Basic Income: Here’s Where the Money Will Come From.
It’s actually quite simple.
I’ve already written an article about how Basic Income is EASILY affordable, in terms of the fundamental economics of real resources. That’s much more important than the relatively trivial question of where the money is coming from.
Nevertheless, people still want to know where the actual money for everyone’s Basic Income payments will come from.
The answer will vary from one country to another and will depend on the particular scheme in question, but I’ll try here to give broadly applicable answers about how funds will most likely be raised in a fairly typical, advanced, developed economy.
For the purpose of this article, I’ll leave to one side both MMT-based explanations (which aren’t necessarily wrong) and suggestions based on having an entirely new monetary system. I’ll stick to the conventional approach of paying for government spending through taxation.
So, how will Basic Income be funded?
There are perhaps five main sources:
1. Money diverted from existing welfare schemes.
Basic Income can replace many existing welfare schemes. All sorts of existing welfare payments — for the unemployed, for…
