Discussion
This is the kind of bureaucratic bullshit a UBI does away with;
Where can we do everything we're supposed to, and our benefits can still get cut off because all these pointless, miserly make-work forms take so long to process.
Imagine people with no paid work just got paid our UBI every week, no matter what, just like everyone else. No living in fear of being unable to pay rent or buy food, due to unprocessed paperwork.
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Think of all the meaningful public service work MSD staff could be doing if their job wasn't to check every 6 months that we still need our income. Stuff like helping people struggling with housing precarity into secure housing. Or supporting young people with little or no family support to transition into independent adult life.
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@strypey I am in support of universal basic income. I also don't see it as a replacement for all other benefits. There are those who will have needs above the UBI and we need to make sure they continue to receive support. A wealth tax, rather than a land tax, would be a fairer source of capital to pay for it. And I wouldn't assume any savings from reducing the MSD budget. They are still needed, just repurposed to help rather than hinder.
@syllusg
> I am in support of universal basic income. I also don't see it as a replacement for all other benefits
Certainly all the base benefits like unemployment, Supported Living, and Super. Opportunity's Citizen's Income retains a version of the Accommodation Supplement, a family benefit, and a few other targeted top-ups.
> A wealth tax, rather than a land tax, would be a fairer source of capital to pay for it
Maybe. Either would be an improvement on neither.
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@syllusg
> I wouldn't assume any savings from reducing the MSD budget
As mentioned in my second post, I support redeploying WINZ staff rather than firing them. But I still think there'd be some significant savings made by abolishing WINZ. Which would serve no purpose worth keeping it for, if benefits were replaced with a weekly credit paid to everyone by IRD.
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Your nation has some of the highest electricity costs in the world (I was spending upwards of $280/month in Wellington <2017 for a tiny, studio flat with one PC and one laptop. Flatmates fight each other over space heaters!) Your nationalized airline failed as is now private. Your national payment system for teachers failed so colossally some of them didn't get paid for months! Meanwhile your teachers actively fought PACT (a program I was contracted on), a program to measure student/teacher progression through school.
UBI is overall a terrible idea, but the NZ government (which retroactively changed the laws to make it legal for the GCSB to spy on all citizens) would somehow make it 50x worse.
Unless we have unlimited power as cheap as ocean water and replicators to 3D print everything from unlimited energy, UBI will not work. It will create a State where people on UBI are now slaves to the government, few of which will produce any value. It will be nothing like Star Trek and everything like The Expanse.
@djsumdog This is quite a jumble of unrelated stuff. Let's start with the general dunking on Aotearoa;
> Your nation has some of the highest electricity costs in the world
Agreed. Mainly due to corporatising most of what was a publicly-owned electricity network, including the renewable generation. Although it's only expensive if you're paying retail bills, not for industrial users buying on the spot market.
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@djsumdog
> Your nationalized airline failed as is now private
It failed because it got sold off. It was mostly renationalised, then partly sold off again a couple of governments back. Similar story to what happened with KiwiRail. Yet Business Idiots keep promoting the idea of selling our public infrastructure ("recycling" public assets is the most recent buzzphrase they've tried).
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