by Julen Bollain | Mar 12, 2019 | News
On 28th September 2018, the Elkarrekin Podemos party registered an initiative in the Basque Parliament to organise a parliamentary discussion in order to study the effects of robotisation and digitalization, distribution of employment, and Basic Income.
This initiative will soon be discussed in a Plenary Session of the Basque Parliament. However, before taking this step, the party requested two appearances on the “Employment, Social Policies and Youth Commission” of the Basque Parliament: Daniel Raventós, head of Red Renta Básica, BIEN’s Spanish affiliate, and Ángel Elías, Dean of the School of Labour Relations and Social Work at the University of the Basque Country.
In his appearance on the 5th of February 2019, Daniel Raventós explained why many meetings of international forums (e.g.: the WEF in Davos and the International Monetary Fund) are now talking about Basic Income. According to Professor Raventós, there are three main reasons for this. First, the vertiginous speed of automatisation of jobs and the potential destruction of employment in the not-too-distant future. Second, it is deterioration of the material conditions of the non-rich majority of the population. And third, Raventós mentioned the structural failures of minimum income schemes.
In the second appearance, on the 12th of February 2019, Ángel Elias explained that, in the present unfair distribution of wealth, fewer and fewer people are accumulating greater and greater fortunes, at the cost of diminishing the resources needed to guarantee people’s access to decent living conditions. He shared his views on transformations in the labour market, and analysed possible solutions. Elías stressed the need for a Basic Income that would guarantee the material existence of all citizens, together with a fairer distribution of employment for everyone.
Elkarrekin Podemos officials are convinced that the destruction of employment deriving from processes of digitisation and robotisation requires urgent analysis with a view to finding solutions. Furthermore, social protection models need to be rethought. In this framework, the universalisation of the right to an income should be seen as an alternative, in the face of a reality where the fusion of robotics, information technology, and artificial intelligence is unstoppable.
by Andre Coelho | Mar 9, 2019 | News
Rutger Bregman at Davos (2019). Picture credit to: World Economic Forum
Rutger Bregman has been hitting the numbers the past few weeks. After a controversial participation at Davos, at the end of January, he went on for a controversial interview on Fox News that never got aired – but got “aired” on Twitter, and watched by more than eleven thousand people, and retwitted over sixty thousand times – and is, most probably, getting the spotlight out of a simple fact: he’s saying out loud what most people are thinking.
At Davos, on a shared panel, Bregman decided to touch the open wound, a particularly sensitive issue for all the millionaires and billionaires that fly over to this global elite event once every year: taxes. According to him, no private philanthropy can solve the real issue of tax avoidance, and that high taxes on the wealthy are an urgency in these troubled days (as well as terminating with tax havens). And he is not alone on this quest: most Americans support this general trend in tax policy – higher marginal tax rates, wealth taxes, inherence taxes and so on – and, if that’s the situation in the USA, then most possibly in the rest of the world that tendency is also real.
As an example, also cited by Bregman, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has been pushing for taxes on the wealthy as high as 70%. He adds that this is no coincidence, but a part of what he sees as an uprising on a “new generation waking up”. He believes this generation, in which he includes himself (a young 30 years-old Dutch historian), simply doesn’t believe anymore that inequality is some kind of fatality, and that (ordinary) people just have to deal with it. Bregman also voiced at Davos’s shared panel what he called “a moral equivalent of a war”, particularly when in reference to inequality (and also on environmental protection). Although imbued of a strong potency, it remains to be seen if warfare – real or a moral equivalent of it – has actually brought anything else to the world than heartbreak, death and destruction.
On Fox News, Bregman was interviewed by Tucker Carlson, a prominent Fox News anchor who, somehow, felt the need to affront him with harsh words. Apparently, the reason for that was Bregman’s boldness in saying that (about Carlson) “You are a millionaire, funded by billionaires, that’s what you are (…) and that’s why you’re not talking about certain things”. One of those things being, in particular, tax avoidance. Naturally, this word exchange didn’t come to any meaningful conclusion, but it may just be that Bregman went over to Fox News to speak for millions of people, who already suspect the collusion between big money and big media.
An edited eight-minute segment of the famous never aired interview can be watched over the link below (from Now This).
More information at:
Patrick King, “He took down the elite at Davos. Then he came for Fox News”, The New York Times, March 1st 2019
André Coelho, “United States: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: uncompromising, intelligent and courageously, she is driving progressive values in the US like we haven’t seen in a long time”, Basic Income News, January 23rd 2019
by Tyler Prochazka | Mar 7, 2019 | News
The third annual UBI Taiwan international summit will be held in Taipei on March 16, 2019. This year’s theme is “Key Trends of the Next Generation,” focusing on technological development as well as growing income inequality and how these trends intersect with basic income.
Asia has progressed rapidly in the global basic income movement, led by India which has shown intense political interest in implementing policies containing aspects of basic income.
Sarath Davala, Basic Income Earth Network’s Vice Chair, will join the conference to discuss these developments and more in his keynote speech “Basic Income is the Foundation of A Caring Society.”
“This is the third consecutive year that UBI Taiwan is organizing a regional Basic Income Conference. UBI Taiwan is perhaps the only national level basic income group that organizes annual conferences. That is a demonstration of a robust movement, the strength of its leadership and their commitment to the idea of basic income,” Davala said.
Ryan Engen, an Economic Officer at the American Institute in Taiwan, America’s unofficial representative entity in Taiwan, will deliver the opening remarks discussing how digital transformations should make global economies consider updates to our social security systems.
Guy Standing, the co-founder of BIEN, Andrew Yang, the U.S. Democratic presidential candidate, and Peter Knight, the former World Bank economist, will join via pre-recorded messages.
This year, there will be a focus on bringing in academics and opinion makers from across Taiwan. Professors from Taiwan’s premier universities, National Taiwan University and National Chengchi University, as well as influential Taiwanese media figures, will address the conference.
The Critical Language Scholarship’s (CLS) Alumni Development Fund (ADF) provided a grant to help fund the conference and related events. CLS is a language program under the U.S. State Department.
James Davis, the former Field Research Director for UBI Taiwan and one of the project recipients for the ADF grant, said the conference demonstrates UBI Taiwan’s commitment to pushing this discussion in Asia and around the world.
“UBI Taiwan is here to change everything. We are not content with a society where wealth is concentrated in the hands of a few, as the wages of the working class fall year after year,” Davis said.
Davala has participated in every conference since it began in 2017.
“I am proud to be a regular participant of these conferences. I wish UBI Taiwan team success for this conference. With their kind of energy and dedication to basic income, I am sure one-day UBI will be a reality in Taiwan,” Davala said.
Brian Anderson, a senior at Western Kentucky University and also a recipient of the ADF grant, said this conference will help create academic connections between Taiwan and the United States.
“The push for UBI deserves international support and my project seeks to promote mutual understanding of shared interests between Taiwanese and American citizens,” Anderson said.
For Davis, society’s “inadequate” support for parents and caregivers as well as the financial difficulties faced by students illustrate the reasons why Taiwan should consider a basic income.
“UBI is the future. And UBI Taiwan is here to deliver,” Davis said.
The full conference information can be found on the UBI Taiwan website and on the Facebook event (Chinese).
by Andre Coelho | Mar 6, 2019 | News
Charles Eisenstein. Picture credit to: Resilience.
Charles Eisenstein, author, thinker and true believer that a better world is possible, has spoken his mind about Unconditional Basic Income (UBI). For that purpose, he has recorded this short video.
In his view, UBI stands as a threat for the current work marketplace, since people (getting a UBI) would not easily do “degrading, dangerous work”, or that “no one would do it for very long, or very much…unless you paid them to do it”. He goes as far as to say that UBI would “change the whole structure of the economy”, since people would no longer submit to terrifying work conditions, or under-poverty line salaries, just in order to survive. With UBI, Eisenstein reasons, “people wouldn’t be trapped in those things”. In fact, he continues, today’s economy is locked in with millions of people undergoing degrading work.
People want to do things, people have dreams, Eisenstein says. But in this present-day economy, people’s wants, needs and dreams are trampled on constantly by the relentless speed and coldness of “survival”. So, he questions affluent people: “Do you want your affluence to be built of the humiliation of other people?”. At the bottom of his argument, Eisenstein points to “force”: work is only degrading when people are forced to do it. And so UBI would simply revolutionize capitalism, since people would no longer be forced – by means of a “survival threat” – into labour, but gain enough freedom to pursue their dreams and passions.
https://www.facebook.com/basicincomequotes/videos/2113748875604082/
by Andre Coelho | Mar 3, 2019 | News
Anna, 29 – Participant in the HartzPlus experiment in Berlin, Germany
The HartzPlus experiment is starting in Germany this month. Previously summarized, the experiment will involve 250 welfare beneficiaries, subject to the Hartz IV welfare scheme. For three years, the randomly selected participants will receive 416 €/month, whether they comply with the Hartz IV conditions or not. For comparison purposes, the minimum wage in Germany is around 1500 €/month, and the poverty line stands at approximately 1100 €/month. So, just like the recent experiment in Finland, this is an test which on objective terms cannot be said to be reproducing a “basic” income, in the sense of providing the basic for achieving a minimum dignified standard of living (in this case, in Germany). Like in Finland, it is mainly testing the effects of introducing an unconditional element on the income of a group of people, for a limited period of time.
Other propositions have been vocalized in Germany, mainly in response or even as an expression of protest against the Hartz IV, enforced in the country since 2003. One of such voices has been Berlin Mayor Michael Müller, a long time Social Democratic Party (SPD) official. However, what Müller is defending, in essence, is a job guarantee, over a basic income. Beneath the “basic income based on solidarity” concept lies a fundamental distrust in Berlin’s citizens: that the latter must be coerced into municipal or social service jobs, in exchange for their “basic income” (a gross amount or around 1500 €/month). However, the proposition has been popular in Germany for a long time, with the Social Democratic Party and the Left Party having subsidized public employment in Berlin between 2002 and 2011.
While politicians and voter’s stomach for Hartz IV is running dry, after more than 15 years of enforcement, clear justification for a UBI kind of policy still seems to be lacking on the public arena. For instance, funding a basic income is still publicly presented as value of basic income times number of recipients which, of course, leads to prohibitive costs. This comes at a time when ever more studies demonstrate that providing a basic income to citizens can cost much less than that to the State on a net basis, or it can even be calibrated in such a way as to be cost neutral (by applying changes to social security schemes and taxation).
Hilmar Schneider, an economist for the IZA Institute of Labor Economics, actually thinks that creating a financial floor for poor people means spending money on all the population. Internally, he is also thinking in a “value of basic income times number of recipients” mentality, not understanding the income transfer mechanism inherent in basic income implementation. According to him, present day low paid jobs will become less attractive, which sounds reasonable to assume, since most people only accept those jobs because they are permanently threatened with destitution. What might not be so reasonable to assume, however, is to think that it may lead to price increases, and a general downward trend in income for many people. If people can accumulate a basic income with whatever income they can get from paid work, within a properly setup tax structure which incorporates basic income at its core, a rise in poverty is surely questionable.
More information at:
David Martin, “Berlin mayor calls for basic income in Germany – or does he?“, DW, March 20th 2018
Arthur Sullivan, “Germany’s “money for nothing” experiment raises basic income questions“, DW, 28th February 2019
André Coelho, “Germany: The first basic income experiment in Germany will start in 2019“, Basic Income News, 16th December 2018
by Andre Coelho | Mar 1, 2019 | News
Prem Das Rai (Wikipedia)
The Morung Express newspaper has interviewed the sole Sikkim MP at Lok Sabha (central parliament in India), Prem Das Rai. On the 17th of February, excerpts of that interview were posted, where Rai clearly states that introducing a universal basic income (UBI) in the state “is a leap of faith”. To him, it is a trust issue, when critics point out that a UBI kind of policy may turn people lazy. In reply, he says that “lazy people will be lazy people whether they get money or not”.
Rai does not conceive UBI as a grant, or a subsidy, but an income. That means that the purpose is not to have UBI seen as a hand-out, but a human right. “UBI is for every citizen of Sikkim, all Sikkimese people”. This contrasts with the recent announcements of both national opposition party Congress and government Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which Rai considers to be targeted schemes (Congress aims at the “poor” and the BJP at “poor farmers”) and in reaction to the agrarian crisis ravaging the country.
According to Rai, Sikkim state is not proposing basic income as a reaction to some urgent crisis, but as a way to look “ahead and changing the mindset of the youth”. Over that new mindset, and knowing they will have a guaranteed influx of money every month, regardless of their personal situation, people will naturally behave differently and tend to make better choices in life. That is Rai’s belief, anyway.
As for funding, and instead of speaking about taxes, Rai responds that Sikkim state is rich in resources, such as “hydropower, tourism, organic farming and pharmaceutical companies”, as well as “educational facilities”, and so will find the funds to cover for basic income, from within these several sources. The specific form this funding will be performed, however, is still unclear.
On Raul Ghandi’s Congress party promise to implement a kind of basic income all across India (conceived as a negative income tax), if it gets elected in May, Rai responds that Sikkim is the example to follow, devaluing Ghandi’s initiave. Rai sees basic income in India more as a growing number of regional initiatives, rather than a central idea, implemented nationally.
More information at:
André Coelho, “India: Sikkim state is on the verge of becoming the first place on Earth implementing a basic income”, Basic Income News, January 11th 2019
“Universal basic income proposal a leap of faith: Sikkim MP”, Morung Express, February 17th 2019
André Coelho, “India: Basic income is being promised to all poor people in India”, Basic Income News, February 1st 2019
