£10k for eveyone!!

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-43078920

Seems like bloody stupid idea to me. Would it not be better to enforce a living wage?

I like the sound of Universal Basic Income, but 2 £5K handouts sounds like the worst idea imaginable!

Everyone gets a £2300 handout every year and they’re so ungrateful they don’t even notice

>Would it not be better to enforce a living wage?

You still need a job though..

I’d be happy to see a pilot and see how it works.

Seems to me to be a sensible option worth exploring given that the current system is appalling, expensive to implement and doesn’t actually solve the problem of supporting those worse off people in society.

<quote>
but 2 £5K handouts sounds like the worst idea imaginable!
</quote>

Not to my local high-street, it will sound like heaven to the book-keepers and take-aways ;-)

Alaska has had an annual state-giveaway in the past. It supposidly works quite well with most people using it to help renenw expensive goods and saving a good portion.

I still think schools should have lessons on life-skills and managing your money, maybe they now do? The PHSE lessons I had 20-odd years ago would not have helped me how to budget 2 x £5k payments. Coke & hookers?

New bike fund…….

I’m in. 😀

“I still think schools should have lessons on life-skills and managing your money”

Bit off topic but schools cant put in what parents leave out!

“Bit off topic but schools cant put in what parents leave out!”

Always excuses with teachers, if there is one group who should be excluded from 2 x £5k payments it’s them. Lazy work shy gits, they work 6 hours a day, get all that time off and then can’t even be bothered to teach my children how to manage their finances, utterly useless!

;-)

it doesnt look like a UBI for all ,

you need to show intent reading into it ….. ok you could lie…. but i doubt it would continue very long.

the way its suggested to structure and what its suggested uses are (training and education) sounds very similar to that of what the University grant system used to be.

“then can’t even be bothered to teach my children how to manage their finances, utterly useless!”

Indeed, and last week I had to teach 30 year7 boys’s not to **** on the bus and that they should wash themselves…if ever a job was for a parent!

Alaska has had an annual state-giveaway in the past. It supposidly works quite well with most people using it to help renenw expensive goods and saving a good portion.

Alaska is well, Alaska…. and has a fairly unique set of circumstances and employment and equally a fairly specialist economy.

Not having read the report itself I’m somewhat intrigued why it stops at 55 ??

If anyone is in need of some reselling surely it’s people getting to 55 with 20+ years or so left of having to find some employment in a skills market where the skills they have are near useless?

If the argument is that so much money is wasted on means testing, admin, fraud, etc (also that spent on existing benefits) that the govt would be no worse off (or even better off?!) then I’m all for it!

Agree that 2 x 5k payouts is a bad idea though… what about people who can’t budget & blow it all in a month! Do you bail them out again or say, tough titty, you’ll have to starve?!

Would be great for me personally… I’d be able to work part time rather than full… if enough people did that, would it force employers to raise wages or at least better consider quality of life for their workers? It would also give people more time to get fit, volunteer, etc so could have massive benefits for society as a whole.

How does this scheme help someone with a family on 20-25k struggling to make ends meet? i.e most of the ‘hard working families’ that are keeping this country going – nurses, call centre workers, cleaners, low grade office workers, retail staff etc etc It is in lieu of tax allowance and child benefit so there would be no point claiming it. Yet all these people are actually paying into the system.

Madness.

I’d be able to work part time rather than full… if enough people did that, would it force employers to raise wages or at least better consider quality of life for their workers? It would also give people more time to get fit, volunteer, etc so could have massive benefits for society as a whole.

I don’t know what you for work do but somewhere is an end-consumer.
Those consumers may or may not pay for your extra wages. Say for the sake of argument you sell coffee or something similar. Some of your customers may just buy more expensive coffee.. others might not and others might buy it far less or just a weekend treat.

So perhaps your hours will be weekends only? Perhaps your coffee shop is no longer profitable and you have no job? Perhaps it makes no difference to your customers and they happily pay 20% extra?

Everyone gets a £2300 handout every year and they’re so ungrateful they don’t even notice

Huh?

I like the sound of something radical like this.

Arguably a better idea than liquidating the banks.

What a pile of shite click bait the BBC has produced.

Christ, I should write some lies and proclaim some fantastic proposal that has no hope in a cold dark hell of ever becoming a reality.

I’m going to write to BloHard and get his opinion on this nugget of wisdom, if he backs it I know it’ll both fail and there will be some political backhander in it for him and is halfwitted followers

Everyone gets a £2300 handout every year and they’re so ungrateful they don’t even notice

Huh?

It’s pretty simple… whatever you give people they will take as a right.
They won’t be grateful rather they will argue over why it has conditions, why it’s not more…

it’s precisely because it’s a halfway house arrangement rather than proper UBI and tax reform that makes me say no

Notice in the article by the beeb that it’s a brexit campaigner that says ‘we shouldn’t do it because rich people will have to pay tax to fund it’

>Notice in the article by the beeb that it’s a brexit campaigner that says ‘we shouldn’t do it because rich people will have to pay tax to fund it’

Rich* , well moderately well off who pay PAYE, already fund all the state benefits (Pensions, housing benefit etc), so no real difference.

* the real rich don’t pay any tax and just donate to the Tories to keep HMRC out of their hair.

So perhaps your hours will be weekends only? Perhaps your coffee shop is no longer profitable and you have no job? Perhaps it makes no difference to your customers and they happily pay 20% extra?

because of the £10k I wouldn’t need extra wages, so worst case I would just work less hours for the same (hourly) wage, and the coffee shop would employ more (part time) staff, putting more people in work. Win-win! In an ideal world :lol:

It’s pretty simple… whatever you give people they will take as a right.
They won’t be grateful rather they will argue over why it has conditions, why it’s not more…

I don’t necessarily disagree, but what is the £2300 I’m getting at the moment?

Not too far in the future when many jobs are taken by robots and automation UBI is going to have to be implemented in some way. Over the course of a few years millions will be without jobs. The only way to prevent this is to make the majority of peoples employment part-time and have shared jobs whose income is propped up by UBI.

Stopping it at 55 is a bit tight though, whats going to happen to people who have got used to the income up till that point I wonder?

Given that we’re taking the state pension *away* from people until they are so old that a reasonable proportion are dead, the chances of this happening are pretty remote.

If it ever comes about, I trust that all those receiving this will make a point of thanking those that are giving it.

Has anyone else worked out where this £2300 free money we get every year comes from and goes to yet? It’s gone right over my head.

It is the tax due on our income tax allowance? Have we got a flat-rater in the house?

Anyway – I don’t like the idea, it seems good in principle, but the way the UK is, it would last about a year, maybe two before we worked out how to roll it into house prices or otherwise lose it to inflation.

Anyway – I don’t like the idea, it seems good in principle, but the way the UK is, it would last about a year, maybe two before we worked out how to roll it into house prices or otherwise lose it to inflation.

It wouldn’t even be a month…. in the months preceding this would be all sorts of ways to relieve people of this. Even predicting people would have it would lead to pre-selling on credit leading to inflation… leading to a higher GDP and yet everyone being poorer.

Not too far in the future when many jobs are taken by robots and automation UBI is going to have to be implemented in some way.

im sure the same was said when the waterwheel saved grinding of flour being done manually…

im sure the same was said when the waterwheel saved grinding of flour being done manually…

Well said.  This fear of robots taking our jobs is becoming tiresome.  If a robot can do the job then they’re welcome to it.  Jobs change, jobs evolve, new jobs are created.  It’s progress, but some people are scared of it.

Payments would come from a British sovereign wealth fund

I think they must have got the decimal point massively in the wrong place. Should read 10p surely!

applicants would only have to demonstrate how they intended to use the money

So instead of means testing benefits, (saving money) there going to do a critical assessment of everone’s plans! Good luck with that. What happens if my plan is to sniff it all up my nosehole? I suppose I could always lie and say I was going to start a charity to protect baby robins faces from evil mountain bikers, but then someone would have to test my moral compass.

Cloud Cuckoo land.

“Cloud Cuckoo land.”

I didnt say it made sense , im just reading the info off the report.

[Quote]I don’t necessarily disagree, but what is the £2300 I’m getting at the moment?[/quote]

Everyone (bar the rich who probably avoid tax in the ways anyway) gets a ‘tax free allowance’ of £11500, thus you are in effect given £2300 in the form of not paying 20% income tax. Think of it as UBI for everyone in a job more than part time/min wage.

If a UBI was implemented things like tax free allowances would likely disappear.

I’m not a fan, I’d rather a £15 minimum wage, which would have a similar effect allowing poor people to work part time or job share, without dicking about too much with the tax system (maybe remove employers n.I. on minimum wage and a few other things to help pay for it).

tinas, a tax allowance isn’t giving you anything, it’s just taking a bit less. The point of UBI is that you get given money for nothing (and don’t lose it if you earn).

I don’t think that qualifies as ‘free money’ its part of a complex mechanism to make income tax seem less than it is and ‘fair’ to as many active voters as possible.

I have a similar feeling about NI – people moan “the 40% tax bracket is a tax on working hard!” They never mention that whilst income tax does rise from 20% to 40% – NI drops from 12% to 2% and as they ‘only’ pay 40% on the bit over and above the 20% rate the total % of income paid in tax is a negligible difference.

Everyone (bar the rich who probably avoid tax in the ways anyway) gets a ‘tax free allowance’ of £11500, thus you are in effect given £2300 in the form of not paying 20% income tax. Think of it as UBI for everyone in a job more than part time/min wage.

that’s the same thing right enough. :rolleyes:

tinas, a tax allowance isn’t giving you anything, it’s just taking a bit less. The point of UBI is that you get given money for nothing (and don’t lose it if you earn)

However you phrase it, it amounts to the same thing. In the current system you either get £3700/pa in JSA, or £2300 in income tax allowance (assuming anyone in work would be earning >£12k) + tax credits for those with kids etc which probably actually make it very close being in or out of work.

There are (approximately) as many jobs in the country at the moment as there is available workforce. They might not always be good jobs, but someone has to do them, even stacking shelves in Sports Direct on a zero hours contract is an essential job for the economy, because people would have to spend their UBI somewhere. If there was a UBI, you can guarantee there would still be plenty of incentive to work.

Back to the coffee shop example someone was illustrating, if everyone in the future utopia took the money and decided to live a frugal life without work, perhaps supplementing their income painting water colours in Northumberland whilst drinking coffee as houses are cheap.

The the house prices in Northumberland would rise, and as no one was working to make them the prices of watercolour paints would go up, as would the coffee. Inflation would very quickly make a mockery of the plans. Meanwhile as everyone is trying to sell their watercolours (i.e. in the real world, trying to get the nice fulfilling jobs they think they could do if only they had more money in the bank to subsidise them) the value of paintings plummets. So some people would go back to work making coffee and watercolour paints in the factories, etc etc.

For a UBI to work either everyone has to take it, and stay in their jobs to pay enough tax (and generally make and sell each other stuff to spend their UBI on) which is effectively what we have now.

Or you have to have incredibly high taxs on the richest to pay for it (i.e. facebook, google, amazon etc). Which is fine in principal, but I bet the data on a poor person is nowhere near as valuable as a nice middle class consumers data. And Amazon can’t make money if no one has money to buy suff.

TL/DR of all that:

If you give everyone £10k and they all quit work, you can bet that the price of bread will be £10k very quickly as no one is at work making it but everyone still needs bread.

At the right wing end of the scale, the opposite happened. Give every student a £12k loan to cover tuition fees, and as if by magic almost every single university course costs £12k, who would have thought it!

I’d like to think of myself as socialist, but interfering with markets on that scale is just nonsense.

What a load of drivel! £10k isn’t going to make everybody stop working.

What a load of drivel! £10k isn’t going to make everybody stop working.

So what’s the point? If everyone is £10k richer inflation will kill any benefit. It doesn’t even make for more progressive tax system because inflation usually hits the poorest hardest (upwards pressure on food prices is usually balanced out by the falling prices of flat screen TV’s etc).

the easy solution here is put a tax on automation, then divvy up that between everyone. More automation = more direct compensation.

Most people are too short sighted to see the need for it though.