To basic income's credit, a large percentage of the spending for welfare and disability programs like Ontario Works and ODSP gets swallowed up by bureaucracy instead of going to the actual recipients' pockets. It's far more cost efficient to just send a direct deposit to millions of bank accounts and mail out millions of cheques. I used to do payroll for a corporation. With our software we'd upload an excel file to our business bank account to direct deposit money to 5,000+ bank accounts. It's a very labour efficient process these days.
I would rather we scrap means-tested welfare, take the means-tested welfare pot and divvy it up evenly to every Canadian adult 18+ who applies for basic income. And then for every person who enrolls, tax the benefit back at a 40% ratio if they earn income.
So if basic income was say like $800/month ($9,600/year), you need to make less than $24,000 per year in order to even qualify. And if you accidentally or maliciously apply for it if you don't qualify anyways, you're going to get a tax bill from the CRA. If you make like $15,000 per year working part-time/casual for example, you'd only get $200/month basic income. This would give low-income people an incentive to work while providing a safety net.
Now there are some people in the system who do make more than $800/month already who are going to complain: people on disability. So we'd have to top them up more while decreasing the pay out for everyone else. And we'd need to employ some barebones staff to assess whether someone qualifies for disability.
The system I'm proposing is actually very similar to what libertarian economist Milton Friedman suggested. In fact if you post this proposal on OGFT, there would be major push back on there. Because there are probably lots of social workers on that forum who'd be out of a job. And some people on means-tested welfare do get a better deal than ours and they'd be paranoid at the possibility of getting a worse deal than what they have now.
There's no way the government is going to lay off a half a million employees.
Yeah there is going to be push back from government employees about this. Which is why the politicians don't want to fix the problem. The Liberals and NDP know that the poor have nowhere else to go and take their vote for granted. Toronto and Vancouver keeps voting Liberal and NDP. And look at how many homeless people are in those cities. The Liberal and NDP are poverty pimps who pay lip service to the poor and then give a bunch of government money to the bureaucrats and skim some cream off the top for themselves too. The Karen bureaucrats treat people in the welfare and disability office like shit (this is well-documented) and these Karen bureaucrats' labour unions give money to the NDP and Liberals.
To basic income's credit, a large percentage of the spending for welfare and disability programs like Ontario Works and ODSP gets swallowed up by bureaucracy instead of going to the actual recipients' pockets. It's far more cost efficient to just send a direct deposit to millions of bank accounts and mail out millions of cheques. I used to do payroll for a corporation. With our software we'd upload an excel file to our business bank account to direct deposit money to 5,000+ bank accounts. It's a very labour efficient process these days.
I would rather we scrap means-tested welfare, take the means-tested welfare pot and divvy it up evenly to every Canadian adult 18+ who applies for basic income. And then for every person who enrolls, tax the benefit back at a 40% ratio if they earn income.
So if basic income was say like $800/month ($9,600/year), you need to make less than $24,000 per year in order to even qualify. And if you accidentally or maliciously apply for it if you don't qualify anyways, you're going to get a tax bill from the CRA. If you make like $15,000 per year working part-time/casual for example, you'd only get $200/month basic income. This would give low-income people an incentive to work while providing a safety net.
Now there are some people in the system who do make more than $800/month already who are going to complain: people on disability. So we'd have to top them up more while decreasing the pay out for everyone else. And we'd need to employ some barebones staff to assess whether someone qualifies for disability.
The system I'm proposing is actually very similar to what libertarian economist Milton Friedman suggested. In fact if you post this proposal on OGFT, there would be major push back on there. Because there are probably lots of social workers on that forum who'd be out of a job. And some people on means-tested welfare do get a better deal than ours and they'd be paranoid at the possibility of getting a worse deal than what they have now.
Yeah there is going to be push back from government employees about this. Which is why the politicians don't want to fix the problem. The Liberals and NDP know that the poor have nowhere else to go and take their vote for granted. Toronto and Vancouver keeps voting Liberal and NDP. And look at how many homeless people are in those cities. The Liberal and NDP are poverty pimps who pay lip service to the poor and then give a bunch of government money to the bureaucrats and skim some cream off the top for themselves too. The Karen bureaucrats treat people in the welfare and disability office like shit (this is well-documented) and these Karen bureaucrats' labour unions give money to the NDP and Liberals.
Man your posts are usually bang on.