If no one will do a job that pays less than $2800 per month, then how will those jobs get done?
Historically, wealthy societies that guaranteed incomes for citizens had slaves. I'll bet if you go digging around in these proposals you'll find a class of people who aren't eligible (new immigrants or something), who are going to wind up doing all of the low paying jobs.
Your job income adds directly to those $2800; it does not replace the basic income. E.g., if your employer pays you $500 a month, your total monthly income will be $3300.
Note that life in Switzerland is expensive enough that $2800 is not a whole lot more than minimum wage level in the US.
And that's perfectly fine. It's not like the employee would starve. You'd still have to pay enough so that working for you is worthwhile (because people aren't forced to work or starve). Employees would have the genuine bargaining power of a free agent, because employment would no longer be an existential need.
Also, it would be much easier to become self-employed or become an employer yourself; not only is the risk of failure lower, but your payroll expenses would shrink enormously. If there were a basic income, I'd have started my own company long ago (or at least tried).
Note also that "keeping more to yourself" is modulo the higher and more progressive taxes you'd need to finance a basic income.
The big question is rather: would enough people still have an incentive to work? It depends, I think, on how close to the subsistence level such a basic income would be.
That's my other concern. $2800 a month isn't enough for me personally to be able to stay home and play video games all month, but it might be for a fair number of people. And they wouldn't be contributing much to the economy (other than to the makers of Cheetos snacks.)
Here in Québec, we have "social help" where the government gives you money if you cannot work, etc.
A lot of people I know abuse of this. Pay the rent with the social help, then get money "under the table". A lot of people abuse of it, but I still think it's worth it. I work hard, but I know that if all else fail, I won't be stuck in the street.
It's also not a perfect solution. There are still homeless people (who are often too ill to be able to ask for the social help, or don't have a permanent address to sent it to). You can't live very well in Montreal with it alone, but you can manage to get somewhere to live, especially if you have "sidejob". Otherwise, there are HLM (French for "housing at moderated rents") where the rent is actually based on your income. You can live for $350 - $900 / month in a three room apartment in those. Especially if you live around the island on Montreal and not on it.
People who use this service are frowned upon. They call them "BS" (Guess you would call them SH in english, for "Social help"). The stereotype is that they all abuse the system, take your hard earned money and live in a big appartment with the latest computer, drink all day (no work!) and do drugs. People fail to see that computers are not as expensive as they were before.
I actually grew up in that world. The abusers were a minority. A large, noisy minority, but a minority nonetheless.
So? We don't have enough jobs for everyone anyway. Instead of guilt-tripping people by telling them it's their fault for not having a job and then making them jump through hoops to get unemployment, let's just cut everyone a check and let them eat Cheetos.
And there will be an extra kick to the young, whose labor is less valuable.
A negative income tax or EITC tends to work better, since you have to do some kind of work to get them. And the best way of determining if someone has a job tomorrow is if they have a job today. Long-term unemployment sucks.
The employer has to pay enough to get people to bother to apply for the job. If it can convince people to come into work while paying $1300 instead of $2800, then why not let it? We don't have to worry about people being forced into a job they hate, because they've got their basic needs cared for. Employer gets cheaper marginal labor, employee gets minimum income plus more income plus lower effective marginal tax rates.
You put your finger right on why this was originally a Republican proposal. It would replace the minimum wage, and allow the wages for low end jobs to go as low as would attract anyone interested in earning something above the mincome level.
The idea of a basic level of income isn't that it goes away once I find a job that pays the same or more, it's that I'm always guaranteed that base pay. If I take a job that pays an additional 2800 per month, then I'm grossing 5600/mo.
I don't think there's any reason to believe that low paying jobs will just go away, and more reason to think that the people who want nothing more than those low paying jobs will take them.
You can work a job that pays $1200 a month, and the program will chip in the rest to top it up.
This is not so people will do crappy jobs that pay very little, but instead so they can pursue things that otherwise don't pay very well, like working at a charity or other non-profit with a very slim budget.
Actually, this system would pay you the money unconditionally, and any money you make goes on top of that. It's a system that encourages work. However, it's going to encourage people to do work that makes them happy, because it's no longer necessary to work just to survive.
I think this could pose a problem for truly awful jobs like at slaughterhouses, because nobody would be desperate.
>I think this could pose a problem for truly awful jobs like at slaughterhouses, because nobody would be desperate.
I think this would pose a great solution for awful jobs: in order to attract workers you'd have to dramatically improve your working conditions.
Take Amazon's practice of hiring temps to work in their warehouses - Amazon might have to pay to introduce air conditioning and heating to their stockrooms, give their employees actual breaks, raise wages, etc.
Alternatively they'd invest more heavily in automation to replace employees, driving technological innovation while not displacing human labor.
> I think this could pose a problem for truly awful jobs like at slaughterhouses, because nobody would be desperate.
It might drive up the price of meat until you could pay people enough to work in a slaughterhouse (or make it cost effective to automate them), but is that a bad thing?
Maybe I'm reading this wrong, but if it's anything like the Mincome Experiment (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mincome) then it means you get $2800 unconditionally, but a $1200 a month job comes out of it.
The way these programs are paid for is because most people would be making more than $2800 a month anyway, so their net cost to the government is zero.
Mincome != Basic Income. Under Basic Income, everyone gets a fixed amount unconditionally. Any extra income you get on top of that is yours to keep. So you get the $2800 from the government, then get a job for that $1200 (from the grandparent's example), so now you have $4000 in total.
Mincome worked differently from this, but the OP talks about Basic Income, which just gives a fixed amount to everyone.
Actually, now that I'm doing more reading, things can be a bit more confusing.
There are a few approaches to solve this problem - in some cases a negative income tax is applied, and in others the government actually issues a 'citizens dividend'.
Neither case necessarily mandates a 1:1 decrease in benefit as your other income sources go up. It all depends on how things are structured... someone with a significant monthly income could have a high enough tax as to effectively remove the base payment, where a particularly poor worker may not lose any.
And unfortunately I don't speak enough French to read the petition, and none of the sources in English I can find actually spell out the details.
The job doesn't have to pay 2800/month. It doesn't even have to be a 40-hour job. You could get 1000/mo and the government would make up the difference. What they want is a baseline where everyone gets something no matter what. And that isn't attached to a minimum wage.
> who are going to wind up doing all of the low paying jobs.
This proposal removes the concept of a low paying job.
You're describing a significantly different proposal there: with a basic income, the government doesn't make up the difference of pay up to some threshold, which amounts to a massive marginal tax rate on low income labor and a massive subsidy to employers of low income labor. That's a guaranteed minimum income.
With a basic income, the government gives you the same size check, regardless of if you work and how much. I believe what Switzerland is proposing is a basic income.
The Mincome experiment (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mincome) did research into this and found out that, surprise, people don't like sitting around doing nothing. On the whole they want to work.
Significantly?? That is pretty bullish. Are you saying the supply of labor will drop dramatically for undesirable jobs? Or there won't be a underclass willing to work for less pay?
Historically, wealthy societies that guaranteed incomes for citizens had slaves. I'll bet if you go digging around in these proposals you'll find a class of people who aren't eligible (new immigrants or something), who are going to wind up doing all of the low paying jobs.