Name: What is Basic Income and why do we need it
Uploaded: 2017-03-25T20:14:09.000Z
Duration: 4 min 25 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

When we talk about basic income, we should be clear that we are talking about unconditional basic income,

which means that everybody gets a monthly basic income without having to give something in return.

Basic passive voice

Basic Income is meant to improve general living conditions

and make it possible for everybody not simply to survive, but to participate in society.

Furthermore the right to work will change into a right to exist.

Nobody will be forced to work, while it is still possible and made an incentive to work.

There are several reasons why a discussion about basic income is necessary.

Especially with the ongoing automation in every economical sector, which is happening right now.

Self-driving cars, warehouse-bots, software-bots, salesman-bots, etc.

And those bots do not represent a small amount of the workforce.

This is a list of jobs ranked by the number of people who perform them.

All of these jobs already exist for over 50 years, and almost all of them are easy targets for automation.

The only new job introduced because of the advances in technology is on place 33.

The unemployment rate during the great depression was 25%, the jobs above are 45%.

This list only represents the US workforce but nonetheless, if implemented on a global scale,

it will cause problems for the people that are currently employed in those sectors.

They will be competing against robots who do not need to sleep, take no breaks and need no salary.

The changes are inevitable and may sound bad for many people, but it’s rather important what we make of it.

Now to explain the idea of basic income we are going to use this simple sheet.

Every one of those bars represent the income of one individual.

Number One completely relies on social benefits as she can’t find a job.

2, 3 and 4 do have a job but they do also get social benefits of some kind.

7 does have a job and the highest income on this sheet, but also gets child support.

Next up, the green line represents the basic income gap.

As I stated out earlier, everybody gets basic income.

Also basic income will replace social benefits till they eventually disappear.

As 2-7 do have a job, they still get paid and for simplicity of this sheet,

they do not get replaced by bots, lose their jobs or stop to work.

There are many different ways to finance basic income but I’m going to focus on financing through income tax.

An important point in financing through income tax is,

that basic income should also implement an incentive to work, therefore it should also come with a tax free income gap.

If 2 and 3 still want to work, they will not get taxed for it as they are below the gap.

4 to 7 have a higher income and will get taxed.

The actual income tax will not change much and whatever taxation system you choose, all of them will get the job done.

Of course it would be possible to use more than one way of financing, for example,

as an addition to income tax also taxing certain products different.

To face some complaints about basic income from the beginning,

basic income won’t be implemented with 2000 Dollar at Day1, as the robot revolution won’t take 45% of jobs by tomorrow.

It will slowly rise and at first won’t make a huge difference to your income.

And certainly it won’t make you rich. It will give you a certain standard including the freedom to choose to work.

If you can’t, improve the work environment till people want to do it “Better pay”

If it’s gets possible or cheaper to automate it, automate it

Basic income would be a solution for the ongoing automation process, but there are more things that we would directly benefit from.

It would reduce overall poverty and crime, it would make the governments bureaucracy more transparent and efficient.

People who are handicapped would get better treatment, included better into society and not seen as a burden of society.

Productivity would rise on both sides, through automation on one and through the passion of the people on the other.

And for all the “We need more growth people”, even the economy would profit because everybody is able to spend more money.

Besides these important changes for the society as a whole,

each person on their own can spend time with things they love and enjoy.

Of course basic income won’t be solving every problem we need to face in the future,

but it’s an important idea we need to understand and improve to create a world worth living for everyone.