A close vote on a basic income
Support for the idea of a universal basic income –a guaranteed regular payment for life to every individual, adult or child– often starts high but then falls once people realise the complications of introducing such system. This was certainly the experience at the Brussels Economic Forum, when the audience switched their votes from 60% in favour and 40% against before a debate, to 51% against and 49% in favour, after.
Hilmar Schneider, Professor and Chief Executive Officer at the Institute of Labor Economics, said that opinion polls in Switzerland at the turn of the decade showed two thirds in favour of introducing a universal basic income but that just 23% eventually voted in favour of the measure in a referendum in 2016.
"When people reflect on a basic income, they come to a much more sober view," Schneider said. "It must be feasible."
A universal basic income was comparable to a retirement pension, he said. "Most people stop working when they reach retirement. Can we be sure a sufficient number of people will continue working when retirement age is set to your birth date?"
Moreover, the economic studies suggest that the level of taxation needed to finance such schemes would simply be too high, he argued.
"Why should we give up an established welfare system in favour of a highly risky experiment?" he asked.
Guy Standing, a Professorial Research Associate at SOAS (University of London), and honorary co-president of the Basic Income Earth Network, who spoke passionately in favour of universal basic incomes said that the policy leads to better health and a more active, happy workforce.
A universal basic income was a valuable weapon against the "eight modern giants," said Standing, referring to the metaphorical giants cited by Sir William Beveridge in the 1942 "Beveridge Report," that helped pave the way for the creation of the Welfare State in the United Kingdom after the second world war.
For Beveridge, the ‘giants’ of the time were ‘disease, ignorance, squalor and idleness.’ Standing, however, argued that today the eight modern giants were ‘inequality, insecurity, debt, stress, precarity, robots/automation, the ecological crisis, and populism’.
A universal basic income could help defeat all these problems and had led to less stress and illness in many studies across five continents.