Removes disincentive for beneficiaries to
undertake part-time work
Poverty is reduced but only at the 60 and 70
percent relative levels (2, 2A)
May improve labour market outcomes in
some areas: more employee flexibility;
encourages unpaid work; additional employee
bargaining power; encourages
entrepreneurial activity; and reduces the
opportunity cost of full time training or
education.
Lowers administrative, management and
operating costs
Costs:
Poverty is either increased across all relative
levels as Superannuitants have their payment
decreased by 44% on average (1), or is
increased when measured at the 50 percent
relative level (2, 2A).
Horizontal equity problems due to differential
treatment of one and two parent families
Many current beneficiaries (e.g. sole parents,
the disabled and carers) will be financially
worse off under the scheme
Reduces the supply of labour: decreases
hours worked; increases migration of skilled
workers; discourages people from taking
entry level jobs; discourages further
education and training; and the EMTRs for
families with children are very high
discouraging further work, MFTC (1, 2).
High personal income taxes have negative
implications for saving, investment and
productivity
Lowers economic growth (estimated at 2.8
percentage points per year)
Non-alignment causes integrity and
coherence issues for the tax system
You are using a Private Use Area codepoint (U+F0B7) for your lists. These will show up as boxes-with-a-hex-code in it for some (I get this), the glyph you intended (no idea) for others, and a completely unrelated and inappropriate glyph for the rest.
It's interesting that they think it will be a disincentive to work, $300 is less than the benefit now when you include the accommodation supplement and quite a lot less if you include training incentive allowance, emergency cash, food allowances, etc. Yet people still work.
I wonder if it would actually be the opposite, with people being able to work legitimately rather than under the table to supplement their income (and not have to fake ACC injuries).
I don't think the study is really sure what effect it would have either.
Sure they have "discourages people from taking entry level jobs" under Costs (and they don't really elaborate much more in the main text), but they also have "Removes disincentive for beneficiaries to undertake part-time work" under Benefits.
At the moment when you're on the unemployment benefit there's a lot of pressure to look for and acquire a job. The lack of that pressure might be a factor in reducing the incentive to get an entry-level job. Or it might be the opposite - an incentive - because you won't lose your benefit when you get one!
It's complicated - the sort of thing that probably needs to be tested in a real-life trial. Too bad it'd be so hard to set up (and potentially revert) at a government level. If only we had a perfect computer simulation of a country.
There'd be so many knock-on effects. Like say you get your $300/wk, and you don't have a job with a company - is there going to be a big exodus from the cities since it's too expensive to live there on a UBI scheme? And you only NEED to be in the city if you have a job there.
It depends on the benefit, I've known quite a few people who have been on the artists benefit and there is no pressure to look for a job there.
People will still gravatate towards cities because that's what we do. However a little easing of the pressure on the three main cities would do wonders, as we know the cost of housing is out of control. With the fibre rollout we'll also see the requirement to live in a city is limited, if you can get 100Mb/s and work from home in the Waiarapa why would you bother living in Lower Hutt and face that commute to Wellington?
For giving $300/week to all 16+ years old citizens.
Poverty increases because higher taxes have to be levied on income earners (PDF says 44-48.6% range). Single person householders with >$50K; Two-earner households with children earning over >117K; Single income families earning >$183K are worse-off as it will reduce their disposable income. The main worry is people will work less for the time that fetches them $300/wk but the upside is that people will be more willing to take on part-time work; also people might shun entry-level jobs; increase in emigration due to increase in taxes; while immigration from unskilled labour will increase.
Brief 5 min look-through synopsis. Please correct if it seems insufficient.
As others have said aleady, the table at the end (https://imgur.com/VZAFXWi) is a pretty good summary on its own.
This was a fairly limited study in that it only looked at a couple of simple ways of doing things, but I do think it's a good analysis to read. There's still a lot more actual number-crunching in it than you'll find in the average Internet discussion.
That would have been about the time that Don Brash was commissioned to write a report on how to grow the economy and his suggestion was to lower the average income... Two very different approaches.
Labour and the Green party have both shown an interest in UBI so it will be interesting to see if it comes up as policy during the elections next year.
Did they analyse an actual Guaranteed minimum Income trial or is this a paper exercise?
As far as I know the experiments that have been done (one in Canada and two in the US) concluded that only people in a few specific circumstances worked less (single mothers in particular I think).
