THBT Government should provide all citizens with an unconditional living wage

Pros:
Helps us rethink how & why we work

A basic income can help you do other work and reconsider old choices: It will enable you to retrain, safe
in the knowledge that you’ll have enough money to maintain a decent standard of living while you do. It
will therefore help each of us to decide what it is we truly want to do.

2) Basic Income will contribute to better working conditions

With the insurance of having unconditional basic income as a safety net, workers can challenge their
employers if they find their conditions of work unfair or degrading.

3) Basic Income will downsize bureaucracy

Because a basic income scheme is one of the most simple tax / benefits models, it will reduce all the
bureaucracy surrounding the welfare state thus making it less complex and costly, while being fairer and
more emancipatory.

4) Basic income will make benefit fraud obsolete

As an extension of (3), benefit fraud will vanish as a possibility because no one needs to commit fraud to
get a basic income: it is granted automatically. Moreover, an unconditional basic income will fix the
threshold and poverty trap effects induced by the current means-tested schemes.

5) Basic income will help reducing inequalities

A basic income is also a means for sharing out the wealth produced by a society to all people thereby
reducing the growing inequalities across the world.

6) It will provide a more secure and substantial safety net for all people

Most existing means-tested anti-poverty schemes exclude people because of their complexity, or
because people don’t even know how to apply or whether they qualify. With a basic income, people
currently excluded from benefit allowances will automatically have their rights guaranteed.

7) Basic Income will contribute to less working hours and better distribution of jobs

With a basic income, people will have the option to reduce their working hours without sacrificing their
income. They will therefore be able to spend more time doing other things they find meaningful. At the
macroeconomic level, this will induce a better distribution of jobs because people reducing their hours
will increase the jobs opportunities for those currently excluded from the labor market.

8) Basic Income will reward unpaid contributions

A huge number of unpaid activities are currently not recognized as economic contributions. Yet, our
economy increasingly relies on these free contributions (think about wikipedia as well as the work
parents do). A Basic Income would recognise and reward theses activities.

9) Basic Income will strengthen our Democracy

 With a minimum level of security guaranteed to all citizens and less time in work or worrying about
work, innovation in political, social, economic and technological terms would be a made more lively part
of everyday life and its concerns.

10) Basic Income is a fair redistribution of technological advancement

Thanks to massive advancements in our technological and productive capacities the world of work is
changing. Yet most of our wealth and technology is as a consequence of our ‘standing on the shoulders
of giants’: We are wealthier not as a result of our own efforts and merits but those of our ancestors.
Basic income is a way to civilize and redistribute the advantages of that on-going advancement.

11) Basic Income will end extreme financial poverty

Because we live in a world where we have the means (and one hopes, the will) to end the kinds of
suffering we see as a supposedly constant feature of our surroundings. Basic income is a way to join
together the means and the will.

 Dennis Milner, a Quaker and a Labour Party member, published jointly with his wife Mabel, a short
pamphlet entitled “Scheme for a State Bonus” (1918). There they argued for the "introduction of an
income paid unconditionally on a weekly basis to all citizens of the United Kingdom". They
considered it a moral right for everyone to have the means to subsistence, and thus it should not be
conditional on work or willingness to work.
Cons:

-Universal Basic Income (UBI) takes money from the poor and gives it to everyone, increasing poverty
and depriving the poor of needed targeted support.

Poor people face a variety of hardships that are addressed with existing anti-poverty measures such as
food stamps, medical aid, and child assistance programs. UBI programs often use funds targeting the
poor for distribution to everyone in society. According to Robert Greenstein, President of the Center on
Budget and Policy Priorities, "[i]f you take the dollars targeted on people in the bottom fifth or two-fifths
of the population and convert them to universal payments to people all the way up the income scale,
you're redistributing income upward. That would increase poverty and inequality rather than reduce
them." [15]

Luke Martinelli, PhD, Research Associate at the University of Bath (UK), created three models for
implementation of UBI and concluded that all three would lead to significant numbers of individuals and
households who are worse off, noting that "these losses are not concentrated among richer groups; on
the contrary, they are proportionally larger for the bottom three income quintiles." [37]Research by the
Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) in Finland, France, Italy, and the UK
concludes that "rather than reducing the overall headcount of those in poverty, a BI [basic income]
would change the composition of the income-poor population" and thus "would not prove to be an
effective tool for reducing poverty." [39]

UBIs are less cost-effective than targeted welfare programs because many people lack more than just
cash. [19][24] UBI does not cure addiction, poor health, lack of skills, or other factors that contribute to
poverty. [19]
-UBI removes the incentive to work, adversely affecting the economy and leading to a labor and skills -
shortage.

Earned income motivates people to work, to be successful, to cooperate with colleagues, and to gain
skills; however, "if we pay people, unconditionally, to do nothing... they will do nothing" and this leads
to a less effective economy, says Charles Wyplosz, PhD, Professor of International Economics at the
Graduate Institute in Geneva (Switzerland). [33] Economist Allison Schrager, PhD, says that a strong
economy relies on people being motivated to work hard, and in order to motivate people there needs to
be an element of uncertainty for the future. UBI, providing guaranteed security, removes this
uncertainty. [36]

Elizabeth Anderson, PhD, Professor of Philosophy and Women's Studies at the University of Michigan,
says that a UBI would cause people "to abjure work for a life of idle fun... [and] depress the willingness
to produce and pay taxes of those who resent having to support them." [17]

In 2016, the Swiss government opposed implementation of UBI, stating that it would entice fewer
people to work and thus exacerbate the current labor and skills shortages. [34]

Guaranteed income trials in the United States in the 1960s and 1970s found that the people that
received payments worked fewer hours. [9]

-UBI is too expensive.

Y Combinator, a startup incubator, is going to run a UBI trial in Oakland, California, providing individual
participants with $1,000-$2,000 a month. [22] A $2,000 a month per head of household UBI would cost
an estimated $2.275 trillion annually, says Marc Joffe, MBA, MPA, Director of Policy Research at the
California Policy Center. [23] Some of this cost could be offset by eliminating federal, state, and local
assistance programs; however, by Joffe's calculation, "these offsets total only $810 billion... [leaving] a
net budgetary cost of over $1.4 trillion for a universal basic income program." [23]

The UBI trial in Finland provides participants with €560 ($673 USD) a month for two years. [21] lkka
Kaukoranta, MS, Chief Economist of the Central Organization of Finnish Trade Unions (SAK), says that
Finland's UBI model is "impossibly expensive, since it would increase the government deficit by about 5
percent [of GDP]." [20]

In a Sep. 14, 2016 parliamentary debate, UK Minister for Employment, Damian Hinds, rejected the idea
of UBI, saying that estimated implementation costs ranging from £8.2 billion - £160 billion ($10.8 billion
- $211 billion USD) are "clearly unaffordable." [38]

Economist John Kay, Research Fellow at the University of Oxford, studied proposed UBI levels in Finland,
France, Germany, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and the United States, and concluded that, in all of
these countries, UBI at a level which can guarantee an acceptable standard of living is "impossibly
expensive... Either the level of basic income is unacceptably low, or the cost of providing it is
unacceptably high." [41]

-It will be unfair to rich people

-Some people use this facility wrongly, not buying what they need , but what they want