Basic income for some is not basic income. No country has tried this yet.
Most countries actually do have a form of basic income where they are subsidizing food, shelter, healthcare in some form or another for essentially all people falling outside of the safety net of income, pensions, social security & welfare, charity, etc. I tend to think of basic income as the former without the absolutely massive bureaucratic overhead. An enormous cost saving in other words. To put this in perspective: many European countries spend almost as much on unemployment programs and related bureaucracy as they do on the actual benefits payed to the unemployed.
With a basic income you could abolish minimum wage, make labor cheaper for companies and less risky, make it easier for people to take multiple small jobs to supplement their basic income and reduce their risk, stop forcing people to retire or forcing them to work until they are allowed to retire (both are bad), make all forms of income insurance opt in (pensions, disability benefits, unemployment insurance), etc. It just simplifies things a lot.
The reason this is not happening is that dismantling the existing bureaucracy is highly disruptive and will be hugely unpopular.
Finn here. The trial has been criticized from the get-go as being a poorly-designed compromise; those of us with a more cynical outlook suspect that it was intentionally nerfed so as to discredit the idea of basic income in general. But I guess it's just politics as usual; the current government as a whole is not exactly sympathetic with the idea of free money to "lazy people". Everyone does seem to agree, though, that welfare traps are a problem with the current system.
It's hard to find much about why, BBC has a link to a study by an OECD think tank criticising the program, but no idea if that study specifically motivated decisionmakers in Finland.
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-43866700
Study: https://www.oecd.org/eco/surveys/Finland-2018-OECD-economic-...
Basic income is an admittance that hundreds of millions of people are no longer necessary. Governments and corporations will not pay billions of dollars per year to people who do nothing. It will result in a strange situation where companies like Apple will be giving people money so that they can buy the iPhones they make.
Eventually, these people will somehow have to disappear. This means there will also be less demand for the robots to make things. This would then end with a small population with robots occupying the planet.
Welfare is essentially a way to kill a human's soul. If the choice is to go out slowly like this, then I would say "it is better to die on your feet, then live on your knees".
I'm interested to see what the final report on this program will say. My only concern with UBI programs is that if a company, landlord, etc. knows someone is receiving an additional amount of money for free each month, then they can raise their prices by that much.
Wow, so the experiment succeeded - they figured it can’t work.
Well, except for that whiner who reminds me of central banksters and complains it didn’t work because it wasn’t tried for long enough. They can pay me to do nothing for ten years, I’m ready - if they’re interested they Dan contact me offline.
Other recent discussions about Finlands basic income:
https://hn.algolia.com/?query=basic%20income&sort=byDate&pre...