Posted on 03/05/2016 7:39:37 AM PST by blam
Chris Weller
March 5, 2016
Finland and The Netherlands have already shown their interest in giving people a regular monthly allowance regardless of working status, and now Ontario, Canada, is onboard.
Ontario's government announced in February that a pilot program will be coming to the Canadian province sometime later this year.
The premise: Send people monthly checks to cover living expenses such as food, transportation, clothing, and utilities — no questions asked.
It's a radical idea, and one that has been around since the 1960s. It's called "basic income." In the decades since it was first proposed, various researchers and government officials have given basic income experiments a try, with mixed results.
Folks at the Basic Income Canada Network, the national organization promoting basic income, have high hopes.
"We need it rolled out across Canada, and Quebec, too, is in the game," said chair of BICN, Sheila Regehr, in a statement. "So there's no reason why people and governments in other parts of this country need sit on the sidelines – it's time for us all to get to work."
(snip)
(Excerpt) Read more at businessinsider.com ...
The more I think about it, the more I see a wealth of ulterior motives that government will be unable to resist.
Don’t like the suburbs, pay people more to live in the city. If your neighborhood isn’t “diverse” enough - no free money for you. Too much carbon coming from you - no more money for you.....it goes on and on.
If you pay people to do nothing, more people will do nothing and you end up with shortages and inflation. See every communist country in history for examples.
I predict it will have the opposite effect.
Does Cruz qualify?
The concept has its interesting points, but you still end up with homelessness (probably more) and hungry children.
And then you have to start giving section 8 and food stamps again to prevent that........and on we go.
PFD is just one shot a year under 2 grand. Helps definitely but mostly covered some of the bills and you could put a decent sized down payment on a snow machine, or buy a new washer and dryer or TV.
I would imagine porch sitting socialists would love it and hopefully drink or drug themselves clean out of the gene pool or at the very least shave a few decades of taking away from them.
If I got money every month for the basics,I’d be out opening another business or two or just investing or even day trading.
“The concept has its interesting points, but you still end up with homelessness (probably more) and hungry children.
And then you have to start giving section 8 and food stamps again to prevent that........and on we go.”
You’ll just need to study it further. There would be no remaining Section 8. The government would have no further role in lives, after providing basic incomes. Drink it up, have no generous friends, sleep outside.
Ovens? Are you out of your mind?
Ovens for the murderers that get the death penalty. Ashes is all they deserve if they harm others.
It doesn’t matter if it’s not a lot of money. The point is that it’s still free money you get for doing nothing. Private companies pay fees (taxes) to the state and the state puts that in a fund and distributes money from that fund to the citizens whether they do anything or not. That’s “distribution of wealth.”
As far as I know, socialism is still socialism even if you just do a little bit of it.
It is the beginning of the end of the Canadian Dollar, and any other currency this is done to.
Whatever you think of this, it is basically just an adjustment to welfare. It won’t involve anyone who isn’t already either on welfare or about to qualify for welfare. So the main question is whether it represents an increase, or a redesign.
It’s my rather uneducated impression that U.S. welfare is handed out in portions that include food stamps and other directed amounts. Canadian welfare tends to be just one check that the recipient is supposed to use to cover all expenses. Almost inevitably it isn’t enough to cover rent, food and utilities so people end up getting most of their food from food banks. The official food banks are tied up in all sorts of regulations so a lot of pressure then falls on church-run food banks to feed welfare recipients.
Within certain limits a guaranteed income is probably a smarter option than welfare anyway. You don’t want to encourage people not to work but if welfare is less than enough to live on, it just creates crime and leads to the welfare recipients becoming unemployable (they can’t afford to get to job interviews even if they want the jobs, or they miss them because they are scrounging all over for food).
I think the solution is a basic guaranteed income that can be cut off if recipients refuse to comply with reasonable program requests to upgrade working skills or apply for work. Keep it just over the sum total of basic rent and food/utilities to prevent anyone from wanting to choose that option over better paying work.
Welfare hasn’t worked as intended, whether you believe it is a good or a bad thing, it basically provides something like 80% of what’s actually needed in most (Canadian) cities so the results are predictable. We probably end up paying more in taxes to cover the crime and health care problems created.
The PFD fund is multi-billions in value, and they only disburse a small amount of interest. I don’t think that is socialism, that is derived from oil taxes, that’s capitalism and it is a big shot in the arm for the Alaskan economy.
I lived up there for 16 years and got various amounts.Did I work for it? No. I just did some service for just a couple oil companies, I only contracted and didn’t work for them directly, but without the PFD being created the oil companies would have just had bigger profits and would have given it to their shareholders (who don’t work for it either).
Am I just not understanding you correctly or are you trying to argue that the PFD is not socialism?
“without the PFD being created the oil companies would have just had bigger profits and would have given it to their shareholders”
Isn’t that what capitalism is supposed to be about? Taking money from the companies and shareholders and giving it away is socialism.
It’s not Canada, but Ontario. Ontario has very little in the way of oil, it’s mainly secondary and tertiary industries, with some mining.
Saying it’s Canada would be the same as if Californicate did this, and headlines said “the USA is giving away money to all citizens”.
The pipeline runs across both federal and state lands and Valdez has huge infrastructure for handling the supertankers. So in several ways the state of Alaska (the people) is a major stakeholder in the oil companies. So it is really capitalism but without seeing the interconnection it would look like socialism.IMHO.
From the dictionary: “Socialism is a range of economic and social systems characterized by social ownership ... of the means of production”
From you: “in several ways the state of Alaska (the people) is a major stakeholder in the oil companies”
Socialism.
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