by Kate McFarland | Oct 9, 2016 | News
The International Peace Bureau (IPB) held its 2016 World Congress in Berlin, Germany from September 30 through October 3. This year, the congress included a panel discussion on universal basic income.
The panelists — who were also the organizers of this IPB workshop — included Juana Perez and Angel Bravo from the Spanish organization Humanistas por la Renta Básica Universal (“Humanists for a Universal Basic Income”), and Diana Aman and Ralph Boes of the Bürgerinitiative bedingungsloses Grundeinkommen (BBG), a Berlin-based advocacy group which celebrated its 10th anniversary at the start of the month. (BBG, in collaboration with other pro-UBI German organizations, has been campaigning for the introduction of a basic income referendum in Germany.)
The panelists described ways in which the implementation of a basic income would contribute to peace — for instance, by reducing or eliminating violence and social unrest caused by poverty, and by overturning the “inhuman system” of present societies that presently abide by the “biblical curse that says ‘By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread'”.
Founded in 1891, the International Peace Bureau has a long and distinguished history of advocating for a world without war and facilitating communication between peace societies worldwide. The IPB was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1910, and 13 of its officers have received the prize as individuals. At present, IPB has 300 member organizations in 70 countries.
The IPB’s main present focus, and the theme of its recent congress, is the reallocation of military expenditures by governments.
For details concerning the IPB panel on UBI, see:
Sasha Volkoff (October 6, 2016) “A workshop on the Universal Basic Income in Berlin“, Pressenza International Press Agency.
Reviewed by Genevieve Shanahan
Image: Doves at International Peace Day, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 United Nations Photo
by Andre Coelho | Oct 6, 2016 | News
(Eduardo Suplicy. Credit to: Folha de São Paulo)
On October 2, the headline of the newspaper read: “With 301 thousand votes, Suplicy is the most voted councilman in São Paulo.” This news is significant for two reasons. First, because São Paulo is a city of 12 million inhabitants – more populous than the whole country of Portugal – and, second, because Eduardo Suplicy is one of the most accomplished defenders of basic income in Brazil.
Suplicy was elected to this important political position with 301,446 votes, or 5,6% of all valid votes. He will be a part of a nine-member team of São Paulo councilmen representing the party Partido dos Trabalhadores (PT). However, the party Partido da Social Democracia Brasileira (PSDB) elected more officials, and it will be represented in the city council by a team of eleven. On the political spectrum, the PSDB may be considered left-right centre, while the PT is a conventional left-wing party.
This historical election – Eduardo Suplicy was indeed the most voted councilman in the history of elections in São Paulo – was partly due to Eduardo’s tireless work as an activist and speaker for basic income. In his own words: “(…) after arguing the main advantages of the basic income as an important instrument of economic policy to build a just and civilized society in more than 100 hundred lectures in all kinds of auditoriums and public rallies, I was elected a city councilman of the city of São Paulo (…)”.
We might expect that more decisive steps towards basic income will come from the São Paulo district, now that its city government hosts one of the most resilient basic income defenders alive: Eduardo Suplicy.
More information at:
Bruno Soraggi e Rafael Balago, “Com 301 mil votos, Suplicy é vereador mais votado em São Paulo [With 301 thousand votes, Suplicy is the most voted councilman in São Paulo]”, Folha de São Paulo, October 2nd 2016
by Guest Contributor | Sep 21, 2016 | Opinion
Evidence indicates that Universal Basic Income (UBI) policies would benefit our society’s least fortunate, decreasing poverty and improving the prospects for long-term income mobility. However, one UBI critic has asserted that a basic income replacing current forms of welfare would make it harder for immigrants to become naturalized citizens of the United States because of political pressures. An excerpt from an interview journalist Megan McArdle gave to PBS News Hour:
A lot of immigrants are low-wage workers. They’re not skilled, a lot of them. They don’t have as much education as most Americans and so they never do get up to the point where they would ever pay enough in taxes to make back that check. Even if you just limited it to their children, the political support for importing people whose children will then be entitled to the same $15,000 a year as your children — I don’t think that would ever be politically viable.
So if you want to have a guaranteed minimum income, you need to shut down, pretty much effectively, shut down immigration, or at least immigration from lower skilled countries…
There are three reasons why McArdle’s conclusion, that UBI would complicate the immigration debate and necessitate an end to immigration, is very incorrect. First, naturalized immigrants are already the recipients of welfare transfers in the status quo; distributing this aid through a UBI will lower administrative costs, be less controlling, and help those in poverty more than existing welfare policies do. Second, the UBI’s political effects on immigration are largely unpredictable, but the reform could be sold to the public in a bipartisan fashion. It is not hard to imagine that UBI would have broad appeal if constituents knew it offered a simplified benefit structure, created clear incentives for legal immigration, and eliminated some of the perverse incentives embedded in current welfare policies.
Welfare policies already exist – and naturalized immigrants already participate in these programs at relatively high rates because immigrants are more likely to be low-income than the average American citizen. This is worth repeating for emphasis: naturalized are already eligible to receive social security benefits, Supplemental Security Income, food stamps, TANF benefits, and benefits from other transfer programs. This fact alone means that UBI, as a phased-in alternative to current welfare policies, would not increase the amount of money transferred to naturalized immigrants.
While it is feasible that welfare transfers to new citizens could be viewed as unpopular, the balanced approach of a UBI could help mitigate these concerns while leaving everyone better off. Policymakers who answer to constituents with negative views on immigration could effectively communicate that a UBI would reduce the total cost of welfare by reducing administrative costs. Policymakers who answer to constituents with positive views on immigration could argue aid would be given to those in need in a better way, a way that empowers new immigrants to make their own choices rather than choices dictated by the government.
Depending on implementation, a UBI policy may slightly increase or decrease aid to the families of illegal immigrants. Although immigrants illegally residing in the U.S. are generally ineligible to receive welfare, illegal immigrants are permitted to apply to receive food stamps on their children’s behalf. A UBI equal to the value of the food stamps the family would have otherwise received should be the preferred policy. Various states already have their own forms of supplementary assistance for illegal immigrants in addition to food stamps: these states could bridge any perceived gaps by offering the same assistance they do now.
Lawful, non-citizen residents, such as students, exchange visitors and foreign workers, are eligible for certain welfare transfers depending on their circumstances. Current laws also require waiting periods and point systems for noncitizens to become eligible for Supplemental Security Income (SSI) transfers. These rules could be maintained to alleviate concerns that noncitizens would take advantage of the UBI: as it stands now, non-citizens receive substantially less welfare transfers than their citizen counterparts. Essentially, a UBI would end up looking very similar to the SSI – the general idea would be to have fewer onerous requirements on how welfare dollars are spent.
The political implications of UBI implementation are nearly impossible to predict, especially in the context of immigration. For example, even though illegal immigration has been falling over the last decade, voter concern is relatively high. Additional demographic changes will likely change the political realities surrounding immigration reform and welfare policies.
It is also unlikely that a UBI would drastically change the rate of naturalization or where non-citizens choose to call home. After all, research shows that welfare spending does not have large effect on immigrants’ decisions on where to live (the biggest factor appears to be economic opportunity). It also appears that citizenship fees are a bigger factor in determining whether immigrants will pursue naturalization than welfare is.
It is clear that UBI would not lead to the cataclysmic outcomes McArdle expects: we would have already seen those consequences with current welfare policies. A UBI would just improve the existing system.
About the author:
James Davis is an undergraduate at Columbia University studying Economics and History.
by Roland Duchatelet | Sep 19, 2016 | Opinion
Social security emerged in Western Europe with voluntary solidarity contributions within labour unions in the late 19th century developing into a mandatory insurance contribution organised by the state in 1950. A mandatory insurance payable to the state is a tax, in this case a tax on labour. Because the employer pays all if it, it does not matter if legislation categorises it as employee’s contribution or employer’s contribution.
In addition, the 20th century saw the birth of a new type of tax: the income tax, designed to capture the total income of wealthy people. However, after 1950 the income tax started to hit the rising incomes of the working class. It became the second component of the tax on labour. Zero in 1930, insignificant in 1950, the total tax on labour is now by far the most important tax income for Western European states. It varies between 50 to 200 percent of the net labour income of the workers, making the cost of labour on average twice as high compared to what the worker gets.
The history of its creation explains why social security is linked to labour participation. The political class assimilates “job creation” to welfare: the more people work, and the longer they do, the more taxes are paid and the better for the state budget. This thinking induced many countries to increase the age of retirement. Obliging older people to work longer when there is a five-fold increase of unemployed young people waiting for a job, is absurd. It is an example of wrong collective thinking by people indoctrinated by the “Labour Church”, because they assume “full employment” is still possible.
In the cultural sector, the high tax on labour is a problem. We can watch fantastic artists for free on television. High taxes on labour increase the wage cost of artists. Most local performances cannot compete unless they get subsidies, which is now current practice in most Western European countries. Would it not be more straightforward to have no taxes and no subsidies in the cultural sector?
Education and healthcare are heavily subsidised in many countries to cover the cost of their employees including the tax on their labour and other expenses. Their net finances would be the same if taxes on labour would be set to zero and subsidies lowered with the same amount.
Same for services completely paid by our tax money like police, justice, the military, federal and local administration: the labour tax cost included into the payroll expenditure of the state is paid and collected by the state, the same wallet. Setting their labour tax to zero would not affect their net finances.
In Western Europe, 40 to 50 percent of employment is publicly funded which means the corresponding labour tax has no effect on net state receipts.
For a state, the real proceeds of labour tax come from the non-subsidised private sector. Hence, the proceeds are much lower than what policymakers are tempted to believe while looking at public accounts which provide gross rather than netted labour tax income figures.
Meanwhile, the high tax on labour effectively increases the cost of services for those who want their shoes, a washing machine or a bike to be repaired. Mind that the “Labour Church” does not allow citizens to trade services. Services should be acquired from service companies because allowing citizen’s to work for each other by exchanging services would be unfair competition to the firms selling such services.
These firms charge a labour cost at least twice as high as what their workers get, because of the tax on labour. This higher price obviously reduces the demand for repair services and many people try to paint their house themselves, maintain their garden themselves and their kids drive bikes without proper lights or brakes. The tax on labour reduces exchange of services, hence it reduces the creation of wealth in the proximity economy.
In Western Europe, the labour Church created this barrier to social inclusion by segregating contractual labour from voluntary and informal work. Helping each other in an informal way, like our grandparents did, is not permitted anymore: the labour tax collectors are chasing offenders. However, poor people can get help from subsidised workers if they successfully find and convince the right state personnel that they are really poor. Clearly, the economic religion put in place by the “Labour Church” does not empower the population to help each other.
Would it not be more effective to convert the directive, complex, fraud-prone and costly social security allowance system into its basic income equivalent and allow the social economy to thrive again by allowing people to work for each other in an informal way, like our ancestors did until 50 years ago?
by Kate McFarland | Aug 29, 2016 | News
Philosopher Elizabeth Anderson has written an article in Boston Review in which she analyzes and reviews the political and economic theories of Thomas Paine, Friedrich Hayek, and others.
Anderson identifies the roots of modern systems of social insurance in Paine’s Agrarian Justice. She traces the history of the idea and its implementation through the late 1800s — when German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck instituted the world’s first social insurance scheme — and on to the present. In the latter half of the article, she critiques Hayek’s opposition to social insurance programs such as Bismarck’s pension system. Whilst people are fine with people getting insurance from Covered.com.au or other sites, there can be confusion about this part of the social system. Anderson connects modern right-wing opposition to the welfare state with Hayek’s criticisms of social insurance, criticisms which she argues to be unwarranted.
The article is not presented as an argument for basic income, but as a general defense of social welfare schemes — especially those that protect the middle classes. Indeed, Anderson herself clearly favors Bismarck-type schemes, in which “pension and disability benefits were graded according to each payer’s contributions” over Paine’s (and Hayek’s) idea of distributing equal benefits to all. She only mentions basic income “by name” when describing right-wing proposals, such as that of Charles Murray. She rejects these right-leaning basic income proposals — which would do away with all other benefits and keep individual subsidies below the poverty line — as insufficiently generous and detrimental to the middle class.
Although she seldom discussing basic income directly, Anderson situates some of the idea’s most important predecessors in their historical and political contexts. Paine’s Agrarian Justice and Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom are both canonical works in the history of the basic income movement. However, Paine and Hayek endorse very different types of basic income policies, for different reasons and as responses to different political currents — which Anderson’s article does much to illuminate.
Elizabeth Anderson is the John Dewey Distinguished University Professor of Philosophy and Women’s Studies at the University of Michigan (or, as we say here in Columbus, “the school up north”). Her areas of research in democratic theory, equality, racial integration, the ethics of markets, rational choice theories, and the political philosophy of John Stuart Mill and John Dewey. Her current work focuses on the history of egalitarianism.
Read the full article here:
Elizabeth Anderson, “Common Property: How Social Insurance Became Confused with Socialism,” Boston Review; July 25, 2016.
Photo: Statue of Otto von Bismarck, via Bernt Rostad
