Tuesday, May 24, 2016

[NJFAC] UBI: Not The Best Public Intervention To Reduce Poverty or Income Inequality

Many, especially Libertarians, are proposing UBI because of the threat to jobs posed by new and expanding uses of robots. Here is a counter-argument. j Why The Universal Basic Income Is Not The Best Public Intervention To Reduce Poverty or Income Inequality   on 24May 2016 https://www.socialeurope.eu/2016/05/why-the-universal-basic-income-is-not-the-best-public-intervention-to-reduce-poverty-or-income-inequality/ ...

Parties that are committed to reducing inequalities should not channel that reduction through UBI, but rather through a combination of fiscal and redistributive policies and labor market interventions aimed at increasing the percentage of total income derived from labor at the cost of the percentage derived from capital – as most progressive parties are already doing.

A final observation: the growing weakness of labor explains the large deterioration of the labor market, with a third of the labor force (almost half in Southern Europe) in precarious work, one of the major reasons for the growth of poverty and of income inequalities. To believe that UBI is the solution (or part of the solution) to what has been called the "precariat" is to ignore the active causes of the deterioration of the labor market, causes that remain untouched with UBI measures. This "remaining untouched" was the primary reason liberal thinkers proposed the initial focus on UBI. It is impossible to resolve the problems of precarious work and of the precariat without touching on the relation of power, both in the state and in the labor market, between capital and labor.

-- June Zaccone National Jobs for All Coalition http://www.njfac.org