Basic Income: The World's Simplest Plan to End Poverty, Explained
Dylan Matthews, Vox Media
In recent months, discussion of basic income proposals have become fairly mainstream, but not so mainstream that most people know what the phrase "basic income" means. With that in mind, here are the basics (get it?) of the idea, in eleven questions.....
........Has a basic income been implemented anywhere?
Not exactly, but a lot of countries have generous cash transfer programs of one variety or another. In the United States, Social Security is more or less an age-limited basic income program which ties benefits to wages to make itself look like a pension program. Supplemental Security Income is a guaranteed minimum income scheme for the aged, blind, and disabled. Food stamps are a guaranteed minimum income distributed through food rather than cash. The Earned Income Tax Credit functions much like a negative income tax with a work requirement.
Most other developed countries, including the UK, France, and Germany, have similar income support systems with eligibility requirements of varying strictness. In the developing world and in particular Latin America, conditional cash transfer (CCT) schemes — wherein low-income families are given cash benefits with no use restrictions provided they fulfill certain conditions, like sending kids to school or getting vaccinated — have become popular over the past decade or so. The most famous program is Brazil's Bolsa Familia, but Mexico, Colombia, and plenty of other countries have similar programs, with meta-analyses showing the programs have significant positive effects on health and education outcomes. New York City even tried out a CCT, with evaluator MDRC finding positive results.
Formal basic income plans have been tried in small experiments. A whole series of experiments in various US cities testing out negative income tax plans were conducted in the 1970s, as was a much more ambitious trial in Manitoba, Canada. The results of the experiments are controversial, but included a modest reduction in hours worked as well as improvements in health outcomes and, naturally, an increase in incomes. A much more recent trial in Namibia also reported positive outcomes.......
