Basic Income Earth Network (BIEN): Development of BIEN Ireland
A basic income is an income universally and unconditionally granted by the state to all on an individual basis, without means test or work requirement. It is a form of minimum income guarantee, also known as a citizens’ income or social dividend. It differs from state payments that now exist in various European countries in three important ways:
- it is paid to individuals rather than households;
- it is paid irrespective of any income from other sources;
- it is paid without requiring the performance of any work or the willingness to accept a job if offered.
Below you can read a summary (not comprehensive) of some of the benefits of a universal basic income (UBI).
The Basic Income Earth Network (www.basicincome.org) is an international network of individuals and groups committed to or interested in Basic Income. We believe that this is a good time to re-activate BIEN Ireland, the loose group of those interested in pursuing or studying BI in Ireland.
We are convening a meeting with a view to developing the Irish network, on Saturday May 7th, 2011, in the Central Hotel, Exchequer St, Dublin, at 2pm.
Out of the meeting, we hope that an organising committee would emerge. Please reply to basic.income@nuim.ie if you would like to attend this organising meeting or, if not, whether you would like to be put on our mailing list for future events and developments.
Joint coordinators for BIEN Ireland:
John Baker, UCD School of Social Justice
Anne B Ryan, Department of Adult and Community Education, NUI Maynooth
Summary of the benefits of Universal Basic Income (UBI)
- provides basic financial security for all in ways that means-tested social welfare and a mimimum wage cannot do
- can create a social and cultural climate where everybody is free to act in morally, ecologically and socially responsible ways
- gives people the basic financial security to undertake uncertain paid work (including farming, growing and food processing); they can be entrepreneurs or independent contractors, start businesses, participate in low-paid but valuable caring, artistic, and political work, participate in education
- gives people the freedom to do no paid work and still have basic financial security
- gives a basic income to those who currently receive no state or other payment, but who participate in caring work or other forms of work that are not financially rewarded
- facilitates people to develop all sorts of economically dynamic and intelligent carbon-neutral and socially sound activities; because they have some degree of certainty that they can pay for their basic needs, they have psychological space and actual time to be creative.
- benefits all those who currently have no access to state benefits if paid work disappears for whatever reasons
- gives those currently on welfare a way out of the poverty trap: if they get decent paid work, they can take it without the worry of losing benefits, as they do on means-tested welfare
- benefits casual and short-contract workers, who may find themselves with no or limited sick pay or holiday pay
- gives those who are dissatisfied with their type of work or with their work conditions a chance to negotiate other ways to live and work; UBI would allow many overstretched in their jobs or self-employed work to cut back on the time spent in paid work.
- gives all employees increased bargaining power within their jobs, because they are not reliant on income from work to supply basic needs
- lessens the importance of jobs and paid work in the whole social arrangement and in doing so, gives a chance for valuable unpaid work to flourish
- creates social inclusion by means of equal basic security for all; increased social inclusion creates conditions for increased civic participation
- fosters social solidarity and reduces resentment and divisiveness among groups currently experiencing different levels of security
- gives basic financial security to asylum seekers and other poor immigrants, thereby reducing the possibilities for their exploitation by gang masters, traffickers and unscrupulous employers
- does away with the ageist countdown to retirement and pension age; everyone would have a UBI from birth to death and it would replace the state pension.
- costs to employers are reduced; UBI acts as a subsidy (although the money goes directly to the employee) which brings down the wage bill.
Discussion
We welcome and encourage lively discussion from the public about articles on Irish Left Review. You can leave a comment using the form at the bottom of the page. Please read through the existing comments before posting your own.
Leave a Comment
Sins of the Father
Subscribe by Email
Best of the Web
EU Should Admit Greece is Bankrupt | Christian Rickens
The unvarnished truth - the second Greek Bailout should not have happened.
The mistake isn’t the size, but the construction of the bailout package. It isn’t geared to the requirements of the people of Greece but to the needs of the international financial markets, meaning the banks.
How else can one explain the fact that around a quarter of the package won’t even arrive in Athens but will flow directly to the country’s international creditors? The holders of Greek government bonds are to get some €30 billion as an incentive to convert their old paper into new bonds. The aim is to keep alive the illusion that Greece isn’t bankrupt — after all, the creditors are voluntarily forgiving part of the debt. The financial sector is cleverly manipulating the fear that a Greek bankruptcy would trigger a fatal chain reaction.
That leaves €100 billion. But that too isn’t geared to what Greece needs in order to get back on its feet. It’s linked to an estimate of how much debt the Greek economy can bear without collapsing. International technocrats agree that with debts amounting to 120 percent of gross domestic product, the country can just about go on servicing its debt. That’s the level at which the cow can go on supplying milk without dying of exhaustion. So 120 percent became the goal.
Collaboration, with our European partners | Cunning Hired Knaves
The European project was supposed to be a bulwark against the dangers of fascist ambition, but now it is the instrument used to dismantle European democracy in the interest of the risk adverse looking for a steady income stream from the provision of the social net by those who cite the words and actions of old fascists while doing so.
The post Collaboration, with our European partners by Richard of Cunning Hired Knaves summed up in one sentence. For much better sentences and many more urgent points read the post.
On Sunday there were massive demonstrations throughout the Spanish state, with half a million people on the streets of Madrid and 450,000 in Barcelona, protesting against the labour ‘reform’ planned by the Partido Popular, the right-wing party that most closely represents the interests of the power elites that conserved their position when the transition from dictatorship to democracy was undertaken.
S.P.A.R.K. protest at cuts to lone parents, Dublin 18th February 2012
Many families were cut in the last budget but lone parent families were particularly hit by the Fine Gael/Labour Party government.
The key elements are that single parents can’t take advantage of training such as Community Employment (CE) Schemes and when the youngest child turns 7 years old, the parent is declassed as a lone parent but treated as an ordinary worker even though there are few affordable creche places. There is a bill coming up in March which will copper fasten some of the worst elements of government plans.
There is particular anger directed at the Labour Party because they are associated with women’s rights and a more progressive society.
Please share the link to this video
Exiting the euro | Michael Roberts
Michael Roberts argues that those in Greece who cite the example of Argentina when suggesting that Greece should leave the Euro are not necessarily looking at the whole picture. The situations are not the same, Roberts points out, citing Argentina’s former central bank governor at the time, Mario Blejer and his recent piece in the Financial Times. He also points to research based on the the experience of five recent devaluations of economies in crisis (including that of Argentina) which “shows that they lead to a 10-20% fall in real GDP and take five to ten years to recover to previous real GDP levels. But that is not to say that there is no alternative to “lowering wages, privatising the state sector, reducing taxes for the corporate sector (especially big business) and ‘deregulating’ labour markets i.e. the super-exploitation of the Greek people to raise profitability.”
But the left could also find an alternative policy to exiting the euro where Greece negotiates a full default on its debt to private and foreign bondholders; takes over the banks; and uses the savings from bond and interest repayments (€17-20bn a year) to start state directed investment in jobs, technology and funding small businesses, while staying in the euro to protect the savings of the people from destruction, keeping down inflation and avoiding a rise in foreign debt. The question of exiting the euro then becomes an issue for the Euro leaders to impose (and to be resisted by a campaign within Europe), not as the main policy plank of the left.
Corporate tax avoidance: where are the worst offenders?
This table comes via the Tax Justice Network (and Richard Murphy). It’s from a table produced by U.S. researcher Kimberly Clausing and as TJN notes “demonstrates which countries are working hardest to wage economic warfare on the United States (and, by extension, on other countries,) via the global tax system”.
Solidarity campaign to support the people of Greece
Mikis Theodorakis, famous Greek composer of Zorba’s Dance, and Manolis Glezos, veteran resistance fighter against the Nazi occupation, have issued a call for a European Front to defend the people of Greece and all those facing austerity. We have decided to support this call and work with trade unions, campaigns and parties across Europe to establish a European Solidarity Campaign to defend the people of Greece. We will organise solidarity and raise practical support for the people of Greece; they cannot be made to pay for a crisis for which they are not responsible.
Chris Dillow | Capitalism against freedom
[...]
During the Cold War, opponents of communism routinely, and not entirely wrongly, claimed to be champions of liberty. Freedom for capitalists and freedom of speech and thought go together, it was claimed. “Freedom is indivisible” wrote Bruce Winton Knight in 1952. “Economic freedom is…an indispensable means toward the achievement of political freedom“ wrote Milton Friedman in Capitalism and Freedom. And back in 1944 Friedrich Hayek complained that “We have progressively abandoned that freedom in economic affairs without which personal and political freedom has never existed in the past.”
Today, though, this seems wrong. Many threats to freedom come from capitalists. The story is no longer capitalism and freedom, but capitalism against freedom.
Ian Stewart | The mathematical equation that caused the banks to crash
In The Observer, Sunday 12 February 2012
Anyone who has followed the crisis will understand that the real economy of businesses and commodities is being upstaged by complicated financial instruments known as derivatives. These are not money or goods. They are investments in investments, bets about bets. Derivatives created a booming global economy, but they also led to turbulent markets, the credit crunch, the near collapse of the banking system and the economic slump. And it was the Black-Scholes equation that opened up the world of derivatives.
The equation itself wasn’t the real problem. It was useful, it was precise, and its limitations were clearly stated. It provided an industry-standard method to assess the likely value of a financial derivative. So derivatives could be traded before they matured. The formula was fine if you used it sensibly and abandoned it when market conditions weren’t appropriate. The trouble was its potential for abuse. It allowed derivatives to become commodities that could be traded in their own right. The financial sector called it the Midas Formula and saw it as a recipe for making everything turn to gold. But the markets forgot how the story of King Midas ended.
Greece: a Sisyphean task | Michael Roberts
In a Eurozone that is unwilling to share its surplus with weaker, hardest hit economies there is no other option for those economies but default. Despite the agreement of Greek politicians to shorten their political life and accept the deal all that they have done is simply postpone this eventuality once again. However, even that postponement might be shortened by the Greek elections in April where the smaller leftist parties outside the coalition currently have 40% of the vote. Or so says Michael Roberts:
Whatever the Greek coalition leaders agree to and try to implement, such is the weakness of Greek capitalism, it will not be able to meet its fiscal targets or get its debt down to reasonable levels. Before the end of the year, the Troika will have to report that Greece is not delivering. Then the EU leaders will have to decide whether they ‘let Greece go’ or not. The EU leaders have agreed to more money for Greece (or more accurately its bondholders and banks) in return for draconian cuts in living standards in order to provide more time to try and ‘ring-fence’ other vulnerable Eurozone states like Portugal and Ireland (where they are preparing extra funding). So when Greece goes down, it will not affect the rest (or so the EU leaders hope). Of course, the Greek people may force the issue earlier if they vote in an anti-Troika government in April.
As Greece stares into the abyss, Europe must choose | Maria Margaronis
Do we really want to live in an economic union that must destroy the future of millions in order to just tick along? Maria Margaronis points out that the situation in Greece today says little about Greece and everything about the EU.
The trouble with historical metaphors is that they can obscure the present: what’s really at stake here is not Greece’s identity but Europe’s. All eyes are fixed on Athens, but the way out of the crisis requires a choice about what kind of Europe we want. The one we have now, with its deep structural inequalities and its rigid adherence to a failed economic ideology, protects neither democracy nor human rights. Stiff-necked and punitive, it prefers to eat its children.
Comment by: Tom Scally, Leitrim
May 4th 2011 at 15:05
With 400,000 to 500,000 unemployed in Ireland now and this faltering “jobs budget” (or is it a jobs initiative, or what is is) promising at most 100,000 jobs in the next five years, the message is clear. Ireland is fast becoming the real-life laboratory for Jeremy Rifkin’s “End of Work” thesis. Ireland and the other European “peripheral” countries are the first to experience this historic shift in the meaning of work. Unlike the previous paradigm shift that brought the Industrial Revolution, we will not have the “big boys” to look to as models to follow. Because the big counties are doing nicely in the global market, so they’re OK for now. We will have to work it out for ourselves. Do we have the courage to pioneer Basic Income? Will be be the ones to to light the candle as the old certainties lose their brilliance and fade to night?