Sup beeches, so it seems universal income schemes are gaining proponents at the moment (well they're set to be trialled in Finland, Canada and Utrecht) and I wondered what y'all think of the idea.
These schemes vary a lot in the details but essentially the idea is that instead of paying welfare to individuals who meet a certain criteria you simply pay a regular income to every adult citizen regardless of their own private income (generally these schemes still allow extra money for those at retirement age and for disability benefits). On the face of it it sounds unaffordable, but according to a group of UK economists/some form of money boffins (sorry I can't find the article at the moment so sourcing this is a bit tricky) a citizen's income of £71 a week (about twice this for over 65s and somewhat less for 18-21 year olds) cost very close to the UK's current welfare system, although social housing costs and disability benefit would still be necessary here and I'm not sure if they were included in the cost of this scheme, I shall try to find the source.) Since you don't need to pay for means testing, check up with claimants investigate benefit fraud etc you simplify the system and reduce the cost of this welfare scheme. Evidence from Canada's 1970s mincome scheme (all residents of the trialled area who fell below the poverty line were offered a guaranteed minimum income regardless of whether they were already in work) suggests that this sort of scheme also significantly reduces strain on health care and would see a decrease in crime rate, saving money from the central budget which could (no solid evidence here, just saying it could) make up for the extra cost of this scheme. Analysis of the mincome trial also showed that this scheme did not generally stop people seeking work (teenagers in education, mothers of newborns and those close to retirement did tend to choose not to work) although I'm not sure if average work hours decreased for those on this scheme.
The proposed benefits of this scheme are mainly that it would make the system fairer (no one would be financially better off out of work), would reduce stress for most of the working age population by acting as a safety net and by allowing the option of reduced working hours (which may well benefit employers also as this is associated with an increase in productivity) and would allow for more people to do voluntary work and suchlike. It would also mean a lot of people wouldn't have to work jobs they hate just to get by, but the flip side of this is that there are lots of unpopular low paid jobs and so this could cause a labour shortfall in these jobs.
The major criticism of this scheme is obviously the fear that people would just choose not to work, but it generally seems unlikely as £71 a week is not a huge amount of money, and the evidence from mincome seems to support this. I suspect this scheme would cause a drop in average working hours a week but this doesn't seem economically detrimental, and should help to reduce unemployment rates as well.
Personally I was very skeptical of this idea at first, but if it proves to be financially viable I'd be very keen to see it implemented. I expect that at some point in the future a system of universal income would be pretty much a necessity for the developed world since automatisation is going to continue to reduce the value of human labour, but as to whether it's a viable option in the near future I think we shall have to wait and watch these upcoming trials in Canada and Finland.
I apologise for the general lack of sources, but I am a terribly lazy human being.