This is because unions think they would lose power if basic income is implemented. Unions in Finland have abandoned part time and low income people and only look after people who have full time jobs (who are members in the unions).
Green party in Finland made 560 euro basic income proposal few years ago that was cost neutral. That was verified with microsimulation model that used real world data.
> Unions in Finland have abandoned part time and low income people and only look after people who have full time jobs (who are members in the unions).
A union is a membership organisation that looks after the interest of it's members, I don't see how they could have abandoned people that aren't members. What has happened in other Nordic countries though is that politicians have worked hard to lessen the power of unions by decoupling things like unemployment and introducing other form of employment. Therefor it makes less and less sense to be a member of a union. But that is to a large extent a political question not a choice by the unions.
I also think maybe one of the biggest unanswered question with basic income is how you can guarantee it long term. We already know that things like minimum wage, unemployment benefits, student benefits and social insurance don't keep up over time despite the power of the institutions and the unions. Now people are saying that we should put all those things in one basket and hope that the politicians don't screw us over later?
>Now people are saying that we should put all those things in one basket and hope that the politicians don't screw us over later?
Having one basket for everyone is politically easier to defend.
If you look at the Finnish or Nordic welfare model in general, most of the income transfers go to to middle class who also pays for them. Poor people are taken care on the side.
The reality is that people don't care about poor, but if you create system were everyone gets money equally, people don't want to give it up. We already have kind of UBI for children in Finland where government pays certain amount of money every month for families with children, rich and poor. Nobody wants to give it up, because free money (paid by taxes).
> If you look at the Finnish or Nordic welfare model in general, most of the income transfers go to to middle class who also pays for them.
Right, but I don't see the difference to basic income in that regard. How do you avoid a politician going "let's cut basic income and lower taxes" benefiting the majority of people that are employed?
They might have significant others depending on UBI - parents, children, friends. So they would not like cutting basic income, even if it recovers slightly more money for them.
Compare this to situation with poor: Most of middle class don'r really have poor significant others in their life, making cutting benefit programs easier.
> Green party in Finland made 560 euro basic income proposal few years ago that was cost neutral.
Sure. But the ongoing experiment is not anywhere near cost-neutral. It's literally giving free money to all participants, while raising no extra revenue from any source. Even people in favor of the basic income agree that implementing this model country-wide would be totally impossible (the 5% of GDP extra deficit from the article seems like a fair estimate).
So criticizing this experiment seems totally reasonable, no matter what ulterior motives the labor unions might have. The experiment is just not going to be actionable no matter what the outcome, everyone knows it's useless, but it was implemented anyway since it was an item from the coalition agreement that could be ticked off easily.
If they've abandoned part time/low income people then how come they care if those same people have a means to survive? They should welcome them as potential, new consumers of goods/services that their members provide.
They are stuck into supporting their shrinking support base for ideological reasons.
Unions are strongly connected to both social democratic party (SDP). Unions and social democrats achieved many good things for several decades. But things have changed and they and their support base is trapped in the past and looking back to old good times. They are basically party for baby boomer generation.
I believe the Unions' thinking goes more like that they represent a constituency of traditional 9 'til 5 workers with steady income from one employer. Since such citizen are more likely to have Union membership, the Unions are fundamentally opposed to any social policy that would erode the basic motivation for majority of citizens to choose 9 'til 5 employment, like UBI. Remember that membership is everything to Unions.
This makes me wonder if basic income can't get passed in Finland with a constituency that should (in theory) be in favor, what chances does it have in the rest of the world where dynamics are aligned against it?
I think most economists agree that UBI would reduce poverty traps and marginal tax rates on poor individuals even if they don't support UBI for other reasons.
In Finland these traps and marginal tax rates are especially large. Marginal tax rates on poor can be as high as 80-100+% depending on their situation (with single moms marginal tax rate can be higher than 100+ going to work makes things worse).
The discussion about UBI is framed into lazy bums vs. hard-working good people. Lazy bum argument is easy to counter when you point out that half of the low income workforce in retail would already get the same income from welfare programs if they would stop working. If they would be rational and not value work, they should quit. If people would realize that many of the poor people either can't work full time (due to mental or physical illness) and that their marginal tax rates are usually much higher than in any other income group, they might reconsider supporting UBI.
I sometimes wonder if BIG is counterintuitively more popular with libertarians than with liberals/socialists. There seem to be four solutions to the automation will require hardly anyone to work problem.
1. Ignore it
2. Patch and reinforce the existing welfare system
3. Basic Income guarantee
4. Try to trying time
1 & 3 are obviously stupid solutions. But a combination of 1 & 3 seems to be what the current administration is doing. Democrats seem to like a combination of 2 & 1. I think 2 is generally the go-to solutions for all liberals/socialists world wide who are used to that approach and therefore are comfortable with it. I think libertarians who acknowledge the problem and therefore not to go with 1 will not like 2 and 4 because they both massively mess with the market. So that leaves BIG. Therefore I wouldn't be surprised if we see some form of BIG in the US before we see it in Europe. The enormous size and regional diversity in the US might prevent that though.
> I sometimes wonder if BIG is counterintuitively more popular with libertarians than with liberals/socialists.
It's really not - and the only reason it might even seem like it is is that most discussions really only talk about the theory, not specific policy details.
As a concrete example: let's say that everyone agrees on some fixed amount that should be guaranteed - perhaps $5,000/month. The actual figure doesn't really matter, so you can replace it with whatever you personally think the right value is[0]. The only important thing is that (a) it is a fixed amount (each individual knows exactly what they will receive ahead-of-time), and (b) every person somehow agrees that it is the "right" amount.
Now, that money is cash, so everyone's free to spend it how they want. But invariably, there will be some person for whom that $5,000 isn't enough. Maybe they have an accident that leaves them with a career-ending disability. Maybe they decided to go to Vegas and bet it all on red. Maybe they made a bad investment. Maybe they gave it to a family member who absconded with it.
There are all sorts of situations that you cannot rule out occurring unless you also restrict people from having the agency to do what they want with their money[1]. No matter what that fixed amount is, there will always be someone who ends up needing a bit more in order to put food on the table, whether that comes from bad luck or bad decision-making or both.
The problem is that the libertarians are only on board with giving the $5,000/month on the presumption that it replace the vast array of other government-provide welfare and social services that cost money. So if you say, "well, at that point, it falls to the state to pick up the bill", then you've already turned off libertarians, because they're only on board with the idea because it allows them to dismantle the existing state welfare system.
But on the other hand, if you say "well, tough luck - they had the money, and they still couldn't manage, so it's their responsibility to figure it out" - well, that's not really going to work politically. So, the only way that you could have this (politically, not economically) is to retain some form of a welfare state, at which point libertarians have long since lost interest.
[0] You can even replace it with a linear scale if you'd prefer - again, as long as each person is only entitled to a specific amount.
[1] And if you argue in favor of that, fine, but you're arguing for a fundamentally different system altogether, not a guaranteed income. (And libertarians would hate that system even more than the status quo).
Yes, what you are describing would be the worst of everything. You are probably right that that would be the most likely outcome given the political system. And you are right, I certainly wouldn't want that.
> "well, tough luck - they had the money, and they still couldn't manage, so it's their responsibility to figure it out" - well, that's not really going to work politically.
Why isn't it?
If you have medical emergency - this is where charity kicks in, they will help you.
If you bet it all on red - in this case you have to mow lawns for $20 to eat every day until the next paycheck comes.
5: Government policy to aggressively drive down the cost of living via automation.
This should also be a libertarian win-win since it benefits everybody through lower costs and it doesn't provide benefits for some at the expense of others, nor does it come with the risk of inherent inflation that a minimum income might have, especially as more work becomes automated and fewer jobs become available for people who don't have the talent or simply the intelligence to do higher-value work, which raises the need for a higher minimum income to supplant the inability to find work.
Green party in Finland made 560 euro basic income proposal few years ago that was cost neutral. That was verified with microsimulation model that used real world data.