by Andre Coelho | Mar 15, 2019 | News
Andrew Yang. Picture credit to: The Daily Beast
Few political analysts bear to take Andrew Yang presidential candidacy seriously, but that doesn’t seem to slow him down. Yang’s team (informally also called “Yang’s gang”) has already surpassed a 14000 donors mark, and has active members in more than 35 states.
From previous articles, and from several interviews, it is clear that at the core of Yang’s motivation for running for President is the understanding of two things: automation is upon us (sure to wipe out millions of jobs in the next few years) and present-day economy is just not working for the average human anymore. He has already said that, according to him, Trump won the 2016 elections due to automation taking away four million jobs in swing states like Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Missouri and Iowa.
Some might say the replacement of human labour by machines is a terrifying perspective, but these dire predictions can only materialize if the social structure still demands income from jobs to assure survival. And then others criticize the basic income proposal as “socialist” – which has a very negative connotation in the USA – as if somehow the implementation of that particular policy would turn contemporary USA into mid-XXth century USSR. On that issue, Yang simply replies that “this is capitalism where income doesn’t start at zero”.
Naturally that Yang is frequently asked the million-dollar question of how is he thinking to pay for a basic income in the USA (he proposes a 1000 $/month for every adult citizen, no questions asked). To him, the answer seems straightforward: make tech giants pay value-added taxes (since these are the main movers behind the great automation wave), and savings on conditional benefits (which can be replaced by the unconditional stipend). Yang envisions basic income to be implemented as a Negative Income Tax (NIT) policy, in which the state would, in each yearly tax exercise, consider the full amount of owed taxes versus basic income, and determine how much each adult citizen would pay or receive under a NIT system.
That and a lot more Yang spoke about at this year’s SXSW Conference, where Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has also been present (on another of the Conference’s sessions).
More information at:
David Smith, “Andrew Yang: the 2020 candidate warning of the rise of robots”, The Guardian, 24th February 2019
Daniele Fabri, “USA: Presidential Hopeful Andrew Yang speaks at the Register’s Political Soapbox”, October 6th 2018
Jacob Banas, “How universal basic income could be affordable, Andrew Yang explains”, Futurism, March 10th 2019
by Andre Coelho | Mar 13, 2019 | News
By: Rebecca Warne
This article by Alex Gray summarizes a presentation given by historian Rutger Bregman at the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in Switzerland, January 2019.
Bregman would like to see ‘work’ redefined as ‘activity which adds value to society.’ He sees the starting point for this as more general recognition that some jobs are socially useless (at best). Bregman quotes Jeff Hammerbacher, an early employee of Facebook who apparently said: “The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads. That sucks.”
Bregman’s interest in an UBI is twofold. Firstly, it would enhance individual quality of life by removing the necessity to work for money. Secondly, workers whose jobs are poorly paid but socially useful would be freer to draw attention to this fact by withholding their labour.
He rejects the further argument that an UBI will be necessary to offset the inevitable replacement of human beings by technology: “Automation throughout history has never meant mass unemployment. We should never underestimate the power of capitalism to come up with more socially useless jobs. Theoretically, it’s possible we will all just be pretending to work.”
Bregman doesn’t engage with economic arguments around the feasibility or impracticability of an UBI, so much as the ‘hearts and minds’ aspects: “The obstacle is not about economics or technology, it’s ideology. We have to redefine so many of our basic concepts.” According to Bregman, “We’re all basically nice, meaning-seeking creatures, and if you assume the best, that’s what you get out. It’s the power of expectation…. The first time I wrote about basic income was five years ago, and back then no one was talking about it. Now the idea is everywhere and there are experiments around the globe. The first talks I gave were for small groups of anarchists and now I’ve been invited to the World Economic Forum. It just shows how ideas change the world. Life-changing ideas never start in Washington, Westminster or Davos, they start at the fringes. In a basic income society, wages would better reflect societal value, and kids would live out their dreams.”
More information at:
Alex Gray, “This is our chance to completely redefine the meaning of work”, World Economic Forum, January 9th 2019
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 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
