How fair and free Basic Income could change the world

How would you like €188 a week into your hand for doing nothing?

No, not the dole (although the sum is the same) but a basic income for everyone regardless of whether they work or not. Anything extra earned would top this up.

Basic Income would replace social welfare and transform taxation.

The total cost could be €30 billion - almost as much as the welfare and tax it would replace, according to a 2012 study by the Nevin Economic Research Institute

The system would benefit the low income families who have no incentive to work. They are little better off – and in many cases worse off - than they would be on the dole, a fundamental and very unfair flaw in our economy.

Of course, someone has to pay more. Who? Those slippery customers at the top end of the pay scale, the ones who slide through loopholes and benefit most from every percentage-based tax cut under the current system.

The basic-income-for-all concept is a sort of left-wing alternative to Renua’s much-derided 25% flat tax plan, only it works from the bottom up - not the top down.

Yet it includes the merits of Renua’s plan in simplifying the tax and social welfare systems and providing an incentive to work – only for low earners not high earners.

Instead of everyone paying the same lower basic tax rate, everyone would pay the same basic higher rate of around 45%.

The €188 a week in extra income would more than compensate low and middle earners, but not higher earners.

The Nevin Institute believes this is how social welfare would be structured if started from scratch.

The benefits wouldn’t just be for the low-paid.

There’s a necessary meanness, pettiness and bureaucratic complexity to social welfare as it stands.

Jobseekers allowance, for example, is meant to be for only for those actively seeking work.

A lot of largely pointless effort goes into trying to ensure recipients seek work, which costs the State a lot of money, doesn’t really succeed and can be demeaning to, say, a 65-year-old with no computer skills who gets rejected for menial jobs he’s forced to apply for.

The definition of work is narrow and short term – it means an immediate job.

The system doesn’t help people who are prepared to live frugally in the medium term to better themselves in the long term, or even just to live a more fulfilling life: students, entrepreneurs and artists for example.

Instead of going through painstaking and costly bureaucracy to get the odd grant, or fake job-seeking to get the dole, aspiring writers, musicians and visual artists could afford to live with some dignity. Any work they sell would be a bonus.

The State could save even more money on the costly and often controversial system of grants and their administration, where bureaucrats can make decisions on which artist deserves support. Under Basic Income, they all would.

Nathan Jackson a member of the lobby group, Basic Income Ireland, the Irish affiliate of a global movement, works for low wages on a community farm in Kildare.

He said: “Everyone would have more flexibility over unpaid work

…No one would face the poverty trap. No one would face the indignity of “signing on”.”

“A basic income would make a big difference to my family,” he said.

So who else supports Basic Income?

It’s official policy of the Greens and Fianna Fail said they will look into it.

A majority of Finns are in favour and are undertaking a pilot study, as are the Americans.

Switzerland recently held a referendum on the issue, and rejected it.

One objection that helped swing the No vote was that if they introduced Basic Income “everyone would want to live there.”

It seems a shame to reject positively transforming your society because it would be too popular?!