by
Guy Standing
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Tax credits are a subsidy to capital, whatever impact they have on poverty and the incomes of wage workers. One US estimate suggests that for every dollar spent on the EITC the low-wage worker gains 73 cents while the employer gains 27 cents by paying lower wages. In the similar finding for the UK, researchers have concluded that about three-quarters of the value of tax credits goes to workers, the rest to employees.
I mean everything is a subsidy to capital in some way unless it improves the collective bargaining power of labour (and they carry through)
Although an NIT would be a useful anti-poverty device, it would do little to advance republican freedom or provide assured economic security, nor would it be a vehicle for social justice. It would not apply to people without jobs or with incomes too low to pay tax. [...]
Milton Friedman's idea; similar to BI but would be based on household earnings (like regular tax credits) and would be paid (if at all) after the fiscal year (basically tax refund) and it would be hard to estimate the amount in advance. so just a regular means-tested scheme
Charity is based on the sentiment of 'pity' and, as the philosopher David Hume noted, pity is akin to contempt. Private charity as a central feature of social policy may satisfy libertarians, but it profoundly offends the central idea of republican freedom, that of non-domination. Being dependent on the good will of offers is not consistent with full freedom On the contrary, it compromises the freedom of the giver as well as the supplicant.
[....]
The fact that so many people in modern society are going to food banks and shelters demonstrates social policy failure. Private philanthropy should be marginalize again; it is an undemocratic way of shaping society and the selective well-being of individuals, groups and communities.
thought: private charity does intersect (or at least approximate) democracy in the case where capital allocation is proportionate and remains that way (i.e., there is full capital distributional equality), but then it's indistinguishable from regular democracy and provision of social services and it's also quite different from what we think of as charity so yeah burn it down
[...] Targeting also addresses yesterday's, not tomorrow's, poverty; it aims to help those who have fallen into poverty rather than those in danger of doing so. Yet the most effective way to reduce poverty is to prevent it, as preventing poverty costs less than helping people out of it.
[...] Once the cash transfers started, parents had enough money to pay school fees, and teachers had money to buy paper, pens, books, posters, paints and brushes, making the school more attractive to parents and children and raising the moral and, probably, the capacity of its teachers.
2008-2009 (small village of 1000 people), with a state-run primary school that required a fee, which many parents couldn't pay
the fact that you needed a "pilot" to be run to ensure this would happen is mind-blowing. sure it's a classic market failure example, but is it not the job of the government to ensure that the economy works??? is that not the whole point??? if the government recognises that primary school education is a good idea, is it not so obviously important to ensure that it's well funded even at the potential psychological cost of printing money? god, what drift
It is often assumed that low-income countries cannot afford basic income. [...]
which is really a stupid assumption because it relies on a complete lack of imagination. why are these countries low-income? are they actually self-deficient or is it a result of global development policies that rely on paralysed or misdirected productivity in the third world, in order to ensure their status on the periphery of the Washington Consensus-dominated world market? is it possible that outside conditions (including psychologically-induced effects) have prevented these countries from producing as much as they could have?
governments can literally print money (in fact, one way of defining the state is via its legitimacy in doing so) and the fact that they don't is less an indication of its feasibility, and more a call to question the structural adjustment policies that prevent these countries from lessening their dependence on outsiders
[...] In the UK, the existing system was well described by the Scottish National MP Ronnie Cowan in a House of Commons debate on basic income in September 2016:
If we were all given a blank sheet of paper and asked to design a welfare system, nobody--but nobody--would come up with the system we have now. They would need thousands of sheets of paper and would end up with a mishmash of abandoned projects, badly implemented and half-hearted ideas so complicated that it lets down those who need it most.
basically a system that needs to be refactored
DRIFT
[...] the funding should be shown as coming from 'capital' or forms of rent, so the media could not present it as taxing Bill to pay Jack.
[...] Empathy derives from a strong faith in the human condition. It is the ability to put oneself in another's shoes and to accept that people have the right to live as they wish, as long as they do no intentional or careless harm to others. Defending these values in the face of lurches to authoritarianism and paternalism may be very difficult in current circumstances. And we must recognize that this means a fundamental reform of 'rentier capitalism' arising from the policies and underlying ideology that have held sway since the 1980s.
even more low-level than empathy: it's about seeing others as selves
Means-tested housing-related benefits might have to be continued in the UK and other countries with distorted housing markets, which should be tackled separately [...]
in a section about phasing out means-tested benefits over time to be replaced by BI
I understand his intentions here (it's in a sub-section called "Baby steps") but man, it's hard to read that and not immediately think that the lion's share of housing benefit really accrues to the rentier class, and thus we need to eradicate that by making all housing provided by the state at some level