Topic: Universal Basic Income: Ideas on how to make it work? - page 4. (Read 725 times)

This would be dependent on the nation's economy. Emerging markets and developing economies may not be able to carry out this sustainably as their economies are not as robust and they usually have a rapidly growing population.

This would still be dependent on the above factor as well as the living wages in a particular country.

If people were filtered out then it will no longer be universal, but rather a selective palliative giving you those who are most in need.

This is an issue that should be addressed with or without such a program. Corruption especially at a large scale when left unchecked has limited the growth of many rich economies with enough resources and work force to become a developed nation.

What is Universal Basic Income? Simply put, this means that every citizen will receive a certain amount of money from the government as income, unconditionally, without question. In our society, many types of work are considered 'inferior' and workers are looked down upon. Such as cleaning toilets, cleaning garbage, skinning dead animals, prostitution, etc. Those who do these things do not seem to do so happily, they do so out of helplessness. If they have a regular income, don't do this anymore. Society will then try to meet those needs in other ways.

That would vary, if we were to place a central body that would manage the UBI for the entire world, then varying payments would happen due to different inflations of each country, not to mention that each country has different levels of financial assistance they could provide.
This also depends on how much pay would one get. If a central body were to set the maximum amount of expenses for each group (high class, middle class and low class) then things would probably be a lot easier, but then again, let's not even mention how some people don't have any proper way to regulate their expenses, there's also disparity when it comes to people from each class.
Financial status should be more than enough, though changes with employee status may change their financial status at times, so finding a solution for that could be pretty helpful. With this issue, it may be a lot easier if they gave out UBI monthly to avoid issues when people get fired from their jobs abruptly.
Nothing we can do about this really. Corruption has and always be somewhere money is.

Then how about a fixed amount is obtained from government budget? That, or you could set a sort of tax that varies with wealth which directly goes to UBI funds. Though this makes it look like the rich is supporting the poor, while the poor is making the losses of the rich be at the bare minimum.

The major challenge to this is the wealth of a particular nation, how buoyant their economy is and how low their level of unemployment is. UBI is a good initiative, but in a struggling country/third word country it'll be impossible to achieve, a country still struggling with an impoverished economy and writhing debts cannot undertake this program.

A country with a high unemployment rate will also struggle, you'll expect the nation to channel much of their funds into creating more jobs for it's citizens, as that will give them a stable income, rather than paying them a little amount that can hardly meet their needs. There is also the problem of creating inflation by printing more money to fulfil this program, that being said, I'd only expect this sort of program to be possible in first world countries.

Not giving it.

If it is really universal (i.e given to everybody) it will create inflation. If it's only given to some, it will not be very different from the existing systems of support for the most disadvantaged, which consist of a redistribution of wealth from the middle class to the poor.

Cnut237 and I were having a conversation about wealth distribution in this thread, where he mentions UBI. So rather than derailing that thread I'm going to open it here.

In case you don't know what UBI means it is a program for all citizens of a country, rich and poor, to be paid a fixed amount by their government and the goal of this program is to make sure everyone can pay for what they need. There are obviously many challenges to address before this works out, the most basic ones are:

- How much to pay? Since they're paying millions of people, they need to ensure they have enough money set aside for that, or UBI payments will deplete the government's money.
- What time interval to pay in - If this is not controlled we get the same consequence as paying too much at a time.
- Should people be filtered out based on financial status (EDIT: and employment status as well)? Presumably finance ministries of governments have records of every citizen's earnings (as in profit not balance), and a UBI proposal needs to be crafted meticulously to be very precise in the criteria for organizing everyone into (only a few) financial wellness categories, a vague set of requirements can be challenged by parliaments and get the proposal blocked.
- Corruption: Some of the budget can be stolen and laundered by people in charge of safekeeping it. Look at 1MDB for example, $700million was stolen from them with the help of the prime minister.

Let's assume people will be filtered by status, since giving everyone a fixed amount while keeping withing the budget risks not giving the most needy people enough money, the main hurdle faced here is parliamentary consensus of how to classify everyone in different categories so they can set different incomes for each group. And that's complicated because government budgets decrease and sometimes increase so you have politicians arguing that the income should be raised or lowered accordingly and this just entangles entire proposals.

We basically have nobody in power agreeing with each other on how much money to pay each person.