by Citizens' Income Trust | Apr 30, 2011 | News
Kevin Donnelly, who was an active supporter of Basic (Citizen’s) Income from its early days in the 1980s, has died at his home in Manchester aged 82. In an article by Kevin in the BIRG Bulletin in 1989 he described himself as ‘currently supply teaching, writing articles and leaflets, after a career as high-school dropout, toolmaker, clerk, sales manager, then teacher’.
Kevin was passionate about doing something to better the lives of ordinary working men and women. He expressed this through his religious belief, as well as actively promoting a Citizen’s Income in any arena available to him. In 1989 he was a founder trustee of the Basic Income Research Group, which became the Citizen’s Income Trust in 1994.
The standard definition of a Citizen’s Income is that it should be paid for by levying tax on the incomes of workers. It was unease with this aspect of Basic or Citizen’s Income that led Kevin (and me) to become involved in monetary reform. If the state reclaimed the money-creating power from commercial banks, then the proceeds could be used to fund a small Basic Income. Monetary reform used to be the preserve of cranks (and sometimes bigots as well), but it has now become urgent and mainstream following the banking crash of 2008. An important forum for the monetary reform debate is the Christian Council for Monetary Justice, of which Kevin was a long term supporter.
Kevin, always inspirational, argued with infectious good humour. His great joy was in pricking the pomposities of the hide-bound and conventional. His do-it-yourself Christmas cards with their poems and pictures were a delight. Game to the end, his wife Shirley tells me he had several recently delivered books yet to read.
by Citizens' Income Trust | Apr 30, 2011 | News
The Institute for Fiscal Studies has published Universal Credit: A Preliminary Analysis. Their researchers write: ‘Our empirical analysis in Sections 4 and 5 illustrates well the constraints all governments face when contemplating radical welfare reform. Universal Credit will strengthen financial work incentives for some, as intended, but weaken them for others. In general, incentives to work will be strengthened for the main earner in a family who works part-time or has low earnings, and will be weakened for those with higher earnings and for second earners in couples. Marginal effective tax rates will tend to fall for those on lower earnings, and rise for those on higher earnings, although this pattern also depends on how many earners there are in the family. The reform will also lead to both winners and, in the long run, losers. Because of the way the parameters of Universal Credit have been set, couples, and particularly those with children, look set to gain by more, on average, than single-adult families, particularly lone parents, who will lose on average according to our analysis. But, in general, the impact on incomes is progressive, with the bottom income deciles gaining the most as a fraction of income.’ (pp.67-8) (www.ifs.org.uk/bns/bn116.pdf)
The Institute for Fiscal Studies has reported research on the National Minimum Wage (NMW) undertaken by a team at Royal Holloway College in the University of London. They find that ‘the NMW is associated with a significant fall in wage inequality in the bottom half of the distribution’, and that in those areas where the NMW has had the largest effect on wage levels, declines in wage inequality are steeper than elsewhere. ‘While the overall effect of the NMW on employment rates averaged over its existence is neutral, [they] do find small positive employment effects from 2003 onwards. Likewise, the association of the NMW with unemployment has been negative in recent years. NMW effects on hours have been mixed, but overall there is no compelling evidence to indicate that the NMW upratings have had an adverse effect on full-time total hours of work … The areas where the NMW bit most have experienced larger falls in unemployment, particularly in the latter half of the sample period’, (Peter Dolton, Chiara Rosazza Bondibene and Jonathan Wadsworth, ‘The UK National Minimum Wage in Retrospect’, Fiscal Studies, vol.31, no.4, pp.510-532).
by Karl Widerquist | May 27, 2010 | News, The Indepentarian
The new Conservative/Liberal-Democratic coalition government of Great Britain has announced that it will rescind the one step in the direction of a universal basic income made by the previous Labour government. In 2002, the Labour government created “the Child Trust Fund” which gave each child born in Britain that year a 250GBP plus another 250GBP when reaching ate 7. The bonds reach maturity when the child turns 18, at which time the bonds would be potentially worth thousands of pounds. The idea was that every child born in Britain should have some small share of inheritance. The ruling government announced that the program will be entirely phased by 2011, so that only children born between 2002 and 2010 will receive any part of the fund.
Stuart White, a professor of Political Theory at Oxford, commented, “So the party of ‘property-owning democracy’ (Tories) and ‘ownership for all’ (Liberals) combine to end the first policy ever to guarantee an asset for all young people.”
Martin O’Neill, a political philosopher at the University of York (UK), pointed out that the announcement of the repeal of the Child Trust Fund was made by Gideon George Osborne, who sits in the British “House of Commons” despite being the heir apparent of Osborne Baronetcy. He stands to become the 18th Baronet of Ballintaylor, and according to O’Neill, Osborne has already inherited a personal trust fund of more than 4 million pounds.
A blog about the demise of the trust fund is online at:
https://www.nextleft.org/2010/05/child-trust-fund-great-liberal-policy.html
