Universal Welfare: yea or nay?

[Self--Esteem]

Although I wasn't entirely arguing about your concept. Some of the 3rd parties of Germany, Britain and France had a similar concept. They would like to increase the VATs to exactly 50%. The problem is, that this does not make a whole lot of sense. If I increase the VATs everyone has to pay, prices go through the roof and all means of charity or welfare become partly useless.

See. I spend 50 euros a week on groceries (minimum). With VAT (7%), that's 53.50. Now if the VAT was 50%, those groceries would cost me 75 euros.

This would cut right through the "citizen income" (I think that's what both, the Greens in the UK and the Violets in Germany call it).

The UK Greens wish to pay for a citizens income via a raise in the income tax, not increased VAT.

Indeed, the wish to (gradually) remove VAT altogether.

My bad. Must have been another organisation then.

But the Violets of Germany definitely wanted to increase VATs to 50% and rename it to consumption tax.

[Scalietti]

Nay

[Self--Esteem]

hello, I am Prince Zaza from Nigeria, I would like to claim the 10,000 per week for my 50 children.
Please give me your bank account details so we cna move forward with this rewarding transaction.

Wait a minute, Nigeria is a Republic! You're a phony! A great big Phony!

Not at all! He's a real prince, robbed of his heredity by those socialist bastards in Nigeria.

Let's pass around the hat and get up the $10,000 for this unfortunate individual. I'm not sure what we're going to do with the children, but we'll think of something.

I heard man's flesh isn't too different from chicken

You mean, Universal Welfare is...People!? We've got to stop them now!

First this ...


... then Universal Welfare. When will it all stop? When?

Only when all delicious children have been eaten and all the tasty baby blood is spilled. Only then, my friend, will we realise what we have done to our fellow cannibals. Only then will we see the reason for their tears.

[Nobel Hobos]

Its a horrible idea. Especially the thought of shoe prices going up.

Women would be heading straight for our throats.

But really. It's a 0 - 0 situation.

What difference does it make if you give a beggar 100 euros of which he can buy necessities for one week or 500 euros with prices going through the roof so that he might end up paying 500 euros for the same shopping basket?

I see you're still arguing on page 8. I'm sorry I wasn't here (should have posted in the morning not late at night).

I did mention ameliorating poverty (specifically starvation and undernourishment) as a desirable affect of my plan, but a lot of posters have lept on that as if I said that was the purpose of the plan. I really didn't mean that. It's true that inflation would reduce the buying power of the handout (growing the market, with supply lagging behind, of course it would) and its also true that increasing the payment to try to keep the same purchasing power would just drive inflation higher. Absolute runaway process, train-wreck.

It's my feeling that in poor countries the payment cannot be enough "to buy necessities for the week". I think that's a level which would harm not help grassroots economies. It might get supermarkets on street corners, but a whole lot of the produce would have to be imported, rather defeating the purpose. Yes, that would employ truck drivers and shelf-stackers, but I'm aiming for a lot more than that. I'm aiming at building a working and self-perpetuating economy in places with distorted and/or weak economies, and as such the payment has to be subtle, a strengthening component in the existing economy rather than a magic bullet. There would still be need of infrastructure investment, of education and health programs, policing ... all the things which developing nations do anyway to the extent they could afford it.

And yes, it is socialist. But here's the magic of it: it's also individualist. I'm talking about building economies from the grass-roots up, by empowering people to invest in tools, to import what they personally choose for their business, not just take whatever an international charity thinks is what they need. This is in stark contrast from how we actually help out struggling nations, by giving their governments money for specific purposes. That isn't working well, and it will work even less well in the future as we repeat the lesson "if you squander the money so badly you can never pay it back, we'll forgive your debt" ... loans worked better than gifts, but the motivating effect (obligation to pay it back) is pretty much blown by the numerous precedents of the loan being retrospectively made into a gift.

It's my feeling that good government is only really possible with a working economy. Trying to fix economies by giving money to their bad governments just isn't going to work. Nor is it fair to give money only to governments which spend it well: it's not the fault of the people that they have a bad government which is corrupt or has wrong ideas of what is good investment. Give the money directly to the people!

>snip by NH<

Thanks for the insight.

Although I wasn't entirely arguing about your concept. Some of the 3rd parties of Germany, Britain and France had a similar concept. They would like to increase the VATs to exactly 50%. The problem is, that this does not make a whole lot of sense. If I increase the VATs everyone has to pay, prices go through the roof and all means of charity or welfare become partly useless.

See. I spend 50 euros a week on groceries (minimum). With VAT (7%), that's 53.50. Now if the VAT was 50%, those groceries would cost me 75 euros.

This would cut right through the "citizen income" (I think that's what both, the Greens in the UK and the Violets in Germany call it).

I wonder what kind of socialist (tho' Greens tend to be big-state civil libertarians, so not simply Left or Right) would propose to pay for any new spending entirely with VAT.

To me, VAT is a flat tax, or even regressive (if it applies to necessities). I don't mind it as one component of overall taxation (just about the only way to tax imports without tariffs) I wouldn't over-rely on it, nor raise it without limit. I like resource taxes (royalties) but unfortunately no country can raise them as high as I'd like without driving mining logging etc offshore ... just one of the ways that multinationals can play governments off against each other and enforce the business conditions which suit them. Small companies, tied to assets within a country, can't do that, and individuals can't without emigrating and possibly changing citizenship. Ah well, I'll start raving about world government if I dwell on that.

Again, I regret starting off the discussion with a rate of universal welfare which would be enough to survive on in most industrialized countries. What I really meant to settle on is a rate low enough to stimulate but not swamp developing economies, and to have so little effect in developed countries that it would probably be bundled into annual tax returns, or paid quarterly to save on administration costs. I'd also give people who considered it too-little-money-to-bother-with the option of redirecting it to charity.

I few weeks ago I was looking at different tax regimes around the world. There are only a very few, usually small countries which don't rely on Income Tax, VAT, Company tax ... and the rates are surprisingly homogenous too. It's a very similar mix even between rich and poor countries ... inclining me to think that diversified taxes are what works best.

[Eternal Yerushalayim]

...More people think sex with a monkey is acceptable then believe that universal welfare is a good, but hard to implement ideal... Does this say something about the community?

There's no one size fits all for personality.

[Nobel Hobos]

...More people think sex with a monkey is acceptable then believe that universal welfare is a good, but hard to implement ideal... Does this say something about the community?

The last option in polls is often reserved for those who don't take the question seriously, or object in some way to their preferred option being left out. Some people put "Pancakes!" there or some such, I just tried to be more creative.

Having two votes probably inflated that result a bit too. As far as I could manage, I made the serious poll options mutually exclusive ... but if you give people two votes they usually want to use both.

btw ... what species would you be if your first cousin was a monkey ...

[Das Reich des Viertels]

I started posting this in another thread, but it occurred to me that it is perverse enough to arouse hostility from Libertarians and Communists alike, and might be a thread's worth of whacky idea.

(It's quite serious, btw. I shouldn't have to say that, but sometimes I'm not sure if I'm serious or not. This time I am.)

My idea is Universal Welfare. "Welfare" in the sense of cash payments to individuals, from government, based on some criteria. "Universal" in the sense of for-all-people-everywhere.

It goes like this: every person on Earth gets the same payment, in cash. The criterion is that they are a living human being, nothing more. Everyone would get this payment: newborn babies would get it. Criminals in jail would get it. Enterprising teenage boys selling lemonade on the pavement would get it. The middle-class would get it. The rich and the super-rich would get it. Everyone on earth would get it, from the day they're born to the day they die.

The case of children is, as always, tricky. I'd like to argue that out during the thread, but at the moment I'm thinking of something like a trust account for those not mentally competent to spend money.

There are seven billion people in the world. If each and every one of them got a welfare payment of US $200 per week (a VERY generous payment, being unconditional, and no doubt topped-up by national governments which can afford further payments when other criteria are met, eg age pension) that would amount to US $72 trillion (7.2 x 10¹³) per year.

That's quite a lot of money. But bear in mind that almost all of it will go to stimulating economies from the bottom up. It will be spent on food, clothing, education, housing, and games consoles for the kids. OK, that's not how YOU would spend it, but it's how the vast majority of the world's population who live on less than $200/week would spend it.

That money would build economies from the bottom up. Instead of handing money to governments to spend on their citizens' behalf, or trying to bypass governments by delivering goods like food directly to the needy (which being goods not money, undermines rather than builds an economy) ... hand out the money directly. One person, one cheque.

Not only would this eliminate starvation around the globe (by giving people in countries where "one dollar" is Big Money power to purchase some of the global glut of food) but it would build economies from the individual up. People with money to spend on food support a grocer, who supports an importer. If they have money left over, but not enough to buy imported shoes, they can still afford shoes from a local artisan who can then afford imported glue or thread to make shoes from hides or jute made locally. If they can pay for a tutor for their kid, they help keep an educated person in their country, tutoring or teaching, instead of emigrating as they could.

This isn't just "foreign aid". This is building markets, building competitive economies in every corner of the world which doesn't have the jump, doesn't have the historical advantage of getting in first and getting up the economic pyramid by industrializing early. It's not just humanitarian, it's in our own interests as rich people, to live in a big market and a big world. So our coffee and chocolate would cost more. The price of shoes would go back up, to the point we'd consider having them repaired by a shoesmith instead of binning them and buying new ones. We'd be happier that way. The happiness of cheap things is wearing very thin for me ... I wonder for how many others.

For those who read this right through, here's a tip: I will compromise on a lot less than two hundred dollars a week. A great deal of good could be done, for everyone everywhere, by Universal Welfare at the rate of US $1 per week. This would cost $360 billion dollars a year, which is diddly-squat really considering the benefits. People who currently starve through no fault of their own could eat, new markets and industries would be born in places where investors and angels fear to tread now. One US dollar a week (and not by "household" but by individual) would lift as many as a billion people out of grinding poverty, the kind of poverty where you just have to keep doing what you're doing because there is no other way to get by. A dollar a week buys a lot of freedom.

So that's my ambit claim. The industrialized countries of the world, beginning with the US as always, should move a motion in the UN to implement Universal Welfare, with a condition that only the sponsoring countries (which I expect to include the USA, the EU, India and China, possibly Japan) will pay into the scheme for the first five years, pro rata to their GDP's. The US would thus bear about 25% of the cost, or $18 trillion per year. The EU, slightly more.

Good idea? Bad idea? Needs modification?

Heheh, I misread it as Universal WARfare and voted Great Idea: Impossible to implement and Interesting Idea: Needs moar alcohol.

[Nobel Hobos]

I meant to bring up a serious issue, and no just derail, I'm partly through the thread, but people in poorer places will just have kids to get more money this way, not to mention poorer nations forging birth certificates for the cash.

You brought up a serious issue by alluding to phishing spam ... and you expected anything but a page of baby-eating jokes? You must be new here

It is a serious objection, indeed. If the payment is high enough (in local terms) that you could keep a child alive on it and have money left over, then it's a clear incentive to adults to have children to get more money ... and more children is the last thing societies with weak economies need. A replacement rate is healthy, (ie, half-parentage of two children per adult) but there are problems above AND below that rate, and the worst problems are far above that, with family sizes of five or more children. Even a small proportion of adults being so irresponsible can be a problem for everyone in the region ... and of course for the children themselves.

The first thing which occurred to me was to cap the number of children per parent. But really, I'm intending the money to be used in the child's interest, and for the child themselves to decide that as much as they are competent to do so. You might think "they'll spend it all on candy" but really this is what a spoiled western child might do. A poor child who may actually be working to support themselves and/or their family would have a much more responsible attitude and could be entrusted with the decisions at a younger age. But clearly there is still a minimum age where the parent or some other responsible adult has to make spending decisions for the child. A baby can't lay cash on the barrelhead for baby formula or nappies ... if they could exercise choice at all, it would probably be "keep your stupid nappies, I'll shit wherever I like!" which wouldn't be good for their health or anyone else's.

And what happens when the parent has a third child? I'm certainly not proposing to send UN troops to forcibly sterilize them! China may have done that, and I have some sympathy for how hard they went in on population control, it was a hard problem which needed hard solutions. But even a putative world government (which I support, but am trying not to make into a requirement for my welfare plan) wouldn't take actions like that. For the foreseeable future, a federation of world governments would regulate governments, not world citizens directly ... the first approaches to that would world courts and police, prosecuting only crimes which are widely recognized. Having too many children certainly doesn't fall into that category.

We see pretty plainly that even when they're having trouble feeding themselves, people do have children and more children. Giving them unconditional help supporting the children could be expected to make the population growth problems in the poorest regions worse. But actually it might not have much effect if it was still below the support cost of a child ... it's not a rational decision to have children one can't support and which no-one else will support. We know that education works strongly against that "decision" and access to birth control does too. Birth control would be absolutely free, no questions asked, to everyone on earth if churches and their unethical intention to induct new members from birth did not have such sway. Grrr. But back to my subject.

I simply can't disentitle anyone. I said right from the start that FELONS should get this payment! The payment is not a reward for anything, it is intended to be morally neutral. It is intended to serve a social good (yes, even for those who pay! In the long term). Even for the goals of social good like discouraging crime or limiting population growth, I'm not willing to give that up, though I know it makes my case much harder to make. The universal welfare has to flow to babies, infants and children too.

Making the payment conditional leads to the corruption of the principle, just as we see in tying foreign aid to abstinance education, which does so little to actually change what is delivered but has a huge impact on how it is received.

All I have to suggest at this point in time is trust funds for children's welfare. I'll explain that, but first let's be plain that my plan is not intended to replace the good work of charities, NGO's and indeed national governments. It's to build economies from the individual up, and if that helps in the same direction as those explicit humanitarian efforts then good.

Trust funds: one approach is to withhold all the money due to a child, placing it into a trust fund to be withdrawn from at an increasing rate as the child ages (withdrawn by the child themselves and spent at their discretion, not a "jackpot" at legal coming of age, but at approximately the full adult rate at that age). Parents who are materially supporting the child get nothing at first, but perhaps a share of the fund later, perhaps by stages according to the child still being alive at those ages. Doesn't this leave the child of very poor parents with nothing? Here social support comes into play, including the most unlikely of helpers, banks. This parent may or may not get a good job and pay back a loan taken to raise the child in infancy, that is hard to judge and depends (on a scale of ten years or so) also on the local economy. However, with a share of the trust fund coming to them if their child survives to a certain age, there IS certain future ability to repay and the actuarial question becomes "is the parent caring for the child in such a way that the child will survive to x age?" ... and if national governments want to take on that, I'm sure they could do it better than banks or local philanthropic lenders could, having access as they do to relevant information like how the child is doing in school, their health problems, the circumstances in that sub-national region.

Or another approach to trust funds: put the money due to the child into a trust fund, to be distributed as vouchers for a wide range of things of benefit to the child, but not easily appropriated by adults. For instance, unless the environment is a rainforest, children need shoes. If every child has shoes (by voucher) the resale value of a pair of children's shoes is a lot less than what comes out of the trust fund to provide the voucher. Yes, the parent can take the child's shoes and sell them, but since no other parent needs shoes for their child, but would have a second pair if the price was right, the corrupt parent gets a lot less that way than if the cash is handed straight to them in the hope that they will buy shoes.

There should still be non-financial support for children themselves ... like schooling and health services, which cannot be syphoned off by selfish parents. School lunches too (the quality of which astounded me in the year I spent in a British high school: socialism! In this country I had considered hopeless bound by class privelege! The junk food SOLD to me and other kids in Australian schools I rejected with contempt when I returned, though I'd been a good little sucker before. Twenty years later it's hardly any better. School lunches at nominal or no cost are an awesome program and belong everywhere).

The benefits parents may get incidentally (not cheating the system, not stealing their child's allowance) amount to their child or their adult-they-grow-into being able to do their reading and writing for them, or support them financially in their old age ... and if they bring up children (with some help from national government and from international agencies) who can do that, and respect their parents enough to do that, then even in an overpopulated region those parents have done well and deserve some benefit. So perhaps we should look at delaying some of the payment intended for children as a "successful completion of parenthood" reward for parents. I find it hard to weigh that against the other possible use of the child's entitlement: a continuing trust fund to help them in becoming independent ... as a wage subsidy or as a scholarship for further education.

It's a very hard question, and despite all these words I'm not offering a firm answer. Just some ideas.

[Nobel Hobos]

I started posting this in another thread, but it occurred to me that it is perverse enough to arouse hostility from Libertarians and Communists alike, and might be a thread's worth of whacky idea.

(It's quite serious, btw. I shouldn't have to say that, but sometimes I'm not sure if I'm serious or not. This time I am.)

My idea is Universal Welfare. "Welfare" in the sense of cash payments to individuals, from government, based on some criteria. "Universal" in the sense of for-all-people-everywhere.

It goes like this: every person on Earth gets the same payment, in cash. The criterion is that they are a living human being, nothing more. Everyone would get this payment: newborn babies would get it. Criminals in jail would get it. Enterprising teenage boys selling lemonade on the pavement would get it. The middle-class would get it. The rich and the super-rich would get it. Everyone on earth would get it, from the day they're born to the day they die.

Explanation. Replies without reading this are OK. But serious replies should consider these details.]The case of children is, as always, tricky. I'd like to argue that out during the thread, but at the moment I'm thinking of something like a trust account for those not mentally competent to spend money.

There are seven billion people in the world. If each and every one of them got a welfare payment of US $200 per week (a VERY generous payment, being unconditional, and no doubt topped-up by national governments which can afford further payments when other criteria are met, eg age pension) that would amount to US $72 trillion (7.2 x 10¹³) per year.

That's quite a lot of money. But bear in mind that almost all of it will go to stimulating economies from the bottom up. It will be spent on food, clothing, education, housing, and games consoles for the kids. OK, that's not how YOU would spend it, but it's how the vast majority of the world's population who live on less than $200/week would spend it.

That money would build economies from the bottom up. Instead of handing money to governments to spend on their citizens' behalf, or trying to bypass governments by delivering goods like food directly to the needy (which being goods not money, undermines rather than builds an economy) ... hand out the money directly. One person, one cheque.

Not only would this eliminate starvation around the globe (by giving people in countries where "one dollar" is Big Money power to purchase some of the global glut of food) but it would build economies from the individual up. People with money to spend on food support a grocer, who supports an importer. If they have money left over, but not enough to buy imported shoes, they can still afford shoes from a local artisan who can then afford imported glue or thread to make shoes from hides or jute made locally. If they can pay for a tutor for their kid, they help keep an educated person in their country, tutoring or teaching, instead of emigrating as they could.

This isn't just "foreign aid". This is building markets, building competitive economies in every corner of the world which doesn't have the jump, doesn't have the historical advantage of getting in first and getting up the economic pyramid by industrializing early. It's not just humanitarian, it's in our own interests as rich people, to live in a big market and a big world. So our coffee and chocolate would cost more. The price of shoes would go back up, to the point we'd consider having them repaired by a shoesmith instead of binning them and buying new ones. We'd be happier that way. The happiness of cheap things is wearing very thin for me ... I wonder for how many others.

For those who read this right through, here's a tip: I will compromise on a lot less than two hundred dollars a week. A great deal of good could be done, for everyone everywhere, by Universal Welfare at the rate of US $1 per week. This would cost $360 billion dollars a year, which is diddly-squat really considering the benefits. People who currently starve through no fault of their own could eat, new markets and industries would be born in places where investors and angels fear to tread now. One US dollar a week (and not by "household" but by individual) would lift as many as a billion people out of grinding poverty, the kind of poverty where you just have to keep doing what you're doing because there is no other way to get by. A dollar a week buys a lot of freedom.

So that's my ambit claim. The industrialized countries of the world, beginning with the US as always, should move a motion in the UN to implement Universal Welfare, with a condition that only the sponsoring countries (which I expect to include the USA, the EU, India and China, possibly Japan) will pay into the scheme for the first five years, pro rata to their GDP's. The US would thus bear about 25% of the cost, or $18 trillion per year. The EU, slightly more.

Good idea? Bad idea? Needs modification?

Heheh, I misread it as Universal WARfare and voted Great Idea: Impossible to implement and Interesting Idea: Needs moar alcohol.

Yay! I expected right from the start that some people wouldn't take the idea seriously. I'm OK with that.

The only thing I'm not OK with, is people whose inquiry into the subject stops at the word Welfare, and they decide they're against it and start spouting off about abuse of welfare in their own country. I wish I'd been awake to give those people a timely dose of "read the damn OP!"

[Kayliea]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/south_asia/8682558.stm
other link: http://www.sott.net/articles/show/20861 ... an-village

free market capitalists would rather they continue eating mud.

[Autonomousness]

I've come across this kind of idea before, and I think it's an awesome concept! There's a movement called 'citizen's income' (http://www.citizensincome.org/), which would have every citizen receive a fixed sum payment every week/month.

While I do love the idea, I can't help thinking that such a scheme would just drive inflation - if everyone has more money, businesses could/would just raise prices thus largely negating any benefits of the scheme.

I don't think that an equal income would do good. People will start to complain like this:
"Oi! Why do I work double the work, and yet I receive the same payment every month!?"

The idea isn't to give everyone a fixed total income. People would still have jobs and be paid salaries by their employer as now, except they would also receive this additional payment. It is essentially a replacement of benefit schemes, so those without jobs would still have enough to live on.

[Georgism]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/south_asia/8682558.stm

free market capitalists would rather they continue eating mud.

The link is broken, for me at least.

[Kayliea]

ok, put a new link which had the same content in the original post

edit: they both work now

[Self--Esteem]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/south_asia/8682558.stm
other link: http://www.sott.net/articles/show/20861 ... an-village

free market capitalists would rather they continue eating mud.

Yay! Bullshit strawman! No one but the outmost right fringe proposed that. And their reason for it certainly isn't a free market (see Great-Nepal, as he fits the description pretty well).

[Risottia]

Nice idea.
I'd object to two things, though:

1.The well-off getting it. They don't need it, so why give it?
2.Getting it in exchange for nothing (for adults). I think that the recipients, if unemployed, should be required to do some minor job or a service in favour of society, like, dunno, keeping a road or a park clean, taking kids to and from school etc. There's a lot of minor jobs that are both useful, but for whom no-one would be willing to pay a full standard wage.

Basically, the way you proposed it makes it look like a human right. I don't think it should be the case - it should be help, not a right.

[Kayliea]

Also, this is a policy of the Green Party of Britain. They would implement a living wage (paying someone for living =) if they got into power (which is very unlikely but who cares) which would help evvvvvverybody as well as theoretically saving quite a bit of money on bureaucracy-you don't have to bother with all the paperwork of benefits and the like.

yay. go greens.

[Milk and honey land]

Hell no

No one could afford it.

Will cause massive inflation, until value of payment is worth nearly nothing. Ever market will adjust to the new money in the world and set prices in relationship to the new money out there.

Idea is EPIC FAIL.