Several years after launching a trial, Ireland is set to make its basic income for artists program permanent starting in 2026.
Under the program, selected artists receive a weekly payment of approximately $375, or about $1,500 per month. There are 2,000 spots available, with applications set to open in September 2026; eligibility criteria have not yet been announced. The government may expand the program to additional applicants in the future, should more funding become available, according to Irish broadcaster RTÉ.
The current program, which began in 2022 and is set to end in February after a six-month extension agreed to earlier this year, was launched to support the arts sector following the pandemic. Many artists suffered disproportionate income losses during that time due to the cancelation of live performances and events.
For the pilot, applicants could apply under visual arts, theater, literature, music, dance, opera, film, circuses, and architecture. They were required to submit two pieces of evidence proving that they were professional cultural workers, such as proof of income from art sales, membership in a professional body, or reviews. At the time, the New York Timesreported that more than 9,000 people applied, with 8,200 deemed eligible and 2,000 randomly selected to receive payments. Another 1,000 eligible applicants were placed in a control group to be monitored but not receive funds.
The announcement follows the release of an external report by UK-based consultants Alma Economics, which found that the pilot cost €72 million to date but generated nearly €80 million in total benefits to the Irish economy. The report also found that recipients’ arts-related income increased by more than €500 per month on average, income from non-arts work decreased by around €280, and reliance on other social programs declined, with participants receiving €100 less per month on average.
“The economic return on this investment in Ireland’s artists and creative arts workers is having an immediate positive impact on the sector and the economy overall,” Patrick O’Donovan, minister for culture, communications, and sport, said in a statement.
The report further estimated that a permanent, “scaled-up” program would likely result in artists producing 22 percent more work, while lowering the average cost of art to consumers by 9 to 25 percent.
In October, the government released the results of a public survey on the scheme, which found that 97 percent of respondents support the program. However, 47 percent of the 17,000 respondents said artists should be selected based on economic need, while 37.5 percent favored selection by merit. Only 14 percent preferred random selection.
Ireland’s BIA program is a form of universal basic income, a policy that grants all citizens a recurring payment regardless of socioeconomic status or other factors. Such programs have grown increasingly mainstream—if not widely implemented—in recent years, as fears rise over the effects of artificial intelligence and other technology-driven job losses. Many UBI advocates have cited Ireland’s program as evidence that the model works.
“As the pilot shows, basic income works and people need a UBI now to face and deal with the many social, economic, and ecological crises of our world. The Network will continue to help demonstrate basic income within communities and show how it is a sustainable policy,” the UBI Lab Network said in a statement calling for a nationwide program.
“We need no further pilots. People need a UBI now to face and deal with the many social, economic, and ecological crises of our world,” Reinhard Huss, organizer of UBI Lab Leeds, told Business Insider in June.
They tried to call this "universal" until people pointed out it is the opposite of universal. This program is a wild distortion of what UBI is meant to be.
Everyone who would _like_ to be an artist, but can't afford to be one, is disqualified. Meanwhile, the acquaintance of mine who sold his house in London at a large profit and retired to a cottage in Westmeath to live off his gains and noodle around on the guitar a bit is a recipient of funds from this program.
Tellingly there's very little information about how to _become_ an artist with this program.
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A key component of the total benefits came from psychological wellbeing, which contributed almost €80 million. In addition, the report estimates that audience engagement with the arts generated €16.9 million in social value, based on public willingness-to-pay for cultural experiences.
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And, as much as I like psychological wellbeing (who doesn't!) - saying that it's worth €80 million when you didn't actually get €80 million doesn't help things when it comes time to pay for the program. I'm unsurprised that giving people money improved their psychological well being.
I'd be more excited to see basic income for Deliveroo riders and people working in chippers.
Ah Jaysus! Ireland’s has been running "basic income schemes" since the 6th century. "Modernity" is just a bit blind to how it worked. What we are seeing now is the secular attempts at institutionalizing it.
What we now call "Pastoral Care" emerged out of the behavior of some Irish monks in the sixth century embedding themselves in local communities exchanging advice for free mead and shelter. They started writing books about its effectiveness.
And so it became institutionalized world wide. So they would send a bloke to Ballykissangel, pay him to sit there, listen to the villagers’ woes on Sundays, and spend the rest of the week in the pub providing cultural enrichment.
Most importantly no numbers and report were used to justify these programmes. And this is what Sociologists say is the problem with modernity.
Corporate wonderland and McDonalds has convinced the "educated" numbers are somehow magic. And its easy to break that spell. Just ask a Kid to come up with a business plan to run a McDonalds. Its a super simple exercise involving costs and expenses. After they do that, ask them to scale it up so McDonalds can feed the world. Once you learn the McDonalds model cannot feed the world, the only path forward (for people who care about these things and most don't) is coming up with models that aren't built on top of numbers. There is a big reason the Church has outlasted corporations and empires. And its not numbers and reports. Its pastoral care.
> There is a big reason the Church has outlasted corporations and empires. And its not numbers and reports
Right, the Catholic Church doesn't pay any attention to its finances. It doesn't have regularly financial reports full of numbers that are carefully reviewed by several levels of leadership. It doesn't zealously protect its tax exemptions and press people for donations each week. It just kinda wings it and hopes the checks don't bounce, which they magically don't because the Church does good work in the world?
"The is a reason Usain Bolt won, and it is not because he is tall" does not imply he is short/not tall. You're arguing against a statement gp did not make
Ggp didn't make much of a point at all, just implied that the church had longevity because it wasn't obsessed with numbers and money and instead just cared about listening to people, with the ancient example of once a week in exchange for board.
Gp then sarcastically pointed out that they are, in fact, extremely obsessed with numbers and money and asking for money and growing that money.
I don't want to speak for gp too much but when I read that I thought it did a great job of pointing out why the implied causality of the church longevity wasn't correct (or at the very least wasn't enough of the picture).
> And so it became institutionalized world wide. So they would send a bloke to Ballykissangel, pay him to sit there, listen to the villagers’ woes on Sundays, and spend the rest of the week in the pub providing cultural enrichment.
Oh, for sure, being a minister of any religion is a tough job that involves a lot more work than many people might assume. That's the role GP was clearly referring to, there, though.
More usefully, GPs point, or something adjacent to it, might be stated like this: in our modern age, certain roles that were previously fulfilled by religious groups are now either being commercialised, taken on by the government, or left to fall by the wayside. As we navigate modernity it's important to understand the larger context so we can make better decisions about how we handle the resulting changes in our social support structure, and what we might need to intentionally add back in.
But yeah, don't become a priest if you're looking for an easy job. I didn't mean to imply that.
They really have Monday morning and Monday afternoon mass? Friday afternoon? This seems like a lot more activity than the Catholic churches that I know.
Growing up, the Catholic church which my family attended, and to which our grade school was attached, held the following masses:
* Wednesday evening mass
* Thursday morning mass (this was attended by the school kids, as well as a collection of retirees)
* Saturday evening mass
* Sunday 7am mass
* Sunday 10am mass
There was also a weekly or maybe biweekly Confession.
That was serving quite a small congregation too, so I wouldn't be surprised to learn that bigger parishes have more frequent masses (although in my experience larger parishes often have more than one priest).
Also, the job of a Catholic priest is definitely not limited to performing Mass. They're essentially on call for Last Rites 24/7, but apart from that there's also just various parish events they'll be involved with.
So anyway, I don't want that job, I want the one where you give out vaguely mystical advice and listen to problems once a week, and then during the rest of the week you're like a cool side character at the local pub.
I spoke to a priest doing this when a family member passed. He'd perform the early Sunday service in town, then drive 1.5h to the next valley over and do a service there, then drive 45m to a third church before returning to the first for meetings and elderly care visits. Worse, each of these churches had different sermon schedules so he was preparing sermons customized to each on top of his other duties.
> They really have Monday morning and Monday afternoon mass? Friday afternoon? This seems like a lot more activity than the Catholic churches that I know.
Yes! For Catholics, there are daily Masses (and the Priest performs them, even if no one shows up!) in addition there is all of the other services they perform: Baptisms, Confessions, etc.
Then there is pastoral administration tasks, writing Homilies, etc.. then you have many important months where additional work is required..
You also have all other programs that Church organizes, including charity works, various community groups, etc..
I can't speak for Protestants however, since I'm a Catholic but if there are any hanging around here, they can clarify.
Protestant churches will vary, but I grew up in the American South, where religion is at least ostensibly important (and a major cultural fixture in the past, though less so today). Usually one or two morning services and some kind of Bible study in the evening on Sunday, and Wednesday nights usually had Bible studies and a sort of mini-service.
Other nights featured smaller study groups, athletic activities (a lot of casual adult sports like softball are organized by churches), or special events like musical performances, choir practice, etc. And then there's the daily pastoral care (officiating funerals, visiting the sick, etc.). But in the absence of Eucharist as a frequent component of worship, and where confession and last rites aren't even considered sacraments, there's little fundamentally different between a well-run Bible study and a full service except the scale. The actual things done aren't really different.
Note: Episcopal services would be much more familiar in structure to a Catholic mass, and I believe Lutherans are similar (but, y'know, not a ton of Lutherans in the South, so I can't speak with any authority on the matter).
Probably depends on the region. In my country, the church i attended to had three masses during the week and i think 6 (back to back all day) during Sundays. This was only one of three churches within a walking distance, and the (mid-small) city probably had around 10-15.
Which is expected, since every adult was expected to go to church every Sunday, and many people, especially elderly, went during the week. Also there were four or five priests, and only Sunday masses has more than one attending at once, so the load probably wasn't that large as I make it sound.
I think the church has a few other things going for it. Guilt, redemption, fear of rejection from community, ya know things of that sort. I'm sure you're glad to see corporations taking up such tactics with climate-shaming and such. As long as it's not money.
I don’t think I support UBI but one thing I like about the concept is the absence of eligibility testing that does away with the related bureaucracy. If the bureaucratic overhead stays it’s basically just another government welfare program.
An underrated reason to remove eligibility testing is to make programs accessible for people in poverty. Navigating a means-tested welfare program is byzantine in the worst way-- accessing and submitting countless forms with confusing, often ambiguous or incomplete instructions; standing in long lines at specific times/locations far from the city center to get help or make progress; complete lack of process transparency; and dependence on faceless bureaucrats to decide your fate.
My family once had to navigate Medicaid. I was well-resourced, understood the expected outcome thoroughly, was motivated to get it done, and committed the time to follow the required process. When our initial application was mishandled due to inaccurate guidance, it took over 2 years of persistent failed communications with the various county, state, and federal agencies, back-office middlemen, doctors, and legislators to get any response beyond "apply again and hope for the best", which we did several times to no avail. In the mean time, having a Medicaid application open changes the availability of medical care, as some doctors will not or cannot by law accept additional Medicaid patients. Eventually by some mild social engineering I procured direct access to a specific empowered bureaucrat who had knowledge of a separate set of applicable rules/processes and resolved our case immediately.
Most people in poverty do not have the time, attention, or stamina to persist through means testing on top of struggling against whatever landed them in poverty in the first place. Every time I visited the county office, I would hear someone complaining about how they had applied 8 times without success for a program everyone in the room agreed they should qualify for. Means-testing is designed, by popular demand, to make accessing benefits difficult for the sake of spending less. UBI, for all its faults, at least addresses that problem.
This is the main benefit of UBI specifically - if something is truly universal, you don't have to spend inordinate amounts of time, energy, labour, and money on making sure people don't get it. In fact, there are a lot of articles about the idea of UBI and how governments could pay for it that tend to show that more than half the cost of UBI could be paid for by the funds going to existing programs and the funds going to keeping people off of those existing programs.
It could also replace existing government programs like employment insurance, parental leave, child welfare payments, sales tax rebates, and so on, and simplify the rules for all of the above. Did you know that in Canada the government pays for parental leave? Did you know that it's capped at a fixed amount regardless of your income or the cost of living where you are? Did you know that if you make any income while you're on parental leave - even if it's 'passive income' like sales of an ebook - you have to report it and they take it out of your benefits? So that you're legally not allowed to make up the difference between what they're willing to pay and what you actually need to live?
Sure, they're trying to avoid people double-dipping and getting government benefits they don't need on top of income they're already getting, but in practice it means that you're getting a maximum wage and if you don't have savings then the government may be forcing you into (temporary) poverty if the number they've picked won't pay your rent.
A universal and consistent basic income process with a proper sliding scale (so that each dollar you earn privately doesn't remove one dollar publicly) would simplify everything and let everyone get by to some degree.
I had a similar experience helping a disabled family member. Without being too specific, it's amazing how much effort and expertise it takes to access benefits to which a person is legally entitled. It's almost as if the means testing is inverted, you cannot access benefits without the means to navigate a system designed to prevent benefits from being distributed. We have a homelessness epidemic for a reason.
In Sweden everyone gets around 110 euro per month as a child subsidy, you don't even need to apply. It just shows up in your bank account. At age 16 the benefit goes directly to the child.
The main difference is that in Sweden you don't need to do any paperwork to claim it, it is automatic.
The thing with these kind of benefits is that the bureucracy involved in dispensing them often costs close (or more) than the money dispensed. The system is more efficient if you just let everyone have it. It is one of the core arguments of UBI vs Welfare.
In this case the benefit still counts as welfare, not UBI obviously. However since the dispensing of the benefit is so simple (registered with tax agency, which is required to have an ID) it carries the same argument. If UBI was a thing in Sweden it would work the exact same way sans a check for parent-child relationship.
Also the amount per child grows slightly with every child up to 4 I think.
How is it checked that you're eligible? Asking because the system in the Netherlands could be defrauded, people registering to be living in the country, registering X amount of children, then going back to live in a cheaper country. Not sure if their children were actually real either.
(this was a relatively isolated incident but as these things go, they overreacted, set up software that over-eagerly identified families as defrauding the system and taking their benefits away, causing widespread chaos and a still-running compensation program that's costing the government years tens of billions to set right (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_childcare_benefits_scand...)).
If the child are registered with the tax authority and have a personnummer (ID number) then the parents get it at their tax-authority registered bank account.
About that kind of fraud I never heard anything like that in Sweden, but I would assume social services checks if children are attending school and if they are not, they investigate the parents. So this kind of fraud shouldn't be possible long-term. Social services would get called if a child doesn't show up for school or is not registered in any schools pretty quickly.
I also think that home-schooling is illegal, but not sure on the specifics.
Everyone with a child. Or half of them anyway, since it goes to one parent only (at least for parents that live together).
It's not really transferred to the child at age 16. What typically happens at that age is that the child has completed all mandatory years in school and move on to optional education and then they get paid for studying.
Yes, sorry I mis-explained the 16-year thing. I think one highlight of that is that the benefit shifts to being paid by the CSN (Sweden board of student finance, they are the ones who provide subsidized student loans as well) and it is tied to you being a student. So if you drop out of high school you stop getting this benefit.
It saves a lot of work and therefore money. But there’s another layer to consider for many people. Someone getting benefits who doesn’t deserve it is less important than someone who needs help not getting it. You can’t scam a system that’s free to everybody, and there’s no incentive to.
A big part of why UBI isn't really viewed as a great option by actual socialists. I'd rather see us literally just give people food, housing and medicine without money being involved, but for some reason that's a tough sell to most people.
Yet even in "pure capitalism" America, certain versions of all those things are widely tolerated, if not seen as basic rights. Food banks, soup kitchens, subsidized school lunches, and other free-ish food. Very generous tax treatment (both property taxes and mortgage interest) for houses. Hospitals required to give free care to the indigent.
In many ways, I'd say the socialists mostly need to work on their branding and spin.
> In many ways, I'd say the socialists mostly need to work on their branding and spin.
Don't they always? As much as I despise the modern Republican party and Trump in particular, I think they're much better at messaging and group consensus. Considering Bernie Sanders' electoral performance, there were (are?) definitely opportunities.
People getting money who need it generally have other problems and so you need to get them in touch with the other help they need. Stopping scams of the system is a bonus, but the real value is (or should be!) evaluating everyone getting help to ensure they are getting the other care they need. Many people who need money are unable to handle money and so we still need programs to find them and ensure they are not getting scammed, or wasting their money (that is not saving enough to eat at the end of the month despite getting enough)
If your only concern is people who are scamming the system, UBI ensures they are not scamming by definition. (we can debate if that is a good solution or not - a very different topic). However the main concern should be people who need help, and a large number of them money is a secondary need to their main problem.
> [for] a large number of them money is a secondary need to their main problem.
This is true, but there is plenty of evidence in the disability sphere that it's more cost-effective to give people with disabilities money up front because they can spend it on their own needs better than government programmes.
Think of it like a business that wants to make sure WFH is comfortable for its employees. Many companies now just give a grant up front for monitors, chairs, etc.
If they don't do that they need someone to admin/spreadsheet what monitor is best value for the company, what chairs, and investigate perhaps all the accessibility needs that might need to become a matter of policy for the firm. Updates to employee contracts. List goes on. And at the end, people will still complain because they think the company chose the wrong chair for them.
Which disability? There are number where they cannot manage their own life and so need intervention. So we need to examine everyone anyway to ensure those who can't get management done for them. Those who are more able of course don't need us to do it - but they are also borderline able to support themselves without help.
We spend $850B on defense, and nobody ever asks where the money to do it comes from. It's only once you start talking about feeding people that everybody is concerned with the economics.
I commiserate, yet it's way more than $850B. Current spending for fiscal year 2025 was $1.5T (Trillion). It's the Unreported Data* tab. Clearer if you click one month back on 10.
Exactly this! National defense is a sovereign need but it should not be above scrutiny for how the money is spent.
Add to this the fact that the US Military is effectively a jobs program and there's little to no domestic return on that investment.
This subject gets artfully deflected by "We love our troops!" nonsense but if anybody is complaining about government spending they should be willing to look at all facets of it regardless of which side of the aisle they're on.
Far from above scrutiny, the military budget has been the go-to talking point and area for real actual cuts my entire adult life. While it's share of the national budget has gone down, spending has only increased in other areas to more than compensate for it. I can't really say the increased spending on social services has resulted in great gains for societal health, education outcomes, or really anything.
Not everything can be explained by budget percentages, but on the face of it redirecting military spending to other areas has not resulted in many large wins for society as a whole so far.
It likely didn't have to be this way, but we apparently are really bad at deploying tax dollars into socially meaningful infrastructure. That and there are larger factors at play.
It's been talked about (because it should be!) but not enough has changed. I remember the years in a row of the pentagon budget audit just completely being unable to account for billions of dollars and then everyone just moving on after realizing there's no way to enforce it without Congress and they made it clear where the money comes from (and where it goes).
Not only that, but ensuring that someone else did not claim the money owed to another. Look at how rampant income tax return fraud is in the US, and that's just bad actors claiming tax refunds on the behalf of others.
There is always enough money to build bombs, but never enough money to feed and house everyone. It’s almost like governments can just create money out of nowhere to do whatever they want.
Yes I agree and right now the system seems like the opposite: better ten deserving people go without than one undeserving person gets an extra penny, even if we have to pay way more in bureaucracy costs adjudicate everything.
I firmly believe that removing the administrative spend to run the current bureaucratic nightmare that is welfare would free up enough money to implement a true UBI. Of course, that's almost impossible to prove, but I just feel it in my bones that it's true.
Also, not all of the admin overhead would disappear if we got rid of means testing. I don't have the expertise to come up with a specific number, but I'd wager that getting half the admin costs back would be the absolute best case. I still support simplifying means testing for benefits programs, but not because it's going to magically free up a consequential amount of money.
> Also, not all of the admin overhead would disappear if we got rid of means testing.
Exactly. The same conversation happens with discussion about eliminating private health insurance: Other countries with nationalized health care still have their own overhead. It's less than the overhead of a private healthcare system, but not by as much as everyone assumes. You could completely eliminate the overhead of private health insurance in the United States and it would only change the situation by a couple percent, though most people assume it would be much, much more.
Precisely, people on the left wildly overestimate the admin overhead while people on the right wildly overestimate the fraud.
In the end, we have a gradually increasing idea of what the "basics" are which we should provide the poor / the elderly / everyone, and a decreasing working-to-retired ratio.
That is - the spend side is increasing faster than the income side. Europe is about 10 years ahead of us on this problem, but we are catching up fast.
I think the other problem with UBI, besides the fact that we can't afford it .. is that its probably actually bad for society.
Many problems come from an increasing lack of purpose in society. Getting paid to do nothing will not solve that for probably 99% of the population. Lots of idle time for lots of bored people is like pouring gasoline on a fire.
UBI isn’t “getting paid to do nothing”, it is “removing rapid clawback from means-tested welfare so that there isn’t a significant range in the working poor to middle income range where additional outside income as reduced impact because it is offset by welfare clawbacks.”
Mechanically the other problem would seem to be, if you listen to someone like Gary Stevenson, that it only works if you ratchet up taxes on the top end.
Otherwise broad flat cash distribution from the government generally causes inflation and all the money ends up workings its way up to the wealthier. So if you do not tax it back, it actually ends up being regressive.
The mechanism is something like - the poorer you are, the higher % of your income, by necessity goes to spending on basic needs. You have a zero or negative savings rate. The richer you are, the opposite. You have savings you put into income producing assets (stocks which are fractional ownership in companies, real estate, etc).
So if everyone gets $25k/year, the bottom end will spend it all on goods & services (food, clothing, rent) that are owned/produced by the wealthy. And it compounds as the wealthier then are able to buy more and more income producing assets from the middle class.
> Mechanically the other problem would seem to be, if you listen to someone like Gary Stevenson, that it only works if you ratchet up taxes on the top end.
That’s not what I'd call a problem (its part of most concrete UBI proposals), but, yes, whether you look at it through a classic fiscal lens or a macroeconomic impact lens, you have to raise taxes concurrently if the UBI is significantly greater in aggregate payments than the means tested welfare it replaced (which it must be to maintain the same base benefit level, and many proposals would increase the base benefit level), and any sensible implementation will do it progressively starting somewhwere above the middle of the income distribution.
Its actually simpler on both an initial and, even moreso, ongoing basis to eliminate multiple means tested programs and replace them with a single UBI with clawback through progressive taxes than to adjust the numbers in all of them in a way which has the same effect and then administer that on an ongoing basis througn the separate bureaucracy attached to each program. (Especially since the UBI itself, as well as the clawback, can be built into the tax system simply by “adjusting the numbers” in that system. Which is why “negative income tax” is a name under which a policy identical to UBI+tax financing has been proposed.
Negative income tax is probably a more straightforward to implement this.
Explaining to middle class people that they are going to get $20K UBI but their taxes are going up $18K isn't going to go well.
Remember whenever you setup a "good" government program thats dependent on 1-2 other "bad" government programs in unison (UBI + progressive tax increases) then the risk is future admins remove the medicine but keep the candy. Then the whole thing becomes unaffordable and the good program gets wound down.
Or you end up with crazy stuff like the UK triple lock pensions.
Two mitigations would be gradual adjustments, and a willingness to delay reductions a bit.
People shouldn't be sweating bullets about help being pulled prematurely as a direct result of trying to get past the need for it. Or have the marginal impact of increasing their earned income actually reduce total help+income.
I know somebody in an extremely bad health situation, and dealing with both of those perverse issues. Attempting employment would carry a lot risk. And with kids to be cared for, playing roulette in an already challenging situation is a real barrier. (In this case, it isn't government help, but a situation with similar logic.)
A large number for sure, and completely agree likely too much.
However that's against a projected total spend of $6 trillion in 2027, so 13% accounting for all profit for every level in the medical system (insurers, providers, pharma, medical equipment, etc) .
If you were to wipe that to 0, maybe medical costs go down 13% in US. I don't think US is seen as obscenely expensive and bad value (outcomes per spend) because of a 13% difference.
For example per capita medical spending is 2.3x higher in US than UK, so wiping out all profit will bring us to.. about 2x UK costs.
It's a deeper structural problem of utilization (lifestyles, behavioral), high labor costs (AMA cartel), incentives (pay for treatment not outcomes), etc.
Feelings are uncorrelated with accuracy. Last year, the US revenue was $4.7 billion [1]. The US population is estimated to be 342 million [2]. If we had no government, we could UBI everyone $13,742/year. This is the maximum we could UBI, and it is not enough to live on. But if you want roads, enforcement of food and drug safety, some sort of law enforcement system, national parks, at least enough military to prevent Canada or Mexico from waltzing in and annexing us, support for research grants, etc. then it's going to be substantially less than that.
I never even thought to think of it that way. I know that for a lot of readers that $13742 doesn't seem like much. And, cutting it down to (say) 25% of that —
$3250 seems like a pittance. But, I'd wager a lot of people reading here haven't been really desperately poor. I lived on <$8000 for a few years, and <$20000 for twice that. $3000 a year would have been LIFE CHANGING. That'd be things like preventative maintenance for my car; regular food in my house; guaranteed electricity; no fear of eviction; the ability to go to the urgent care clinic when I sick (vaccines for the flu!). Y'know ... BASICS. There's a lot of predatory stuff out there when you're scraping by. An extra 250$/month would've been pretty amazing.
Don't forget all the private sector jobs associated with means testing.
Read "Bullshit Jobs".
Also, taxes on the top are way, way too low. As evidenced by the facts that inequality is at a high point and the super rich are able to thoroughly control the government.
Edit: The person I replied to made a pithy comment about 'feelings being uncorrelated with accuracy', then made an incomplete superficial analysis.
Now, I'm getting downvoted with no logical rebuttal.
Seems like a knee-jerk emotional reaction to me daring to say taxes aren't high enough, even though inequality is high, and the balance of power does favor the super rich over the government and the masses.
Either that, or an inability to imagine the second order effects on the economy if people who are currently working BS jobs had enough of a safety net to persue their passion projects.
Even though their wages are private sector, the jobs are private sector waste to support governmental waste. Imagine if instead of getting people to work 40 hours a week to help a company determine if they're in compliance with a governmental means-tested program, people were just given money to live.
Some would spend their time taking care of their grandkids. Many would start businesses. Open source projects would have plenty of labor. Towns battling invasive species would have plenty of labor.
> the facts that inequality is at a high point and the super rich are able to thoroughly control the government.
Perot failed at buying his way into the Presidency. So did Bloomberg. Hillary outspent Trump 2:1 and lost the election. Harris outspent Trump 3:1 and lost the election. The idea that rich people thoroughly control the government doesn't add up. (Though people definitely get rich by getting into power. The Clintons entered the White House as paupers and emerged around $100m.)
Why do both parties cater heavily to the poor people vote? Why does Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security dominate government expenditures? Those programs don't benefit rich people.
Large corporations donate heavily to both parties and absolutely get their money's worth.
They don't cater heavily to poor people for votes. They use lies and misinformation to get poor to vote against their interests.
If the poor were actually being catered to like you seem to think they are, they'd actually have their basic needs met.
Why are we stuck with Medicaid and Medicare instead of having universal healthcare? It's not cost. We're currently paying more than other rich countries (which answers your 'domonating government expenditures' comment). Because the status quo helps the rich.
That still doesn't explain why M, M and SS are the dominant expenditures of the government and are directed at poor people, but the rich don't benefit from them.
It touched on an explanation even though it didn't completely spell it out. You really think our broken healcare system is worse for rich people and corporations than single payer would be?
You got that backwards. The incentives are less perverse than what our system has. Why don't you consider letting companies leech off of us as a problem, but you roll out a boogie man word when someone proposes a situation where our money gets spent back on us?
> to implement a true UBI. Of course, that's almost impossible to prove, but I just feel it in my bones that it's true.
It's actually easy to prove that this isn't true. Not even close.
What do you define as a "true UBI"? Take that annual number and multiply it by the population of the United States. That's how much a "true UBI" program would have to spend annually.
If we took a poverty-level wage of $15.5K annually and gave it to every person, that would require $5.4 Trillion, excluding any overhead of sending out the money.
That's more than all of the federal tax revenue combined. Even if we took every dollar paid in federal taxes and gave it to every person in the United States with 100% efficiency, divided evenly, it would still be below what's considered poverty-level wages.
I think a lot of people have "feel it in my bones" beliefs about UBI that they haven't stopped to check with some simple math. Actually giving everyone a lot of money is extremely expensive.
> So to do true UBI, you’d also have to raise taxes quite a bit.
That's correct.
You'd have to raise taxes across the board. There is a lingering assumption that we can tax billionaires and get UBI, but more simple math shows that won't work either. Even if you seized 100% of the net worth (not just cash in the bank) of all US billionaires, you couldn't provide poverty-level wages to everyone for very long.
In practice, this means that a UBI program would turn into a tax rate program. You might "receive" $15K in UBI, but your middle-class taxes would go up by $20K per year. So you're technically getting UBI, but your taxes have gone up to pay for it to go to people in lower tax brackets.
Another benefit over most welfare programs is that there is no welfare cliff. You'll never have less incentive (or negative in some programs) to start a job because you'd lose the benefit (other than relative marginal value of the next marginal dollar being inherently lower).
The spirit of UBI isn't to bring in everyone around the world and try to pay for it. No nation can pay for the entire world, no matter what anyone thinks. The US may be effectively more wealthy than most of the world, but there are a lot of people in the world. If you increase the effective population without increasing the tax paying workforce, it simply doesn't math anymore.
This program is an insignificant spec of spending compared to UBI though. UBI in most countries would be 50% of all government spending and welfare related spend is just nowhere close to that.
Which is precisely while UBI will never happen - it takes power away from the government. Replacing the vast majority of welfare with NIT/UBI just makes too much sense. It's too efficient. Less government jobs, less government power. So it will never happen.
The fundamental problem with UBI is that if it is enough to live on (even if it's a crummy life), then who is going to pick the strawberries? The ugly truth is our society is built on top of people doing absolute shit jobs for insulting pay.
If someone needs that money to eat they'll do the job, but if you're asking them to wreck their body in inhumane conditions in order to have slightly more spending money then they're going to say no. Even if their living conditions are lousy it's better than bending over in the mud under the boiling sun while a slave driver yells at them all day long.
Is there some reason that you are bound to do business with literal slavemasters? Are you incapable of resisting doing business with the lowest bidder?
The stats don’t agree that government jobs only ever increase. In 1990 there were 1 million more federal workers for a population 100 million smaller. I assume it’s a popular belief because the oligarchs gain power as the federal government loses it, and they have better PR.
> Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that".
There will surely never be a UBI that doesn't have government based eligibility testing. If you aren't a good citizen (that votes, is vaccinated, meets climate change goals, has a gov id, has a phone, etc) why would the government give you money? (Or more likely, govcoin?)
I agree that a big flaw in the welfare state idea is that even if at first it’s really “universal”, eventually governments and people look at it like they are “giving you something” and start to attach conditions.
It’s easy to find talk, for example from people who think universal healthcare should be applied differently to people who live an unhealthy lifestyle.
There’s also all other consequences like vetting immigration that will crop up as well.
Immigrants are nearly always not eligible for public funds, and are excluded from almost all kinds of welfare until their citizenship process is complete, at which point they become citizens and not immgrants.
This is a very America-centric idea. Most of Europe works on a 'human dignity is inalienable' principle that gives everyone, even immigrants, access to public welfare if the circumstances necessitate it.
This isn't correct though; in the Netherlands, you cannot get a residence permit unless you have a sponsor, income, family, or whatever. If you have a residence permit, you can lose it if you apply for welfare [0]. I do believe you're entitled to child benefits, but that's about it.
If you're an asylum seeker / refugee, you're entitled to housing in an aslyum seeker center and a weekly budget of E60 a week (for which you need to pay food, clothes, etc yourself - and which gets cut if you misbehave) while your application is being processed.
Human dignity is inalienable on paper, but in practice you get the bare minimum until you nationalize.
My experience as an immigrant to Europe (Ireland, specifically) was that I had no recourse to public funds, and when I first arrived, needed to pay for my own private health insurance. In addition, while you _can_ avail of public welfare (if you're on stamp 4, which you can get after 2 years of employment on a critical skills employment permit), doing so will negatively impact any application for naturalisation or permanent residency.
You have also made a comment in this thread that the Irish policy of building in the countryside is xenophobic, which considering the major changes to the demography of Ireland in recent times feels quite ungracious.
Can you elaborate? The current system says that you can build a house in the countryside, but _only_ if you have strong ties to an area and meet "local needs", which in effect means if your parents live there. This is a de-facto ban on immigrants, since they (by definition) will not have parents from there. It's also a de-facto ban on city people, but everyone I knew in the country hated Dubs for some reason, so they probably wouldn't differentiate much between them and foreigners.
Funny enough, I _did_ build a house in the countryside, and as an immigrant, but only by buying a very old house and refurbishing/extending it. I hardly view this as a claim on the public purse; I imported my job (by working remote for a US company), dumped hundreds of thousands of Euro in to Ireland (half a million just in taxes), then built a house after working with asinine planners and finally sold it at a huge loss. So Ireland got a bunch of money and another house. They're welcome.
As far as Ireland's demography, I don't see how people immigrating (mainly to the cities) changes what I said? Ireland is noteworthy in that it _also_ has a huge problem with emigration; it treats nurses terribly and more or less pushes them out the country, for instance.
Yes, it was the use of the word xenophobic which I do not feel was justified, and considering the huge changes to Ireland's demographics brought about by immigration, it felt particularly harsh. I do appreciate you meant by extension of the fact you need to be from the area.
Personally, I have some sympathy with these types of laws. As someone whose home town in the UK became greatly gentrified before I was able to get on the housing ladder, I find myself living a little way out from where I want to be. Some people are "Anywheres" whilst others are "Somewheres". I am very much a "Somewhere" and need to be based around where I grew up and where my early memories reside. My sister is an "Anywhere" and lives in sunnier climes, apparently with no sentiment for where she grew up.
What "Anywheres" tend to take for granted is they usually have a somewhere they can go back to, but the displaced "Somewhere" does not.
BTW, I certainly did not mean to imply anything about your use of a public purse.
> It’s easy to find talk, for example from people who think universal healthcare should be applied differently to people who live an unhealthy lifestyle.
Brought to you by the same people who oppose healthy free school lunches.
If the lunch were actually free no one would probably oppose it. It's that they oppose throwing grandma to the street when she can't come up with the property tax to pay some lunch-co megacorp to give the kids lunches. If you literally go to the grocery store on your own dime, bag lunches, and donate them for poor kids to eat I don't see how anyone could rationally oppose that.
Economies of scale are huge here, so no government is going to win in any reasonably functioning government.
Government would also reduce overhead from not collecting money for school lunches, thus making such a program more than 100% efficient here if scaled to every child.
Your assertion is underpinned by a false equivalence between scale and efficiency that does not hold in reality.
A few old ladies working in a church kitchen (the typical form these sorts of volunteer endeavors take) to slap PB and J (or deli meat and cheese) on wonder-bread and pairing these with apples and single serving bags of potato chips are going to run circles around the government when it comes to lunches provided per dollar. The government is incurring similar input and labor costs (let's assume the volunteers are paid for the sake of comparison) to do comparable work (i.e. what happens in every school kitchen) but there are entire categories of overhead that the latter has to pay for, and furthermore, these categories of overhead apply constraints that increase costs. The government provides meals that meet more specific criteria. It does not provide them more efficiently on an resources in vs "output of thing we want" produced basis.
You’re describing an inferior product (cold PB and J, apples, unhealthy chips ? drink) that also has higher costs due to packaging to get to those lunch ladies and more packaging to families as you can’t use lunch trays.
That product also needs to then be distributed to individual families vs being prepared inside a school.
So in terms of "output of thing we want" per dollar it’s a massive failure here.
PS: Deli meats and jelly are also terrible health wise, but I get that’s not really your point.
Why must we presuppose all these health and safety regulations that make it too difficult for a charity to just deliver a big batch of healthy meals at the school can't be eliminated, but somehow we can suppose we can increase taxes enough (apparently, in areas impoverished enough that free school lunches have this massive economy of scale you reference) to cover government or corporation supplied school lunches? This is just a rigged game.
In terms of economies of scale Schools can prepare any food using public logistical networks (grocery store etc) a hypothetical donator can do, but they just get more options and easier distribution. A friend ran a nursery school with ~25 kids and even at that scale she could provide snacks cheaper than individual parents. This was a for profit school and parents were themselves paying for the food in both cases, school wins even without considering the cost of ‘free’ labor.
As to health and safety, biology and human nature can’t be hand waved away. Food banks get specific legal protections for cases of food poisoning, but the underlying issues result in people getting sick. Similarly all that wasteful tamperproof packaging comes from real events like the Chicago Tylenol murders, at scale people suck.
There’s also inherent disadvantages when you want food to be preserved without freezing or refrigeration. Jelly is mostly sugar to inhibit microbial growth. Deli meats need to use preservatives you eat while minimally impacting taste when added to meat and we don’t have good options here. That’s why people have refrigerators in their homes, it’s solving a real issue.
> It's that they oppose throwing grandma to the street when she can't come up with the property tax to pay some lunch-co megacorp to give the kids lunches.
>If you literally go to the grocery store on your own dime, bag lunches, and donate them for poor kids to eat I don't see how anyone could rationally oppose that.
The health department will accuse you of running an unlicensed food pantry and threaten you with hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines. The useful idiots will endorse this action becase "it's not ideal, but we can't have unlicensed restaurants can we".
Restaurant licensing and "health inspections" always seemed so absurd to me. If somebody makes shitty food or their place is gross people just won't go there. We don't need daddy government saying which places are safe.
Look why don't you look up the concept historically and how it is used now? Its surface level stuff this.
edit: To give you an answer Welfare is given to those that need it. A universal basic income is not given to those that need it, but by definition given to everyone as income.
... people care about definitions. We all care about definitions. What are you even talking about? We're not politicians and we're arguing definitions. Dude, go out and touch grass.
It's impossible because actually removing precarity from people's existence would mean that they wouldn't need to to toil so existing capital owners could capture the value they create in return for being permitted to have a home. The implicit threat of ruin is a feature, not a bug. It's why housing must always be kept scarce.
That's why I defined the term. Any practical implementations end up looking exactly like welfare with another name because UBI is impossible. This also informs on how long we should spend discussing it...
Yet it strangeyl keeps popping up, and commenters get all emotional about it. It's like the Flat Earth of progressist hipster college kids.
UBI would basically be a massive transfer of wealth to rich landlords. There is no fixed price for housing, it's based on what the market will bear. If suddenly everyone has X to spend on housing then the landlords will decide that the price is X * 0.3.
> UBI would basically be a massive transfer of wealth to rich landlords.
No there’s no realistic scenario where that is true; that requires assuming (aside from “landlords capture all marginal income increases, as a first order effect”, which is silly in itself) that (1) the inflationary effect of the additional spending of UBI is offset by taxing money out of the economy (otherwise there is no increase in wealth for landlords to capture), and (2) that tax does not fall more heavily on “rich landlords” than society generally.
> There is no fixed price for housing, it's based on what the market will bear
That's true of essentially all good and services in the economy in the economy under a market system. Its true that some parts of the US have artificial housing supply constraints, but those are also under policy attack.
> If suddenly everyone has X to spend on housing then the landlords will decide that the price is X * 0.3.
A UBI of $X, in any realistic scenario, doesn't mean that everyone has +$X of additional disposable income, the difference from traditional welfare programs is that instead of a rapid clawback creating an area somewhere in the poor to middle income range where additional outside income has little, zero, or sometimes negative impact on program-inclusive income, clawback is shifted into the progressive income tax system where it is never (except maybe at extremely high incomes) consumes the majority of marginal outside incomes, definitely doesn't consume >100% of marginal outside income, and doesn’t kick in any significant way below the middle of the income distribution.
(This also eliminates having a separate mechanisms for income verification and clawback through benefit adjustment, simplifying benefits and rolling that function into changing the numbers in the tax system in a way which doesn't increase the overall work of assessing and collecting, so that you also burn fewer resources on administration.)
Do the math. It'd cost huge, huge amounts of money that would need to come from somewhere, except there is no such "magic money tree". So in practical terms it is impossible. Or you print money to finance it and things balance themselves out in the end through inflation and you end up handing worthless money.
It would depend a lot on just how much people value working or producing to get luxuries. I would guess people trying to do something like bag a wife/girlfriend would value them a lot if they were trying to impress a certain segment of most sought after mates and thus would man the machines to gain the prestige, but yeah there are plenty of people out there that are happy to just have necessities and then go skateboarding or smoking crack or whatever and presumably that would significantly lower production of necessities produced by those people.
It's impossible in any case, but if many people are OK to live off that money and don't work at all (well, as long as that money is worth something, as pointed out) then the whole society would collapse...
The trick is to make it enough that you can live off it, but the vast majority are not content.
What is the minimum? Something like a tiny bedroom, with a shared bathroom and kitchen (there are very few of these in the world so we have to build it - including zoning changes to allow it). You eat "rice and beans" that you cook in that kitchen because you can't afford more. You sleep on the floor because you can't afford a bed. You get two outfits that you have wear until worn out - and wash in the sink because you can't afford a washing machine or laundromat. You don't get TV, phone, internet - if you want those luxuries you have to work for it. You can borrow books from the local library, but otherwise you don't have entertainment options.
If we limited UBI to that level it is easy to see how the vast majority will want more luxury and be willing to work a job to get it. However the above is bad enough that I'm not willing to allow the truly needy to live like that, so we end up still needing welfare for those who need help (not to mention my point elsewhere that the needy often need help other than money).
I don't think it's impossible, just unlikely. It depends on luxuries being valued enough by some people that they're willing to overcome the tax and bothering to produce and there being enough of that to cover everyone's necessities.
The only human drive I can think of strong enough to overcome that is that it would probably give you better access to mates or prestige in the community, thus some people would be willing to do it. However you'd have to have an insanely efficient production infrastructure for it to cover all the necessities, I'd guess.
Envision for a moment a society where most of the most attractive women want to date the richest guys. And the way to become the richest is to produce things. Conceivably a large group of men would still work despite UBI so they can get with the "hottest" women.
Put this at grand scale and you have why a lot of men bother with anything more than living in a tent by the river. If that production is high enough to actually produce enough necessities it might work, but would require some insanely efficient production.
In America there used to be a 90% marginal tax rate the wealthiest members had to pay. They used their influence to do away with it.
I’m just saying, I know where the money is. One man’s “right” to own a billion dollars doesn’t outweigh providing the base needs of living to everybody.
Take 100% of the wealth of everyone with more than $1B in the US and you get $23k per person / $33k per adult. That's a good amount of money; the adult number would be enough to live off of in the right parts of the country. It's about 4x the annual welfare spend. But then next year comes, you have to find the money again, and you're out of billionaires.
Change billionaires to top 1% wealth holders (>$13.7M) and things are more tenable. You could run the $33k/adult-year program for 6 years, or invest at 7% return for $13k/adult-year. You probably can't get a 7% return for at least a few years after second-order effects on the economy and I don't know what those effects would be long-term, but these numbers at least pass the smell test.
An important point is that this wealth is purely notional. It doesn't exist as cash you can distribute unless there is a liquid market, and confiscating it would annihilate any liquid markets. Furthermore, ~70% of that wealth in the US is non-liquid generally.
That wealth doesn't become cash unless there is a giant pile of cash owned by someone that can be used to buy the assets at the notional value. Where is that cash going to come from? It can't come from the government printing money since that is just inflation with more steps.
Central bank prints the money, puts it into bank accounts or hosts the bank accounts itself. Government taxes money to destroy it. I think its interesting if you can assign money different "classes" or make it programmable; give fiat away to stoke consumption but make it have an expiration or prevent it from being invested if sourced from a central bank allowance, but lots of hazards too (usual suspects of human governance failure modes). Money earned "human to human" could have a different, higher value or class than money printed for consumption of goods or services that can be produced by automation also comes to mind. Much better imho than the blunt instrument of target interest rates for adjusting the speed of an economy and blanket fiat value.
I don’t mean to denigrate anyone, but I don’t think you understand that no amount of logic will ever be able to sway emotions let alone most propaganda conditioning.
People like the idea of UBI on an emotional level, and they would probably support UBI, even if the wealthy and powerful of the world came out and had a joint global press conference, declaring that the whole purpose of UBI is a fraudulent plant to further enrich themselves at the expense of everyone else on the whole planet and that UBI is just the vehicle for doing that. The response would be something like “ok, but when do I get UBI”.
Whatever the processes in humans is that allows such things to happen, it seems very common across most domains, even in fields where one would believe that everyone is logical and applies scientific principles, only to find out that no, if emotions clash with scientific logic, then clearly the scientific logic must be bent and manipulated to meet the emotion.
Another way of looking at UBI is simply as an adjustment to the tax system that shifts the baseline of the tax curve to that people with less than a certain income receive money instead of paying it. This probably works better in countries hat have a more nearly smoothly varying progressive tax rate than those like the UK which have just a few widely spaced thresholds.
Then it is simply a case of adjusting the parameters of a fairly simple formula so that the total tax revenue is as it was before and that the minimum after tax income is something one can live on.
The general idea is that in civilized countries you are paying out the money anyway, just less efficiently.
Government expenditures are ~30% of GDP in US. Theoretically you could just distribute ~30% of the gdp/capita (about $28,000) to every person in the USA, make them buy all government services on the private market (government now gone except to collect and distribute the single UBI), and you'd not have much tax effect on productive enterprise (or alternatively, distribute ~20% or almost $20,000 and return to pre-1913 non-wartime government services).
> make them buy all government services on the private market
The market won't magically provide all the services that people need. The government would have to have some mechanism that made sure that all the necessary services were available to everyone.
The national drinking age? Really that's just an outgrowth of how dysfunctional the US is, especially along the Federal split. Not really an issue in Ireland or the UK, neither of which is federated.
Don’t forget about giving the government almost all of your bio data, such as your fingerprints and eye-scans. All in the name of “keeping the system fair / keeping the s scammers away” or some other similar bs.
> I don’t think I support UBI but one thing I like about the concept is the absence of eligibility testing that does away with the related bureaucracy. If the bureaucratic overhead stays it’s basically just another government welfare program.
I don't support UBI, because it's the smallest possible sop to the masses, designed so the billionaires' can collect maximum profits from their hoped-for AI wealth machine without them being disrupted by discontent from mass unemployment.
Much better to nationalize the sector, and spread the profits around equally. Give Sam Altman a billion dollars and a pat on the back then show him the door.
There is no such thing as "the absence of eligibility testing." Otherwise, I'd be signing up for UBI for my 100 imaginary friends. Too much administrative overhead has always been a concern troll argument against welfare anyways. Even the most bureaucratic welfare programs have a administrative burden of less than 10%. With a fraction of that, you could easily screen out the top 10% of income earners from basic income.
My wife has won multiple prestigious awards for her writing (novels, memoir). She's published by huge multinational corporations you've heard of. She got paid about $100k for her last novel, which took maybe 5 years to complete. It works out to less than $20k/year, after paying her literary agent. The publisher encourages her to spend her own money on PR (~$20k).
Many of our friends in the literary circles of NYC end up teaching in MFA programs (Columbia, NYU, New School), but then they have very little time for their own work and the pay isn't great (she's been offered $4k to teach a course for the semester at Columbia MFA). Of course we do have friends that have gotten $1 million advances, but that is exceptionally rare and you have to be a bestseller at that point.
So, that's all to say, you can have an artist that from the outside looks wildly successful because of the awards and articles written about them, but they're in reality poor.
I earned about $10 for the last quarter for the second edition of a technical book I wrote--which actually earned out royalties. With rare exceptions, writing a book makes basically no sense unless you're on the clock for a company anyway and the book comes with lots of other benefits.
So effectively what you're saying is that institutions are willing to reward her with attention, but people are not willing to pay for her art after all?
> She's published by huge multinational corporations you've heard of.
Publishers have an interest in publishing stuff that doesn't sell as long as ticks some other check-boxes to appear prestigious or politically correct for the time.
Should society bear the costs of maintaining artists who produce things that are not in demand or have low value?
Sure, but you could say the same thing for teachers, foodservice workers, nurses, etc.... yet they are unable to avail of this program, for reasons I don't understand.
These are mostly employed positions, where employees have procedures to negotiate their salary with the employer (which might be the government itself).
Most artists otoh are self-employed, and the government decided that the country at large would benefit from giving some of them economic support. You can argue with the modalities but the reasoning does not seem that opaque to me.
Sure, but in practically every other non-essential situation (i.e. food, medicine, housing) that gap would be considered supply in excess of demand and allowed to work itself out.
This feels like it violates the social contract where we all produce things other people want/need, and in return we get the things we want/need. It feels wrong that artists get a special carveout there, where they get to produce things other people don't want (at a livable price) and everyone else is forced to create the things they want/need anyways.
This would be different to me if it were a full post-scarcity thing that everyone gets because the prior contract is based on a scarcity that doesn't exist anymore. This feels wrong because it both acknowledges that scarcity still exists, while taking money from the people producing those scarce goods to fund creating goods that are overabundant to a degree where the creators are destitute.
If we were collectively creating so many car tires that they were being sold below marginal cost, the solution would be to make fewer tires and have the workers go make something else. It reads wrong to me that for art the solution is just to levy taxes and continue making more than the market can bear.
Then don't count that money in a fake economic justification. Just say "the bureaucracy would like to assign people your tax money based on vague criteria" and leave it at that.
I think you need to solve the gap the other way, by bringing down the "amount people need to live", ideally to zero, and not by directly paying people.
There is no numerical value of UBI that makes any sense in Canada. Rent is expensive and toys are cheap.
You need universal basic services with income being a thing you use for toys and vices. So this hypothetical artist should instead get paid what other people are willing to pay but need $0 in pay for basic food, water, healthcare, and housing.
> It is possible that there can be a gap between "the amount people are willing to pay" and "the amount artists need to live on (food, housing, etc)"
It's possible. It's possible that there can be a similar gap between "the amount people are willing to pay" and "the amount I need to live on while I pursue my career in snail sniffing". So what? That's why my snail sniffing is purely a hobby.
Most artists don't make enough, though? Isn't that famously well known? Picasso was never rolling in it, burned his paintings to stay warm, and had trouble even eating.
Worse still, you're perpetuating a debunked myth of a starving artist. 99% of the artists you've heard of were able to support themselves with their craft - those that weren't stopped producing and that's why you've never heard of them (a prime example of survivorship bias). Van Gogh is an extreme outlier.
This seems both a) vague and b) based on a sample size of n=1. 85% of all visual artists in the U. S. make less than 25k/year [0]. Also, don't forget that most artists work in companies (again: visual art), like making story boards for anime etc.
Could be interesting to try negative tax on works from small artists up to a certain value. So when you buy a painting from some person of little name recognition the goverment pays like 20 percent extra up to 2,000 Euro, 10 percent up to 5,000 Euro, and over 10,000 Euro taxes are paid as normal for luxury goods.
Of course you'd need a bunch of bureaucracy to avoid it getting abused, but it would help artists make a living.
Seems like it could be an "infinite money glitch" if the artist and customer are in cahoots. Churn out alot of cheap artworks, even just fake ones, then split the profits. The bureaucracy capable of preventing this would be so onerous, would anyone still be interested in the dole for it?
> If people are willing to pay for their art then artists don't need a welfare check.
Copyright, and, to less extent, ticketed events, are a system of artificial scarcity, would be cool if this had a public domain aspect. At least a limited form within the nation subsidizing it.
There is a lot of value in reducing risk, variance and up-front costs for artists. Enough value that, to somebody barely scraping by, it makes the difference between a show/exhibition/etc being doable and not.
It also changes the distribution. I'd say it's a net positive if a bunch of artists get enough money to live on their art rather than the vast majority not making enough and a tiny fraction making the most. It's just a matter of correcting for structural factors that otherwise push towards an exponential distribution of income.
> It's just a matter of correcting for structural factors that otherwise push towards an exponential distribution of income.
Why is this a thing that needs "correcting" in any field, and why anyone would start with art, a thing my children can do with their fingers and some paint?
UBI (which I consider not feasible) is not meant to make it easier for freeloading companies. If they want delivery personnel, they should pay them sufficiently. The "gig economy" is a large step back, right to the 19th century/ It is not the goal of UBI.
Right - the idea is that with a UBI a deliveroo rider would have more ability to decide they don't _have_ to be a deliveroo rider (unless they want to be of course).
It seems perfectly reasonable for a state to want to fund its own cultural legacy and production (in ways outside of the market system), and not just everyone writ large.
This kind of thing is much more common in continental Europe, but for whatever reason the English-speaking world tends to have a problem with funding culture via government money.
My objection to this is that you're taking money away from teachers, waiters, taxi drivers, etc and giving it to artists, as though artists are somehow more virtuous people. It doesn't seem fair.
Any not to any artists, but only to those the government bureaucrats recognize as being artists. I doubt they'll be paying anybody to write computer programs with artistic merit.
That's obviously going to depend on the specific organization doing the funding. But I'd imagine you'd need to make some effort in contextualizing your work to the "art world" in such a way that makes coherent sense.
If it's just some private art fund that has their own arbitrary view of what art has merit, then who cares? But if it's the government taxing me, an artist, so they can give my money to some other artist, then the standard for what counts matters quite a bit more. The "art world" is highly nepotistic and is basically a playground for the rich to piss away their lives while feeling good about themselves. Art is something anyone can and should do, but being recognized as an artist isn't meritocratic, and I doubt getting government bureaucrats involved helps that at all.
Maybe understand it as a conceptual question instead of a question about Ireland. Only the Irish have a right to care about where Irish taxes go, we're discussing the concept.
So, who would you fund as an artist? Who would you tell "no, you're not an artist, you don't qualify." Can you acknowledge that this is a difficult question without calling people argumentative?
In practice it's really not that difficult of a question. "Artists" have a portfolio of work and are usually (but not always) engaged with organizations related to the arts: galleries, nonprofits, etc.
If you show up and say, "this random obscure software thing I'm doing is art," without any effort at portraying yourself as an artist, working in the arts, writing about your work, showing it in galleries or online, etc., then no, you probably aren't going to get funding. But you'd have to be pretty clueless about the entire process to think this is viable in the first place. These organizations are funding people that are socially "artists", and are not interested in some abstract debate about the meaning of art and then funding people that fit that definition.
There are plenty of people doing obscure software-related things (usually described as digital art) that are absolutely considered artists for programs like this. But they are deliberately engaged with the process, so the supposed problem alluded to here doesn't really exist in practice.
From what you describe it really sounds like outsider artists aren't welcome and to get the money you have to be socially engaged with the nepotistic "art community". This is highly problematic to me, as I believe that going through creative artistic processes is something everybody benefits from and we shouldn't be reinforcing a dichotomy between artists and non-artists.
I don’t mean to be rude or dismissive here, but I really don’t think you have much information about this at all. We’re talking about hundreds of different organizations with various different metrics for funding.
You’d learn more by actually researching them yourself and not having arguments here.
I don't think it's a worthwhile conceptual question. It was spelled out in detail on the official website; while it's completely valid to discuss and dispute the criteria for inclusion, abstracting it away for the purpose of argument is just shit-stirring.
Wouldn't your reasoning just apply to basically every situation, until you arrive at the most "virtuous" people receiving money?
I don't interpret this action by the government as bestowing virtue upon artists. It's just a way to fund something considered important culturally. It's not supposed to be fair or just, it's just a way to ensure that culturally-valued things are maintained without having to rely on the market to fund them.
Well, I think it only follows if the reason the artists are getting money is because they are virtuous. Which they aren't. Just because someone is getting funding doesn't imply that the reason is because they are deemed more virtuous than someone else. Usually it just implies that they are doing a specific thing that someone wants done.
The idea is that there’s practices that are good for society that fall outside of market value, and these practices should be protected or they die. Some things cannot survive in the market.
> My objection to this is that you're taking money away from teachers, waiters, taxi drivers, etc and giving it to artists, as though artists are somehow more virtuous people. It doesn't seem fair.
Why do people remember fairness and frugality only when money are spent to directly help those in need?
I didn't see anyone complaining when money are funnelled to industries (e.g. Big Ag) instead of individuals.
We don't know each other but big ag and programs that literally pay farmers to destroy wildlife habitat and turn plants in to meat (a highly ecologically destructive practice) are bad, and we should not do them. The CAP is horrendous policy from the EU.
It wasn't personal (sorry if that was not clear), and Big Ag was just an example.
My point is that somehow it is always some modest direct relief initiative that will spark endless discussions, while multi-million (or shall I say billion?) subsidies directed to already filthy-rich corporations go with zero public discussion and scrutiny.
This is a ridiculous argument. You can fund artistic endeavors without coating it in the language of UBI.
UBI is a way to manage a social security system. It is not a way to manage cultural heritage. Giving artists free money is also not a way to manage cultural heritage. If you want to do that you should pay artists for their works, hire them, commission from them, buy their artwork, all of that is more effective then just giving them money, which, again, is not the point of UBI.
Culture is subjective. Art is entertainment. Maybe the English-speaking world wishes our governments would solve infrastructure problems instead of distracting us with pretty things to look at.
My problem with it is that state art is propaganda. State art is state culture, and funds elite tastes.
If you want taxes to fund art, chop off 5% of everyone's taxes and tell them it's mandatory that they have to donate it to an artist. It's still bad, because people will have to register as artists and the state will have to say "yes, you are an artist" and "no, you are not an artist." But at least the state won't be saying "we've chosen you to be an artist!"
The state should not be intervening in or restricting art or journalism (i.e. expression in general.) Or any other form of expression. It should not be licensing artists, or licensing journalists. You're Zimbabwe when you start doing that.
edit: note that this is separate from intervening in trade and sales. You can still enforce antitrust, restrictions on content (e.g. copyright), or rules around fraud and deception on commercial art or journalism. One of the main purposes of government is to regulate trade, that's why they print the money, and why you get to go to court when a trade goes bad.
The UBI I support comes from a land value tax. Basically every citizen has an equal share of the land of the country, and rents it out to people who want to use it. If you use more than your fair share you pay in, if you use less you get paid.
Ireland has a stunningly regressive tax regime with respect to property - property taxes are a rounding error away from zero. In effect, renters pay (through income taxes) for local infrastructure and amenity improvements that benefit homeowners and increase home values, and none of that resultant increase in home value is captured in taxes.
Well, the property tax that I pay on the house that I own in Dublin is decidedly not "a rounding error away from zero". It has also recently increased, in line with the increased value of properties in the locality.
Regarding your second assertion, the construction of local amenities is in fact often paid for by the property tax. And in any case, what has actually driven the strong increase in the prices of houses nationwide is their relative scarcity now that the population has swelled so dramatically.
I think it's not a specific parcel of land, but rather, the total land tax gets divided by the number of people, and everyone gets that much of a refund. So if you own land that costs an average amount of tax, you're paying net zero. If you own land that costs more than an average amount of tax, you're a net payer. If you own land that costs a less than average amount of tax, you're a net recipient.
The other thing that usually goes with this proposal is that there would be no land costs other than tax. Land allocation would be like this: Everyone would bid how much they want to pay for the land; the winning bidder pays that much into the tax pool, and gets to use the land. The details of this idea wildly vary depending on who you ask - it's an extremely difficult problem to figure out what exact rules would work well to stop, e.g. Elon Musk outbidding some elderly lady's family farm just because he hates her (yet still balancing that with the need to stop her heirs from blocking development in that area forever). Maybe it necessitates human judgement in such cases. That's getting into the weeds though. You can see how that general kind of system would work, from a bird's eye view.
This sounds very interesting and fair. How does it address the needs of the people who create value. For example some one who might invent a transistor equivalent ? or even someone who wants to work on something that might eventually produce a social good like a new antibiotic. And how do we evaluate the resources going into that vs lets say build a Eiffel tower
Yes. It's also straightforward to extend to things which are also about use of a common resource, such as taxes related to pollution (airline seat taxes, etc.) Non-transferable shared ownership is useful and right for many things.
Why complicate things? Existing taxes are the ones which it would be sensible to start with, and existing taxes on things which we can't easily make more of (land, air, water etc.) are the sensible things to start with of those again.
Skilled labor is not currently taxed as a specific thing, and we can make more of it by educating people, so why on earth bring that up unless it's a setup for some odd rhetorical point?
It’s just more fraud and abuse in various forms and degrees. Not to mention what art is deemed as worthy of receiving this money and who has the power to squander other people’s money by becoming something akin to lords that rule over people’s lives through an incentive to please them in exchange for favorite status?
If it’s not only open to indigenous people engaged in art of the indigenous cultures, i.e., in this case Irish doing indigenous Irish cultural things whatever those may be, you could have some perverse injustices where, e.g., some Asian engaged in hentai pornography, living off the taxes taken from some old indigenous Irish lady who gets €500/month in old age support.
But since “discriminating” in favor of survival by preserving your own culture and insisting on your own people’s survival in the west anymore, things are going to get extremely perverted, in the sense of grotesque distortion and corruption, even more than already exists.
Unfortunately, it seems that all European ethnic groups all around the world have seemingly lost any and all ability to project actions into future effects or evaluate their outcomes, and seemingly have also been totally brainwashed into simply facilitating their own eradication and lost any survival instinct or will to live.
This kind of wedge of using other people’s money in a system where you are not allowed to discriminate in favor of your own survival, will ultimately lead to the destruction of the civilized world, i.e., civilization itself.
It’s the problem of the fat smoker, the ironic inability of the civilized world to see the inevitable long term outcomes of their self-harming behaviors… so they keep killing … only this time themself … and only slowly.
France has a long standing program for artists and entertainment technicians and while the niceties can get complex the big idea is that the State guarantees a minimum level of income if you work a minimum amount of hours per year for artistic purposes (507 I think), including teaching and rehearsals.
It's not basic income. It's a subsidy for artists, just like they subsidise foreign companies, the farmers, the remote islands, the irish language etc.
In the USA, all kinds of things are subsidised too, EVs, oil drilling, NFL teams.
Universal Income isn't universal until everybody gets it.
The bottom line is that in most countries all the basics are taken care off one way or another. Nobody really starves. There's shelter and housing of some sorts for anyone. Healthcare is taken care off as well. And if you grow old and needy you typically don't end up on the streets either. That of course costs money and is in practice fully funded mostly.
True to some extent in most countries. The US is notably a bit harsh on this. And people do end up on the streets there. But by and large even there people are taken care off.
My view is that society could be a lot fairer if we just formalized the status quo of all that a bit and just guaranteed it. It doesn't have to be super comfortable or amazing. But just provide some basic promise to people that, no matter what, starvation is not something you need to worry about. We'll keep you warm, sheltered, healthy, educated, protected, etc. If you want to have nicer versions of that, go and work for it and earn those things. Most people that can do that of course already do that anyway. This is not a massive change in many countries. We already have these guarantees. It's just all super complicated, wrapped in stigma, and hopelessly bureaucratic.
So bureaucratic in fact that many countries actively dis-incentivize work. Work literally doesn't pay if you are on benefits. You could go out and work for a few hours but you'd just get cut on your social security and lose your benefits. When accepting work becomes risky like that, something is wrong.
Germany has a great name for their social welfare benefits: "Bürgergeld". Literally citizen money. It's what you get if you are not entitled to anything else. It comes with lots of restrictions and caveats. But it's a great name. If you are a citizen, that's what you can fall back to if you have nothing else.
UBI would be taking that notion and just giving it to everyone while reducing their other income by the same amount. It would add up to about the same cost. It's a bookkeeping trick. The fear of course is that people would stop working. But the positive effects would be a reduction in cost of labor for employers and a vast reduction in bureacracy needed to police the whole thing. Germany spends almost as much on unemployment bureaucracy and programs as it does on the actual benefits.
UBI simplifies social security, taxation, unemployment insurances, pensions, etc. You never go all the way to zero. You might still want to insure something extra of course. But that's your choice. What we have right now is the opposite: a lot of cost and no choice. But you are taken care off either way.
>> And, as much as I like psychological wellbeing (who doesn't!) - saying that it's worth €80 million when you didn't actually get €80 million doesn't help things when it comes time to pay for the program.
Surely it's an €80m saving in something like health care costs or productivity?
Edit:
You've really ignored a lot in that RTE article.
>> measurable decline in reliance on social protection, with recipients receiving €100 less per month on average
>> Participants were also 38 percentage points less likely to be receiving Jobseeker’s payments
>> income from arts-related work increase by over €500. At the same time, their earnings from non-arts employment fell by approximately €280
Finally, your complaint that there's no information on how to join the program - it's a pilot. People were selected, the pilot was run, and these are the results of it. Either they'll continue with the pilot to gather data, end the scheme altogether, or open it widely based on the data they've gathered.
That's addressed, but it seems like it doesn't change the fact that it's a net loss
"""
The original cost of the pilot was €105 million, but after accounting for tax revenues and reduced social welfare payments, the net fiscal cost dropped to just under €72 million.
"""
The values you cite just seem like really small amounts overall compared to the cost of the program.
Again, though, my core issue here is that I _want_ UBI, and what this gives us is empty tokenism (if the pilot were this successful, shouldn't we want to immediately open it to all artists?) at the same time the government has managed to produce a catastrophically bad housing crisis and a collapsing health system.
Oh I would love UBI too. That would be great. But I don't feel like that's what they're trying to sell this as. It's "Basic Income for the Arts". To me it's equivalent to various tax breaks/credits. People get 'free' money just because they've had children. Various industries get large subsidies. This seems equivalent.
>> if the pilot were this successful, shouldn't we want to immediately open it to all artists
It sounds like this would be the goal but it depends on what is allotted to the program in the budget.
Budget sensitivities are exactly why it's frustrating when this program is presented as a net financial gain. If it were, budgeting for it would be a lot easier.
Psychological wellbeing contributes some amount of money though in systems that pay for healthcare (especially when that includes psychiatry). It's also to a degree one of the key things government spending is hoping to produce so if it is actually producing that it's a good use of funds.
I do agree the program needs to make it doable to get the funds in order to become an artist since otherwise it's exclusively for rich artists who can be an artist while waiting for eligibilty.
> I'd be more excited to see basic income for Deliveroo riders and people working in chippers.
Weird line. The point of UBI is that it goes to everyone. Which allows people to choose to be a Deliveroo worker for some extra cash, an artist if that fancies them or work a traditional job for that extra moolah.
We agree - I think it would be great for artists, deliveroo riders (but who are we kidding, Ireland needs an underclass of poor immigrants living a precarious existence), and teachers to all benefit from UBI.
If you look at the World Happiness Report, Ireland's scores have plummeted year over year since 2020. I'm going to go ahead and hypothesize that this program wont make a dent in that.
> A key component of the total benefits came from psychological wellbeing, which contributed almost €80 million
> And, as much as I like psychological wellbeing (who doesn't!) - saying that it's worth €80 million when you didn't actually get €80 million doesn't help things
There are a LOT of problems with this programme, but personally, I think associating a costed economic benefit with "psycholigical wellbeing" seems good. It may make a pretty good precedence argument for other beneficial-to-society programme pilots to point to when selling their merits. The idea of a government programme appearing to prioritise psychological wellbeing seems net positive.
Psychological wellbeing is great! But this report was much ballyhooed in Irish media to claim that the program paid for itself when it absolutely did not.
Making Tuesday free ice cream day would also improve psychological well-being, but that doesn't help pay for the program.
My taxes pay for the programme. That is why I pay them. If the programme benefits psychological wellbeing, then it is worthwhile for me to pay for it.
Whether you choose to quantify this in terms of monetary net contrib to the economy as a broad concern, or as direct public benefit, is splitting econ hairs.
Did "they" actually try to call it universal? I could (easily!) be wrong, but I don't recall the scheme ever actually being labelled UBI by the government, only by the media and commenters on social media.
To conflate this with UBI very much misses the point. This isn't some experiment in post-capitalist utopia, it is basically a subsidy for the arts. Societies often subsidise things they want more of and that the market, for one reason or another, cannot or will not provide. As someone who paid taxes in Ireland for many years I never had any issue with subsidies for the arts. I would be happy for the government to subsidise FOSS development, too, for what it's worth (and in fact the EU does this to an extent).
Can't it be a start? As people start get replaced my tech and still have the need to feed/shelter themselves, maybe piecemeal is the only way it happens. We all move into hives while billionaires become trillionaires and allow the rest of us exist under their benevolent and generous mercy.
> the pilot cost €72 million to date but generated nearly €80 million in total benefits to the Irish economy
I don't like how these reports speak with such certainty. How do you measure "total benefits"? For one, it includes income of the artist. Yes, giving money to people generally increases their income, so it would be weird if any amount given would not be break even to the expense, unless that person decides to do less of some other activity, which I guess is possible but unlikely at least for these amounts.
Then the study counts public facing artistic activity. Kind of hard to measure the value of that. I guess you could by saying "this person created a piece of art that people pay to see", but I doubt that's what they're getting at.
Then satisfaction and well being. I would certainly be happy with more money.
I personally don't think we have a lack of culture and art. If Ireland is at all like the US, they have more art majors (as a proxy for art creation). All artistic majors have grown considerably over the last few decades:
> A new analysis from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences’ Humanities Indicators finds that bachelor’s degree conferrals in the arts have remained substantially above average for the past 30 years. The data also show recent growth in the number of arts degrees conferred to traditionally under-represented racial/ethnic groups. As of 2015, departments and programs in the fine arts and performing arts awarded 80,360 bachelor’s degrees, with another 7,087 awarded for the “humanistic” study of the arts (subfields such as art history, musicology, and film studies, which the Indicators tabulate along with the humanities). This figure is down slightly from the historic peak of 82,778 degrees awarded in 2013 (or 90,543, when humanities subjects are included), and above the annual figure recorded at any point before 2011.
So the question is, what problem is this program trying to solve? Give rich kids that can afford to do art more money to support their lifestyle?
> "this person created a piece of art that people pay to see", but I doubt that's what they're getting at.
I also doubt that's what they're getting at, because if they were, there's a fairly straightforward way to, you know, pay the artist who created the art.
This is a regular fellowship. Nothing wrong with those, they can be government (assuming people are OK with this way to spend their taxes) or private. Those are pretty common. I was funded by a private fellowship for a year of my PhD; don't remember the details.
But as others have said, this has nothing to do with the UBI, as this is not universal. The main thing that makes this fellowship unusual, and not in a good way, is the fact that the selection criteria are shrouded in mystery.
The eligibility criteria was clear for the pilot[1] and has not been announced yet for the scheme from 2026 onwards. They selected 2,000 for the pilot which was due to end in June 2025 and was extended to early 2026 and in the 2026 budget was changed to reflect TFA.
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