8:43pm September 5, 2013

➸ A Town Without Poverty?: Canada's only experiment in guaranteed income finally gets reckoning | The Dominion

quantumblog:

For four years Dauphin was a place where anyone living below the poverty line could receive monthly cheques to boost their income, no questions asked. Single mothers could afford to put their kids through school and low-income families weren’t scrambling to pay the rent each month.
…
Initially, the Mincome program was conceived as a labour market experiment. The government wanted to know what would happen if everybody in town received a guaranteed income, and specifically, they wanted to know whether people would still work.

It turns out they did.

Only two segments of Dauphin’s labour force worked less as a result of Mincome—new mothers and teenagers. Mothers with newborns stopped working because they wanted to stay at home longer with their babies. And teenagers worked less because they weren’t under as much pressure to support their families.

The end result was that they spent more time at school and more teenagers graduated. Those who continued to work were given more opportunities to choose what type of work they did.
…
If a guaranteed income program can target more people and is more efficient than other social assistance programs, then why doesn’t Canada have such a program in place already? Perhaps the biggest barrier is the prevalence of negative stereotypes about poor people.

“There’s very strong feelings out there that we shouldn’t give people money for nothing,”

So here’s some evidence that unconditional benefits make people happier and healthier and do not lead to laziness.

In the period that Mincome was administered, hospital visits dropped 8.5 per cent. An 8.5 per cent decrease in hospital visits across Canada would save the government $4 billion annually, by her calculations. And $4 billion is the amount that the federal government is currently trying to save by slashing social programming and arts funding.

this makes me cry, seriously.

imagine a utopian society where everybody has all their basic needs met, no questions asked. you have a safe place to sleep, clean water, nutritious food, medical care, and education available for free your entire life. if you don’t want any of those things, you don’t have to take or use them, but if you do, they’re there. if you want more stuff—nice furniture, an internet connection, a car, books—you have to work for money to buy them. but if you don’t want to work, or can’t, you don’t have to. and you never have to worry about not having any of these basic necessities if you’re injured, suddenly laid off, or—ever, at all.

imagine that freedom. you know what that would do? it wouldn’t create a world of lazy imbeciles. it would create a world of people who could choose to do work they like, that they can be proud of. a world of people who have the education and options to make informed choices. imagine how much more volunteerism there would be. imagine how much safer everyone would be. imagine how much less misery, fear, and desperation there would be, as people don’t have to work themselves to exhaustion at three part-time, minimum wage jobs just to feed their kids.

every single time that this experiment has been tried, that is exactly what has happened. every. single. time. why aren’t we doing it? because there are people with a lot of money and power who are afraid that if this became the default for how we live, they would lose a lot of that money and power—and they’re right. they would. they’d rather keep us in poverty and fear, rather keep us cheap and expendable to shore up their profit margins. and they’re willing to use the code words that make people’s knees jerk—“welfare society,” “tax leeches,” “lazy,” “those people,” “my tax money”—who then continue to vote them into positions where they can continue to exploit everybody else for their own selfishness.

this system is unsustainable. it can not continue. it will break down. it’s already showing cracks. but the people in power will do everything they can to keep the system going the way it is. the fight is going to be ugly, and we’ll probably have to go through a few iterations of “new leaders, same ideas” until either the entire system gets replaced—or civilization as we know it is destroyed, quite possibly with the extinction of the human species.