[Savvy27]

http://www2.macleans.ca/2013/04/19/t...chuck-welfare/

The notion of a guaranteed income is often dismissed as a utopian folly, certain to destroy the national work ethic and bankrupt the country. Yet advocates like Conservative Sen. Hugh Segal note the idea has a strong free-market pedigree. In 1985, the Macdonald royal commission into Canada’s economic future in a free-trade world called its version of universal income security “the essential building block” for social programs in the 21st century. The grandfather of guaranteed income, the negative sales tax, as he called it, was the late American economist Milton Friedman, the ultimate proponent of unfettered markets and small government. He said giving families the right and responsibility to spend support money as they see fit is a wiser investment than having priorities set by an expensive, oppressive bureaucracy. “If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert,” he said, “in five years there’d be a shortage of sand.”

Fresh research by University of Manitoba health economist Evelyn Forget on an experiment into guaranteed income, conducted in the farming community of Dauphin, Man., between 1974-79, found that even modest financial security cut hospital visits by 8.5 per cent compared to similar Manitoba communities.“When you realize that Canada is spending something like $50 billion a year on hospitals,” Forget says of the potential reduction, “that’s a lot of money.” There was a decline in accidents and injuries, and significantly fewer visits to doctors or hospitals for mental health reasons, perhaps because a measure of financial security reduced anxiety or depression, researchers concluded.

While Dauphin was a short-lived 1970s experiment, that era also spawned the Guaranteed Income Supplement for seniors, an innovation that continues to improve lives for millions. The idea was born in the Ontario hothouse of a minority government when premier Bill Davis’s Conservatives were attacked by the opposition for the high rate of poverty among the elderly, many of them single women. Segal, then an adviser to Davis, recalls the plan was created within weeks. Rates of poverty as high as 30 per cent fell to five per cent. It eventually became a national program administered under the federal tax system. Hospital visits for younger retirees fell, longevity increased and seniors were more socially engaged, says Segal. “Why? Because they could actually live a reasonably comfortable life.”

Canadian poverty rates for the elderly are now among the lowest among peer nations of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). By contrast, Canada has among the worst scores (15th of 17 countries) in rates of child and working-age poverty.

I think there is substance to the idea of a guaranteed income. That's why I am hoping that the Swiss try it out. There is little political will in Canada for radical ideas, so maybe it will work out somewhere else and we can learn from it. Or maybe it will be a disaster and we have avoided it.