China Quietly Prepares Golden Alternative to Dollar System; in Support of Basic Income

"China, as current chair of the G-20 group of nations, called on France to organize a very special conference in Paris. The fact such a conference would even take place in an OECD country is a sign of how weakened the hegemony of the US-dominated Dollar System has become.

By F. William Engdahl

On March 31 in Paris a special meeting, named “Nanjing II,” was held. People’s Bank of China Governor, Zhou Xiaochuan, was there and made a major presentation on, among other points, broader use of the IMF special basket of five major world currencies, the Special Drawing Rights or SDR’s. The invited were a very select few. The list included German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble, UK Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne, IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde discussed the world’s financial architecture together with China. Apparently and significantly, there was no senior US official present.

On the Paris talks, Bloomberg reported: “China wants a much more closely managed system, where private-sector decisions can be managed by governments,” said Edwin Truman, a former Federal Reserve and US Treasury official. “The French have always favored international monetary reform, so they’re natural allies to the Chinese on this issue.”

A China Youth Daily journalist present in Paris noted, “Zhou Xiaochuan pointed out that the international monetary and financial system is currently undergoing structural adjustment, the world economy is facing many challenges…” According to the journalist Zhou went on to declare that China’s aim as current President of the G20 talks is to “promote the wider use of the SDR.”

For most of us, that sounds about as exciting as watching Johnson grass grow in the Texas plains. However, behind that seemingly minor technical move, as is becoming clearer by the day, is a grand Chinese strategy, if it succeeds or not, a grand strategy to displace the dominating role of the US dollar as world central bank reserve currency. China and others want an end to the tyranny of a broken dollar system that finances endless wars on other peoples’ borrowed money with no need to ever pay it back. The strategy is to end the domination of the dollar as the currency for most world trade in goods and services. That’s no small beer.

Despite the wreck of the US economy and the astronomical $19 trillion public debt of Washington, the dollar still makes up 64% of all central bank reserves. The largest holder of US debt is the Peoples Republic of China, with Japan a close second. As long as the dollar is “king currency,” Washington can run endless budget deficits knowing well that countries like China have no serious alternative to invest its foreign currency trade profits but in US Government or government-guaranteed debt. In effect, as I have pointed out, that has meant that China has de facto financed the military actions of Washington that act to go against Chinese or Russian sovereign interests, to finance countless US State Department Color Revolutions from Tibet to Hong Kong, from Libya to Ukraine, to finance ISIS in the Middle East and on and on and on…

Multi-currency world

If we look more closely at all the steps of the Beijing government since the global financial crisis of 2008 and especially since their creation of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, the BRICS New Development Bank, the bilateral national currency energy agreements with Russia bypassing the dollar, it becomes clear that Zhou and the Beijing leadership have a long-term strategy.

As British economist David Marsh pointed out in reference to the recent Paris Nanjing II remarks of Zhou, “China is embarking, pragmatically but steadily, towards enshrining a multi-currency reserve system at the heart of the world’s financial order.”

Since China’s admission into the IMF select group of SDR currencies last November, the multi-currency system, which China calls “4+1,” would consist of the euro, sterling, yen and renminbi (the 4), co-existing with the dollar. These are the five constituents of the SDR.

To strengthen the recognition of the SDR, Zhou’s Peoples’ Bank of China has begun to publish its foreign reserves total–the world’s biggest–in SDRs as well as dollars.

A golden future

Yet the Chinese alternative to the domination of the US dollar is about far more than paper SDR currency basket promotion. China is clearly aiming at the re-establishment of an international gold standard, presumably one not based on the bankrupt Bretton Woods Dollar-Gold exchange that President Richard Nixon unilaterally ended in August, 1971 when he told the world they would have to swallow paper dollars in the future and could no longer redeem them for gold. At that point global inflation, measured in dollar terms, began to soar in what future economic historians will no doubt dub The Greatest Inflation.

By one estimate, the dollars in worldwide circulation rose by some 2,500% between 1970 and 2000. Since then the rise has clearly brought it well over 3,000%.

Without a legal requirement to back its dollar printing by a pre-determined fixed amount of gold, all restraints were off in a global dollar inflation. So long as the world is forced to get dollars to settle accounts for oil, grain, other commodities, Washington can write endless checks with little fear of them bouncing, stamped “insufficient funds.”

Combined with the fact that over that same time span since 1971 there has been a silent coup of the Wall Street banks to hijack any and all semblance of representative democracy and Constitution-based rules, we have the mad money machine, much like the German poet Goethe’s 18th Century fable, Sorcerers’ Apprentice, or in German, Der Zauberlehrling. Dollar creation is out of control.

Since 2015 China is moving very clearly to replace London and New York and the western gold futures price-setting exchanges.

As I noted in a longer analysis in this space in August, 2015, China, together with Russia, is making major strides to back their currencies with gold, to make them “as good as gold,” while currencies like the debt-bloated Euro or the debt-bloated bankrupt dollar zone, struggle.

In May 2015, China announced it had set up a state-run Gold Investment Fund. The aim was to create a pool, initially of $16 billion making it the world’s largest physical gold fund, to support gold mining projects along the new high-speed railway lines of President Xi’s New Economic Silk Road or One Road, One Belt as it is called. As China expressed it, the aim is to enable the Eurasian countries along the Silk Road to increase the gold backing of their currencies.

The countries along the Silk Road and within the BRICS happen to contain most of the world’s people and natural and human resources utterly independent of any the West has to offer.

In May 2015, China’s Shanghai Gold Exchange formally established the “Silk Road Gold Fund.” The two main investors in the new fund were China’s two largest gold mining companies–Shandong Gold Group who bought 35% of the shares and Shaanxi Gold Group with 25%.

The fund will invest in gold mining projects along the route of the Eurasian Silk Road railways, including in the vast under-explored parts of the Russian Federation.

A little-known fact is that no longer is South Africa the world’s gold king. It is a mere number 7 in annual gold production. China is Number One and Russia Number Two.

On May 11, just before creation of China’s new gold fund, China National Gold Group Corporation signed an agreement with the Russian gold mining group, Polyus Gold, Russia’s largest gold mining group, and one of the top ten in the world.

The two companies will explore the gold resources of what is to date Russia’as largest gold deposit at Natalka in the far eastern part of Magadan’s Kolyma District.

Recently, the Chinese government and its state enterprises have also shifted strategy. Today, as of March 2016 official data, China holds more than $3.2 trillion in foreign currency reserves at the Peoples’ bank of China, of which it is believed approximately 60% or almost $2 trillion are dollar assets such as US Treasury bonds or quasi-government bonds such as Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac mortgage bonds. Instead of investing all its dollar earnings from trade surpluses into increasingly inflated and worthless US government debt, China has launched a global asset buying strategy.

Now it happens that prime on the Beijing foreign asset “to buy” shopping list are gold mines around the world. Despite a recent slight rise in the gold price since January, gold is still at 5 year-lows and many quality proven mining companies are cash-starved and forced into bankruptcy. Gold is truly at the beginning of a renaissance.

The beauty of gold is not only what countless gold bugs maintain, a hedge against inflation. It is the most beautiful of all precious metals.

The Greek philosopher Plato, in his work The Republic, identified five types of regimes possible–Aristocracy, Timocracy, Oligarchy, Democracy, and Tyranny, with Tyranny the lowest most vile.

He then lists Aristocracy, or rule by Philosopher Kings with “golden souls” as the highest form of rule, benevolent and with the highest integrity. Gold has worth in its own right throughout mankind’s history. China and Russia and other nations of Eurasia today are reviving gold to its rightful place. That’s very cool."

Source
http://www.theeventchronicle.com/finanace/china-quietly-prepares-golden-alternative-dollar-system/?utm_campaign=coschedule&utm_source=facebook_page&utm_medium=The+Event+Handbook&utm_content=China+Quietly+Prepares+Golden+Alternative+to+Dollar+System#

More Research on this topic

http://www.cnbc.com/2014/05/27/what-russia-china-relations-mean-for-the-dollar.html

http://journal-neo.org/2016/05/18/china-quietly-prepares-golden-alternative-to-dollar-system/

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-10-13/russia-china-sign-currency-swap-agreement-to-double-100b-trade

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/nov/18/van-ness-russia-china-preparing-eliminate-our-rese/

https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/fields/print_2116.html

https://emergingequity.org/2015/03/03/more-de-dollarization-india-and-russia-on-the-verge-of-currency-agreement/

https://ec.europa.eu/energy/sites/ener/files/documents/1_EN_ACT_part1_v5_0.pdf

http://astanatimes.com/2014/12/kazakhstan-china-ink-14-billion-cooperation-deals/

Is universal basic income too simplistic to meet housing need?

"In a world with a universal basic income for all, what would you do about housing costs?

UBI – also known as citizen’s income or negative income tax – is a seductive idea that is now gaining ground, with support spanning the political spectrum from the Green Party to the ideas of the late US economist Milton Friedman. The hope is of a welfare system that would empower people rather than penalise them, offer freedom in place of sanctions and enable us to adapt to a rapidly changing labour market rather than being at the mercy of Google and Uber.

But where will we live – and how will we pay for it? These are questions housing and social security experts have been asking ever since the blueprint for the welfare state was laid out by Sir William Beveridge in 1942.


The problem of rent: why Beveridge failed to tackle the cost of housing
 Read more
His system combined benefits at subsistence levels and others based on insurance contributions with action by the state to create the NHS, family allowances and full employment. But he admitted there was one problem even he could not solve: “The attempt to fix rates of insurance benefit and pension on a scientific basis with regard to subsistence needs has brought to notice a serious difficulty in doing so in the conditions of modern Britain. This is the problem of rent.”

Rents vary from place to place. If you pay a flat-rate allowance for housing, people in expensive areas will not have enough to pay the rent, while those in cheaper places will have a surplus. If you make it part of the insurance benefit, what is to stop people moving to an expensive house the moment they retire?

Beveridge hoped his new system of social security would mean the end of the hated means test. He tried to “make the most of a difficult situation” by proposing a flat-rate housing allowance on top of contributory unemployment benefit. After the war the government decided to meet actual housing costs but means test claimants. Housing benefit (soon to be absorbed into universal credit) did improve matters but it costs £25bn a year, is costly to administer and relies on means testing and steep withdrawal rates.

So what can supporters of UBI do? Many proposals simply ignore housing costs (and the equally difficult area of long-term sickness and disability) but that means retaining a means-tested allowance that undermines the simplicity that is meant to be one of the main points of the idea.


Rate-your-landlord or more prefabs? Four visions for the future of housing
 Read more
Another option is to include a flat-rate allowance for housing, possibly on a regional basis to reduce the worst anomalies. But that would still mean some people receiving more than their rent, while leaving others unable to pay for a decent home and at risk of homelessness. As Donald Hirsch argued in a report for the Joseph Rowntree Foundation last year: “It seems unlikely that a government would walk away from providing targeted support to those unable to afford acceptable housing, risking a return to slum conditions that were largely eradicated in the UK in the post-war years”.

A report published by the Royal Society of Arts in December floated the idea of a “basic rental income” granted to everyone who rents rather than owns a property, and with the additional costs incurred by central government paid for through a land value tax. It certainly seems a neat solution to use one idea fashionable across the political spectrum to fix the problems with another one – but is it a bit too neat?

The truth is that the “problem of rent” is an even bigger headache today than it was for Beveridge. At the time he produced his report there was strict rent control in the private sector, and Britain was about to embark on a massive programme of council house building. Now rents vary even more from place to place and the government is more intent on selling social housing than building, at the same time as it complains housing benefit is “out of control”.

Join the Guardian Housing Network to read more pieces like this. Follow us on Twitter (@GuardianHousing) and like us on Facebook to keep up with the latest social housing news and views."

Source
http://www.theguardian.com/housing-network/2016/apr/26/universal-basic-income-housing-rent

A Silicon Valley entrepreneur says basic income would work even if 90% of people smoked weed instead of working

"The chief complaint people lodge at universal basic income — a form of income distribution that gives people money to cover basic needs regardless of whether they work or not — is that it'll make them lazy.

Sam Altman doesn't buy it.

On a recent episode of the Freakonomics podcast, entitled "Is the World Ready for a Guaranteed Basic Income?" Altman argued basic income could support huge amounts of productivity loss and still carry the economy on its shoulders.

"Maybe 90% of people will go smoke pot and play video games, but if 10% of the people go create incredible new products and services and new wealth, that's still a huge net-win," Altman says. "And the American puritanical ideal that hard work for its own sake is valuable — period — and that you can't question that, I think that's just wrong."

Maybe the American ideal of work is wrong. Maybe a system like basic income could allow people to focus on their true passions (even if that's playing video games) and the country would still function just as well because people are healthier and more fulfilled overall.

Suddenly, brilliant people who don't have time to focus on their passions now would find themselves with the means to pursue their dreams.

Basic income is a radical form of income distribution. It involves giving people a regular check regardless of their working status that covers basic expenses like food, clothing, and shelter.

The idea of basic income saw brief flashes of interest in the late 20th century, but stayed mostly dormant until the last year or so. Switzerland announced a plan to hold a basic income referendum in June of 2016, and other basic income experiments are set to start in the Netherlands, Finland, and Canada sometime in 2017. New Zealand and the United States might not be far behind.

The US push is being led by Altman and his cohorts at Y Combinator, Silicon Valley's largest startup accelerator. Its past success stories include Airbnb, Reddit, and Zenefits.

In January, Altman wrote a blog post describing a plan for a basic income experiment in fairly vague terms. It'll last for five years and involve a select group of Americans, although the exact start date, the amount of money given out, and the name of the researcher leading the project have yet to be announced.

The complaint Altman addressed on the Freakonomics podcast is a common one. Study after study, however, has shown that giving people extra money makes them feel financially secure. That security ends up leading to empowerment, not de-motivation.

That's why Altman is so confident that 90% of people could sit around all day and do nothing and the US would still keep chugging along: Basic income is such an effective motivator that enough people will use their newfound free time to produce extraordinary innovations that make up for the laggards.

But the beauty in that, which Altman hints at, is that there really won't be any laggards. Nine-tenths of the population won't suddenly sit around and get high, because the best evidence suggests a financial safety net actually encourages people to work harder.

Even in the worst-case scenario basic income still wins."

Source
http://www.techinsider.io/sam-altman-praises-basic-income-on-freakonomics-podcast-2016-4

Tech's favorite policy, universal basic income, is about to get its first big test

"6,000 Kenyans will get cash grants for at least a decade

Over the last two years Silicon Valley has fallen in love with a striking economic theory. As former Facebook executive Sam Lessin wrote recently, "There’s been a dinner-time revival of the old conversation about the inevitable need for a guaranteed basic income in the United States."

It’s ironic that in the heart of winner-take-all venture capital culture, there is a growing call for a massive redistribution of wealth, but if you believe that artificial intelligence and robots will improve dramatically over the next decade, it makes sense to start planning for a society that has little need for human labor.

The idea of universal basic income (UBI) has been around for a while, and numerous studies have found that giving cash directly to the poor can be more effective than traditional welfare. But so far no one has actually implemented a program that meets all the requirements of full-fledged UBI. They either didn’t cover everyone in a community, didn’t give enough to meet basic needs, or didn’t last very long. That changed last week, with the announcement of the first full-fledged test of universal basic income by an NGO called GiveDirectly.

The New York City-based charity will be giving 6,000 people in randomly selected Kenyan villages a steady flow of cash for the next 10 years. The amount will be similar to past GiveDirectly projects, between $255 and $400 per person, per year.

That’s based on the average annual income and meant to cover basic needs like food, shelter, and healthcare. Unlike its earlier projects, these grants are universal, meaning every member of the local population will get the same amount, regardless of their employment status or financial health.

"When we started in 2009, people said what you might expect ‘they’ll waste it on alcohol, they’ll stop working’ and that just turns out not to be true. In reality, cash transfers are more effective than many things that we do," says co-founder Michael Faye. GiveDirectly has been growing rapidly, raising over $100 million since launching, and $52 million last year alone.

Faye acknowledges that the tech sector has been a key constituency behind basic income's recent surge in momentum, and that many donors are "tech people who think robots are going to put people out of jobs." And there are plenty of things about GiveDirectly that tie it to the world of tech. It’s backed by Google.org and Good Ventures. Albert Wenger of Union Square Ventures will be involved in the work on basic income.

It’s focused its operations on Kenya and a few other African nations because of the combination of extreme poverty and availability of electronic payment systems like M-PESA. It has also incorporated technology across its operations, including the identification of poor households and fraud detection.

But Faye cautions against pigeonholing the concept as being a favorite only among the tech set. "Basic income may have supporters in the tech world, but its historic appeal is far broader. There aren’t many ideas that can claim support from both Martin Luther King Jr. and Milton Friedman."

Regardless, GiveDirectly’s project will provide the tech sector, and Silicon Valley dinner parties, with something that’s been missing from the recent discussion around universal basic income: hard data. "I’ve been intrigued by the idea for a while, and although there’s been a lot of discussion, there’s fairly little data about how it would work," wrote Sam Altman, president of the iconic startup incubator, Y Combinator. "I think it’s good to start studying this early.

I’m fairly confident that at some point in the future, as technology continues to eliminate traditional jobs and massive new wealth gets created, we’re going to see some version of this at a national scale."

DO PEOPLE SIT AROUND AND PLAY VIDEO GAMES?

Y Combinator is planning to fund its own research into universal basic income, but is well behind GiveDirectly in terms of putting anything into action. Altman’s vision of basic income is also a bit more existential. "It would be good to answer some of the theoretical questions now. Do people sit around and play video games, or do they create new things?

Are people happy and fulfilled?" he wrote. "Do people, without the fear of not being able to eat, accomplish far more and benefit society far more? And do recipients, on the whole, create more economic value than they receive?"

Faye hopes the impact of GiveDirectly’s program will be more immediate, both for the families receiving money and for the ongoing policy discussions.

The conversations happening around universal basic income in the tech world are helping to drive awareness of the idea, but are distinct from the immediate need for more effective welfare programs around the world.

As Faye says, "The Pakistani government does a billion dollars of cash transfers a year and i can tell you for a fact that its not motivated by the fear of AI."

Source
http://www.theverge.com/2016/4/18/11441536/universal-basic-income-givedirectly-ngo-tech-sector

You Can’t Talk About Robots Without Talking About Basic Income

"Conversations about basic income, a government-funded salary given to every citizen, used to take place in the dingy offices of extremist left-wing politicians, or in the campus dorm rooms of idealistic students determined to fix the problems of the previous generation. The conversation was about social responsibility. It wasn’t an economic case, it was a moral one.

A sharp uptake in technology designed to automate jobs and replace human workers is bringing new voices to this old debate.

Today’s society could be disastrously affected by artificial intelligence and growing automation, and scientists and technologists are looking for ways to stop that damage before it happens. The eyes of the tech industry are turning towards basic income, and the entire conversation is changing.

The Rise of AI

The Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence conducts high-impact research on artificial intelligence. Their CEO, Oren Etzioni, believes AI could be the key to creating a true utopia - but that journey will come with challenges. “There will be very real disruption,” says Etzioni. “Jobs will be taken away and those people need to be taken care of. People have floated the idea of universal basic income, of negative income tax, of training programs. We have an obligation to figure out how to help people cope with the rapidly changing nature of technology.”

That changing nature is in large part the rise of artificial intelligence. We already know about the potential economic destabilization that will come from the automation of commercial trucks, which will remove 3 million jobs in the US, plus 6.8 million employed in other parts of the industry. Now consider the police, which brings in $6 billion US a year in revenue from speeding tickets—that’s a significant number of lost jobs on police forces.

Add to that the lawyers and insurance companies who handle automotive accidents, the mechanics who fix dents and bangs, the physiotherapists and massage therapists who specialize in automotive accidents, and driving schools, and suddenly the number of potential lost jobs is staggering. And that’s just from automated cars.

Automation’s Long Reach

Artificial intelligence will do more than just create driverless cars. Take, for instance, food production. A student researcher at MIT has created the BakeBot Robot, which uses a laser scanner and stereo camera to identify ingredients, and then simple robotics to manipulate them.

Restaurants are already toying with the idea of reducing serving staff by having diners order and pay using apps. That order can then be relayed automatically to the kitchen, where BakeBot prepares the meal. Add delivery by drone, which is already technologically possible, and you have an entire restaurant that has eliminated human workers, all with technology which exists today. That technology remains unperfected, but only drive to adopt stands in the way.

Then there are the things we are on the cusp of accomplishing, such as the automation of medical services. Telemedicine and diagnostic artificial intelligence will drastically reduce non-emergency visits to the ER, which remain a problem that traditional methods have been unable to solve.

Robotic surgery, or robot-assisted surgery, is a common tool that allows doctors to perform surgery with far greater precision and and control. Right now these machines require human operators, but the leap to robots performing on their own is one we are already preparing to make.

The Thinking Machine

The real turning point will be if, or when (and it increasingly seems like a question of when), machines become genuinely creative. We have long been able to automate physical tasks, but automating cognitive tasks is a much more difficult hurdle. Researchers argue the definition of artificial intelligence and whether it has been achieved, but everyone agrees that we aren’t quite there in terms of a true general intelligence. They also agree we’re getting close.

AlphaGo recently defeated Lee Sedol at the game of Go, an advance that, in 2015, was still predicted to be at least ten years away.The most exciting moment was a single move during the second match, which was so strange that one commentator said he thought it was a mistake. It wasn’t a move any human would have thought to make, but Fan Hui, another Go champion, described it as “beautiful.” While we tend to label creativity as creating art or telling jokes, thinking “outside the box” is also creative thinking. Coming at a problem sideways, rather than directly, is something computers have long had difficulty doing, and AlphaGo has cleared that hurdle.

Boston Consulting Group predicts that by 2025, up to a quarter of jobs will be replaced by either smart software or robots. Gartner, a technology research firm, ramps that estimate up and predicts that one third of all jobs will be eliminated by 2025, while University of Oxford researchers Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael Osborne say a grand total of 47 percent of US jobs will be automated by 2033. Worried that your job is on the chopping block? You’re probably right.

The Question Basic Income Answers

So what exactly is basic income, and why is it being touted as the solution to automation woes?

There are two common terms (often used either interchangeably or incorrectly): basic income and minimum income. Basic income (sometimes incorrectly called a guaranteed minimum income) is an income paid by a political community to all its members on an individual basis, without a means test or work requirement. That means every single person, regardless of how much or how little they make, gets the same payout.

A minimum income is also paid on an individual basis, but benefit levels are affected by factors such as household income (earn more, lose benefits) or medical proficiency (disability payments), or can be paid out in set schedules (x amount for rent, x amount for food).

Welfare is an example of a minimum income. In most countries, a hodgepodge of different government programs are tacked together to create the safety net we provide the poor; and that bad tack job leads to holes. A true minimum income would combine things like welfare and tax credits into one program.

If you’re thinking that sounds a lot like socialism, you’re right. Yet conservative intellectual Charles Murray proposed introducing an annual $10,000 basic income “grant.” The Alaska Permanent Fund, which is funded by investments from state oil revenues, sends annual dividend checks to the state’s residents in a form of supported income. And Milton Friedman, an economist often quoted by conservatives and Republicans, supported basic income.

That’s because basic income promises to do the two things that will make make right-wingers jump onto the social services bandwagon: save money and reduce government. Right now most countries’ social assistance programs are a mess of overlapping bureaus, organizations, and support systems. Having one set amount that every person in the country receives eliminates that snare of red tape entirely (and a lot of jobs, in the process).

Of course, not everyone is convinced. The greatest fear is that without a motivator to work, people will stop doing their jobs, especially minimum wage and unpleasant jobs. Long-term studies on the efficacy of the program are an important step towards implementation—so far there aren’t many to choose from, but there are two important use-cases.

The “Mincome” experiment took place in the small town of Dauphin, Manitoba, from 1974 to 1979. Often referenced when referring to successful examples of basic income, it was actually a prime example of a minimum income. Between 1968 and 1980, five such experiments were conducted in North America, primarily to investigate the impact of basic income on the labour market. The Mincome study was unique because, while it also focused on the working poor, it did not eliminate the elderly or the disabled. This makes it a much better benchmark for how a real program would operate.

Each family or individual in Dauphin was eligible for a set monthly amount, which replaced any benefits they might have been receiving prior. Their mincome supplement was then reduced by fifty cents for every dollar they earned by working. Because Dauphin was an agricultural community, where incomes were heavily dependent on harvests, many residents did not know in advance whether they would get a mincome stipend. Only 1,000 residents ended up receiving them, and everyone knew the experiment was temporary (which some argue affects the results).

Mincome was a staggering success. The fear that people wouldn’t work if they didn’t have to proved unsubstantiated; working hours dropped only one percent for men, three percent for married women, and five percent for unmarried women. Mothers with newborns got to stay at home longer, teenagers were more likely to graduate, and hospital visits dropped eight percent. There was also a reduction in rates of psychiatric hospitalization, and in the number of mental illness-related consultations with health professionals.

Unfortunately there was a change in government, the program was abandoned, and the results were largely ignored. It wasn’t until Evelyn Forget published an analysis of the results in 2011 that people began to take notice. Canada had done something incredible, and it was something that could be done again.

As far as scale, however, Mincome was relatively small. Dauphin is a small agricultural community, with a population of roughly 8,000. That’s a very small sample size on which to judge a program that would need to span an entire country. And the only use-case for something so far-reaching has far less impressive results.

In 2010, Iran became the first country in the world to adopt a basic income. Intended to replace subsidies on petrol, fuel, and other supplies, each citizen is given roughly $40 US per month. Unfortunately, the basic income has cost the government more than it was spending on subsidies. One option to address the issue is to implement a minimum rather than basic income, with means tests to determine who will be eligible for the new program. Another suggestion has been that universal entitlement need not mean universal payment; if the better-off can be induced to forego their entitlement voluntarily, the problem would solve itself. The telling point, however, is that few voices are suggesting a return to the old system. While it may not yet be perfected, it seems that a minimum income strategy is there to stay.

Around the world, countries are listening to these examples, and starting their own experiments into basic income. The Canadian province of Ontario announced, as part of its 2016 budget, plans to embark on a basic income experiment. While the full scope of the project has yet to be announced, Canada has said its purpose is to establish whether a basic income could lead to overall social services savings. In Finland, a basic income experiment will begin in 2017, and span two years. This will be the most methodologically rigorous and comprehensive test of basic income to date, and proponents eagerly await the results. Meanwhile, Switzerland will hold a referendum on the topic in June of this year, and a charity called Give Directly has decided to take the onus out of the government’s hands; it’s giving guaranteed 10-year basic incomes to selected families in Kenya.

Tech Takes Charge

Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking are among 8,600 people who have signed an open letter about the potential dangers of AI. The letter describes the need for safeguards to ensure that AI is positive rather than neutral in respect to purpose, but it also calls for the maximization of the societal benefit of AI. In short, it calls for social responsibility.

People in the technology industry are taking responsibility for the innovations they’re creating, with results that will fundamentally change our world. As Sam Altman of Y Combinator says, “50 years from now, I think it will seem ridiculous that we used fear of not being able to eat as a way to motivate people.” Y Combinator has decided not to wait for the government, announcing proposals for a project manager to run an independent five-year basic income experiment. Google.org is one of the founders of Give Directly’s Kenyan experiment, while Silicon Valley luminaries like Netscape creator Marc Andreessen and media giant Tim O’Reilly both support basic income. Andressen told NY Mag that the main argument against basic income was that people would stop working, but human nature defies that. “Human wants and needs are endless. We’re never satisfied.”

The question of whether or not humans will embrace automation is the deciding factor in whether or not to get on board with basic income. Because if it is taken as a guarantee that artificial intelligence will replace human workers, basic income may be the only path forward."

Source
http://motherboard.vice.com/read/you-cant-talk-about-robots-without-talking-about-basic-income

All of the problems Universal Basic Income can solve that have nothing to do with unemployment

"Universal Basic Income isn’t just mankind’s answer to the threat of robots in the workplace.

Those who support the transformative economic policy offer widely varying versions of exactly how it would operate, but all involve distributing a standard sum of money to citizens regardless of need. Many argue that this set-up could save the millions who are on track to lose their jobs to machines. But that’s not all.

The idealistic-sounding scheme would also solve many other 21st century problems, according to its supporters, largely because those with basic income would be less dependent on paid work. This, in turn, would give employees higher negotiating power to change the structure of employment.
Dutch reporter Rutger Bregman, whose Netherlands bestseller “Utopia for Realists,” was published in English earlier this week, argues for a form of UBI high enough to eradicate poverty. He believes this would remove our existing need to toil away for the vast majority of our waking hours, hoping to earn enough bonuses or promotions to enjoy a decent standard of living. Instead, we could fulfill the economist John Maynard Keynes’ prediction of a 15-hour working week by the year 2030.

Others are less convinced that there would be such a sharp drop in working hours, but nevertheless believe that UBI would reduce the working week. Currently, most people can’t afford to leave a job without worrying about being destitute, points out Jason Murphy, assistant professor of philosophy at Elms College in Massachusetts, who serves on the US Basic Income Guarantee Network Committee. “Having UBI means more negotiating power all around,” he says in an interview.

As well as increasing leisure time, working less could be a massive step towards reducing the pace of climate change. Bregman points to studies suggesting that working less would half the amount of CO2 (pdf) emitted this century. After all, countries with shorter working weeks have smaller environmental footprints (pdf).

“It’s pretty obvious why,” says Bregman in an interview. “We’re using most of our wealth and increased productivity in the form of more consumption.” We work more to spend more—on travel, cars, trips to the mall, exotic food, and many other products that harm the environment.
Murphy adds that more employees will have the negotiating power to insist on a job closer to their home. “A lot of carbon generation comes from commuting to work,” he says.

There has also been a growing focus on how basic income could be implemented to address gender inequality. Murphy believes that introducing a dependable source of income via UBI “gets to the very heart of women’s economic vulnerability.” He points to a rape shelter in Vancouver that has voiced support for UBI, in part because it would give women the economic freedom to escape abusive relationships.

A monthly stipend and reduced working hours would also give both parents the freedom to commit to domestic chores, while still being able to invest in professional careers. Meanwhile, women carry the burden of emotional labor—the childcare, support, and household work, which largely goes uncompensated. “Of course this unpaid work is valuable and I think UBI is recognition of that,” says Bregman.

There’s also some hope that UBI would allow both our employment and leisure time to become more fulfilling. Currently, millions of people are employed in what anthropologist David Graeber calls “bullshit jobs”—work that serves no real purpose, and is simply a way to fill time and provide salaries. One YouGov survey found that 37% of Brits think their jobs are meaningless. But under UBI, Bregman believes we would have the financial freedom to pursue useful and worthwhile work.

And how might we use all the increased leisure that we would enjoy with our greater financial freedom and reduced working hours? Bregman claims that we would no longer be returning from work to sit in front on the TV, exhausted, as we would have the energy to engage in more cultural pursuits. “People in countries with the longest working weeks go to the least theater, read the least books, and watch the most TV,” he adds. For example, those in United States and Japan, with notoriously long working days, spend several hours every day watching TV.

Others are not so certain that we wouldn’t be a little bored. Murphy suggests that we would likely have more cultural and political activities available, simply because there would be more people around the organize them. But he believes some people might well find themselves whiling away their time by watching daytime TV.

“I would gladly trade some bad reality TV for everyone if it means people aren’t worried about being one paycheck away from losing a house,” Murphy adds. “We can solve boredom next.”

Source
http://qz.com/667208/all-of-the-problems-universal-basic-income-can-solve-that-have-nothing-to-do-with-unemployment/

Basic income will be at the core of monetary policy in the 21st century

"To tackle spiraling deflationary trends, governments and central banks will soon have no other choice but to resort to printing money and giving it directly to the people.

Article by John Aziz, originally published on azionomics.com under the title “Universal Basic Income Is Inevitable, Unavoidable, and Incoming.”

The last time I saw universal basic income discussed on television, it was laughed away by a Conservative MP as an absurd idea. The government giving away wads of cash responsibility-free to the entire population sounds entirely fantastical in this austerity-bound age, where “we just don’t have the money” is repeated endlessly as a mantra. Money, they say, does not grow on trees. (Only as figures on the screen of a computer).

In this world, universal basic income seems like a rather distant prospect. Yes, there are some proposals, like Finland which is set to start local experiments in 2017 and Switzerland which is holding a referendum on universal basic income next month. I don’t expect the vote to pass. The current political climate is just too patriarchal.

We live in a world where free choice is unfashionable. The mass media demonizes the poor as feckless and too lazy and ignorant to make good choices about how to spend their income. Better that the government spend huge chunks of GDP employing bureaucrats to administer tests, to moralize on the virtues of work, and sanction the profligate.

But this world is fast changing, and the more I study the basic facts of economic life in the early 21st century, the more inevitable universal basic income begins to seem.

And no, it’s not because of the robots that are coming to take our jobs, as Erik Brynjolfsson suggests in his excellent The Second Machine Age.

While automation is a major economic disruptor that will transform our economy, assuming that robots will dissolve jobs entirely is just buying into the same Lump of Labour fallacy that the Luddites fell for. Automation frees humans from drudgery and opens up the economy to new opportunities.

Where once vast swathes of the population toiled in the fields as subsistence farmers, mechanization allowed these people to become industrial workers, and their descendants to become information and creative workers.

As today’s industries are decimated, and as the market price of media falls closer and closer toward zero, new avenues will be opened up. New industries will be born in a neverending cycle of creative destruction. Yes, perhaps universal basic income will help ease the current transition that we are going through, but the transition is not the reason why universal basic income is inevitable.

Welcome to the world of hyperdeflation

So why is it inevitable? Take a look at Japan, and now the eurozone: economies where consumer price deflation has become an ongoing and entrenched reality. This occurrence has been married to economic stagnation and continued dips into recession. In Japan — which has been in the trap for over two decades — debt levels in the economy have remained high. The debt isn’t being inflated away as it would under a more “normal” rate of growth and inflation. And even in the countries that have avoided outright deflationary spirals, like the UK and the United States, inflation has been very low.

The most major reason, I am coming to believe, is rising efficiency and the growing superabundance of stuff. Cars are becoming more fuel efficient. Homes are becoming more fuel efficient. Vast quantities of solar energy and fracked oil are coming online. China’s growing economy continues to pump out vast quantities of consumer goods. And it’s not just this: people are better educated than ever before, and equipped with incredibly powerful productivity resources like laptops, iPads and smartphones.

Information and media has fallen to an essentially free price. If price inflation is a function of the growth of the money supply against growth in the total amount of goods and services produced, then it is very clear why deflation and lowflation have become a problem in the developed world, even with central banks struggling to push out money to reinflate the credit bubble that burst in 2008.

Much, much more is coming down the pipeline. At the core of this As the cost of superabundant and super-accessible solar continues to fall, and as battery efficiencies continue to increase the price of energy for heating, lighting, cooking and transportation (e.g. self-driving electric cars, delivery trucks, and ultimately planes) is being slowly but powerfully pushed toward zero.

Heck, if the cost of renewables continue to fall, and advances in AI and automation continue, in thirty or forty years most housework and yardwork will be renewables-powered, and done by robot. Water crises can be alleviated by solar-powered desalination, and resource pressures by solar-powered robot miners.

And just as computers and the internet have made huge quantities of media (such as this blog) free for users, 3-D printers and disassemblers will push the production of stuff much closer to free. People will simply be able to download blueprints from the internet, put their trash into a disassembler and print out new items.

Obviously, this won’t work anytime soon for complex objects like smartphones, but every technology company in the world is hustling and grinding for more efficiency in their manufacturing processes.

Not to mention that as more and more stuff is manufactured, and as we become more environmentally conscious and efficient at recycling, this huge global stockpile of stuff acts as another deflationary pressure.

hyper-deflation

These deflationary pressures will gradually seep into services as more and more processes become automated and powered by efficiency increasing machines, drones and robots. This will gradually come to encompass the old inflationary bugbears of medical care, educational costs and construction and maintenance costs.

Of course, I don’t expect this dislocation to result in permanent incurable unemployment. People will find stuff to do, and new fields will open up, many of which we are yet to imagine. But the price trend is clear to me: lots and lots of lowflation and deflation. This, ultimately, is at the heart of capitalism. The race for efficiency. The race to do more with less (including less productivity). The race for the lowest costs.

I’ve written about this before. I jokingly called it “hyperdeflation.”

Global Japanization

And the obvious outcome, at the very least, is global Japan. This, of course, is not a complete disaster. Japan remains a relatively rich and stable country, even after twenty years of deflation. But Japan’s high level of debt — and particularly government debt — does pose a major concern. Yes, as a sovereign currency issuer borrowing in its own currency the Japanese government runs no risk of actual default. But slow growth and deflation are stagnationary.

And without growth and inflation, the government will have to raise taxes to cover the deficit, spiking the punchbowl and continuing the cycle of debt deflation. And of course, all of the Bank of Japan’s attempts at reigniting inflation and inflating away that debt through complicated monetary operations in financial markets have up until now proven pretty ineffectual.

This is where some form of universal basic income comes in: ultimately, the most direct stimulus for lifting inflation and triggering productive economic activity is putting cash in the people’s hands. What I am suggesting is nothing less than printing money and giving it away to people — as opposed to trying to push it out through the complicated and convoluted transmission mechanism of financial sector lending.

This will ultimately become governments’ major backstop against debt deflation, as well as the temporary joblessness and economic inequality created by technological acceleration. Everything else, thus far, has been pushing on a string. And the deflationary pressure is only going to become stronger as efficiency rises and rises.

Throw enough newly-created money into the economy, inject inflation, and nominal tax revenues can rise to cover the debt load. Similarly, if inflation gets too high, cut back on the money-creation or take money out of circulation and bring inflation into check, just as central banks have done for the last century.

The biggest obstacle to this, in my view, is the interests of those with lots of money, who like deflation because it increases their purchasing power. But in the end, rich people aren’t just sitting on hoards of cash.

Most of them do have businesses that would benefit from their clients having higher incomes so as to increase spending, and thus their incomes. Indeed, in a debt-deflationary spiral with default cascades, many of these rentiers would face the same ruin as their clients, as their clients default on their obligations.

And yes, I know that there are legal obstacles to fully-blown ‘helicopter money‘, chiefly the notion of central bank independence. But I am an advocate of central bank independence, for a variety of reasons.

Indeed, I don’t think that universal basic income should be a function of fiscal spending at all, not least because I think that dispassionate and economically literate central bankers tend to be better managers of monetary expansion and contraction than politically motivated — and generally less economically literate — politicians.

So everything I am describing can and should be envisioned as a function of monetary policy. Indeed, what I am advocating for is a new set of core monetary policy tools for the 21st century.

“To tackle spiraling deflationary trends, governments and central banks will soon have no other choice but to resort to printing money and giving it directly to the people.”

Whether governments or central banks print money (drop helicopter money) for everyone or just the unemployed, an inflation tax is imposed on working families. That’s not a good idea because it reduces support from working families for the basic income initiative.

A similar case can be made for QE, ZIRP or NIRP that papers over recessions and gives money to a less pitiable variety of actors at the expense of most everyone else. There are, indeed, other choices that do not compromise the independence of central banks, whether you may like them or not.

To improve a working citizen’s financial life, businesses can raise wages for exemplary service or governments can lower taxes. Helping the unemployed may be satisfactorily funded through taxation. Some governments in advanced economies, like the USA, can raise taxes for the safety net by broadening the tax base and, at the same time, lowering taxes for each citizen with an apt tax system[1-3]. That would help the employed. Excepting medical care services, an unconditional, working-age individual citizen’s negative income tax[4] for the roughly 45mn under the $12K individual federal poverty level may largely be funded by replacing the current welfare system[5]. That may help the unemployed and working poor.

Abolishing poverty for the unemployed and raising the living standard for the employed is a worthy goal for civilization.

Removing the social stigma for not participating in the labor pool of a market economy has little moral or economic benefit. In practice, it would make it harder for parents to encourage their children to work hard at school to better their own lives, as well as the lives of others around them in our society.

Eliminating poverty helps to eliminate the informal sector[6] that competes with the formal sector that funds a limited government, which in turn, protects our basic rights in society. Raising the living standards of the employed also raises the relative poverty level of the unemployed. One must take careful note that employed and unemployed citizens are not the same people over time. It is a shame not to participate in this praiseworthy enterprise.

Remember that one of the goals of the Royal Society of Arts (think Benjamin Franklin and Adam Smith) was to alleviate poverty, not to remove social stigma*. It is folly to think that job opportunities will cease to exist in the future, but we must cope with great technological disruptions and a frugal form of basic income may help smooth the transition during these times of uncertainty.

* The RSA’s mission expressed in the founding charter was to “embolden enterprise, enlarge science, refine art, improve our manufacturers and extend our commerce”, but also of the need to alleviate poverty and secure full employment. – Wikipedia"

1] The APT Tax | Youtube
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fG8jngOwbpE

[2] Taxation for the 21ST Century: the automated payment transaction (APT) tax | Edgar L. Feige | 2000
http://econwpa.repec.org/eps/pe/papers/0106/0106001.pdf

[3] ON THE CONTRARY; Dreaming Out Loud: One Tiny Little Tax | NYT| Daniel Akst |2003
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/02/business/on-the-contrary-dreaming-out-loud-one-tiny-little-tax.html

[5] Negative Income Tax Theory Explained | Youtube
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zwR3g5WyKS4

[5] CRS Report: Welfare Spending the Largest Item in the Federal Budget | Jeff Sessions | 2012
http://www.budget.senate.gov/republican/public/index.cfm/files/serve/?File_id=34919307-6286-47ab-b114-2fd5bcedfeb5

[6] A Classical Theory of the Informal Sector | Gibson | Manchester School | 1994
https://www.uvm.edu/~wgibson/Research/informal.pdf

SOURCE
http://www.basicincome.org/news/2016/05/basic-income-monetary-policy/

History of Basic Income; #BasicIncome. Learn about Basic Income.

"The idea of an unconditional basic income has three historical roots. The idea of a minimum income first appeared at the beginning of the 16th century. The idea of an unconditional one-off grant first appeared at the end of the 18th century. And the two were combined for the first time to form the idea of an unconditional basic income near the middle of the 19th century.

1. Minimum income: the humanists More (1516) and Vives (1526)

Raphael’s cure for theft – The idea of a minimum income guaranteed by the government to all the members of a particular community is far older than the more specific and radical idea of an unconditional basic income. With the advent of the Renaissance, the task of looking after the welfare of poor people ceased to be regarded as the exclusive preserve of the Church and of charitable individuals. Some of the so-called humanists started playing with the idea of a minimum income in the form of public assistance.

In Thomas More’s (1478-1535) Utopia, published in Louvain in 1516, the Portuguese traveller Raphael Nonsenso, walking on the central square of the City of Antwerp, narrates a conversation he says he had with John Morton, the Archbishop of Canterbury. Such a scheme, he argued, would be a more astute way of fighting theft than sentencing thieves to death, which had the unpleasant side effect of increasing the murder rate.


Thomas More

“I once happened to be dining with the Cardinal when a certain English lawyer was there. I forgot how the subject came up, but he was speaking with great enthusiasm about the stern measures that were then being taken against thieves. ‘We’re hanging them all over the place’, he said. ‘I’ve seen as many as twenty on a single gallows. And that’s what I find so odd. Considering how few of them get away with it, how come we are still plagued with so many robbers?’ ‘What’s odd about it?’, I asked – for I never hesitated to speak freely in front of the Cardinal. ‘This method of dealing with thieves is both unjust and undesirable. As a punishment, it’s too severe, and as a deterrent, it’s quite ineffective. Petty larceny isn’t bad enough to deserve the death penalty.

And no penalty on earth will stop people from stealing, if it’s their only way of getting food. In this respect, you English, like most other nations, remind me of these incompetent schoolmasters, who prefer caning their pupils to teaching them. Instead of inflicting these horrible punishments, it would be far more to the point to provide everyone with some means of livelihood, so that nobody’s under the frightful necessity of becoming, first a thief, and then a corpse.” [Note 1]

A pragmatic theological plea for public assistance

It is, however, Thomas More’s close friend and fellow humanist, Johannes Ludovicus Vives (1492-1540), who should be regarded as the true father of the idea of a guaranteed minimum income, as he was the first to work out a detailed scheme and develop a comprehensive argument for it, based both on theological and pragmatic considerations. Juan Luis Vives was born in Valencia in a family of converted Jews.

He left Spain in 1509 to escape the Inquisition, studied at the Sorbonne but soon got fed up by the conservative scholastic philosophy that was prevailing in Paris at the time and moved on to Bruges in 1512, and in 1517 to Louvain, one of the main centres of the humanist movement, where he was appointed professor in 1520. He taught more briefly at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, but spent most of his adult life in the city of Bruges, where his statue can still be seen on the bank of one of the main canals. In a memoir addressed to the Mayor of Bruges in 1526 under the title De Subventione Pauperum (On the Assistance to the Poor), he proposed that the municipal government should be given the responsibility of securing a subsistence minimum to all its residents, not on grounds of justice but for the sake of a more effective exercise of morally required charity.

The assistance scheme would be closely targeted to the poor. Indeed it is because of their ability to target them more efficiently that public officials should be put in charge of poor relief. To be entitled to the latter, a poor person’s poverty must not be undeserved, but he must deserve the help he gets by proving his willingness to work.

“Even those who have dissipated their fortunes in dissolute living – through gaming, harlots, excessive luxury, gluttony and gambling – should be given food, for no one should die of hunger. However, smaller rations and more irksome tasks should be assigned to them so that they may be an example to others. […] They must not die of hunger, but they must feel itspangs.” Whatever the source of poverty, the poor are expected to work. “Even to the old and the stupid, it should be possible to give a job they can learn in a few days, such as digging holes, getting water or carrying something on their shoulders.”

The point of requiring such toil from the beneficiaries of the scheme is in part to make them contribute to the funding of the latter. But it is also to make sure that “being busy and engrossed in their work, they will abstain from those wicked thoughts and actions in which they would engage if they were idle”. Indeed, this concern should consistently extend to those born rich: Emperor Justinian was right, according to Vives, “in imposing a law that forbade everyone to spend his life in idleness”. If the poor cannot be parasites, why could the rich? [Note 2]

At two junctures, Vives anticipates some insights that will drive later thinkers in the direction of a basic income. “All these things God created, He put them in our large home, the world, without surrounding them with walls and gates, so that they would be common to all His children.” Hence, unless he helps those in need, whoever has appropriated some of the gifts of nature” is only a thief condemned by natural law, because he occupies and keeps what nature has not created exclusively for himself”. Further, Vives insists that relief should come “before need induces some mad or wicked action, before the face of the needy blushes from shame… The benefaction that precedes the hard and thankless necessity of asking is more pleasant and more worthy of thanks”. But he explicitly discards the more radical conclusion that it would be even better if “the gift were made before the need arose”, which is exactly what an adequate basic income would achieve.

From Vives to the Poor Laws
Vives’s plea explicitly inspired a scheme put into place a few years later by the Flemish municipality of Ypres. It also contributed to inspiring incipient thinking and action about forms of poor relief, from the School of Salamanca of Francisco de Vitoria and Domingo de Soto (from 1536 onwards) to England’s Poor Laws (from 1576 onwards). Less well remembered than his friends and protectors Erasmus and More, Vives’s pioneering thinking on the welfare state has been recently rediscovered. [Note 3]

He is also still remembered in his Alma Mater, the University of Louvain: A stone from his house has been incorporated in the wall of the “Universitaire Halle”, which houses the rectorate in the old town of Leuven. And the meeting room of the Chaire Hoover in the new town of Louvain-la-Neuve, where the Collectif Charles Fourier met in 1984-86 to discuss basic income and organise the founding meeting of the Basic Income European Network, has been named “Salle Vives”.

Vives’ s tract is the first systematic expression of a long tradition of social thinking and institutional reform focused on the public exercise of compassion through government-organised means-tested schemes directed at the poor. Despite the difficulties and doubts aroused by the operation of the poor laws, the thinkers of the nouveau régime made public assistance an essential function of the government. Thus, Montesquieu (L’Esprit des Lois (1748), section XXIII/29, Paris: Flammarion, Vol.2, p. 134): “The State owes all its citizens a secure subsistence, food, suitable clothes and a way of life that does not damage their health”. This line of thought eventually led to the setting up of comprehensive, nationally-funded guaranteed minimum income schemes in a growing number of countries, most recently, France’s RMI (1988) and Portugal’s RMG (1997).

Source and TONS more information, history and good stuff
http://www.basicincome.org/basic-income/history/

What Would Happen If We Just Gave People Money? "free the world of what Straub calls “bullshit jobs.”

#BasicIncome

"Daniel Straub remembers the night he got hooked on basic income. He had invited Götz Werner, a billionaire owner of a German drugstore chain, to give an independent talk in Zurich, where Straub was working as a project manager for a think tank.

He had read an article about the radical proposal to unconditionally guarantee citizens an income and spent a few years casually researching the idea. Straub had heard Werner was a good speaker on the topic, and that night in 2009 he was indeed excellent at connecting with the audience, a sold-out house of 200. “It was a very intense evening; people were paying attention,” Straub recalled.

Werner posed a pair of simple questions to the crowd: What do you really want to do with your life? Are you doing what you really want to do? Whatever the answers, he suggested basic income was the means to achieve those goals.

The idea is as simple as it is radical: Rather than concern itself with managing myriad social welfare and unemployment insurance programs, the government would instead regularly cut a no-strings-attached check to each citizen.

No conditions. No questions. Everyone, rich or poor, employed or out of work would get the same amount of money. This arrangement would provide a path toward a new way of living: If people no longer had to worry about making ends meet, they could pursue the lives they want to live.

Straub had studied business, international policy and psychology at school and spent years working for IBM, the International Red Cross and a Montessori school. Basic income “struck a nerve,” he said. “People are burned out more than ever. You come to Switzerland and talk to people, they aren’t happy. They fear for their jobs. There is a gap between the economic possibility in this country and the quality of life.”

After Werner’s talk, Straub quit his job at the think tank and began to campaign for a basic income full time. He and a few hundred volunteers gathered 126,000 signatures over two years to force a referendum, now slated for June 5, to amend the Swiss Constitution to guarantee a basic income to all citizens. (The suggested amount is 2,500 Swiss francs per month, or about $1,700 after adjusting for the cost of living.)

Switzerland is one of the world’s richest countries, and compared to the United States, it offers far more generous health care and education to its citizens. But supporters of the referendum think the government can provide even more security. “We limit ourselves too much,” Straub said. “I’m interested in consciousness, expanding consciousness. And basic income is a wonderful tool for that — it challenges a lot of assumptions we have.”

The entirety of the Swiss government opposes the referendum, citing potential effects on people’s willingness to work and the huge fiscal costs as reasons to vote “no.” Even Straub and his fellow supporters don’t expect it to pass. But he’s excited by the enthusiasm, and media attention, he’s seen for the idea in the past few years. Just getting on the ballot “was a moment of hope, for me and for a lot of other people,” he said. “It was a moment of departure.”

He’s right that interest in basic income is spreading across the world. Finland and the Netherlands are developing plans to study the idea. Canada will likely see an experiment in Ontario, if not on a national level. In France, several members of Parliament have supported running an experiment, and the finance minister is open to it. And in January, Sam Altman, the president of Y Combinator, announced that the San Francisco-based startup fund was organizing a basic income study in the U.S.

“In the last five years we’ve taken on a new respectability. But in the last two years it has become an avalanche,” said Guy Standing, a British economist who co-founded the Basic Income Earth Network in 1986 to promote debate and research on the topic. Initially a small cabal of young economists, philosophers and activists, BIEN has grown into the largest hub for basic income supporters — a global network with national organizations in 23 countries.

Basic income, Standing says, is more than good policy. He calls it “essential,” given that more and more people in developed economies are living “a life of chronic economic insecurity.” He sees this insecurity fueling populist politicians, boosting far-right parties across Europe and the rise of Donald Trump in the U.S. Economic stagnation increases the appeal of extreme politicians, and unless those insecurities are addressed, Standing said, that appeal is only going to get stronger.

The economic uncertainty surrounding basic income is huge, and the politics of bringing such a program about on a large scale are daunting. But something makes this radical proposal so exciting that people and governments are increasingly willing to try it. Basic income challenges our notions of the social safety net, the relationship between work and income, and how to adapt to technological change. That makes it one of the most audacious social policy experiments in modern history. It could fail disastrously, or it could change everything for the better.

Basic income has attracted a motley crew of supporters, spanning the ideological spectrum. Efficiency-minded libertarians like the idea of streamlining the bureaucracy of the welfare state. Silicon Valley techies hope a guaranteed income would cushion the blow as automation replaces human jobs. Those with a more utopian bent, such as the organizers of the Swiss referendum, want to open up more options, to let people create art and free the world of what Straub calls “bullshit jobs.”

Critics of the idea say it’s too expensive, would encourage people to stop working and possibly tank a country’s economy. It’s thought to be a political non-starter, too, especially in countries less wealthy and with less generous welfare states than Switzerland. And because basic income proposes a radical reform to the existing welfare system — one that many progressives, at least in the United States, have been defending tooth and nail over the last 30 years — it makes anti-poverty advocates nervous. Max Sawicky, a former economist at the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal think tank in the U.S., outlined a progressive case against basic income in 2013, calling it a “distraction” from raising the minimum wage, guaranteeing full employment, rolling back Clinton-era welfare reforms and supporting unions — all policies, he argues, “more in keeping with our current system and our political culture.”

Both lovers and haters of basic income often miss an important point: We don’t have great data on how it would work or what would happen if it did. Similar policies were tested in both Canada and the U.S. in the 1960s and ’70s, but studies of their effects were either flawed or abandoned. “To be honest, a full long-term universal basic income has never been tried, let alone rigorously evaluated,” said Michael Faye, the co-founder and executive chairman of Give Directly, a nonprofit that has pioneered direct cash transfers to the extreme poor, primarily in Kenya and Uganda.1 Earlier this month, Faye announced Give Directly’s plan to launch a large basic income pilot in Kenya, giving at least 6,000 people a guaranteed income for 10 to 15 years. They hope to find out what happens when everyone in a randomly selected place receives a guaranteed basic income for a long period — something that has never been done before.

Experiments like this are important for our understanding of how basic income would work. But the idea has always been about politics as much as economics. Until we have more evidence, the best thing basic income has going for it is its broad appeal — after all, who doesn’t like free money?

Basic income is not a single idea but a family of closely related ideas, which go by an assortment of names: universal basic income, unconditional basic income, social dividend, guaranteed annual income, citizen’s income, negative income tax, etc. But the core motivation — to address social ills by just giving people money — has a long history."

Source and FULL Article with lot's of Links and Good Information
http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/universal-basic-income/

#WashingtonBasicIncome

My Facebook Page on Basic Income, Learn Lot's, Read White Paper Documents, Watch Videos and Talks, #BasicIncome is a CHEAPER option, a better Option and a Civil Right.
https://www.facebook.com/Basic-Income-for-Everyone-338385479687853/?fref=ts

On May 15th 2016, Basic Income activists in Switzerland laid out the largest poster in history. That same day, the poster was featured on a screen in Times Square.

The Swiss movement posed the question "What Would You Do If Your Income Were Taken Care of?"

Nearby, we find the words "Citizen" and "Awesomeness". Are these good answers. (We are sure a few would also visit Pittsburgh or invest in the Nasdaq...)

www.basicincome.org

‪#‎biggestquestion‬ ‪#‎basicincome‬ ‪#‎grundeinkommen‬

Universal Basic Income is a Civil Right

Tax Dollars, YOURS, Given to other countries by the Billions. Dollars used to FUND Billion Dollar Bailouts for Banks, while Bankers get 100's of millions of dollars in salary and raises every year, big companies move their money offshore so you pay for ALL this STUFF, they don't. Your Tax Dollars spend billions a year to bomb other countries, to build jets and to train train train. Space programs spend huge money, and so much more that we don't know about, billions a year, year after year. Yet so many of you have huge fits over food stamps and have even bigger rage at the thought of Basic Income. Get Educated on what money really is, where this illusion really goes, who benefits. STOP the cycle of belief that you have to work for money while corporations are given massive handouts, millions a month, a week, a day. Get a Clear Understanding of what Basic Income is. You have a Basic Right to basic food, housing, and survival. BANKS don't have a Basic Right to billions a year just for being banks where you are forced to go to cash your check. - #BasicIncome  . Here is my page on Page Income, TONS of Research, https://www.facebook.com/Basic-Income-for-Everyone-338385479687853/?fref=ts