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.

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.