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Louis Shalako
What would a basic minimum income look like for
Ontario?
It’s very hard to say without knowing what the
government’s pilot
project actually looks like.
Hopefully we’ll get more information on that
very soon.
Let us assume the goal is to get every citizen at
least up to the poverty line. While this number varies according to location
across the province, living in Toronto and other major cities being more
expensive than living in some other places, let us assume this is about
$20,000.00 per year for a single adult.
In Switzerland,
they’ll be voting on one such proposal on June 5. If you look closely, you’ll
see that the program will be funded approximately 75 % by new taxes and the rest is expected to come from savings in other
social programs. We are comparing apples to oranges here, but Switzerland, like
Canada and the Province of Ontario are capitalistic, socialist states. They’re
relatively affluent, not only in natural resources, but agriculture,
technology, and their present state of development.
In
Kenya, as little as $250.00 to $400.00 a year can make a big difference in
health and welfare outcomes.
In Ontario, the only thing really under discussion is
a pilot program, much like the one in Dauphin,
Manitoba in the 1970s. If you take a small community, the cost of a pilot
program is much less than the institution of such a program over an entire
province or country.
Under such circumstances, one could have a very
successful pilot program, one costing five or ten or twenty million dollars
without ever having to justify it politically, without ever even speculating as
to where all the funding might actually come from. Back then, the one in
Dauphin cost $17 million overall—pocket change by modern, budgetary standards.
While I have no doubt that the government is prepared
to make such a social experiment, (heading to the polls a short time later), one
has to wonder just how serious they are at pursuing this to a logical end—or
whether this is just another cleverly disguised attempt to gut the Ontario
Disability Support Program, or Ontario Works, or whatever.
Proponents usually contend that such programs will be
funded entirely by savings in other programs—or they sure don’t mind being misinterpreted along such lines, but if
so, then such programs must inevitably be underfunded, for surely the
government social programs they are intended to replace have always been
underfunded. This has been true since day one, and that includes the Workplace
Safety and Insurance Board, and a hundred other programs administered by this
government.
Here’s an Ontario Works (welfare) rate
chart. A single person would receive, per month, $305.00 for their basic
needs and $376.00 for shelter costs—which is about half what I pay for rent,
although I’m not on welfare. In this province, benefits are divided into ‘basic
needs’ and ‘shelter costs.’ If you don’t have a home, (or at least an address),
then you don’t qualify for shelter costs. (The government did away with moving
benefits some time ago, although start-up benefits may still be available
depending on program. For the most part, these programs have been fiscally
gutted by this very same government.)
Back to our point.
That’s $681.00 a month to keep body and soul together.
Inevitably, most of that will go for rent, and that’s why people on welfare
line up at food banks. They end up homeless and on the street, and they end up
in a whole host of unenviable social situations such as divorce, court, jail
and in other programs largely dedicated to mental health and addictions. How
much of this will be alleviated by living in less stressful social conditions,
and how will this translate into sufficient savings and efficiencies to justify
the basic minimum income social program?
That’s a real good question and one worth asking.
It’s as much about people as it is about saving money
or redistributing income in an era of growing inequality and degenerating
social justice.
It’s a simple equation.
Where there is no hope there is no incentive. Life is
hard at the lowest socio-economic strata.
People are the same everywhere. They
all need the same things. And it’s just what they can’t get. They’re not going
anywhere and they know it. And the day is long—very long. I know that from
personal experience. Filling that day leads to social problems largely stemming
from boredom, desperation and availability.
The $681.00 a month adds up to $8,172.00 a year. This
is approximately $12,000.00 below the poverty line, which I make out to be
about $20,000.00 a year in anything but a major city.
I am referring to
Ontario, Canada, 2016, just so we are defining our terms accurately.
Assuming the goal of an anti-poverty program is to
bring people up to the poverty line, this is $12,000.00 that has to come from
somewhere—somewhere else, as the
taxpayers are no doubt already saying.
That’s an additional $1,000.00 a month, which would
admittedly change people’s lives. The problem is that there are something like
750,000 clients of the ODSP program in the province, and probably another
125,000 families on Ontario Works. This does not address the numbers of
unemployed and underemployed family
members who fall below the poverty line.
Neither does it include the
millions of Ontarians working full time hours for minimum, sub-poverty wages.
Just for the record, I know a lot of these people personally. My own bias has
been disclosed.
Ahem.
If their family income went up, it is entirely
possible that their taxable income would also go up—a fact often overlooked by
commentators who have never experienced the challenges.
Basically if you want
to tax the poor, first you have to give them a raise. But it is entirely possible that middle class
taxes could go down or be reduced under such a system.
The real question is, would that new life cause or
incur savings in other areas, to the tune of $1,000.00 a month, or greater,
from the ‘mean average’ or median individual in question.
This is the question
the taxpayers should be asking.
For parents with children, or for adults with
dependent adults in the household, the no-questions-asked aspect of the
proposed basic minimum income has to sound pretty good.
For a single person on disability, (ODSP) it has to sound pretty good. In my own
case, I can honestly say that an additional eight or nine hundred bucks a month
would make a big difference in my diet, my clothing certainly—and communication,
transportation and entertainment. It would allow me to invest a small amount
each and every month into my business and maybe even into some kind of savings
program.
I’ll be of retirement age in another eight years. After
that, the ODSP has no hold on me. It would be nice if the benefits could remain
in force even when a recipient went out of province or even out of the
country—perhaps for up to six months at a time.
Here’s a funny thing, and I don’t think it’s a
contradiction at all. But I get a pension, and I also work full time as a
writer; which is admittedly one of the most marginal
professions going.
The
problem, is that I don’t make enough money in this
new abundance economy. That problem is only compounded for people with a family
to feed and a home to make and a shit part-time job in some scab industry which
is already being subsidized by scab wages, an abundance of unskilled labour and
this crazy mind-set that somehow work brings dignity. The truth is that leisure and the arts bring dignity.
The problem is that this is only a trial balloon, never meant to actually float.
You heard it here first.
There’s not enough good jobs to go around, but there’s
nothing we can do about poverty per se. There
are only so many skills to go around—and colleges and universities and training
programs also cost this province a lot of money and there aren’t always enough
jobs for those graduates.
But here’s an interesting thing. The federal
government already pays Harmonized Sales Tax
rebates. They already pay or contribute to Child Daycare Tax Credits. They
already pay pension
benefits to the elderly and there are federal disability
programs. (And it’s a crock of shit because I didn’t qualify.) The province
pays plenty to the almost universally excoriated Workplace
Safety and Insurance Board.
They’re already spending hundreds of billions between
the two levels of government for bloated and inefficient bureaucracies, and
yes, this includes the police, court and prison systems.
This already includes the medical, hospital
and mental health systems. It also employs a
lot of people at a relatively high level of income and status. This is a
concern that will have to be addressed, to the tune of much angst no doubt.
It is only by bringing in a much smaller government
apparatus, and perhaps some incremental increase in tax assessment rates that
this program has a hope of succeeding universally, in the long term.
There are already mechanisms in place to pay the
money—the federal and provincial income tax systems come to mind. With modern
algorithmic systems and self-reporting, with verification through existing
channels, the program could be made to work if the political and social will
actually exists to do so.
You sort of have to wonder.
END
