UBI’s are impossible to estimate – lack of specification of its implementation guarantees failure – means you vote neg on presumption

The old Liberal Democratic Party, before the advent of the current libertarian Senator David Leyonhjelm, also put forward its own idea. What's the attraction of a universal basic income? The concept is that, rather than pay a whole range of different pensions and allowances and subsidies, all payments from the state are consolidated and simplified into a single payment. For simplicity and fairness, the payment goes to all citizens, homeless people and billionaires alike. The recipient can decide how best to spend it. After these fundamentals, every proposal for a universal basic income varies tremendously in the detail. The Swiss idea had no detail; a proposal by Charles Murray in the weekend's Wall Street Journal suggested $US13,000 ($18,000) a year for every US adult but with the abolition of all other payments and health programs and pensions and the abolition of the federal infrastructure that administers such programs. A drastic shrinkage in the size of the state, in other words, which is the aim of the right in supporting this concept. Australia's Henderson inquiry suggested a two-tier plan, immediately undercutting one of the main arguments in favour: that it should be a single, simple payment to all. Henderson envisaged a basic universal payment the equivalent in today's dollars of about $8000 a year, says the director of the Social Policy Institute at ANU, Professor Peter Whiteford, supplemented by an extra payment for those on low incomes. For low-income people, this would bring the total up to the equivalent today of about $13,000 a year, broadly equivalent to the Newstart allowance. Today, for anyone on a pension or disability allowance, this would imply a savage cut. The starting point for such a proposal today would have to be about the size of age pension, about $20,000 a year, Whiteford suggests. Paid to all 18 million Australian adults, that comes to $360 billion a year. Abolishing all other social welfare payments would save about $150 billion, so the net extra cost would be of the order of $210 billion a year. "It's enough to frighten the horses," Whiteford concludes. How to pay for it? Tax rates would have to soar to collect this sum. If you increased the GST, you'd put a disproportionate burden on the poor, defeating the purpose of the exercise. Relying on higher incomes taxes would push the top personal tax rate to something like 70 or 80 per cent from today's 50per cent, Whiteford estimates, which is politically implausible. The Fraser Liberal government dismissed Henderson's 1975 proposal for a guaranteed minimum income. "Fraser rejected it because of the cost of the proposed changes," Whiteford says, "and because they were committed to cutting back social welfare," not increasing it. Another question: if everyone were given money for nothing, what would happen to the incentive to work? Four pilot programs in the US in the late 1960s and early '70s tried to measure this. They found that the primary breadwinner cut his work hours by between 1 per cent and 7 per cent when given a basic unconditional income, and the second earner cut back by between 17 and 31 per cent. These are the reasons why, in the long history of the idea, no government has ever introduced a universal basic income. It's impractical. So why is it in vogue? The idea has been revived by the rising panic over the future of work. If robotics and technology wipe out whole employment categories, how will people survive? The answer, however, isn't a universal payment. The answer is for governments to foster innovation and entrepreneurship, so disappearing jobs are replaced by new ones. And this is exactly what has happened after every other similar jobs panic since the dawn of the industrial revolution.