The key is to base eligibility
And that’s how you know this is the usual contempt and hatred for Canadians behind a proposal trying to use the philosophical clout of UBI in a despotic corrupt way.
Their scheme is to reduce old age spending by forcing their kids to support their parents.
UBI is inherently a zero cost program. Government gets no say in what to do with any tax revenue meant for it, and does not pay for administering “eligibility”. Its just another (refundable) tax credit that gets paid by higher taxes on others, but who also inherently qualify for UBI.
UBI becomes an easy cost savings program when other programs are eliminated. UBI that is higher than social programs and EI, means programs can be eliminated to the benefit of people both receiving them and not. Unconditionality means no poverty trap preventing them from seeking additional income. Eliminating crime and homelessness is such a massive quality of life increase to all, including tourism related businesses. Massive economic growth and wage (that multiplies economic growth even more) benefits of UBI, means that the rich get richer even after tax hikes.
“Announce it to big celebration and then put in the fine print that it’s only for single-parent households making less than $100 a year”
They’ve been pulling a lot of this shit lately, like that dental program a while back
Under the nuclear family approach, children over 18 living with their parents are considered separate families and can qualify independently, regardless of their parents’ income. This raises equity concerns because it may result in disproportionate benefits for high-income families.
In contrast, the economic family definition uses the combined income of all related individuals living in the same household, providing a more comprehensive and equitable basis for assessing eligibility.
So, if my daughter lives in my house, we’re all related, and thus one economic family.
But, if my daughter moves into my neighbor’s house, and their son moves into my house, we’re now four economic families?
How about once a month, we just direct deposit the same amount into the bank account of each and every person over the age of 18?
How about once a month, we just direct deposit the same amount into the bank account of each and every person.
FTFY. Kids still cost a lot to raise
I had previously moved more towards a negative income tax approach rather than a universal basic income. The latter seems to be consistently found to be too expensive to implement universally, and how does it make sense to give the basic income to someone who’s currently a billionaire or even a millionaire? (Ok, if a former millionaire loses it all and ends up deep in debt, that’s a bit different, but that’s why I’m limiting to current millionaires.)
That’s why I found this,
which found it is possible to halve previously projected costs while maintaining or even increasing its poverty-reduction impact.
To be so intriguing. Alas,
The PBO, therefore, confirms the P.E.I. report’s conclusion that it is possible to roughly halve the cost of a basic income program for Canada and each province by using the economic family definition instead of the nuclear family.
Basically, the use of the artificial “economic family” standard is what justifies giving lower payments to these folks. So the proposal saves money by … refusing to spend extra money.
Since housing is so expensive right now, many more are living together than we’d normally see otherwise, so I think today’s “economic families” are a bit artificially inflated. If a UBI based on this did go through, I’d expect folks to start moving out of their parents homes to qualify for additional basic income - which would legitimately help them afford their new places, but also cause the programme’s costs to skyrocket.
I don’t think the above was accounted for properly. Don’t get me wrong, I’d love to see a UBI or an NIT come to fruition, and Canada does have a working example of this from the past: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mincome
But having a badly designed proposal tried and failed would hurt the movement, so we have to look at these ideas closely. Ultimately, I don’t see that the “economic family” concept makes sense, and without it the cost of the programme doubles. Perhaps it still works, but be prepared to fund it at double the stated level, don’t let that rise catch us by surprise.
Universal: Everyone gets it, no means testing, no bureaucracy and the cost associated with that.
Basic: You are not buying caviar and exotic holidays, just enough to live and pay rent.
Income: Therefore taxed.
E.g. If UBI is 1000 a month it will likely push people into a higher tax bracket therefore their after tax income will not be 1000 more and for the richest they should be taxed more than they revive from the UBI. Basically we need to sort out a proper taxation system before this can be implemented.
Universal: Everyone gets it, no means testing, no bureaucracy and the cost associated with that.
Basic: You are not buying caviar and exotic holidays, just enough to live and pay rent.
Agreed.
Income: Therefore taxed.
Minor quibble - technically a concept of non-taxable income does exist, see https://www.taxtips.ca/glossary/non-taxable-income.htm for some examples. But agreed on the main point (that UBI is and should be taxable).E.g. If UBI is 1000 a month it will likely push people into a higher tax bracket therefore their after tax income will not be 1000 more
In fact it might all be taxed away for those who are actually rich.
and for the richest they should be taxed more than they … [receive] … from the UBI.
I’d go a couple of steps further. Those rich enough (so not just the richest but perhaps everyone who’s even slightly rich) should have the UBI fully taxed away. Another way to put this is that their taxes after UBI should = taxes before UBI + cash value of UBI
Basically we need to sort out a proper taxation system before this can be implemented.
So if this was just some kind of accounting gimmick then this would be perfect.
The issue from what I understand is that real money - the 1000 in your example - has to be sent into the richest person’s bank account (or equivalent money-receiving receptacle) before getting retrieved by being taxed back. Perhaps we could do something like saying UBI is paid out annually and only given the day before taxes are due to be paid in order to minimize the amount of time this money is floating out there - but the issue is that it still costs real money to pay everyone, even the richest of the rich, this UBI, only to claw it back again in full later. (At most, some higher middle class folks might gradually get less and less than the full amount of the negative income tax/basic income, until we get to zero.)
So it’s not the most efficient way to handle money. By contrast, with a NIT we avoid needing to have that extra cash to move around - we’d only have to give the basic income to those who wouldn’t qualify for this claw back. That frees up funds, real money. The catch is that we’d need some bureaucracy to deal with it - but by making it part of the income tax, the existing taxation bureaucracy can deal with it, hopefully minimizing this aspect of the cost. We’d likely have some costs here anyways as part of the “sorting out a proper taxation system” prereq for a true UBI, and the hope is that a NIT wouldn’t cost more than that.
Perhaps we could do something like saying UBI is paid out annually and only given the day before taxes are due to be paid
AFAIK, taxes are withheld from wages and paid from every paycheck, not once a year.
Self-employed people are required to make quarterly installments, not annual.
The “float” cost is minimal. Indeed, I can eliminate it (and reverse it) merely by claiming the payments came out of the previous tax cycle, rather than the current one. The government constantly owes you 12 months worth of payments, and isnt paying you interest on your money. When you die, your estate receives the remaining 12 payments owed to you.
But the biggest reason to apply it uniformly is, IMO, the social costs. Giving it to everyone, it is an entitlement. It is the dividend the citizen receives for their ownership share of their country.
Giving it only to the poor, it is a charity intended to help people who are unable to support themselves.
Perhaps we could do something like saying UBI is paid out annually and only given the day before taxes are due to be paid in order to minimize the amount of time this money is floating out there
The usual “source income deductions” (from paychecks) works fine with UBI.
Simplicity makes it more difficult for paper-pushers to game the system to help the rich. So any suggestion to complicate it oughta be taken skeptically.
Hi friends I didn’t actually click the link so my skepticism may be unfounded. But I have a few concerns open to criticism or validation lol
In a primarily private sector “market” supply chain etc does basic income not just put downward pressure on wages in the form of a pseudo business subsidy ick.
Or if everyone has the same level of income before labour income **without pricing control **we end up just raising the floor on the cost of living? Sure there are long tails where only nice to have things get more expensive but in aggregate.
I’m 100% for wealth redistribution and believe heavily in public goods so please don’t at me as a capitalist pig 🐽. Maybe I’m missing the mark but adding more money into our under served areas of society without thoughtful discussion about financial literacy and about where that money inevitability ends up we’ve already lost the plot on the program lol
Thank you if you made it to the end of my poorly punctuated run on mess ❤️
In a primarily private sector “market” supply chain etc does basic income not just put downward pressure on wages in the form of a pseudo business subsidy ick.
The freedom to say no to job offers, or unfair working conditions, suggests a higher pressure on wages. Getting 5 recruiter calls per day would also raise your wages.
OTOH, people liking their society and wanting to give back might motivate them to work a few hours for beer money. The previous dynamic can mean eliminating minimum wage. You might be happy to work in a library for $3/hour if you feel it is helping educate society, and it doesn’t happen to be illegal, as an example.
Can you reword your response to the scale of a country rather than an individual?
Primarily how basic income would increase competition for labour? Stating an anecdotal scenario where you have more opportunity is a nice thought but does little to support or dispose the proposal
I can appreciate the sentiment of wanting to give back to community when you’re grateful and many people do donate and volunteer their time for such causes.
Your point that it could remove the need for minimum wage is a scary thought when you consider the corporate obligation to maximize investor returns.
There have been experimental deployments of Universal Basic Income, one of which lasted five years and involved an entire town, and none of those things ever materialized.
Thank you for your comment. I’m confident a towns economic capacity is of no consequence to the interconnected nature of national economics unfortunately. But am also woefully ignorant lol
Not super well informed on the subject, but the idea is that money looses it’s value the more you have. If you’re struggling to make ends meet, even a small amount of additional income helps a ton, but if you’re already stable, that same amount is inconsequential.
Now for the increase in prices, again “cost of living” is not a single thing, so it can’t increase uniformly across the board and affect everyone the same way. The various products have to stay competitive with each other and your local farmer doesn’t suddenly need more income either. So I dont expect essentials to get a massive price bump. The one thing we have to be careful with is rent, and that’s already an issue.
I understand the principle behind the concept but believe it lacks depth and is a bandaid for a systemic problem. If you’re struggling to make ends meet there’s been a failure giving you more money isn’t going to solve.
You’re 100% right the cost of living is far to broad to make assumptions about which areas it would impact at scale but the net idea of you increase monetary supply and capitalism does what it does best.
It sounds good in a vacuum but when you take a step back and think about it in aggregate at national scale with monopolistic national supply chains that are poorly regulated I might add see fixing the price of bread 😂 it’s going to be something we can pat ourselves on the back for but is a big nothing burger :(
We need to ban (or tax out of existence) the concept of owning a house you don’t stay in. Landlords should be illegal, what value they provide to society is so marginal and so minimal that it would be an overwhelmingly net positive.
That tackles one of the largest worries against a universal income.
Rental housing makes sense for people who aren’t intending to stay where they are in the long term (young single people or people whose situation is in flux in some way). If you’re expecting to move on, lumbering yourself with an expensive asset that will take years to pay for and may require months to unload when you no longer need it isn’t smart.
It may make sense to restrict rentals to multi-unit buildings, and also restrict the number of buildings or units under the same owner, but having none at all causes more problems than it solves.
Sure, we can allow some small percentage of the overall housing to be owned by businesses whose sole purpose is providing a good rental housing experience for those in transit. But that’s fundamentally different than parasitic landlords whose only job is owning a property and periodically scheduling the cheapest maintenance workers to do actual work they can.
This isn’t your governments legislation branch, I’m not proposing a 100 page documentation. I’m simply suggesting a policy direction which is housing should be for housing, not for investment or for rent collection. If someone makes money off of someone they should provide a meaningful service and I think if housing wasn’t an investment vehicle the entire system would look so radically different people can’t imagine what a system without some landlords existing would look like.
Imagine everyone owned their house, it wasn’t expensive, selling one was like selling a car, but you could sell to the government if need be at no meaningful loss and the government sold them back to people like a service for just such a situation.
Idk man, it’s not that hard.
Housing is one of the most expensive purchases most people will ever make. Are you saying everybody must be able to commit to that to have a place to live?
When you look at housing as a cash flow expenditure that most people pay in perpetuity the only defining factor being who’s name is on the mortgage the whole thing is criminal lol
I would argue that landlords provide a service in providing a relatively predictable monthly cost of housing. On any given month a homeowner(and/or landlord) could have anywhere from $0 to thousands of dollars of unexpected expenses, things like a major appliance failing or plumbing/electrical issue. Plus there’s intermittent expanses that can be planned for, things like replacing shingles or proactively replacing an appliance approaching its end of life.
It also seems like a market with relatively free competition, given that the cost of purchasing a rental property can be relatively low compared to opening another kind of business. It’s relatively low risk since most of the expense is an appreciable asset, but also relatively low return (historically and over an extended period) than other market investments. Many would actually come out ahead by renting their home and putting the equivalent of what would go to toward their home’s equity into something like a mutual fund.
I think the biggest issue is just lack of good options at the lower end of the housing market. So much new construction is above the average home pricing because that’s where the builders are able to make a reasonable return. The more affordable properties are usually older units, often with significant issues. The Canadian government seems to be on the right track to getting more affordable units built. We don’t need more 1500+ ft^2 units, we need more units in the 500-700 ft^2 range. Something that a single person or young couple with minimal possessions can use as a starter home to build equity. Even if it gets bought by someone to use as an investment property, it can still have a relatively affordable rent while still providing a landlord a reasonable return on their investment.
More affordable units also reduces demand for the currently available units, bringing down prices for the mid-range market as well.
Its a valid argument but discounted when the general public has a high enough financial literacy to budget for “unexpected” expected expenses it’s not really unexpected when you’re 25 year old roof leaks or your 10 year old water heater fails.
The idea that rental property is historically a safe investment is the mentality that reinforces the speculative inflationary cycle that real estate is experiencing. Housing as an investment instead of a basic right is a failure capitalism has burdened us with in the sense we can’t correct it properly without ruining the equity of every homeowner unwittingly complicit in ownership.
It’s true supply and demand cause inflationary pressure on property but it doesn’t include perspective on what drives the demand. Huge influxes of immigration to fill gaps in the labour market primarily exploited by companies offering minimum wage creating a class of workers doomed to be reliant on the rental market or pool resources to purchase a property… the amount of homes I see with multiple families or extended family or rooms rented in these communities is a whole different can of worms but that’s the point of the universal income rant it sounds good in a vacuum but there are too many variables that it doesn’t account for
Imagine if owning a house was the same price as buying a car. That a loan was a 3 year ordeal not a 30.
60 years ago a janitor salary could buy a house in their 20s. Landlords only making house more expensive, not less - and exponentially so.
That’s an issue, but it’s not the whole issue. You’re not going to get a reasonable home down to the price of a budget vehicle. It’s not just home prices alone that have gone up over 60 years, it’s most essential goods combined with stagnating wages that means people need to spend a greater portion of their of their income on basic essentials and don’t have as much left to save for future big purchases.
Don’t get me wrong, homes need to be more affordable, but arbitrary reductionist ideas like let’s ban landlords don’t really work.
Some other ideas might be to increase minimum wages, yes this increases inflation but the people at the lower end of the wage scale still come out ahead. Have a crown corp for housing, even if it needs to be subsidized. Give people affordable and reasonable quality options and make private industry have to compete against that. Some better benefits for tradespeople, like lower the exemption on the trade tools tax credit to make construction more affordable. Though there’s a weird thing that happens where companies bring in big crews of apprentices for cheap labour and then lay-off the journeypeople so they don’t have to pay Journeyperson wages. I guess this keeps costs lower, but it’d be nice to see something combat this so there’s better job prospects for people that complete their apprenticeships.
You’re saying a large complex issue has many ways of tackling it to improve it? And that some random 3 paragraph response suggesting we improve the system by trying anything isn’t a full write up on the exact policy choices we should implement down to the letter of the law?
/s
Yes, obviously improving wages would help people afford things. Yes, helping construction workers improve their process would help make housing costs cheaper. There’s a thousand easy to implement ideas that would help the problem. ONE of those is “don’t treat housing like an investment vehicle akin to stocks”. Housing should be for housing, not for the wealthy to make a steady stream of income off of relatively poorer people. Landlords serve no function except for in a society where owning and trading homes is an expensive, slow, and bureaucratic process. Landlords are simply a means for money to transfer from the less wealthy to the more wealthy. They are an unnecessary cost that inflates the price of housing to the benefit of an extremely small number of people.
To be extremely clear, this is not the only solution. This may not even be a silver bullet. I am not listing the 1000 page legal proposal you can implement in your country tomorrow. My goal is to simply shift the common perception of landlords from “they totally have to exist and wow I love giving them money every month for absolutely nothing - boy owning things sure seems like a burden, thankfully I’ll never have to worry about that because I couldn’t afford to own something even if I wanted to” to “of course landlords are bad for society.” Or even “landlords are by and large capitalistic parasites that slow progress towards a more equitable society by draining people with less wealth of their means of becoming wealthy. Society doesn’t need them, even if you can think of reasons to have temporary housing there are better means than some rich person raising the rent every year on you.”
This sounds really good, for a country that has been growing inflation adjusted per capita GDP the last decade that can afford it.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=bOXgOLCm54A
Canada just announced its increasing immigration for the elderly as well, from India and Pakistan. This party will do the same as its done the last decade, capital swallowing while overburdening our infrastructure and services.
