Switzerland to vote on whether every citizen should receive $2800.00 a month income. USA next?

That's the general idea, to replace as many income-dependent benefit programs as possible with a single, flat rate paid to ALL adult citizens. Hopefully, it would accomplish two things. The first would be the elimination of poverty traps, instances in which earning more money makes your life worse because you aren't poor enough to qualify for certain kinds of aid.

The second purpose is to redistribute income. Middle-skill, middle-wage jobs are going away. It looks likely that the future economy will consist of a small number of highly skilled people making a lot of money doing the kind of intensive creative/cognitive work that computers just don't do very well, along with a large number of people earning subsistence wages doing child-care, hospitality, lawn work, and other tasks that aren't worth enough to automate or offshore.

If that is indeed what the future holds, and if we don't want to live in a country with such a vast gulf between the rich and poor, the USA may indeed be next for a program like this.

 

Take the monetary incentive out of obtaining the skills to do the highly skilled jobs and see how many people want to put for that that kind of effort.

 

Yeah and they also don't have too many corporate welfare recipients pumping out free yachts while not working and stealing from gov't.

It's sad there continues to be this continual beating up on the have nots. Sadly it's by folks that frankly don't have jack either. You get these republican joe bob types that *thinks* he's one of the good ole rich boys because he drives a cadillac and hates black people.

These corporate welfare guys are stealing and they laugh at the joe bobs all the way to the bank. corporate welfare recipients HAVE NOTHING IN COMMON WITH JOE BOB REPUBLICAN. it makes me laugh. I feel sorry for joe bob but I cant support continual attention towards beating the poor.. ALL attention should be placed on corporate welfare, out of control defense spending /police force, prison force.

You are penny smart and pound foolish eddiewinslow.. not sure why you hate people who can't eat?

Our priorities are still real f**ucked up and it disturbs me.

 

i like the idea. it'd sure be nice to know our government started treating us with some respect.

i need a stipend just to keep up with gas groceries prices, not to mention everywhere else uncle sam gets you.

 

There is not a huge difference between $25,000 and $75,000 if you tax the person making $75,000 sufficiently to fund this program. That's what the missing information is. The math doesn't work unless a ludicrous level of taxation is enacted.

What you are talking about is the government confiscating earned income for the sole purpose of distributing it to others under an arbitrary minimum income standard. Unless tailored very carefully, there would be severe Constitutional impediments to such a taking.

 

dumbest thread of the year

 

Definitely not dumber than this one.

http://bbs.clutchfans.net/showthread.php?t=243954

 

There are different ways of measuring a country's wealth, of course, but as you point out, by that measure (and if anyone has spent some time in both the US and Switzerland), Switzerland ranks much higher than our own country. The IMF ranks the Swiss 4th and the US 11th, the World Bank ranks the Swiss 6th and the US 14th, the CIA World Fact Book has the Swiss 6th and the US 15th, and the United Nations puts the Swiss 6th and the US 18th. That's from your link, which I'd already been looking at (coincidence!). I thought it worth posting that information since many won't bother to check the link. Honestly, my own initial comment was based on spending a lot of time in Switzerland. Nothing more.

 

There is zero anger. I posted a correct statement (wealth per capita in Switzerland is clearly higher than in the USA). You disputed it (while posting a link that shows three sources, one of which doesn't even support your statement even in your own logic, and all of which don't address wealth, but GDP per capita). How is asking if you have been out of Texas an "ad hominem"?

Clearly, you haven't been in Switzerland, or you wouldn't have tried to be a smartass about them supposedly not being richer per capita than the USA. Someone knowledgable like Deckard, who has spent time there, immediately agreed with my assertion. Hardly even necessary to look up stats. You won't even find a place like, e.g., Scott Street in Houston (wealth-wise - if it is still like I remember it) in the whole of Switzerland.

I am not talking down about Texas. I am talking down to you - and this is only responding in kind. You first tried to be a smartass, then, when responded to with factual information, changed to a snarky tone that I should "ask some dude". What do you expect? You got factual information that corrected your incorrect statements - and you got responded to in the tone you posted in first.

That was not your initial assertion. Your assertion was that Switzerland is not richer per capita than the USA. You got schooled. Now you are trying to change the argument.

I brought it up because it has an impact on assessing the proposal that is discussed in the OP. I don't think that a publicly funded income of $ 2,800 per citizen is sustainable, even in Switzerland. I think that the idea of a publicly funded minimum income, and then abolishing all other welfare payments, is one that can at least academically be discussed.

FWIW, my personal opinion is that it is healthier for a society to have less of a gap between poor and rich than you have in the USA. But perhaps that is just because I grew up in a society that is clearly more egalitarian. My personal preference is probably somewhere in between what you have in the USA and Germany.

 

The Swiss Plan reminds me of the guaranteed income plan that was proposed and nearly passed by President Nixon back in the salad days of middle class America.

The political policies of those days made education much easier to get with a minimum wage that was much higher, lower tuition, cheaper student loans. An at least 50% higher minimum wage also lifted many out of poverty. More unions helped many of the working class make substantially more. Too bad for folks now subjected to 30 plus years of waiting for trickle down.

 

NIXON?? Wow, I'm definitely reading up on this. Fascinating.

 

Welfare reform proposal first introduced by President Richard Nixon in 1969 that would have guaranteed a minimum income for poor families.

The idea of a guaranteed minimum income gained acceptability in conservative circles in the mid-1960s when libertarian economist Milton Friedman suggested adopting a negative income tax to provide a safety net for the poor while also rewarding work. President Nixon liked the boldness of a proposal that would abolish the current welfare system, and he presented the Family Assistance Plan (FAP) in a nationally televised address on August 8,1969.

The FAP included an increase of about $2.5 billion in federal welfare spending, with the average family of four expected to receive $1,600 in monthly benefits. The plan also promised to provide benefits for more than 13 million working men and women whose wages remained insufficient to lift them above the poverty line but who failed to pass eligibility requirements for other federal welfare benefits.

Nixon’s public support for the FAP was not matched by decisive action to ensure passage of the FAP. The proposal failed to pass Congress in 1970 and again in 1972, as the votes in support of the plan proved insufficient to overcome the opposition from both sides of the ideological spectrum: Conservatives thought the proposal too generous, but liberal politicians and welfare rights activists, most notably the National Welfare Rights Organization, characterized the benefits under FAP as being too stingy. Liberals also opposed the work requirements inherent in FAP, the very feature of the program that conservatives found most appealing.

Although the Family Assistance Plan never became law, efforts to raise the incomes of low-wage workers persisted. The Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), first enacted in 1975, followed in the ideological tradition of the FAP by seeking to provide working families with greater after-tax income

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20120415171119AA7InDe

 

If no one's mentioned it yet, remember the proposal is only for citizens. A quarter of the population of Switzerland are foreigners. It's very hard to get Swiss citizenship if you're not born of Swiss parents, and the society is highly bifurcated, with immigrants used for the low skill jobs.

So, I could actually kinda see it working by making low-skill jobs not even worth accepting by citizens and they'd all be done by foreigners. The citizens would either get a well-paid high-skill job or would be supported by the state while he went to school or training or started a company or did whatever to get the skills necessary for the high-paid job. And, some subset of course will just get high all day instead, but you can probably afford a few loafers because you get benefits of citizens investing in themselves instead of working dead-end jobs, and of course because you can exploit the 1/4 of the population who aren't citizens. It probably isn't a healthy arrangement in the longrun, but I think they could still function.

 

Whether a country can afford to do something for more than a few years depends on that country's economic output. When economists talk about "rich" countries, the vast majority of the time they're talking about GDP, not wealth. In this thread, wealth isn't really relevant, unless the Swiss are willing to sell off their ancestral chateaus to briefly fund the welfare state. So sure, the Swiss are "richer" from the perspective of individual assets, but from a policy standpoint (i.e., income) they're pretty similar to the US; at the very least, not "much, much richer."

It's true that the Swiss don't have the kind of poverty and income inequality (e.g. Gini) that we see in the US. That's why I pointed out the similarity in GDP. One of my big issues is how bad we are at turning economic growth into broader quality of life improvements in the US. I don't like it when I see suggestions that we can't afford to combat poverty like successful European countries because they're just so much richer than us. Mostly, those countries have different priorities and cultures than we do.

That's not to say this particular program is a good idea. As much as it pains my liberal sensibilities, it seems like it will really affect people's incentive to work.

 

I wonder what the world could do if they spent 0$ on the military and weapons.

 

All you have to do is change basic human nature! No problem.

 

i like that nixon's plan was the fap plan, id fap to that if i was poor

 

Our military machine creates quite a chunk of middle class jobs. So again, you are proposing to hit the middle class again to prop those who don't make a certain level of income.

 

The same jobs we could then afford to give people to do all kinds of things like rebuilding roads, bridges, infrastructure, protecting the border, etc.