As Ireland’s $1,500-a-month basic income pilot program for creatives nears its end in February, officials have to answer a simple question: Is it worth it?
With four months to go, they say the answer is yes.
Earlier this month, Ireland’s government announced its 2026 budget, which includes “a successor to the pilot Basic Income Scheme for the Arts to begin next year” among its expenditures.
Ireland is just one of many places experimenting with guaranteed basic income programs, which provide recurring, unrestricted payments to people in a certain demographic. These programs differ from a universal basic income, which would provide payments for an entire population.
This exists already, it’s called mutual aid, I’m participating in it when I can.
The reason why this won’t work on a large scale without a societal shift is the same as why UBI isn’t implemented already. It’s capital leeching off a big share of resources from labor.
If we replace the capitalists with a fair sharing system, we could implement a generous UBI and also your effective net salary would go up.
Or, if you want to go a more reformist route, you can implement a very aggressive progressive taxation scheme (a-la FDR) to force rich people to contribute more. That way once again, we can implement UBI without your taxes going up.
Which is essentially communism and a goal too far away.
Why should the rich share with the average person if the average person doesn’t want to share with the poor?
Start with the average person and the rich will join.
No, it’s more like total welfare state socialism. Not yet achieved anywhere, but might happen within our lifetimes in China.
Only because most working-class people think that, with a bit of class conscience is totally within our grasp.
Because the average person, world-wide, is struggling to get by and doesn’t have much in terms of extra resources, because the rich are stealing a significant portion of the labor value. Meanwhile the rich (who, again, are stealing the resources from the working person) are spending hundreds of billions of dollars on stupid bullshit that even they don’t really need. It’s pretty clear that we should indeed start with the rich.
Lol. No. The rich will never do anything other than short-sighted profiteering unless directly threatened with imprisonment or death. Otherwise they would be joining the mutual aid orgs which already exist almost everywhere.
Of course, because the average person in the West is already rich.
So there are the resources for an UBI.
Make it $800 billion. That would give each person $100.
It us not. The rich can prevent you from starting if you need them to participate but nobody is preventing you from doing it yourself.
Even if they do, it’s just $100 more. You don’t need them.