Despite some of the breathless headlines, Finland is not adopting a national universal basic income. That is, Finland is not scrapping the existing welfare system and distributing the same cash benefit to every adult citizen without additional strings or eligibility criteria. Finland is moving forward with one of the most extensive and rigorous basic income experiments in decades, which could help answer some of the lingering questions surrounding the basic income. The failures of the current system are well documented, but there are concerns about costs and potential work disincentives with a basic income. Finland’s experiment could prove invaluable in trying to find an answer some of these questions, and whether it is possible some kind of basic income or negative income tax would be a preferable alternative to the tangled web of programs in place now.
The Finnish Social Insurance Institution (Kela) will lead a consortium of think tanks, universities, and businesses in surveying the existing literature, analyzing past experiments, and designing different models to test in Finland. They will present an interim report next March, where the government will decide which models to develop further. The consortium will present a final report in November, after which the government will choose which models to actually test. The experiment will begin in 2017 and last for two years, after which the consortium will begin to evaluate the results.
Read more at http://www.cato.org/blog/finland-break-new-ground-basic-income-experiment
No comments:
Post a Comment