From: https://www.patreon.com/scottsantens?ty=h
Basic income advocate Scott Santens has published a piece in the Huffington Post arguing that a UBI is a vastly superior alternative to minimum wages policies, which he says treat only the symptoms rather than the causes of low pay.
The intervention in the American minimum wage debate describes how a UBI would put employees in a stronger individual bargaining position with employers as “possibly the best reason to go with basic income instead of a hodgepodge of minimum wage laws, earned income tax credits, welfare programs, food stamps, housing assistance, tax deductions, and all the rest.”
Santens also illustrates how welfare cliffs and bureaucratic holes in the current system create serious problems of their own, whereas a basic income would eliminate the need for minimum wages laws and other needless things “up to and including the existence of poverty itself.”
Scott Santens, “Minimum Wages vs. Universal Basic Income”, Huffington Post, 11 August 2015
