Basically, four facts here:
1. A 3-year experiment starts in Germany over the idea of Basic Income.
2. 120 Germans will receive 1,000 Euro a month....free.
3. A second group is part of the test.....they will NOT be getting any extra income. It would appear that they are the measurement 'stick' for the 120 folks.
4. It is NOT being funded by the government. I know....this is a shocker. It's a privately funded test. Donations carry the whole 3-year experiment.
So it doesn't matter if you work or not.
Who is conducting this? The German Institute for Economic Research.
What happens here, at the conclusion of the three years? They produce a report. I will take a guess that three things will be said:
1. Money doesn't buy happiness or success.
2. It probably would help if financial or economic 'coaching' was part of the Basic Income business.
3. A fair number of the 120 Germans didn't have a plan on day one, or day sixty, or day five-hundred.....of how to handle the short-term gain.
This is the basic problem of Basic Income.....it quickly would become a welfare program replacement, with no real change except in the name itself. If you offered monthly sessions on handling your income, your lifestyle, or your purchases....you'd get smart and this would lead onto more success in life. But the chief supporters of this concept never grasp that part of the problem.
2 comments:
I think it's a nice distraction from the overall problem of the wealth concentration issue. Look at median wages vs gdp. It should remain relatively constant over time, but now it's impossible to support a family of three with only a single income. It used to be that someone who worked a low skilled job could afford to buy a house and raise a family.
I would offer these three observations:
1. Once the Deutsche Mark flipped to the Euro....everything went up a notch. Talk to Germans over 50 and they mark this transfer as a changing point for the economy. Whether it was intended or not....unknown.
2. Housing in Germany...within urbanized areas....is screwed-up. You can blame both parties (CDU/SPD) for what they did in the 1990s...selling off public housing to commercial companies. Resolving what they did? Now near impossible, unless you put a hundred billion into public housing projects. Go into Munich, Hamburg, Frankfurt, etc....same exact issue...the housing market for regular people is screwed-up.
3. Hartz IV (the welfare program) in the present form, is building up to create a political monster in another decade. Even if you bring Basic Income...it's just a welfare program in the end, unless you found a massive amount of money to flush the system.
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