Today I was thinking about the concept of a basic income, one of many proposition to get out of the current economic situation.
In a few words, basic income means each citizen gets a basic salary just because he is a citizen, without having to work. This basic salary could be 500/600 Euro per month. Now, the concept is difficult to grasp for many people, mainly because they will generally feel that it’s unfair and detrimental to give money “for free”. And they might be right, for what I know.
So, as I was saying, today I was thinking about the basic income, and how it should be linked to a minimum amount of work (let’s say, 16 hours per week).
Let me explain.
Imagine you can get 600 Euro per month if you work 16 hours. You can do any work. You can make up your job (web-designer, musician) or you could work for a factory (16 hours per week is ok), a call center, or even volunteer for the Red Cross or anything else. All you have to do is to get yourself busy somehow. Of course if you work more than 16 hours, you will get paid accordingly.
This is the skeleton of my idea. Its realization is not very easy, because a system must be put in place in order to avoid scams. Perhaps a feedback system a-la eBay might work, along with a microchipped-card similar to the supermarket fidelity cards.
I think that the economic boost something like this would have (imagine how creativity would explode) could pay back the money the governement needs to spend to get the program started.
We have to think about this.
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