A guaranteed income: why not?

“The conservative Swiss could not accept such a thoroughgoing societal change when, in a country whose prosperity has not yet visibly deteriorated, they did not understand the necessity for it."

Gabriel Barta of the Basic Income Earth Network (BIEN) in Switzerland

So, Unconditional Basic Income. Means just that – unconditional. Means everyone (!) would be eligible to approx. 2500 CHF per month “to ensure the quality of life” and would allow everyone "humane existence and participation in the public life". Must admit, it sounds nice. Almost like “Bread and Games for all”, and we know how this ended. The idea sounds simple and actually reasonable, even from the point of view of some neoliberal economists, who say it would simplify the bureaucracy and allow to put through far-reaching deregulation concepts. Hamburg world economy institute (HWWI) suggests that not only „all tax-financed and delivery-financed social benefits would become abolished“, but, in addition, „all sociopolitically motivated regulations of the job market“ would disappear.

All this is nice, until some serious questions arise. First and foremost: who’s gonna finance it? If every citizen received, for example, 2,500 franks monthly from the state, the sum to be redistributed would be nearly two and a half billion euro per year. If one knows that the federal budget consists of less than one third of this amount, the immense realization difficulties of the basic income step in.

Second: distribution. Only moneys received over the basic income would be accounted for. Anyone who lives off rental, interest or dividends, would be still eligible for the UBI, no matter how rich. This finance-favorable construction would be complicated and the gap between arm and poor would deepen for sure. While the old and rich population of Switzerland owes more than one third of the whole property there, just 1 percent of it belongs to poorer population half.

Third: Business owner’s paradise. With the wiping of bureaucracy, there will be no more protection against dismissals, only compensation rules to be agreed upon. There would be no more wage agreements and no minimum wages, only from company to company freely negotiable wages. There would be no more social clauses. The payments made today to the social security would be cancelled completely. So in reality the employee would have less rights than now and trade unions would lose their negotiation power.

Forth: The Unconditional Basic Income would only affect the private (property) wealth, if it is financed through the rise of profits or property taxes which is so in the least of cases. Using this principle the state would simply ignore the different financial efficiency or solvency of the single society members. It would leave the basic income untouched. The rich would only get richer, for the poor it would drastically decrease public pressure to fight against the mass unemployment.

Even if the unemployed persons would be secured with UBI materially better than up to now, the problem of their social exclusion would continue. Finally, such a basic income would become almost necessarily a problem for respective politicians, because it will provide a new incentive for poverty immigration.

What would be fairer is a stronger taxation of high incomes, property and inheritances as well as building up of the existing social system to a united civil assurance, in which self-employed, freelancers and officials would have to be included as well as the government representatives and ministers. Incomes of threshold interest, dividends and rent or lease proceeds would need to be looked at closely. But bet that if this is going to happen in the conservative Switzerland, a country where “economic realism is a cardinal virtue”, according to L’Hebdo,where whopping 76,9 percent of population voted against the motion, most of the well to do are going to do a Depardeiu?