Finland considers basic income to reform welfare system

Re:Finland considers basic income to reform welfare system by Tloewald on Friday August 21, 2015 @04:27PM (#10100009)

You're right about the dates, but when I had a more convoluted set of figures for 2014 (which required doing quite a bit of arithmetic to get the raw inputs, and would have required linking several pages and so forth) the results were pretty much the same.

The fact is the Australian government spends in the ballpark of $2 for ever $1 of benefit handed out; whether it's $1.80 or $2.20 doesn't really matter -- it puts some actual figures behind the concept of simply giving out a basic income (versus trying to figure out who gets the benefit, means testing it, and so forth).

Australia's unemployment rate hasn't changed much over the period 2009-2014 (it was shielded from the great recession by commodity prices).

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Re:Finland considers basic income to reform welfare system by fulafel on Monday August 24, 2015 @04:29AM (#10108552)

Another problem I just noticed - it seems your spending figures include more than just benefits paid in cash. Eg http://www.aihw.gov.au/expenditure-faq/ says

"In 2010-11, Australian Government and state and territory government welfare spending was estimated at $119.4 billion - $90 billion (75%) was in cash payments (including unemployment benefits) and $29.4 billion (25%) was for welfare services."

So to make your case you'd need to dig up figures about how much the administrative overhead related to the cash benefits is.

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