Source: http://www.wired.co.uk/article/finland-universal-basic-incom...
What's happened recently is that they declined to extend it past two years.
Finland just gave the money to unemployed people, so it just became an unemployment benefit.
Anyone with a job making more than X amount will be losing more money due to additional taxes than gained from their UBI cheque.
But if UBI was self funded (endowment system) we could fix that problem.
I'm not an absolutist about it, and I'm happy to help people who need the help. However, I think it's reasonable to expect people who are able to pull their own weight.
+ just for the sake of simplicity, hopefully in a real system the fraction I'm supporting is less than one
Edit: Formatting
As far as I understand modern production technologies may need rather humble number of humans to produce amounts of goods enough for much much much more people so the situation when one man work yields enough to feed a thousand is not a fantasy. I actually doubt many people that actually do useful productive work do just the amount to feed themselves even if they are paid just the amount.
And there also is a huge number of obstacles that can prevent people from doing what they are good at or anything useful at all. In many countries and in many areas people still have to compete to get a job even if they are willing to work. A coder can be denied a job for not smiling enough, being bad at solving puzzles or having a degree less fancy than another applicant has. Will to do a job and will (and capability) to compete are very different things.
Now nothing has really changed and no decisions were taken. No reports have been published and this had not been intended before the end of the trial.
The so-called news is that the trial is not extended. But that's really a lack of news, an extension had never been planned.
(I live in Finland)
- 7 days ago, 169 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16874921
- 2 days ago, 36 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16910856
- 2 days ago, 45 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16909881
- 2 days ago, 27 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16912072
Many international media-outlets have published stories alleging that Finland is going to discontinue its basic income experiment. This information is incorrect.
“The experiment is proceeding according to plan and will continue until the end of 2018”, says Professor Olli Kangas, the leader of the research team at Kela (Social Insurance Institution of Finland).
