I have for some time advocated at least a meaningful test of UBI. Many administrations have dipped their toe in the water, only for the particular venture to be curtailed before any firm conclusions could be drawn. A Christian Science Monitor reporter lays out the history of one such and the logic behind it:
HAMILTON, ONTARIO
Jessie Golem knows the stigma of poverty. She’s been called a leech and parasite. She’s heard more times than she can count, “Go get a job.”
In fact, she always had multiple jobs. But piano lessons, gigs in dog walking, and a budding photography business – a 60-to-80-hour weekly hustle – left her just enough to pay her rent in Hamilton.
It wasn’t until she became part of a pilot program in Ontario, receiving a basic income supplement of $1,400 a month, that her working life finally came together. “It was really awesome watching my photography business grow,” she says. “I drew up a whole business plan and had a financial projection that I would only have needed to be on the basic income pilot for two of the three years.”
That pilot ended after its first year with a change in provincial government in 2018 – frustrating the centuries-old idea of a guaranteed basic wage that has never taken off beyond limited experiments in the last 50 years. But now that millions of Canadians have experienced what it’s like to lose a job or had hours cut back with no recourse, now that citizens around the world have only been able to find a way forward with a government check, an idea that once lived on the fringe has become more mainstream.
Driving the discussion in recent years are technological disruption and artificial intelligence, as well as structural economic systems behind a global gig economy. The idea faces huge hurdles – from cost to societal disdain for “getting something for nothing” – but the pandemic has born a new group that understands intimately how fragile economic security can be.
[...]
Since March, the idea in Canada has been formally endorsed by many groups, from the Anglican Church of Canada to the United Steelworkers, when unions have traditionally worried streamlining welfare into a basic income program could imply a loss of public jobs and services.
A group of Liberal lawmakers called on Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, in a minority government with the leftist New Democrats, to make basic income a top policy resolution at the party’s November convention.
UBI has been a personal crusade of Jane Dodds since she became leader of the Welsh Liberal Democrats in 2017. Now it has become party policy at Federal (i.e. UK) level. It is not going to be easy to promote it and our elections team, which has a poor record of presentation culminating in the 2019 general election disaster, will have to work hard and skilfully. We will have to persuade those who are in secure well-paid jobs that this is not a subsidy for scroungers and also encourage those who will, or are likely to, benefit from it to come out to vote.
My personal view is that UBI is a move towards breaking the chains of poverty as advocated in the preamble to our constitution, but that abolishing homelessness has become at least of equal priority in England and Wales today.
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