PowerSwitch

It's all over the media - 30 people to be paid £1600 a month for 2 years and be monitored to see how this affects them during this time.

It seems to have totally decided the public and experts alike, but not along the lines you'd think. What does everyone think on here?

I can see merits for both for and against really....

I do not know how a trial with just 30 people will tell us anything. Who decides which 30 people get to be in the trial and presumably the people are themselves volunteers and self selecting. What were the criteria for being considered? Presumably they weren’t selected at random from the entire adult population.

Generally, assuming the people do not have steady jobs already, they will stay in the scheme if it pays more than a low paid low prospects job, which is probably all they would be able to get, if any. No one would volunteer if it resulted in them receiving less money than they currently do on benefits.

There are far too many variables for such a small trial to show anything.

I think the advances in AI make a UBI more likely than ever before. It might be the only solution.

My take is that it will be a fantastic recruiting tool for the people traffickers...
Look...., get on this rubber dinghy and over there they give you loads of free money...

It sounds a good idea but IMHO is unlikely to work on a large scale.
The political right will consider it far too generous, a waste of public money and a "scroungers charter"
The left will consider it inadequate.

And yes it will make the UK EVEN MORE ATTRACTIVE To illegal migrants .

It will be a disaster for any attempt to get lazy people working again. This in turn will lead to more manufactured goods being imported from abroad instead of being made at home leading to declining balance of trade and more national debt. One assumes the money to pay this UBI will have to be borrowed as tax receipts will probably not cover it.

In my youth I recall a notice in Marks and Spence stores declaring that "Over 90% of our goods are British Made".

A better idea might be to match earned income with a proportionate amount of government 'benefit'.