To make UBI fly, we will need fair taxation. Countries will have to work together, exchanging data across borders, to stop people and corporations from evading taxes. Simply put, we must all pay our fair share. With good conscience, we can no longer privatize profit and socialize loss.
Then stop the subsidies, notably fossil-fuel subsidies, which hinder the path to achieving the Sustainable Development Goals – especially climate-change targets. This would benefit us all, while generating financial resources not just for UBI, but also to support affected fossil-fuel companies.
Warren Buffet and Bill Gates, among the richest people on the planet, have both advocated for the rich to pay more in taxes, the lack of which has led to a growing and enormous disparity. According to Credit Suisse’s 2018 Global Wealth Report, 10% of the world’s richest own 85% of its wealth.
Multinationals too are not paying their fair share. Apple, Amazon, Google and Walmart to name just a few, generate mind-boggling profits and pay limited amounts in taxes, after taking advantage of all the wrinkles in tax systems. If the top 1,000 corporations in the world were fairly taxed, it would allow for a modest UBI to be tightly and reasonably dispensed in countries across the world.
Something is simply wrong and broken when governments are deprived of funds they should justifiably have to construct a better state.
Lest the naysayers think this is a theory from the left, the idea of tax competition has been touched upon, for years on end, by the Organization of Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). Its members include the US, Canada and Western European countries.
This is what its fiscal policy experts say: “To work effectively, a global economy needs some acceptable ground rules to guide governments and business. Such a framework can help business to move capital to locations where it can optimize its return, without impeding the aim of national governments to meet the legitimate expectations of their citizens for a fair share in the benefits and costs of globalization.”
To achieve “acceptable ground-rules” and “a fair share in the benefits and costs” will require global coordination; because if one country begins taxing this way, highly mobile capital will flee to countries that do not.
There is no question that UBI will be hard to get going. It is important to impartially consider the pros and cons, the reasons why it has not been implemented at scale so far, and what modalities would make it workable.
A key complicating factor with implementing UBI – beyond its fiscal cost – is that it would not arrive in a vacuum. It would need to fit into and complement the existing set of social programmes, both insurance-based and needs-based. And rules would be needed to prevent double-dipping of benefits.
Moving to such a system would need to ensure that the incentives to have a job remain intact. That is relatively simple to do: A UBI should be sufficient, to sustain a person at a modest minimum, leaving sufficient incentives to work, save, and invest.
Finally, good arguments can be made for having very selective conditions – for instance, some that relate to public goods, like vaccinating all children and ensuring they attend school. Such selective conditions would not undermine the main purpose of eliminating poverty and allow low-income people to take calculated risks, to try to lift themselves out of poverty.
The alternative to not having UBI is worse – the rising likelihood of social unrest, conflict, unmanageable mass migration and the proliferation of extremist groups that capitalize and ferment on social disappointment. It is against this background that we seriously need to consider implementing a well-designed UBI, so shocks may hit, but they won’t destroy.
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/04/ ... nequality/
