Geoff Simmons and Gareth Morgan, economists at New Zealand’s Gareth Morgan Foundation, have called universal basic income (UBI) an “idea whose time has come” — pointing out that we already know (at least) ten types of people who would be better off with a UBI, even without waiting for results from impending experiments.
As they claim in the recent article, however, we don’t yet know enough about how to finance a UBI:
[T]he real challenge of any UBI proposal is the fiscal cost and how it is to be funded. In order to be credible, any proposal has to outline the cost and indicate who specifically is supposed to pay for it. This is the hard part, where there are winners and losers. Instead the overseas pilots are testing the easy stuff and ignoring the difficult issue, which is their glaring weakness.
Simmons and Morgan’s column sends an important and valuable message, which we should all consider as we press forward in the global movement for universal basic income.
Read the full article here:
Geoff Simmons and Gareth Morgan, “UBI: the radical solution to tax and work which even Silicon Valley is now investigating,” The Spinoff, June 21, 2016.
Image: Geoff Simmons speaks on basic income on Gareth Morgan’s YouTube channel.
