Finland ends its experiment with “Universal Basic Income”
Surprise ending: It was a failure.
The only surprise is that it was ended.
Finland ends its experiment with “Universal Basic Income”
Surprise ending: It was a failure.
The only surprise is that it was ended.
If a failure to function as expected is any criteria Canada will soon be putting it into effect.
Oh, it’s no surprise. Elites consider it morally wrong to give free stuff to white people who work for a living and believe in God.
That’s why social credit reforms were never allowed to get off the ground in Alberta. Why give peasants free money when it’s more fun and profitable to end a depression by starting a catastrophic world war and using them as cannon fodder instead?
Elites consider it morally wrong to give free stuff to white people who work for a living and believe in God.
How much free money from the taxpayer did people of High River, AB receive when their houses went underwater?
An excellent question!
Assuming no one had house insurance and that the flood was not a product of poor municipal or provincial government planning I would think no one received any “free money”.
However, today with rampant socialism, perhaps they all received some.
Its called insurance. We all pay through the a$$ for it. Whats your next point?
thats all fine and dandy my friend…except for a minor issue. FLOOD Insurance was NOT available in Alberta…at the time. AFAIK…
And yet farmers are flush with government pogey.
A region’s willingness to tolerate socialism, is a direct measure of that region’s stupidity.
Hence, empirical evidence that the world is majority stupid.
Any region you want to define, anywhere in the world, is majority stupid.
You province. Your town. Your block. Likely your domicile (if there are 3 or more people there).
We are living through the stupid apocalypse.
Awesomely true!
“The only surprise is that it was ended.”
Yeah.
Hundreds of years ago a population realized Dane geld was only just another name for slavery.
The only form of society that prevents this is one where the majority believes that the state has no authority to confir rights and state is limited in what it can and can not do.
”Two years is too short a time-frame to be able to draw extensive conclusions from such a vast experiment. We ought to have been given additional time and more money to achieve reliable results,”
–
Insanity.
déjà vu all over again- Yogi Berra
Attempting to do the same stupid experiment knowing you will get a different result.
The only place I can think of where it hasn’t been a social disaster to pay people who aren’t working without requiring them to move, seek jobs or get training is retireees. Everywhere else, from city gettos to aboriginal reserves to impoverished rural areas, it has had only negative outcomes. Drug/alcohol abuse, crime, family breakdown, depression, multi-generation poverty. If economist’s basic rule is that you should subsidize what you want more of and tax what you want less of – then what are economists thinking?
One argument is that ubi will replace the complicated mess of social benefits and get rid of redundancy in the bureacracy. The counter argument is *no it won’t* because the bureacracy will prevent any savings and politicians will give in because public employees are a huge voting bloc. Considering the complete inability to reduce public employee positions or benefits, except perhaps for very, very short periods of time, I don’t think there’s any doubt that taxpayers would be stuck with both the old, expensive sprawling bureacracy of social programs and the new, expensive ubi program. Both of which will continue to expand in the eternal quest of political vote-buying.
So ubi’s most likely outcome is social decay and massively increased costs to taxpayers…a program only politicians and their pet economists would love.
Exactly. I am sympethetic to the technocrat case for UBI but it just doesn’t hold up.
Free money for retirees is also a disaster. It’s what’s bankrupting the US in large part.
To be fair, retirees were forced to pay into retirement programs through payroll and income taxes. The promises and obligations were out of their control but financial plans were based on those programs. I think there are better retirement systems that we could transition to and then phase out the one we have. But, kicking the can down the road this long means there will probably be a painful retirement benefits crisis before changes happen.
Social Security is, at least in America, a pyramid scheme. Those retirees are NOT getting their money; they’re getting the next generation’s money. ‘Their’ money is long gone. Further, they’re getting much more than they paid in, despite the lousy ROI SS gets.
Freedom is best, but if a coerced retirement scheme is going to happen, Australia has the best one. It’s not a pyramid scheme and it’s not going bankrupt AFAIK. It’s also private.
https://www.cato.org/blog/unexpected-praise-australias-private-social-security-system
What “free” money for retirees?
I earned ever penny of my CPP and OAS. I paid exceedingly high taxes for well over 40 years of my career. I still do. I may never receive as much as I contributed, unless of course I live to be well over 100 years.
And if you have been following the news, what’s bankrupting the US are the corrupt and fiscally irresponsible Democrats.
” what’s bankrupting the US are the corrupt and fiscally irresponsible Democrats.”
Bullshit and lies. The Dems are completely out of power at the federal level and the USG spending and deficit are completely out of control.
It’s entitlements: https://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/taxes-dont-cover-americas-expenses
Also, at least in America, retirees get more than they pay in. It might be different in Canada, which is a much more fiscally conservative country.
” …The Dems are completely out of power …”
hahaha!
and how come their judges are blocking every Trump executive order ?
Every time some documents are released by the Trump administration, democrats redact all the parts they don t like which is about 80 % of the documents
I could go on with a couple dozen examples of democrats having more power th Trump has
Trump can barely do anything because democrats have a LOT of power
How much do they pay you to come here and say that silly stuff ?
“and how come their judges are blocking every Trump executive order ?”
Because they’re unconstitutional. WTF does this have to do with the budget?
“I could go on with a couple dozen examples of democrats having more power th Trump has”
And yet you don’t. Instead we have meager whining aka typical Conservaderp Victim Complex
…It might be different in Canada, which is a much more fiscally conservative country.
It mighta been at one time…pre 1960. Now…? laughable with 35 million people supporting over a Trillion dollar debt…and that’s just at the Fed level. Ontario alone with 11.5 million people is 305Billion in the shitter… all thanx for the most part due to LIBERAL over Spending
For those advocates of universal basic income that believe that it needs to be tried and studied, here is all they need to know. If you give people money for doing nothing productive and useful, they will do nothing productive and useful. How is this so hard to understand?
I get the feeling that there’s a whole lot of educated people who have never lived in an economically deprived area. They may walk or drive through such areas, read an article or watch a documentary but they are understandably clueless about the reality.
I spent the last half of my childhood in a mixed income neighborhood with a couple of alcoholic neighbors but in a stable community and many young adult years in income-rich industrial, resource extraction, agricultural areas but I also spent a few adult years in a mixed-income neighborhood with low(no)-income housing in a community with lots of social/family dysfunction. The latter is one that more “thought leaders” should experience.
For those on the right, the welfare neighbors on the next block weren’t awful people. To those on left, these aren’t powerless victims of society. They are nice people who repeatedly make bad choices. Welfare weekends were particularly revealing as to how free money combined with low impulse control and free time creates a viscious cycle. Police and social service visits were not uncommon. Despite community housing and benefits, the school had a lunch program for kids and a breakfast program for families. You’d see the welfare families have free breakfast and then talk on their cell phones as they’re getting into their car to spend a day doing very little while passing by a help wanted sign at the DQ. The lifestyle is as much a choice as it is a tragic circumstance.
To finish off the long post (apologies), which community would a ubi community resemble most? The last one, imo. A dysfunctional, welfare lifestyle. I think our “thought leaders” imagine it’ll be educated groups of happy, well adjusted people sipping coffee at debate salons and tech entrepreneurs designing apps in between organic gardening and trips to the beach. Nope, it is more likely be groups of the depressed unemployed shooting up in the alleys in between trips to rehab, the hospital and incarceration.
Less bad would be people becoming depressed, overweight hermits belonging to social media outrage tribes and bitching about the unfair privilege of bourgeoisie middle class workers, productive businesses and the 1%. But, these citizens would have the time to occasionally go out to “spontaneous grassroots” protest rallies complete with a paycheck, hired coaches, buses and pre-printed signs (partially funded by the federal govt.,of course) while donning masks and weapons, so there’s that bonus. /s
Some excellent points you make, LC.
Perfect!
“If you give people money for doing nothing productive and useful, they will do nothing productive and useful. How is this so hard to understand?”
Exactly, and yet the province of Ontario is doing its own basic income study, to see if giving people more free money will help them, which was started around June last year.
People weren’t exactly eager in their enthusiasm to get it, so they decided to extend the sign up period just to get enough people on board.
I expect that this will go absolutely nowhere and anyone who’s getting their hopes up that the province will enact UBI after the study period is over deserve to get said hopes crushed.
Just over 50% of Canadians are employed. Over 3.5 million of those 18+ million with jobs are part-timers. When you subtract federal, provincial and municipal workers (over 20% of the workforce in 2010) that means that barely over 10 million Canadians are contributing full time to the economy. Yikes!
Your assumption is that unpaid work does not contribute to the economy. Back in the day, when I was a “non-working” wife and mother, I would put in 20 hours per week volunteering for community, schools, and church. And the non-work I did for those organizations contributed a lot more than if I had popped the offsprings in after-school care and gone off to be a cashier at the local Safeway.
Why did it fail? They couldn’t get anyone to work in the programme.
The only way to keep the vast unwashed, idle, masses from starting a bloody revolution … is to toss them some crumbs. Government crumbs. Pelosi crumbs. And give them an Obama phone.
The pilot project paid 2,000 “long-term unemployed” $690/mn. This works out to only $16.56 million per year. A drop in the bucket for the $236 billion Finnish economy.
There are 250,000 unemployed in Finland. If they were all to receive $690/mn this would work out to $2.07 billion per year, or less than 1% of GDP.
Yes it’s a big pile of money, but not really unmanageable if you are confident the money will benefit those unemployed. Something must have scared the Fins more than the cost of the program and we may never know what. My bet is when people got the money they just spent it and did nothing to improve their situation. The Fins then realized that this is a one way, dead end street.
You mean they weren’t all able to do their … “art”?
That’s why Pelosi insisted on Obamakkare ! So “artists” wouldn’t have to take mundane barista jobs … to fund their “art”
How many programs do the Finns have on top of this? they have a problem, otherwise they would not bother to cut it off. you know, votes and that sort of thing.
Several years ago, I watched an episode in a Chinese serial (similar in structure to British ones) concerning a reformer for the Qin Dukedom, which laid the foundation for the unification of China by Qin Shi Huang. It has relevance to this discussion.
The episode related how this reformer found the farmers in this county lazy, drunken, and belligerent. It turned out that several seasons ago the county had a drought, and an allotment of grain was given to it. Somehow the allotment was lost in bureaucracy and had continued since, despite the abatement of the drought. And with the guaranteed harvest, you may say, or guaranteed income, without having to work for it, the farmers with all that free time, turned into the worst examples of welfare recipients. Of course, the reformer put a stop to it immediately.
Remember, this episode was shot inside Communist China, and yet was the most biting satire of the welfare state. I really could not believe my eyes. I thought then perhaps if such sentiments were allowed to flourish, there may yet be hope there. (I do not believe such an episode could have escaped from Hollywood.) Alas, that was pre-Xi. And we all realize that with China reforms are mere mirages, and the totalitarian state can turn on a dime on the whims of the latest dictator.
Still, the episode stands on its own as a powerful testimonial against the welfare state. I do not know how exactly historical accurate it is, but I do not believe it is wholly invented. Something like it must have occurred. And remember, that was c. 350 B.C.