Well, this is a balanced take.

Furlough has fook all to do with the inflation - what it did was prevent a huge deflationary recession with mass unemployment.

Agree with EP tbh. Shall we get Michelle Mone and Co to pay back the £40bn PPE fraud first, and then try this? 

+1 Bertha.  And all the people who took out the £50k bounce back loans (which were handed out like confetti) then folded their failing business.

Them too. This country is a fvcking disgrace.

Because I’ve had enough of rip off britain where all the cheeky chappies and chappesses scoop handouts they blow on bling and blow, when it could be funding proper state education and building competitiveness. Look where we are now. With a 0.1% of people making hundreds of 000s in monkey Inhouse jobs behaving like endangered species. Inequality breeds revolution. 

Bertha05 Jun 23 17:48

Early for being this twotted. People who agree with you find this level of khuntedness unhelpful "comrade". 

Obvious troll is obvious. 

I'm not trolling, just pointing out that you and escapingpuppyframe are oysters from the same shell. 

Hth

"Should further evidence be needed, there are enough people in sh1thole towns claiming that in benefits and contributing fook all to society"

Yeah, absolutely awful people dying 10 years earlier than richer people!

Paying £10 an hour for a 40 hour week is the same as this £1600. It could be less depending on the tax treatment of the universal income.  Do we need incentives to stop people working? Bonkers 

I don't understand what this will tell us. There seems little point in trialling UBI with very few people receiving it as that ignores the U. Yes, the outcome will be great for the people selected but that's not UBI - it's a small number of people receiving it in a non-UBI context.

If it came in universally then the economy would go fooking bonkers for a year or so and that's the important bit. 

Yeah from an experimental design pov it's enraging. How will they make meaningful comparisons? How will they prove causal links with the decisions people make and situations that arise for them? And how will they model wider issues like inflation (or if inflation didn't happen the problem of filling low paid jobs no one wants to do)?

It's also unclear who is funding it. The Charity?

More sneer that kenneth williams about to sneeze on this thread

I'm disappointed u didn't go with Cyril, wang

It's an interesting idea but yes the experiment seems a bit flawed in that it's difficult to tell the wider impacts of UBI etc 

Obviously people who have less than 1600 month who are given 1600 a month are likely to have a successful experiment 

Well as are those who have more - there's no uc style scraping off effect, the idea is that everyone gets this regardless of other income. 

It's not  an experiment.

It's an unfunded proposal suggesting someone should drip feed 38k each to 15 people in Finchley and 15 people in Newcastle over 2 years and see what happens next.

And the researchers obviously also need £500,000 on top of the UBI to see if it works or not.

You don't even need to do this experiment as it goes. 

The National Lottery are already doing it for them. 

Twice a week the National Lottery selects one random person to win a basic income of £10,000 a month for 30 years, They already have more participants in their scheme from this year alone does than this "experiment" will recruit.

There's a ready made pool of guinea pigs there to evaluate. 

Something akin to UBI will be needed after a few years of AI-induced job losses.

But I don’t see how you can draw any kind of reliable conclusions from small scale, short term experiments.

I obviously wouldn’t quit a fat cat city job for 1600 a month, but if I were in a tough manual job with sh1tty working conditions on min wage, and if I knew the UBi would continue indefinitely there’s a high chance I would quit and look for something more fulfilling. If I knew the money was going to run out in 2 years, I would probably behave differently, making me less likely to quit.

There will be loads of points like that which make it impossible to draw any reliable conclusions that would approximate to the real world introduction of UBI.

It's also unclear who is funding it. The Charity?

it’s 30 people getting £1,600 a month for two years

that’s what - £1.1m over two years?

who cares who’s funding it, a single boomer gran could do it in her sleep with her inflated property prices

it’s effectively nothing from a governmental budget

i bet they could spend more just putting together a think tank proposal to decide which tory acquaintances get their multiple millions in government funding 

Lots of people struggling with the “U” part of UBI ITT.

“Something akin to UBI will be needed after a few years of AI-induced job losses.”

Because society has always cared for its most vulnerable in this way when industrialisation has left them behind……

furlough was not in any way even 0.1% responsible for inflation, which is in any event declining now, not rampant, now I hope this truth bomb blows the front off your skull

My first question with things like this is, what would William Cobbett have said?

Probably not a lot tbh. His erstwhile hero Thomas Paine was the inventor of UBI, but Cobbett never espoused it himself. 

Still, I think it would be interesting to see the outcome of this pilot. It's an intriguing idea, and it's always good to see people on the Left and the Right thinking outside the box. 

It is not a experiment on every aspect of universal credit.  It is an experiment to see for example whether people at differing income levels continue to work or work as hard or as long.

the numbers involved are probably not enough for the boffins liking but it is a start and the outcomes will be interesting.

COVID payments were wholly responsible for current inflation as money supply charts clearly show. 

UBI would be fine if the recipients had to turn up for whatever 35 hours they aren't working for training or voluntary work with the payment being conditional on supervisor sign off. Hinckley Point and HS2 are to a large extent UBI in offering up non-commercially viable jobs to people i.e. without state intervention those jobs and the money that comes with it simply wouldn't exist. 

I'm glad to see Bertha considers us the vulnerable.

“who cares who’s funding it, a single boomer gran could do it in her sleep with her inflated property prices”

As with everything here is the issue in a nutshell.

If house prices returned to long term income multiple averages we wouldnt really need to fook around with UBI because “ordinary” incomes would be worth working for. And people on extraordinary incomes would have the wealthy lifestyles their efforts deserve. Rather than wondering what the point of it all is and trying desperately to find a way to retire at 50.

I thought they did this in Finland and they found, unsurprisingly, that many people didn't feel the need to go and work

Which is fine when there aren't many jobs because humans have been replaced with machines.

the point is the relative value of labour will continue to decline compared to capital as computers do more and more - even the higher paid brainer stuff.  This means the consumer market will shrink and teh whole house of cards will come down unless we have universal income  this is why many on the right are in favour as well as those on the left.

Guy you are quite clearly reverse-engineering the justification for this nonsense

"the point is [insert vogue topic with tenuous link to the need to sit at home and flatulate every day"

How could it not be inflationary?

people getting it who dont need it - dont worry about that-  within months the Left would be saying tax it at 100% for earnings over like £30k

East Finchley is an interesting choice - by national standards, an extremely affluent area.  Even by London standards they are doing just fine.  I guess that's the point ... or is it...

it amazes me given the amount the extremely wealthy (and often idle wealthy) consume of the worlds resources the right always get most exercised about the perceived laziness of people living on a pittance.  If you are really think having some money is a disincentive to work lets start with 100% tax on inheritance and lifetime transfers.