Tuesday 24 March 2020

The Universal Basic Income In Action

Capitalism is great all the time you have people further down the financial food chain to snatch money up from but it all falls apart when the supply to the lowest dries up is the case at the moment with the virus lock down.
As the unemployment queues grew substantially each day as employers laid off workers, the government stepped in to pay 80% of workers wages in companies across the nation, effectively nationalising massive swathes of the private sector by paying most of the wages of workers instead
of their employers in order to prevent the economy from imploding.
It is a perfect storm of a major health crisis leading to an economic crisis many times worse than 2008 which we still haven't recovered from so let's not even think of the austerity measures which this austerity loving  Government will tell us they will have to being in to rescue ourselves this time.
So let's leave that particularly thorny issue in the tray marked 'worry about it later' but with the idea of Universal Basic Income being bounded around over the last few years, this is it in action as many will find that for the next few months at least, their pay cheque is being financed by the government who are literally paying them to stay at home.
Sure, you can't go out to spend it anywhere and you have to remember this Government will make sure they get it all back with some austerity measures which will make us all squeak but that's for when we cross that bridge much further down the road, let's just get through it first.

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