In welfare, I advocate for a universal basic income. And by basic, I mean enough to live on reasonably comfortably if you don't have a job. Everyone will get this amount regardless of if they have a job or not. It would replace most forms of welfare which presently exist, greatly reducing bureaucracy. Some argue this would discourage people from looking for work, but that hasn't been the case in places it's been trialed so far. Finland is considering a national level trial.
How are you going to pay for this? Even at full employment, the working population is always going to be significantly smaller than the total because of non-working people like children, retired people, and those physically or mentally unable to work.
Generally a working/total population of 70% is considered good and below 50% poor.
Let's take 50% as an example for the sake of making the maths easier, and assume a balanced government budget before this new basic income, where tax revenue equals government expenditure. but the principles are the same irrespective of what actual numbers you use.
So in our example, every worker supports one non-working member of the population.
To pay everyone in the population a basic income of 10,000 per year means the workers need to be taxed 20,000. The workers then get 10,000 back, making them 10,000 worse off at the end of if. That's assuming perfectly efficient tax collection and redistribution, which is never going to happen.
So to fund this basic income, a new tax slightly more than the value of the basic income need to be applied to every worker on top of the taxes they are already paying.
Whatever the number of a liveable income is, how many of us can afford to pay that as an additional tax?
Even if you apply progressive tax rates for higher earners it won't ever add up, as that will create massive disincentives to work and a likely mass exodus of your top earners.
You can only undertake such a programme if you are running a massive balance surplus, either by have a vast amount of accumulated national wealth earning you huge investment and interest incomes and/or vast natural resource reserves.
But no matter the source of the extra money to fund this giveaway, it could be far better used doing something more productive.
I'm convinced it will pay dividends for national economies in the long term, as automation drives unemployment progressively higher. Imagine an economy with 50% or more of the working age population unable to get work (or enough work). Crime would shoot up, and consumption would be hit massively. A decent UBI is the only way I can see of avoiding this problem over the coming decades.
A country with 50% of the working population unemployed is pretty much collapsed already and a failed state.
As automation increases, people learn new skills and get new jobs higher up the value chain. So rather than assemble a produce, they are now designing it.
Education, improving productivity and changing jobs is how people remain employed in the modernising world.
Compared to even 50 years ago, the amount of automation in everyday life now is incomprehensible to the people back then. Has employment rates dropped off a cliff?
New technologies and developments creates as many new jobs as the destroys old ones. Employment will only skyrocket if a government and populous fails to adapt to the changing world to take advantage of the new opportunities created by moving up the value chain and end up trying to compete directly with new machines and technology as their own wages increase.
Developing economies can get away with lower tech levels because their wages are sufficiently low as to make it more economy to still use people as opposed to investing in machines.
Through growth, development, education and inflation, as average wages goes up, at some point the scales tip and it becomes cheaper to invest in machines rather than continue paying higher wages.
That is when an economy approaches the 'middle income trap' becomes a possibility if that government and economy failed to invest enough in its infrastructure and human resources through education and training and move up the value chain to compete for jobs higher up the value chain with developed economies.
This of course needs a strong tax income to prevent unsustainable deficits (government should run a consistent small deficit to create new money, but that's a different discussion), and I agree with those advocating for large scale tax reform. Personal income and most consumption taxes need to be phased out, while corporations should to be highly taxed. Not directly on their income, but on the use of things such as land and resources. Taxes on things such as pollution are a good idea too. Those which which benefit from automation particularly need to be taxed, not to discourage automation, but to compensate the public for lost job opportunities.
Not going to work. Corporations will just pass on any unavoidable taxes onto the consumers, fueling inflation, or they will simply pack up and leave your country if you squeeze their profits too much or even go out of business if they cannot do that.
