The Big Choice About How to Implement Basic Income
Bit-by-bit, or all-at-once?
There are many potential benefits to introducing a Basic Income system. It could reduce poverty, provide greater financial security for millions of people, reduce stress levels, save on bureaucracy, improve work incentives, boost productivity, foster creativity and make a lot of people much happier — for starters!
Not everyone is yet fully convinced about the benefits and feasibility of a Basic Income system — so there’s clearly more explaining and persuading to be done. But as support for Basic Income grows and we get nearer to the stage of having widespread agreement that we should introduce a Basic Income system, one of the big issues we’re going to have to deal with is the question of how a Basic Income system should be introduced. In other words:
How should we transition from the tax and welfare system currently in use, to one built upon a Basic Income?
The exact answer will naturally depend on the specific country in question, but there are two broad, alternative approaches that could be applied: ‘The Incremental Approach,’ and ‘The D-Day Approach.’ We should think very carefully about this, because the approach we pick could be a major factor in determining whether Basic Income will be introduced successfully, or whether the whole…
