. Karl Widerquist specializes in basic income. The MMT position on basic income is that it should be in addition to a universal job guarantee since they address fundamentally different issues. Moreover, basic income should be means-tested rather than universal, which MMT economists argue is inflationary instead of stabilizing as purported. Since this is shaping up as a policy debate going forward as fiscal rises relative to monetary policy, it is useful to know both sides...

In 1795, the parish of Speen, in Berkshire, England, embarked on a radical new system of poor relief. Due to the ruinous French wars and a series of poor harvests, grain prices were rising sharply. As bread was the staple food of the poor, rising grain prices increased poverty and caused unrest. Concerned by the possibility of riots, the parish decided to provide subsistence-level income support to the working poor. The amounts paid were anchored to the price of bread. Each member of a...

Some 600 people have enrolled in a private basic income experiment in Switzerland, less than a week after it was announced. The trial apparently aims to find out what the citizens are going to do if granted over $2,500 monthly. RTFree cheese for Swiss? Hundreds sign up to get $2,500 a month under basic income trial

The desire to judge people's motives rather than addressing their needs is a “British disease”. We have been suffering from it for hundreds of years, cycling endlessly through repeated cycles of generosity and harshness. Each cycle ends in public outrage and an abrupt reversal: but the memory eventually fades, and the disease reappears in a new form. In this post, I outline the tragic history of Britain's repeated attempts to "categorise the poor". For centuries, successive British...

The basic income means that you are requiring somebody else to use up their finite lifespan to produce output, take it from them by force and give it to somebody who *refuses* to contribute to the production process. There is no value exchange, only theft. That is no different to the process the idle rich use today — and are rightly resented for it. So you have to justify, politically, why society should support people *for their entire life* who simply refuse to contribute when they...

We have a crisis of work. The secure, well-paid jobs of the past - many of them in manufacturing - are disappearing. What is replacing them is insecurity and uncertainty. Low-paid, part-time, temporary and seasonal work. The "feast or famine" of self-employment. The so-called "sharing economy", where people rent out their possessions for a pittance. The "gig economy", where people are paid performance by performance - or piece by piece. "Piecework", we used to call it. Perhaps we...

I've written before about the arbitrary and cruel judgments made by DWP frontline staff in relation to ESA claimants, particularly the mentally ill. And Guy Standing, in his excellent books about the precarious lives of the "new underclass", describes how the process of claiming benefits creates huge amounts of unproductive "work". Benefit claimants have to "earn" their benefits by what amounts to jumping through hoops. But I confess that - not being a claimant myself - I lacked real...

I'm collecting here all the pieces I have written on the UK state pension and its problems. What a shambles. Here are my recent posts, in disaster order. WASPI As I explain in these posts, I would be supportive of WASPI if they were only concerned with addressing the blatant injustice of the 2011 acceleration of the pension age rise for women. But they aren't, and what they are actually after is seriously unfair to other groups. So I can't support them. And I don't like the way they and...