Switzerland will hold a vote on whether to introduce a basic income for all adults, in a further sign of growing public activism over pay inequality since the financial crisis. A grassroots committee is calling for all adults in Switzerland to receive an unconditional income of 2,500 Swiss francs ($2,800) per month from the state, with the aim of providing a financial safety net for the population.
Under Swiss law, citizens can organize popular initiatives that allow the channeling of public anger into direct political action. The country usually holds several referenda a year. In March, Swiss voters backed some of the world's strictest controls on executive pay, forcing public companies to give shareholders a binding vote on compensation. A separate proposal to limit monthly executive pay to no more than what the company's lowest-paid staff earn in a year, the so-called 1:12 initiative, faces a popular vote on November 24.
I'm not entirely sure what to make of these. I reckong that if they tried the 1:12 thing over here then the lowest paid members of staff in some large organisations would end up being made redundant and replaced with contractors.
Now I'm a proper fucking commie, me, but even so, I can kind of get behind a flat rate.
What you'd have to do though, is make the tax-free income allowance fuck huge to compensate. You'd have to have people on minimum wage more or less guaranteed not to pay anything and something like tax credits for people living in daft places like That London, while every cunt else pays 35% or summat.
>>85209 Flat tax doesn't work. Even if you avoid the issues of marginal utility by using a massive allowance, you're still leaving a fuckload of money on the table at the high end.
If you want to make sure the super-rich are paying their share, institute a wealth tax above some massive ceiling threshold. Make it high enough that someone with one property isn't going to fall foul of it, to ensure that anyone subject to it is going to be able to either earn or liquidate enough to pay their bill. Say 2% on wealth above £10m.
Doesn't that just scare the super rich of to tax havens and less scrupulous countries that don't take as much of their unnecessarily large income off them though?
>>85212 The EU would have forced them to from April 1st this year, which is the real reason behind brexit. If Article 50 gets extended, they'll be forced to impliment the new loophole closure measures regardless.
>>85205 If you put cost of living in income tax, you discourage people from moving from high cost areas to low cost areas. Most economists would consider that a bad thing.
Though honestly I wouldn't mind taking the alternate, long-winded approach of having the government try to get the cost of living down as much as possible as part of a general commitment to rescuing areas rather than atomised individuals. Back to the days of telling companies they can get planning permission for a factory, but only if they'll build it in an area of high unemployment, while mass chucking up council houses in London to get rents down. That sort of thing. Most people just don't seem to move that often, and when they do it's to an area with some family connection already.
The structural problems in the British economy are basically the same as in the Eurozone, just on a smaller scale. Islington and Macclesfield are economically as different as Düsseldorf and Athens. The obvious solution is the same - split the currency. London and the Home Counties get one pound, the rest of the country gets another, with floating exchange rates. Most of the problems in deprived ex-industrial areas could be solved in a matter of years if we just allowed the currency to devalue to a sustainable level.
Would it? Or would we just see millions of Londoners drive up to Middlesbrough every weekend to fill up barrels full of cheap petrol?
That's what happens currently in Ireland, people cross the border to take advantage of the disparate prices and taxes on things. There's even some enterprising chaps who park fuel tankers just shy of the border and fill cars up on the other side. Perfectly legal, allegedly.
So you might only end up fixing the economy for the handful of northerners already loaded enough to buy a lorry.
Petrol is only one factor, but it's the entire point in microcosm. You want to incentivise southerners to spend their money up north. You want people to blatantly take the piss, because that funnels money from south to north. You want hundreds of businesses to move their factories and offices up north, you want them to prefer northern suppliers. That's why the value of currencies is allowed to float, why Bretton Woods was such a disaster and why the Euro has broken Greece - differences in spending power help struggling economies to catch up, by making all their goods and services cheaper on the export market. We could rebalance the British economy just by printing a load of new banknotes.
>>85235 >>85238 Y'know, even if he didn't mean that, it's not a terrible idea. During the credit crunch, quantitive easing was essentially printing new money. However if that money was given to the poor, who are more likely to spend it immediately than the rich, it would have a much more stimulatory effect on the economy, for a negligible effect on inflation. It's only printing money repeatedly to fund routine infrastructure or to pay debt, that doesn't work.
>>85259 >who are more likely to spend it immediately than the rich, it would have a much more stimulatory effect on the economy
What would happen is that all the local / Northern shops would just put their prices up. This is capitalism / economics 101. Your printing-money idea would only work if there were similar, compensating controls on pricing and supply; otherwise this would balance out any benefit of doing it in the first place.
If you wanted to help people like this, just give them stuff, don't fuck with the supply or value of money.
>>85261 >If you wanted to help people like this, just give them stuff, don't fuck with the supply or value of money.
The people who say this line almost inevitably proceed to balk when you suggest going all robin hood. Assuming good faith, the fundamental problem is that this misses political economy. If I announce that I'm sticking up taxes and jacking up spending, the response - both on the markets and with the confidence of the general public - is going to be much higher than if I instruct the Bank of England to make some alterations to monetary policy which will have similar (if broader and less predictable) redistributive effects without overtly stating as much.
Frankly so long as whoever's in power isn't a complete idiot about it the risks would seem to be overstated. The 1970s were a total anomaly with disproportionate mindshare and almost every other country that has had major problems has already been a basket case before they went all macroeconomic populist. I'm not saying we should be the first ones to go out and try it and see what happens, it might still do bad things, but serious and sober minded people seem to be capable of thinking the UK could become Venezuela just because someone at the BoE had a shit day in the absence of any historical precedent.
>>85214 While I agree that government should be looking at ways to shift away from our London-centric model I do question how effective it will be. At least in terms of how solutions are now being approached. The London economy is built precisely around it being a global capital with the manufacture parts moved out to places like Derby (for Rolls-Royce aerospace). Yes, the rents outrageous but much of the work done in the capital is location specific and can't easily be transplanted without just hobbling the city.
To go back to the point of the HMRC, they have been doing a fair amount of moving the administrative workers out to regional hubs but there still needs to be a core contingent of policy managers in London. It's looking at the problem backwards when the issue isn't that everywhere else is shit but that London is incredibly successful and now suffers from national policy built on fairness but which becomes unfair regionally.
The alternative I suggest would be to embrace Georgism and attach the majority of tax collection to property value. That might still hurt London by it would at least have the knock-on effect of closing down the property game.
>>85261 >If you wanted to help people like this, just give them stuff, don't fuck with the supply or value of money.
I've long argued that governments should help address the stress of a downturn by buying everyone a pint. It's a bit like that tax holiday we had at the start of the Great Recession where sales tax was removed only rather than just a signal to consume it is one telling you to take some tlc.
Maybe we could go further and have public holiday camps with a special bank holiday in times of trouble. People could choose what kind of place they go (so I don't rub elbows with the riff-raff) but all would offer some greater public function like education or a special singles camp for bonking.
>Geneva is to raise its minimum wage to almost £3,500 a month, reported to be the highest in the world, after locals approved the measure in a surprise vote result sparked by reports of growing coronavirus-linked poverty in the Swiss city.
>The canton’s 500,000 voters passed the increase proposed by local unions and leftwing parties, after twice rejecting it in 2011 and 2014.
>The minimum hourly wage will rise to just under £19.50 an hour, more than twice the rate in neighbouring France, with a guaranteed minimum monthly salary of 4,086 Swiss francs (£3,457) based on a 41-hour working week, or 49,000 Swiss francs (£41,430) a year, in one of the world’s most expensive cities to live.
The world’s biggest consumer goods group is to adopt a four-day working week during a year-long trial in New Zealand.
From next week Unilever, the Anglo-Dutch company behind Lipton Tea and Dove soap, will pay its 81 staff there for five days while they work four. It will conduct a review after 12 months and will use the findings potentially to change working practices for its 155,000 staff around the world.
Several large companies have begun trials on a four-day week in the past two years, even though critics argue the practice would send many businesses to a loss. Microsoft said that employee productivity rose when it offered a four-day week in August last year to its staff in Japan, home to some of the world’s longest working hours.
The long-term benefits of treating your employees kindly are beyond argument.
A friend just told me that his boss practically sees every three-minute chat between employees in the tea kitchen as a misuse of work time, and is completely ignorant of the fact that it can boost employee morale and that those missing three minutes will be made up many times over by increased productivity.
I can see a four-day week boosting productivity in certain parts of the economy, but it always depends on what industry you are talking about. Companies that are more manufacturing centered aren't just going to be able to shut off all their machines Thursday evening because the people operating them get to go home for the weekend. There will be no increase in productivity there, because unlike the "human production factor", machines don't usually need recuperation time after which higher numbers of product X can be churned out. On the days that a machine is standing still, it typically doesn't cover its cost, and that should neutralise the increased productivity that you get from giving employees operating those machines more downtime.
But a company that chiefly produces software like Microsoft and doesn't rely on machinery as such beyond a few PCs that people write their code on can really see increased productivity on the whole from a shortened work week.
>>91824 >Companies that are more manufacturing centered aren't just going to be able to shut off all their machines Thursday evening because the people operating them get to go home for the weekend. There will be no increase in productivity there, because unlike the "human production factor", machines don't usually need recuperation time after which higher numbers of product X can be churned out. On the days that a machine is standing still, it typically doesn't cover its cost, and that should neutralise the increased productivity that you get from giving employees operating those machines more downtime.
Unilever have said that it will be staggered so that there won't be a day they have to shut everything down.
I don't work in manufacturing, but somewhere that does require 24 hour coverage, but still does a four day week - we just stagger people and shifts, it's not much of an issue. It also means nobody has to work permanent nights, or nights at all really - admittedly 1800-0100 is not the greatest shift in the world, but it's far better than the old industry standard way of doing five 12 hour shifts then four off.
I've always thought part of the problem is simply old fashioned management or whoever, sometimes the workers themselves, who can't get their head out of the idea that work happens 9-5, Monday to Friday, and that's that. This demonstrates it quite nicely, otherlad made some good points but then just entirely failed to consider the idea that you might not just have every cunt in the factory on the same shift.
I'm working 4/7 shifts at the minute, we don't need quite 24 hour coverage but we cover 8am to 10pm, and if anything needs attention in between those hours someone is on call. But the transition to this working arrangement took years of battling, but in favour of and against it by the unions and the bosses and the curmudgeonley old workers who didn't want to have to work Saturdays, and so on. These people who are all perfectly happy with McDonalds being open 24 hours but as far as they're concerned, nobody real works outside the typical 9-5.
It's always pissed me off because I'm a lot happier doing late shifts, it just suits my body clock better, I'd start at 2 and finish at 12 ideally. But even now that we're on the extended hours, I can't work my preferred hours as much as I like, because the other lot insist they get their fair share of the enhanced evening pay. These are the same people who spent over five years fighting tooth and nail not to have to do it at all, and I would have happily covered that shift from now until retirement so they didn't have to- But that'd be unfair because I'd get more money.
>A universal basic income scheme is to be trialled in Wales, meaning adults, regardless of their means, will receive a regular sum of money. The idea is that this would cover the basic cost of living.
>First Minister Mark Drakeford said the pilot would "see whether the promises that basic income holds out are genuinely delivered" in people's lives. But the Conservatives said Wales should not become "a petri dish for failed left-wing policies".
>Mr Drakeford said a pilot would "need to be carefully designed to make sure that it is genuinely adding income for the group of people we are able to work with".
>>93663 So do taxes increase throughout this trial period? Will businesses see corporation tax skyrocket for a couple of months? That seems unlikely, but at the same, surely it's not a proper trial otherwise.
>the Conservatives said Wales should not become "a petri dish for failed left-wing policies"
Fucking hell. I hate them so much. I don't even support guaranteed basic income, at least not in the way I usually see it presented, but there comes a point when your party is actively agitating against helping anyone except itself.
>>93670 >UBI won't cause inflation because it's shifting resources from one economic area to another
I don't think they thought that line through. If my rent increases because of landlords, as we discussed in /boo/, then that product has faced price inflation - if champagne and anti-tank missiles become cheaper then it doesn't even out for renters.
If anything it's not only inflation on the basket of essentials but also aiding market inefficiencies.
Is it even really relevant if it causes inflation? Our economic system is more or less based on inflation.
It seems to me like it's one of those things that will get wheeled out as a negative when it's convenient, such as wealth redistribution, and then talked about as a positive in other contexts, like property market speculation.
>>93677 Our economy needs a balanced and steady rate of inflation, not least to encourage investment and adjust to productivity gains. Mess with that balance either way and bad things will happen that can quickly turn into freefall as public confidence in the pound evaporates.
It's illustrative that one of the few examples of a deliberate price inflation of essentials was shock therapy in the Soviet Union to ensure the country avoided starvation.
>Is it even really relevant if it causes inflation?
If the government gives me £9 and a loaf of bread now costs £10 then I've not gained under UBI. That's a simplified example but it's what the argument is getting at.
>>93678 >>93683 Surely if wage stagnation would arrest inflation then the past 10 years would've proved it, if not been part of a long-trend of multi-decadal deflation. Unless it's all been counteracted by the government giving free money to people with connections and property 'investors'. Oh dear I've made myself angry.
Theoretically, maybe, but it presents a huge co-ordination problem. One of the key catalysts of the Winter of Discontent was the imposition of pay increase controls in an attempt to limit inflation.
>A universal basic income of £1,600 a month is to be trialled in England for the first time in a pilot programme.
>Thirty people will be paid a lump sum without conditions each month for two years and will be observed to understand the effects on their lives. Two places in England have been selected for the micro pilot scheme: central Jarrow, in north-east England, and East Finchley, in north London.
I'd be interested to see what happens if people in the multimillion pound mansions win. Let's hope their new wealth doesn't send them off the deep end.