NO ONE NEED LIVE IN FEAR: “What it does is provide a sense of security. No one needs to live in fear. No one needs to think I have just been [benefit] sanctioned, I am not going to be able to put food on my table, I am going to lose my house next week”.

"Natalie Bennett says payment to replace unemployment benefit would ensure no one lived in fear of losing their home"

"The Green party would spend billions to give every adult – in and out of work – a citizen’s income worth more than £72.40 a week, the current value of the jobseeker’s allowance.

Natalie Bennett, the Green leader, said the policy would ensure no one lived in fear of losing their home or being unable to feed themselves. She said some of the cost would be recovered by the payment being withdrawn when an individual income reached a certain level.

Speaking on BBC1’s Andrew Marr programme, Bennett said the Green party, in common with the SNP and Plaid Cymru, would oppose the replacement of a Trident nuclear submarine, and would not form a coalition with any party; operating instead on a confidence and supply basis, leaving the party free to vote as it wished, case by case.

But with polls showing a hung parliament is the most likely outcome, Nick Cleggsaid he did not expect a result in which the largest party needed the support of any party other than the Liberal Democrats to form a government.

He said his party would not form a coalition that included Nigel Farage, and added he could not conceive of circumstances in which he would joined one with the SNP. He rejected suggestions that his parliamentary party would be cut in half.

Clegg said Ed Miliband was flaky on the economy and David Cameron was heartless about society, setting out how his party would act as a counterbalance.

The renewed focus on the cost and feasibility of a citizen’s income, including the way in which it would differ from the government scheme to integrate universal credit, demonstrates the extent to which Green policy is now being taken seriously. 

The payment would replace existing unemployment benefits, but would be paid to people with jobs as well as the unemployed.

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Bennett defended the principle of the citizen’s income saying: “What it does is provide a sense of security. No one needs to live in fear. No one needs to think I have just been [benefit] sanctioned, I am not going to be able to put food on my table, I am going to lose my house next week”.

The cost of a citizen’s income has been put at £240bn, but Bennett said the payment would be withdrawn when an individual’s income reached a certain unspecified level.

She also said the party did not have an open-door policy on immigration, but those who have a right to immigrate should be entitled to exercise that right. She also questioned why Germany had been willing to take 20,000 refugees from Syria, and the UK figure was in the low hundreds.

She said public opposition to immigration stemmed from “low wages, expensive housing or crowded schools or hospitals – all these things are caused by failed government policies and not immigration”."

Source
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2001/05/mother-jones-woman

Switzerland’s Proposal to Pay People for Being Alive

"This fall, a truck dumped eight million coins outside the Parliament building in Bern, one for every Swiss citizen. It was a publicity stunt for advocates of an audacious social policy that just might become reality in the tiny, rich country.

Along with the coins, activists delivered 125,000 signatures — enough to trigger a Swiss public referendum, this time on providing a monthly income to every citizen, no strings attached.

Every month, every Swiss person would receive a check from the government, no matter how rich or poor, how hardworking or lazy, how old or young. Poverty would disappear. Economists, needless to say, are sharply divided on what would reappear in its place — and whether such a basic-income scheme might have some appeal for other, less socialist countries too.

The proposal is, in part, the brainchild of a German-born artist named Enno Schmidt, a leader in the basic-income movement. He knows it sounds a bit crazy. He thought the same when someone first described the policy to him, too. “I tell people not to think about it for others, but think about it for themselves,” Schmidt told me. “What would you do if you had that income?

What if you were taking care of a child or an elderly person?” Schmidt said that the basic income would provide some dignity and security to the poor, especially Europe’s underemployed and unemployed. It would also, he said, help unleash creativity and entrepreneurialism: Switzerland’s workers would feel empowered to work the way they wanted to, rather than the way they had to just to get by. He even went so far as to compare it to a civil rights movement, like women’s suffrage or ending slavery.

When we spoke, Schmidt repeatedly described the policy as “stimmig.” Like many German words, it has no English equivalent, but it means something like “coherent and harmonious,” with a dash of “beauty” thrown in. It is an idea whose time has come, he was saying. And basic-income schemes are having something of a moment, even if they are hardly new. (Thomas Paine was an advocate.) But their renewed popularity says something troubling about the state of rich-world economies.

Go to a cocktail party in Berlin, and there is always someone spouting off about the benefits of a basic income, just as you might hear someone talking up Robin Hood taxes in New York or single-payer health care in Washington.

And it’s not only in vogue in wealthy Switzerland. Beleaguered and debt-wracked Cyprus is weighing the implementation of basic incomes, too. They even are whispered about in the United States, where certain wonks on the libertarian right and liberal left have come to a strange convergence around the idea — some prefer an unconditional “basic” income that would go out to everyone, no strings attached; others a means-tested “minimum” income to supplement the earnings of the poor up to a given level.

The case from the right is one of expediency and efficacy. Let’s say that Congress decided to provide a basic income through the tax code or by expanding the Social Security program. Such a system might work better and be fairer than the current patchwork of programs, including welfare, food stamps and housing vouchers.

A single father with two jobs and two children would no longer have to worry about the hassle of visiting a bunch of offices to receive benefits. And giving him a single lump sum might help him use his federal dollars better. Housing vouchers have to be spent on housing, food stamps on food. Those dollars would be more valuable — both to the recipient and the economy at large — if they were fungible.

Even better, conservatives think, such a program could significantly reduce the size of our federal bureaucracy. It could take the place of welfare, food stamps, housing vouchers and hundreds of other programs, all at once: Hello, basic income; goodbye, H.U.D. Charles Murray of the conservative American Enterprise Institute has proposed a minimum income for just that reason — feed the poor, and starve the beast. “Give the money to the people,” Murray wrote in his book “In Our Hands: A Plan to Replace the Welfare State.” He suggested guaranteeing $10,000 a year to anyone meeting the following conditions: be American, be over 21, stay out of jail and — as he once quipped — “have a pulse.”

The left is more concerned with the power of a minimum or basic income as an anti-poverty and pro-mobility tool. There happens to be some hard evidence to bolster the policy’s case.

In the mid-1970s, the tiny Canadian town of Dauphin ( the “garden capital of Manitoba” ) acted as guinea pig for a grand experiment in social policy called “Mincome.” For a short period of time, all the residents of the town received a guaranteed minimum income. About 1,000 poor families got monthly checks to supplement their earnings.

Evelyn Forget, a health economist at the University of Manitoba, has done some of the best research on the results. Some of her findings were obvious: Poverty disappeared. But others were more surprising: High-school completion rates went up; hospitalization rates went down. “If you have a social program like this, community values themselves start to change,” Forget said.

There are strong arguments against minimum or basic incomes, too. Cost is one. Creating a massive disincentive to work is another. But some experts said the effect might be smaller than you would think. A basic income might be enough to live on, but not enough to live very well on. Such a program would be designed to end poverty without creating a nation of layabouts.

The Mincome experiment offers some backup for that argument, too.“For a lot of economists, the issue was that you would disincentivize work,” said Wayne Simpson, a Canadian economist who has studied Mincome. “The evidence showed that it was not nearly as bad as some of the literature had suggested.”

There’s a deeper, scarier reason that arguments for guaranteed incomes have resurfaced of late. Wages are stagnant, unemployment is high and tens of millions of families are struggling in Europe and here at home. Despite record corporate earnings and skyrocketing fortunes for the college-educated and already well-off, the job market is simply not rewarding many fully employed workers with a decent way of life. Millions of households have had no real increase in earnings since the late 1980s. Consider the current debate over fast-food workers’ wages.

The advocacy group Low Pay Is Not OK posted a phone call, recorded by a 10-year McDonald’s veteran, Nancy Salgado, when she contacted the company’s “McResource” help line.

The operator told Salgado that she could qualify for food stamps and home heating assistance, while also suggesting some area food banks — impressively, she knew to recommend these services without even asking about Salgado’s wage ($8.25 an hour), though she was aware Salgado worked full time. The company earned $5.5 billion in net profits last year, and appears to take for granted that many of its employees will be on the dole.

Absurd as a minimum income might seem to bootstrapping Americans, one already exists in a way — McDonald’s knows it. If our economy is no longer able to improve the lives of the working poor and low-income families, why not tweak our policies to do what we’re already doing, but better — more harmoniously? It’s hardly uplifting news, but minimum incomes just might be stimmig for the United States too."

Source
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/17/magazine/switzerlands-proposal-to-pay-people-for-being-alive.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

Basic Income, Why Not?

"1) What is basic income?

"Basic income" is shorthand for a range of proposals that share the idea of giving everyone in a given polity a certain amount of money on a regular basis. A basic income comes with no categorical eligibility requirements; you don't have to be blind or disabled or unemployed to get it. Everyone gets the same amount by virtue of being a human with material needs that money can help address.

There are a number of different names this idea has gone by over the years. "Universal basic income" and "basic income guarantee" are used frequently. "Guaranteed minimum income" and "negative income tax" are generally used to refer to versions of the plan that also impose a tax that gradually eats up the cash transfer, as a means of reducing the cost of the policy. "Demogrant" was popular in the '70s, and "citizens' 

2) Who supports basic income?

Surprising people! Arguably the biggest popularizer of the idea in the 20th century was libertarian economist Milton Friedman, who specifically favored a negative income tax as a replacement for much of the welfare state. Many left-of-center economists, like James Tobinand John Kenneth Galbraith, were also on board. More recently, Emmanuel Saez and Jonathan Gruber, two of the most influential left-leaning economists currently working, argued that an ideal tax system would feature a "large demogrant."

Martin Luther King Jr. endorsed the idea in his book Where to Go From Here: Chaos or Community?, writing, "I am now convinced that the simplest approach will prove to be the most effective—the solution to poverty is to abolish it directly by a now widely discussed measure: the guaranteed income." 

Activists and scholars Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven authored an influential article in The Nation in 1966 which called for a national movement of the poor with the intended goal of achieving a basic income. More academically, left philosophers and intellectuals like Erik Olin Wright, Peter Frase, Carole Pateman, Antonio Negri, and Michael Hardt and in particular Philippe Van Parijs have written in favor of the idea.

But the idea still retains appeal on the right for the same reasons Friedman embraced it. Libertarian economist and National Review/Reason contributor Veronique de Rugy spoke up for the idea on Fox News and received a favorable hearing. Charles Murray of The Bell Curve fame wrote a whole book laying out a specific plan for a negative income tax to replace the existing welfare state.

3) Has a basic income been implemented anywhere?

A meeting on Brazil's Bolsa Familia program in the state of Bahia. (Manu Dias/SECOM)

Not exactly, but a lot of countries have generous cash transfer programs of one variety or another. In the United States, Social Security is more or less an age-limited basic income program which ties benefits to wages to make itself look like a pension program. Supplemental Security Income is a guaranteed minimum income scheme for the aged, blind, and disabled. Food stamps are a guaranteed minimum income distributed through food rather than cash. The Earned Income Tax Credit functions much like a negative income tax with a work requirement.

Most other developed countries, including the UK, France, and Germany, have similar income support systems with eligibility requirements of varying strictness. In the developing world and in particular Latin America, conditional cash transfer (CCT) schemes — wherein low-income families are given cash benefits with no use restrictions provided they fulfill certain conditions, like sending kids to school or getting vaccinated — have become popular over the past decade or so. 

The most famous program is Brazil's Bolsa Familia, but Mexico, Colombia, and plenty of other countries have similar programs, with meta-analyses showing the programs have significant positive effects on health and education outcomes. New York City even tried out a CCT, with evaluator MDRC finding positive results.

Formal basic income plans have been tried in small experiments. A whole series of experiments in various US cities testing out negative income tax plans were conducted in the 1970s, as was a much more ambitious trial in Manitoba, Canada. The results of the experiments are controversial, but included a modest reduction in hours worked as well as improvements in health outcomes and, naturally, an increase in incomes. A much more recent trial in Namibia also reported positive outcomes.

4) Wouldn't this destroy the economy?

Let's pass a basic income, they said. We won't turn into a desolate wasteland, they said. 

A common concern with basic income proposals is the worry that they'd destroy incentives to work. If people no longer need to work to afford an apartment and food and other life necessities, then it stands to reason that the incentive one has to get a job — or to work a given number of hours on a job — would be reduced. Even if one doesn't want to live on whatever the given basic income is, they might go from working full-time to working part-time, making up the difference with the benefit. This is concerning to people both because most Americans have a strong belief that people ought to work for a living, and because reduced work effort means reduced production — in other words, an economic slowdown.

As noted above, a real basic income has never been implemented across a whole country, which makes macroeconomic effects hard to predict. But we do have some experimental evidence on the question of work effort, drawn from the negative income tax experiments in the US and Canada in the 1970s. Those studies found that work effort declined when a negative income tax was imposed, as predicted, but that the effect was quite small. Moreover, most of the reduction in work effort appeared to come from people taking longer stints of unemployment. That can be a bad thing, but it can also mean that people aren't settling for second-best jobs and holding out for ones that are better fits for them. That'd actually be good, economically. Additionally, the work effect reduction for young people appeared to come entirely from increased school attendance— also a desirable outcome.

Another factor is underreporting. Negative income taxes provide an incentive for beneficiaries to underreport their incomes so as to get a bigger benefit — and that's exactly what happened in the US negative income tax experiments. For the experiment in Gary, Indiana, when participants' reported incomes were cross-referenced with official government data on their earnings, the reduction in work effort went away entirely.

So it's reasonable to think there might be a reduction in work effort if a basic income were imposed. But the scale is likely to be modest, and the form that reduction in work effort takes could very well be good for the economy in the long run.

5) Could a basic income ever happen in the United States?

President Nixon and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who designed his negative income tax plan. (Nixon Foundation)

At the moment, probably not, given that Congress won't pass basically anything at all. But the odds in, say, the next hundred years aren't necessarily zero. For one thing, in the 1970s basic income proposals were popular among both political parties. Richard Nixon pushed a negative income tax through the House, and Jimmy Carter made a less successful but real attempt at passing one himself. In 1972, George McGovern challenged Nixon for reelection not by attacking his income support policies but by proposing a more generous basic income.

More to the point, most countries, as noted above, have income support schemes that are at least somewhat similar to a basic income, and when the idea is framed in more familiar terms it ceases to seem so radical. Case in point: the FairTax plan, which would replace all federal income, payroll, gift, and estate taxes with a 30 percent sales tax, includes a household refund of taxes paid on spending up to the poverty level. Households would receive that refund regardless of their work status, making it a pure (albeit quite small) basic income. And the FairTax has been endorsed by 76 members of the House and 9 members of the Senate — all Republicans. They probably wouldn't think of themselves as basic income supporters, but in a way, they are.

Source
http://www.vox.com/2014/9/8/6003359/basic-income-negative-income-tax-questions-explain

People Want to Do something that Matters; Let Meaningful Jobs Free. Give People Dignity. Time for Basic Income to Free People up to do REAL THINGS that MATTER TO REAL PEOPLE.

"This morning, many sleepy, grumpy, bloated people across the country returned to their jobs for the first time since before Christmas. Some of those people in London—the country's largest hub of early-morning misery—were made to stop and consider the numb feeling inside of them by 200 posters that someone had plastered up in ad spaces on the tube, with depressing quotes such as:

It's as if someone were out there making up pointless jobs for the sake of keeping us all working.

Huge swaths of people spend their days performing tasks they secretly believe do not really need to be performed.

How can one even begin to speak of dignity in labor when one secretly feels one's job should not exist?

The quotes were taken from London School of Economics anthropology professor and activist David Graeber's article " On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs," which explained that much modern employment is pretty much pointless, and that having to do them takes a toll on everyone's mentality. 

The article went viral in 2013 and hasn't lost its relevance since. The poster campaign seemed to be a re-run of the anti-police posters that went up before Christmas. Just like back then, the Bullshit Job posters were designed by Strike! magazine, which ran the original article.

But nobody knows who put them up though, least of all Graeber, so I decided to call him up and chat about why everything I do is a meaningless waste of time.

VICE: Apparently 200 "counter-propaganda" posters have been put up on the tube today quoting an article you wrote on "bullshit jobs."

How do you feel about that?
David Graeber: You know, to be perfectly honest, I didn't even know in advance about the action. I was thinking of going into work today myself. Oddly, I was going to bring a picture with me—the one from the "Bullshit Jobs" piece—that someone gave me as a birthday present, to my office, to use as a "Do Not Disturb" sign.

It was a very pleasant way to wake up: to check Twitter and see pictures of phrases that I had said. I guess the idea is that today's the first day people are going back to work, so I'm assuming whoever did it wants people, after having spent time with their families and doing things that they truly care about, to reflect on whether the job they're going to is meaningful—what they actually think about it, and also the value of what they're doing.

Can you explain what you mean by "bullshit jobs"?
When I came up with the phrase, I was particularly interested in what the subjective value of one's work is. There are millions of people who go to work everyday, and feel that maybe one hour of their work is actually contributing something to the world, and maybe not even that—maybe they're actually subtracting from the world by what they do. I was interested in the effect this has on people.

So do you think someone is just making up pointless jobs to keep us working? One of the phrases on the posters suggested that.
Obviously it's not like people are sitting around in a room saying, you know, "Let's think up pointless jobs!" but it is true that people who talk about economic policy talk about creating employment but never talk about whether that employment is meaningful or not.

This completely contradicts what should happen in a capitalist system. You know, we're used to thinking of the Soviet Union as an economy where they had an ideology of full employment and they had to make up jobs for people that were completely unnecessary and pointless; you'd go to a cashier and one gives you a ticket and another does something else and another something else—they were constantly making up these pointless jobs.

It's understandable that this would happen in an economy that is based on the principle of work as a value unto itself and full employment and so forth and so on. But in a capitalist society, paying somebody to do nothing is the very last thing you'd expect a firm to do, but in fact they do and often you can observe it.

In a lot of the responses I got on blogs, people would talk about how they had figured out a way to automate 90 percent of their job or whatever, and they'd say, "I showed it to my supervisor and they said, 'Don't do that! If you do that, I'll need three workers instead of eight workers and I'll be much less significant within the corporation.'" The corporate bureaucracy is not that different to what happened in the old Soviet system.

Why do you think many people are unemployed and actually wish they had any job—even a bullshit job—to do?
I think one thing that's really significant is an ideological shift, away from the idea that work is valuable in that it produces stuff. It's kind of self-evident that, in the 19th century, work was important to produce the world around us.

But over the course of the 20th century there's been a huge effort to re-imagine the world; it's the imagination of these great entrepreneurial geniuses that create all these things—workers are just robots, working in the factories, doing what they're told, extensions of the minds of these quite great people. It seems there has been an increased emphasis on work as of pure value unto itself.

You say bullshit jobs do moral and spiritual damage. How come? 
There's this idea that work is discipline—you can't become a mature, responsible, self-contained, proper person without basically working more than you want to at things you don't really like. The more unpleasant work is, the more moralizing it is. And that logic has become stronger and stronger and stronger, so anybody who doesn't work you can revile as a parasite.

But we have this weird thing now where even people who enjoy their work are viewed a bit suspiciously. We have this weird situation where the more obviously your work contributes to the world, the less they pay you, with a few exceptions like surgeons, airline pilots, things like that. But for the most part the people who get paid the most are people who it is entirely unclear what they contribute to the world at all. Meanwhile people like, say, a nurse—the people who, if they disappeared, the world would immediately be in trouble—those guys get the least.

How does that happen? I think one of the reasons is passive morality—that, like, work is valuable because you don't wanna be doing it and there's no meaning or value in it at all. It's really hard to get a company to pay people to do something when they have any reason to do so other than the money.

So even if it's like transformation work or artistic work—anything that's in any way fun—they say, "Is there some way we can get people to do this for free?"

So for society, what's the alternative to creating bullshit jobs—how should we organize so that people have to do fewer hours of work in a job that has a point to it? I think there are any number of different ways. One interesting program would be a basic minimum income system—they're playing around with that in Switzerland. Instead of your wage being dependent on your work, you just give everybody a flat rate and have them decide for themselves how they want to contribute to society. And people do want to contribute in some way.

We have this idea that people left to their own devices will just be parasites—they'll lounge about and not do work—but that's clearly not the case. The example I go to is prisons, even here [in the UK], they actually use work to reward people. Here are people who are not particularly altruistic—they're criminals, after all—and they're in a situation where they get food and shelter and they could just sit around all day, but actually they're so eager to do something rather than just sit around that they'd rather work. I think people really do want to do something.

I remember being very struck by Dostoyevsky, who was in a Russian prison camp, and he said if you really want to destroy someone psychologically, much worse than through physical torture, just make up a completely meaningless form of work. You know, have them take water from some giant vat and then move it back to the first vat again. Have them do that all day and before long even the most hardened criminal will be utterly despairing of life, because there's nothing more horrible than devoting one's life to something completely meaningless. I mean, you know, sure, there will be some freeloaders, but we've got more freeloaders right now.

What would you suggest to people reading this, or who saw excerpts of your article on the tube today, and are wondering if their jobs are bullshit?
I'm not really there to tell people what to do with their lives. But if you can find something that actually helps other people and you can still afford to feed your family, you might want to consider that. I think that's most people's dilemma: I remember this very clearly from Occupy Wall Street—people would tell the story of their lives on little post-it notes, and the vast majority complained about their lives a lot. They'd say, "I want to have a job where I actually contribute something to society—I want to be in education, I want to be a nurse, I want to help society."

What is a non-bullshit job?
A job that isn't bullshit should have concrete benefits to other people. But we can't do jobs that aren't bullshit because of debt. That's a great dilemma from which that movement actually started I think. I would say to unions and organizers, think about that, redefine what is valuable about work—work is valuable if it makes other people's lives better.
It would be nice if we were rewarded for making people's lives better, not punished. From an individual point of view, think about the way that you can navigate that with your own conscience."

Source
http://www.vice.com/read/david-graeber-pointless-jobs-tube-poster-interview-912

"The Green Party reaffirms its commitment to a Citizen's Income"

"On Saturday 1st March the Green Party Spring Conference passed the following resolution:

We call upon [Green Party Executive Committee] to establish a working group (WG) drawing on expertise in the fields of taxation, social security and any other relevant fields, to calculate a Citizen's Income at a level that is reasonable and affordable.

We also call for a second WG to be established to create and propose a strategy to raise public awareness and support for a Citizen's Income. We also call on Green Party Regional Council to ensure that a Citizen's Income is included in the manifesto for the next General Election in 2015

The motion's proposer, Alison Whalley, said this in her address to the conference:

Citizen's Income is a universal, unconditional, and non-withdrawable payment to every woman, man and child simply because of their status as a citizen. It is also called basic income because it is a foundation, on which a person can build their life in the economic, social and environmental spheres.

Citizen's Income has three main advantages:

Firstly, because it is not means-tested, it will greatly alleviate the poverty trap now experienced by millions of workers, as well as those seeking work.

It is a secure income. A [Citizen's Income] will give true flexibility to people. It will allow people to build on it through part-time or full-time work, or by engaging in socially and environmentally useful work, paid or unpaid, without financial penalty. This is much, much better than the exploitative 'workfare' schemes so favoured by this government.

It will promote much-needed social solidarity. Since everyone, able or unable to work, rich and poor alike, will receive a Citizen's Income, it will remove the current perceived conflict of interest between 'claimant' and 'taxpayer': there is no stigma, for instance, in receiving Child Benefit or NHS treatments.

A CI will promote a new way of living together, as well as a new way of distributing wealth.

How will it be funded?

An organisation called the Citizen's Income Trust has made financial projections based on a CI equivalent to the Income Support rates for single people. The scheme is close to being cost neutral within the current tax and benefit system.

Why vote for this motion now?

As we all know the prevalent goal of perpetual economic growth is not fit for purpose. A Green economy though is about living within the planet's resources, and sharing the cake, so to speak, more equally - i.e., a steady state economy.

A CI will remove the treadmill of getting any job just to survive. It will give more choice. It will mean not being forced to take a job, like one involved with fracking, that is ecologically or socially unsound. It will unleash people's creativity, and encourage a greater quality of life.

A steady state, green economy means learning to live with less. It will involve a profound shift in priorities and a new mentality towards consumerism. A CI makes the transition possible by protecting everyone's livelihoods.

A carefully thought-out campaign to raise awareness about a CI will strike a real chord wtih many people, when they understand that a CI makes sense, more so now than ever before.

At the same conference, Barb Jacobson gave a speech entitled 'poverty is political'. Here are a few excerpts:

The European Citizens' Initiative (ECI) for Unconditional Basic Income ran from 14 January 2013 to 14 January 2014. Despite problems at the beginning, to do with how ECIs have been set up by the European Commission, which meant that we couldn't start collecting signatures until over two months later; despite the fact that there was no funded organisation behind it - the countries involved went from 13 to 25, and we collected the support of over 287,000 people throughout Europe. As momentum built in the two last months, the Europe-wide signatures doubled, and we doubled the number of signatures from the UK over the last two weeks of the ECI. I'm also happy to say that 34 MEPs, including both UK Green MEPs, Keith Taylor and Jean Lambert, signed a statement in support of this ECI last November. …

Why do I support unconditional Basic, or Citizen's, Income? I have been a student, feminist, welfare claimant, waitress, secretary, journalist, community organiser, mother - all of these jobs with very little - or no - income attached. I still do some of these things. Currently I am paid to be a housing and benefits adviser, and I'm here to say that I'd be very happy if Citizen's Income cost me my current job. …

Every week I see the problems caused by means-testing. The primary one is the high effective tax rate of 85%; if people work and still qualify for benefits, they can only keep 15% of any extra money they make. This is the real cause of the 'benefit trap', not the supposedly easy money.

There is also the problem that with the increase of more flexible, precarious contracts, people need to spend more and more time making and adjusting their claims, with a corresponding extra burden on the bureaucracies which administer them. That is, as long as they're not on zero-hour contracts, which means that while they might not be 'employed' in the sense of earning money by working, they are still 'unavailable for work.' …

We need … to fight for a better society than what has gone before. Citizen's Income, or what many call Unconditional Basic Income, is the best I have found so far. Surely it's better to give people money, and let them decide what to do with it. We know that giving money to poor people increases local spending, multiplying its value by four to five times, in terms of increasing local jobs and other economic activity. And most crucially, Citizen's Income enables us to decide how to use our time - it allows us to be free of stress, overwork, humiliation, and the bureaucratic nightmares that I encounter every week [as a benefits advisor].

The People's Parliament, 4th March 2014

Citizen's Income: a minor policy change that would transform our society

The People's Parliament 'is a discussion series held in Parliament, hosted by John McDonnell MP with the aim of livening up, and providing political depth, to the debate in the run up to the next election' (http://thepeoplesparliament.me.uk). On Tuesday 4th March the subject was Citizen's Income.

Professor Guy Standing, author of The Precariat, spoke about the vulnerability of this new class to economic shocks, and about the serious problem of income insecurity, and recommended a Citizen's Income as a solution to the problem that would satisfy justice principles for both egalitarians and libertarians. He also reported briefly on the significant results obtained from a recent Citizen's Income pilot project in India (see the report on a seminar held on the 5th March for further details of the project).

Malcolm Torry, author of Money for Everyone, then spoke about how a Citizen's Income would work, how it could be funded, how it would affect individuals, families, and our society as a whole, and how it would reduce marginal deduction rates so that net income would rise faster as earnings rise.

Natalie Bennett, Leader of the Green Party, spoke about the Green Party's longstanding commitment to Citizen's Income, discussed the Green Party Spring Conference resolution to include Citizen's Income in the Green Party manifesto at the next General Election, and showed how a Citizen's Income cohered with the party's commitment to sustainability.

John McDonnell, who was chairing the event, spoke about the importance of a Citizen's Income to our current situation and of how its implementation might become politically feasible.

The House of Commons' largest committee room was packed for the event, and following the presentations, a vigorous discussion took place on the desirable level of a Citizen's Income, the costing of proposed schemes, political feasibility, funding mechanisms, administrat-ion, pensions, wage subsidies, the Living Wage and the National Minimum Wage, who should and who should not receive a Citizen's Income, and much more. A dispute about whether work is the way out of poverty was resolved by an understanding that work as it is now, in the context of today's largely means-tested benefits system, is not a way out of poverty, but that, in the context of a Citizen's Income, work could be a way out of poverty for many individuals and families.

The debate ran out of time.

Pilot Projects in India

A report on a seminar led by Professor Guy Standing at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London, on the 5th March 2014

At the seminar Guy Standing reported the results of a Citizen's Income pilot project in which he has been involved in India over the past five years. In recent decades, India has relied on subsidised rice, wheat, sugar and kerosene to reduce poverty, but about three-quarters of the money allocated to the programme never reaches the people for whom it is intended. So an alternative method has now become essential. Cash transfers are the obvious solution, and for the pilot project it was decided that universal, individual, unconditional monthly payments would be the model to be tested. Guy Standing worked with the Self-Employed Women's Association (SEWA) on the pilots with finance provided by UNICEF.

There were three pilots. An initial small project in Delhi offered residents of a low-income area to choose between continuing with the subsidised goods or taking a cash transfer of equivalent value. . About half chose the Citizen's Income. But after a few months of experience, over 20% of those who initially chose the subsidised food and kerosene asked to swap to the Citizen's Income. All those who had taken the cash wished to remain with it.

The second pilot covered 20 villages in Madhya Pradesh. In eight villages every individual was paid a monthly Citizen's Income while continuing to receive the subsidised food and kerosene, if they had been receiving them. Initially, each man and each woman received 200 Rupees a month, and each child 100, paid to the mother or surrogate mother.

Subsequently, the Citizen's Income was raised to 300 rupees per month for each adult, and 150 for each child up to the age of 14. These amounts were approximately one third of subsistence income. Twelve similar villages were taken as control villages in what was a modified randomised control trial, enabling the evaluation of the impact to compare individuals over time and with others like them who were not receiving the Citizen's Income.

A third pilot was conducted in a tribal village, where every adult and every child received 300 or 150 rupees respectively. A second structurally similar tribal village was taken as the control village for comparative analysis.

In each of the 22 villages, a baseline survey (census) was undertaken and then evaluations carried out at six, twelve and eighteen months. In the villages in which a Citizen's Income was received residents were required to open bank accounts within three months, and over 96% of them did so, the remainder being helped afterwards.

In the villages in which residents received the Citizen's Income:

Latrines were built or improved;

Housing quality improved;

Mosquito nets and repellents proliferated;

Child weight-for-age moved closer to the normal distribution, and girls in particular benefited;

Diets improved, with more fresh fruit and pulses being consumed;

There was a lower incidence of illness;

Spending on medical care and on schooling increased;

48 disabled people went to hospital when they were ill (as opposed to only two in the control villages);

Secondary school enrolment outstripped enrolment in the control villages, particularly for girls;
School performance rose

Indebtedness fell, and some men managed to escape from debt bondage. In the local naukar system, someone in debt has to work for the person to whom they owe money.

Particularly important results in relation to the critic-isms sometimes levelled at a Citizen's Income were:

Alcohol and tobacco use did not rise;

There was a general increase in economic activity, particularly amongst women;
The purchase of productive assets increased: goats, chickens, bullocks, buffaloes and sewing machines;

More people in the Citizen's Income villages increased their earned incomes than did those in the control villages. (An increase in work days was mainly generated by increases in second main economic activities and by a shift to own-account labour).

Child labour shifted from external wage labour to work with adult relatives in own-account farming: a form of labour that is less disruptive to schooling.

What is particularly significant about these results is that they were obtained with a Citizen's Income that was only about one third of subsistence income.

Questions and discussion followed the presentation.

A report on a Citizen's Income meeting at the Scottish Parliament

by Anne Miller

A seminar and round-table discussion entitled 'Beyond Welfare Reform to a Citizen's Income: the desirability and feasibility of a CI scheme', was hosted by Jim Eadie, Member of the Scottish Parliament (MSP) on Wednesday 15 January at the Scottish Parliament at Holyrood. Over 60 people attended, including four other MSPs and some Parliamentary Assistants. The majority of the participants were employees and activists in the Voluntary Sector, together with representatives from several Scottish churches, civil servants, academics, and some private individuals.

Jim Eadie opened the proceedings with a warm welcome to the guests, reminding them of the importance and timeliness of the topic under discussion.

The meeting was chaired by Sir John Elvidge, former First Permanent Secretary to the Scottish Government. The first speaker was Ailsa McKay, Professor of Economics at Glasgow Caledonian University, who addressed the question of the desirability of a CI and gave a passionate, but reasoned, discursive presentation on the philosophical and political aspects of a Citizen's Basic Income.

She emphasised that a CI is not a mere reform of our current welfare system, but is a radical transformation that involves the acceptance of a whole new way of thinking about social security policy, and helps to secure both equality and efficiency objectives. She pointed out that the National Insurance system was designed for an industrial society, and does not help those who experience in-work-poverty, and helps those who are self-employed only minimally; nor does it take women's contributions into account. A Citizen's Basic Income breaks the link between paid employ-ment and income, and leads to greater gender equality.

The second speaker was Annie Miller, Chair of the Citizen's Income Trust and retired academic economist, who tackled the feasibility question. She said that the discussion could be relevant to the whole UK, or to an independent Scotland, or to a devolved Scotland with greater fiscal powers within the union. She described the current Social Security system as a Gordian Knot that cannot be unravelled or reformed.

It must be cut through and replaced by a new radical alternative, designed to meet the needs of the economy and society in the 21st century, but robust enough to meet the needs of changing societies in the future. She defined a CI in terms of the recent European Citizens' Initiative on Unconditional Basic Income, that is, universal, individual, unconditional, and high enough for a life of dignity and participation in society. However, this does not define the whole system. She emphasised that there is not one unique optimum CI scheme, and that each scheme should be designed to meet a set of specified, prioritised objectives.

Annie listed a range of objectives that a CI can fulfil. She briefly reviewed some of the suggested sources for funding a CI scheme, including a sales tax, a sovereign wealth fund, and income tax, but only the latter could redistribute income from rich to poor, men to women, and geographically, reversing the trend of recent decades.

The speakers responded to questions from the floor before the discussion was opened up to the participants. Sir John Elvidge asked the delegates to focus on three questions that needed to be addressed.

What are your priorities with respect to a CI scheme: preventing poverty; increasing financial security; reducing income inequalities; restoring incentives to work-for-pay for poorer people; simplification of the welfare system; or stimulating aggregate demand?
What do you think are the main stumbling blocks in implementing a CI?
If you think that a CI is good thing in general, where would you like the matter taken next?
The ensuing discussion tackled all of these questions, and raised many other important issues. Specific answers were not necessarily forthcoming, but the general feeling was one of sympathy for the concept of a CI, and encouragement for the advocates to take it further.

Many of the participants will have heard of the sad death of Professor Ailsa McKay on 5 March, at the far too early age of 50, after a feisty battle with cancer. We print the full text of her talk on the 15th January after the obituary that follows this report."

Source and More
http://citizensincome.org/resources/Newsletter20142.htm

"A Citizen's Income is an unconditional, nonwithdrawable income paid to every individual as a right of citizenship"

"To see Jeremy Howard's thought-provoking talk on how technology will develop, click here. (It's the last bit that's relevant to the Citizen's Income debate) And to see Sonia Sodha's recent article on the same theme in the Guardian, click here

To see Ursula Huws's new blog post on Citizen's Income, click here

To see Rutger Bregman's TEDx talk on Citizen's Income, click here

The Discover Society website has published a new policy briefing on Citizen's Income. Click here to read it.

The think tank Compass has published a report: Reclaim Modernity: Beyond markets, beyond machines, by Mark Fisher and Jeremy Gilbert. The report advocates a Citizen's Income: 'The only truly democratic objective with regard to the labour market is to reduce individuals’

dependence on it and to encourage participation in it not through compulsory mechanisms but by exerting upward pressure on wage levels. It is worth reflecting that the introduction of a citizens’ income would achieve both of these objectives without the need for further regulation of either workers or employers' (p.24).

To see a new film from prosocialprogress.org featuring Guy Standing, click here.

To see a report of the recent New Putney Debates session on Citizen's Income, click here; and to see the discussion on Youtube, click here."

The Citizen's Income Newsletter, issue 3 for 2014, is now available. Click here to read it

Source and Lot's More
http://citizensincome.org/

What if everybody got free cash? Myths and facts about Unconditional Basic Income

"Money for Everyone. Why We Need a Citizen's Income - [UNCUT] Author Interview with Malcolm Torry"

An unconditional basic income, basic income, basic income guarantee, universal basic income, universal demogrant, or citizen’s income.

"An unconditional basic income (also called basic income, basic income guarantee, universal basic income, universal demogrant,^[1] or citizen’s income) is a proposed system^[2] of social security in which all citizens or residents of a country regularly receive an unconditional sum of money, either from a government or some other public institution, in addition to any income received from elsewhere.

A basic income is typically intended to be only enough for a person to survive on, to encourage people to engage in economic activity. A basic income of any amount less than the social minimum is sometimes referred to as a "partial basic income".

Basic income systems financed on returns to publicly owned enterprises are major components in many proposals for market socialism. Basic income schemes have also been promoted within the context of capitalist systems, which would be financed through taxation or a negative income tax.^[3]

Similar proposals for "capital grants provided at the age of majority" date to Thomas Paine's Agrarian Justice of 1795, there paired with asset-based egalitarianism. The phrase "social dividend" was commonly used as a synonym for basic income in the English-speaking world before 1986, after which the phrase "basic income" gained widespread currency.^[4] Prominent advocates of the concept include Philippe Van Parijs, Ailsa McKay,^[5] André Gorz, and Guy Standing.

"Work incentives and disincentives[edit]

One property of basic income is that it does not create a certain disincentive to work that some benefits do. In some cases where basic income is not present, people on benefits who begin work lose benefits at around the same rate that their income rises (a form of poverty trap where the marginal tax rate is 100%). This does not happen with basic income, as the rate of increase is positive at all incomes.^[7]

A frequent objection to basic income is the lack of reciprocity, since the basic income is unconditional.^[8] Thus, one critical view of basic income theorizes that it would have a negative effect on work incentive^[9][10] and labor supply. It might be expected that the degree of the disincentive would depend on how generous the basic income were to be. Many basic incomes are proposed to be set at a level that would only just be liveable, so that people would want to supplement it.^[11]

In one study, even when the benefits are not permanent, the hours worked—by the recipients of the benefit—are observed to decline by 5%, a decrease of 2 hours in a typical 40 hour work week:

While experiments have been conducted in the United States and Canada, those participating knew that their benefits were not permanent and, consequently, they were not likely to change their behaviour as much or in the same manner had the GAI been ongoing. As a result, total hours worked fell by about five percent on average. The work reduction was largest for second earners in two-earner households and weakest for the main earner. Further, the negative work effect was higher the more generous the benefit level.^[9]"

Source
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income