Guaranteed Annual Income

an attempt to provide Welfare without the negative side-effects

http://www.centersds.com/briefintro.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income_guarantee

Joel Schwartz writes Both Nobel economist Milton Friedman and President Richard Nixon backed some version of a guaranteed income program. But we now know empirically from the Office of Economic Opportunity's ten-year Negative Income Tax Experiment (conducted from 1968 to 1978, primarily in Denver CO and Seattle Wa) that such subsidies significantly weaken the Work Ethic. The experiment found, too, that income guarantees correlate with family dissolution. (Teenage Pregnancy)

See also PhilippeVanParijs on Basic Income

Modern proposals for a GAI have usually taken two basic forms that reflect these very different purposes and an infinite number of variations. The form usually favoured by people who place a high value on simplification and work incentives is the Negative Income Tax (NIT). This is a payment by governments to persons or households below certain income level as opposed to positive income taxes which are paid to governments by persons with income above a certain level. The NIT was initially conceived by the American economist George Stigler, in 1946... The second form of GAI is the Universal Demogrant (UD). This is a payment to all persons regardless of income. It is usually favoured by those who see the GAI as a right of citizenship and whose purpose is to eliminate Poverty and lead to more equal sharing of the economic benefits of society. This approach to a GAI received its classic description by another American economist, Robert Theobald, in his 1965 book, FreeMenAndFreeMarkets.

Charles Murray supported this ($10k/yr) in his 2006 book InOurHands ISBN:0844742236

May'2013: Mike Konczal made a Basic Income calculator to show how much $/person would be available by using it to replace various existing budget items.


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