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A comment on Finland is scrapping plans to extend its basic income project. Parent comment

Re:Finland is scrapping plans to extend its basic income pro... by Klathmon on Thursday April 19, 2018 @09:30AM (#16875724)
I have really only read comments on UBI so I might be extremely wrong, but I believe the idea is that as we move toward a more "automated" life, the "1%" can make enough to pay for the 99% to have UBI. And since everyone gets the same baseline, even monumentally high tax rates would be tolerable.

This is basically a way of redistributing wealth with the added side benefit that you can quit your job without fear of losing everything in your life.

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Re:Finland is scrapping plans to extend its basic income pro... by dragonwriter on Thursday April 19, 2018 @09:21PM (#16881472)
> I have really only read comments on UBI so I might be extremely wrong, but I believe the idea is that as we move toward a more "automated" life, the "1%" can make enough to pay for the 99% to have UBI.

That's an idea, but far from universal among UBI proponents.

Actually, reducing the concentration of capital by redistributing it's returns is part of it, and in that view preventing control of the pre-redistribution gains by an increasingly narrow class is part of the goal.

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Re:Finland is scrapping plans to extend its basic income pro... by nabc45 on Thursday April 19, 2018 @09:47AM (#16875834)
>you can quit your job without fear of losing everything in your life

That sounds like an American problem more than anything else

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Re:Finland is scrapping plans to extend its basic income pro... by Klathmon on Thursday April 19, 2018 @10:22AM (#16876091)
It's a problem everywhere, but many places have some kind of safety-net working to prevent it.

The idea of UBI (at least in theory) is to make that safety-net universal, remove the barriers to use it, lower the overhead cost of administering a system like it.

Remove the need for applications to benefit from it, remove the wasteful "taxing unemployment income" that happens currently (at least in the US), remove the stigma attached to having it.

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