Re:Basic income plan clearly rejected by Swiss voters
by tremon on Sunday June 05, 2016 @11:17AM
(#11841394)
What are you talking about? Giving every Swiss a basic income definitely has budgetary consequences...
Re:Basic income plan clearly rejected by Swiss voters
by Mithaldu on Sunday June 05, 2016 @11:20AM
(#11841413)
There was no actual complete proposal for how to do it. The vote was on whether to look into implementing it.
Re:Basic income plan clearly rejected by Swiss voters
by alkonaut on Sunday June 05, 2016 @11:33AM
(#11841471)
So does definitely joining the EU or NATO too - which is why I explicitly listed those as the exceptions as long term political issues. You don't join the EU or adopt BI for a term. Those issues would be referendums in most all EU countries.
Re:Basic income plan clearly rejected by Swiss voters
by Hermel on Sunday June 05, 2016 @11:22AM
(#11841423)
That's quite an ignorant view. The solution is simple: keep a reserve, put everything into the budget and don't spend the money if it gets rejected. For example, my local community has liquid assets of about 50 millions and no debt. So if there is a vote on a new school for 20 millions that gets rejected, the 50 millions stay there for future ideas. It's quite simple, really. I find the idea that a budget must always be fully used somewhat strange.
Re:Basic income plan clearly rejected by Swiss voters
by alkonaut on Sunday June 05, 2016 @11:38AM
(#11841491)
"Keep a reserve" is the hard part. Most countries are in debt. Even if you have a reserve to begin with we can disregard it as a temporary luxury - long term the budget must be in balance or the reserve will disappear.
If you vote for "2% raised taxes" or "expand railway network" only the combination (yes, yes) and (no, no) can balance the budget. People would likely vote against the tax increase but for the infrastructure investment.
And even if you could afford it - how do you prioritize it against something else that was also accepted through referendum?
Re:Basic income plan clearly rejected by Swiss voters
by jdavis703 on Sunday June 05, 2016 @11:58AM
(#11841562)
It's quite common to have both bundled together when voting on ballot measures. In the East Bay there was recently a proposition to expand public transport via a temporary increase in sales tax called measure BB.
The only questions you can decide by referendum is things that either have no budgetary consequences or things that set a long term political direction (join the EU, basic income, ...).
Anything that has a shorter horizon needs to be tightly coupled to the budget and you can only adopt a complete budget, not decide on individual questions. Once you accept that you only choose between budgetA and budgetB for the next year/term - you also accept that those who write those budgets as propositions are "parties" and you have arrived at parliamentary, not direct, democracy. Most democracies already have referendums on things like this, but still aren't "direct democracies".
In short - the Swiss have just slightly more referendums than the rest, but they too have a parliament with parties that propose complete, coherent budgets. I like the idea of slightly more referendums but no country that has a budget with thousands of expenses and thousands of different taxes could be governed only direct votes on each of them (perhaps most importantly because no one is interested in voting on thousands of issues).