Sir, Thank you for your excellent coverage of CORI's proposed "basic income for all" scheme. Would that the London Times were equally receptive to new ideas! Instead, like most of the British media, it is locked into the fallacy that basic income is unaffordable.
This fallacy arises from over reliance on computer models which compare the costs of different policy options in year one, with no account taken of their different long term impacts. In the early years, there is little doubt that a universal basic income system would result in some people paying more tax than they might reasonably have expected to pay under the present tax and social security systems.
Over time, however, as the advantages of basic income worked their way through the system - stronger families, improved social cohesion, a more flexible workforce, increased incentives to work and to save, and more opportunities for young people to study, train and work the opposite is likely to be the case.
It is to be hoped that those engaged in the forthcoming study of basic income proposals - agreed by your Government as part of the Partnership 2000 negotiations - will find some way of feeding into their computer models the costs in terms of escalating public expenditures and reduced tax revenues of sticking with the existing tax and social security systems. Those costs include unacceptably high levels of youth unemployment, crime and family breakdown and the effects of chronic stress on health care costs.
Such costings would look very different to any produced in the past, either in Ireland or the United Kingdom. - Yours, etc.,
Editor,
Citizen's Income Bulletin,
St Philips Building, Sheffield Street,
London WC2A 2EX.