When Americans talk about a minimum guaranteed income, they tend to focus on one of two key themes: how to deal with poverty now, and how to deal with unemployment in the future. Libertarians have homed in on an income guarantee as a low-friction, low-bureaucracy way to take care of the poor. More recently, the idea has caught on with liberals, as cash assistance has withered away and states like Kansas have made access to what remains as onerous and unpleasant as possible. That’s the poverty angle. The unemployment angle is that well-paying jobs are disappearing, either to other countries with cheaper labor or to automation, and there just won’t be enough work for everyone.
.. “The most interesting implication of the basic income,” the Swiss actress Bettina Dieterle says in the film-essay, “is that when I die I will no longer be able to say, ‘I could not do what I wanted.’ “
.. This is Marxism Lite. If the unfulfilled promise of Marxism included “from each according to his ability,” Grundeinkommen is more “from each according to how much he or she feels like putting in today.” Like traditional Marxism, it suffers from problems of credibility, and, like other grand welfare schemes, from issues of expense.
.. As far as expense goes, the plan of paying for the basic income with a hundred-per-cent consumption tax can’t go over well in Switzerland, already one of the most expensive countries in the world.
.. When the Swiss talk about basic income, they’re talking about a utopian vision. When Americans like Reich talk about it, it’s a last bulwark against national impoverishment.
Hillary Helps a Bank—and Then It Funnels Millions to the Clintons
“A few weeks after Hillary Clinton was sworn in as secretary of state in early 2009, she was summoned to Geneva by her Swiss counterpart to discuss an urgent matter. The Internal Revenue Service was suing UBS AG to get the identities of Americans with secret accounts,” the newspaper reports. “If the case proceeded, Switzerland’s largest bank would face an impossible choice: Violate Swiss secrecy laws by handing over the names, or refuse and face criminal charges in U.S. federal court. Within months, Mrs. Clinton announced a tentative legal settlement—an unusual intervention by the top U.S. diplomat. UBS ultimately turned over information on 4,450 accounts, a fraction of the 52,000 sought by the IRS.”
Then reporters James V. Grimaldi and Rebecca Ballhaus lay out how UBS helped the Clintons. “Total donations by UBS to the Clinton Foundation grew from less than $60,000 through 2008 to a cumulative total of about $600,000 by the end of 2014, according to the foundation and the bank,” they report. “The bank also joined the Clinton Foundation to launch entrepreneurship and inner-city loan programs, through which it lent $32 million. And it paid former president Bill Clinton $1.5 million to participate in a series of question-and-answer sessions with UBS Wealth Management Chief Executive Bob McCann, making UBS his biggest single corporate source of speech income disclosed since he left the White House.”