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Perm fails—too expensive to do both

Anna Coote, 10-26-2020, Anna Coote is Principal Fellow at the New Economics Foundation. She has written widely on social justice, sustainable development, working time, public health policy, public involvement and democratic dialogue, gender and equality. Earlier posts include Director of Health Policy at the King’s Fund and Deputy Director of the Institute for Public Policy Research. (Universal basic services and sustainable consumption, No Publication, 10-26-2020, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/epdf/10.1080/15487733.2020.1843854?needAccess=true&role=button, 7-21-2023)//AAlmand

It has been proposed that UBS be combined with a generous, non-stigmatizing system of social security (Stirling and Arnold2020), which both recognizes interdependence and supports individual autonomy. The third critique takes issue with how UBS is costed. It has been estimated that total expenditure on extending the UBS program, if implemented all at once, would be around 4–5% of GDP in a typical OECD country (Coote and Percy2020, 114–127). While costings are based approximately on average expenditures on similar services in a range of countries, they remain open to question, because so much depends on what services are already in place in any country, what is regarded as sufficient in terms of quality and scope, and the level of users ‘contributions (if any). It is fair to say at this stage that more work is required to arrive at viable costings for UBS. However, as noted below, the costs of a sufficient UBI would outstrip the costs of UBS by a wide margin.

And three issues—it isn’t sufficient to solve inequality, doesn’t challenge power structures, and can’t facilitate sustainable carbon reduction like UBS alone

A detailed critique of UBI is available elsewhere(Coote and Yazici2019). Summarizing briefly here, there are three main areas of concern. The first is about how much it can achieve in terms of meeting needs. By giving individuals some money, UBI could help people to meet those needs in the first category set out earlier, with food and clothing as examples. It could do little to help meet needs in the second category, unless it were provided at a sufficiently high level, at least equivalent to a living wage(£10.75 (US$13.90) per hour or at least £380(US$491) a week in 2019–2020). Even at that level, its contribution to meeting needs in the third category would be negligible. By all accounts, UBI paid at a rate that is any-where near sufficient to live on would leave no fiscal space for UBS in any imaginable economy. As Luke Martinelli (2017, 1) concluded after extensive modeling “an affordable UBI would be inadequate, and an adequate UBI would be unaffordable. “Costs would reduce considerably if a basic income were guaranteed to all, rather than paid automatically to everyone, as demonstrated by the New Economics Foundation (Stirling and Arnold2020). It is beyond the scope of this policy brief to argue the case in detail here. The key point is that there are other models of income support that could achieve most of the goals pursued by progressive UBI advocates, while being more compatible–fiscally and ideologically–with UBS. There is no evidence that UBI would challenge existing structures of wealth and power; or that it would help to build solidarity or produce cost-efficiencies in meeting needs. It has been asserted that it would “only help people have more access to consumption without altering anything about how production is organised”(Whitfield2018, 209).The most important critique of UBI in the context of this policy brief is that, in essence, its single purpose is to support individual consumption. Redirecting funds through taxation may leave higher earners with less money for non-essential and luxury consumption, but UBI does nothing else to facilitate carbon reduction or more sustainable use of resources. By contrast, UBS offers multiple opportunities for maintaining expenditure on goods and services within the upper and lower boundaries of consumption corridors.I want to end by making it clear that UBS is not a single policy lever but a framework that offers a route for policy making across a range of different areas. That route is shaped by distinctive values, favoring collective action to meet shared needs now and in years to come. How far these proposals are able to fulfill their promise depends on how services are devised, organized, and funded, a well as where power lies, models of ownership, how people participate, conditions of eligibility, and how entitlements are realized. The UBS agenda can be introduced incrementally, but its ambitions go far beyond piecemeal reform. It is essentially about changing whole systems to achieve a sustainable future.