So, in the last few years I guess I've increasingly become an advocate for the idea of minimum incomes, and thought it might be a nice topic to throw out here (though I'm planning to do some more writing).
Minimum income isn't actually a policy idea, it's more a family of different policies that try and achieve the same goal - the idea that there should be a guaranteed minimum that your income can ever get to, unconditionally. This is a fairly controversial idea on two grounds: one, some people don't believe that people
should be entitled to minimum living standards, on the grounds that if people can't afford to feed themselves then it's their problem not anyone else's, and two, some people don't believe it's practically affordable or think it would have secondary impacts like causing price inflation. On the other hand, there are a lot of advantages to some of these schemes, depending on what you're trying to use them for. Libertarians often want a very low-end minimum income as the ultimate in low-bureaucracy social security - give everyone a payment, done, no paperwork needed (and the lower bureaucracy is something I think is an advantage, though I'm against some of the other stripping down of social security that the right-wingers often want). Liberals and leftists, like myself, tend to want a somewhat higher minimum floor and to retain some other parts of the social security system (for example, in the UK I'd want to retain a separate housing benefit component because that needs to vary by region given price discrepancies), with the aim being to use a minimum income as a failsafe fallback tool against poverty. Other benefits of a minimum income are considered to be that such a system makes it much easier for people to retrain or start businesses, creating a more flexible labour market - as well as a streamlined unemployment net, a min income can also be a springboard that can replace more complex and bureaucratic grant-based schemes for these things. Reports from some international trials also suggest that min income has health benefits; as people don't have to jump through hoops in order to claim it, the additional stability tends to lead to lower stress levels, fewer wider mental health problems, and communal benefits like people being able to care for relatives more easily if they want to. As a more flexible economy and lower spending on other social programmes tend to benefit state income, it's therefore possible (though as yet unconfirmed) that a sufficiently well designed minimum income could actually pay for itself over time.
So what sorts of schemes are there? The most commonly discussed one is UBI, the Universal Basic Income. This is the simplest min income scheme - give everyone a cash lump sum, job done. This is often favoured by both further-left and further-right min income advocates at different levels - libertarians want a cheap UBI for its simplicity, green-socialist groups often want a high UBI on the grounds that everybody paying in and everybody claiming the same benefit will increase social solidarity. My preference as a liberal-leftist, on the other hand, is for the Negative Income Tax; this provides a minimum income wrapped into the income tax system, by paying people below the income tax threshold a rebate as a sliding percentage of the threshold (so if you're earning £0 you get say 80% of the minimum taxable income, and as you earn more that gets tapered out). This requires fewer tax increases and less money funnelled through the exchequer, whilst still satisfying the principle of an unconditional benefit, though NIT, like current social security systems, gives marginally less incentive to work-seekers (because UBI isn't withdrawn when a claimant finds work).
So, what do people think about all this?
