- Keen

Friends come and go. Enemies accumulate.

It seems as if part of the premise is that if the political terrain in a country with employment insurance was the same as the neoliberal "do what we say or starve" countries, then any additional income will be scooped up by rentier and all that the employment insurance will do is to redistribute income among the relatively powerles middle income classes and working poor.

However, getting a Job Guarantee put into place seems like it first requires changing that political terrain, and having a Job Guarantee in place would seem to undermine much of the neoliberal disciplinary stick.

So I'm not clear on how the argument by which the income is soaked up by rentier is consistent with the premise that a Job Guarantee has been successfully put into place.


I've been accused of being a Marxist, yet while Harpo's my favourite, it's Groucho I'm always quoting. Odd, that.

The government cleverly doled out two months' worth of family cash transfers, amounting to some $90 per person, before unleashing its shock. When the first tranche of price rises hit, quadrupling the cost of some kinds of bread and shooting diesel prices up by 2,000%, among other things, there was barely a peep from the public. Iranians have rapidly got used both to paying a lot more for some things and to having more money to spend as they wish. A family of five now pockets monthly sums close to Iran's minimum wage, enough to pull a big proportion of the 10% of Iranians who live on less than $2 a day above that bar. Yet tight controls on the money supply have kept inflationary pressure lower than feared. By some counts it has already fallen from an annualised 20% in March to 14% in May. With government finances now in better shape, that may drop still further, and quickly.

Mild inflation and controlled prices are financially stabilising...

Finance is the brain [tumour] of the economy

And the social ethos seems quite socialist, whatever party badges they choose to put on it.

_{It is rightly acknowledged that people of faith have no monopoly of virtue - Queen Elizabeth II}

Has a living income been tried anywhere?

2008-2010, in Otjivero in Namibia there was a pilot project where every adult gets 100 namibian dollars a month (50 for kids, payed to the mother) for two years. Resulting in more economic activity, less poverty, crime and malnourishment. The pilot project came about as a result of the claims that the 2002 Namtax proposal of universal living income faced.

Similar project in Ghodhakurd in Madhya Pradesh in India in 2012. They got 300 rupees a month, half for kids.

Both were intended primarily as poverty relief (hence the low sums) and as such appears more efficient then other projects. Neither has been continued or led to national projects. According to Guy Standing at University of London this is primarily because of pressure from IMF and the World Bank.

This info is courtesy of Grus&Guld, JAK Sweden's dead tree paper. JAK is a bank for interest-free saving and loans.

Sweden's finest (and perhaps only) collaborative, leftist e-newspaper Synapze.se

But this experiment happened much closer to home. For a four-year period in the '70s, the poorest families in Dauphin, Manitoba, were granted a guaranteed minimum income by the federal and provincial governments. Thirty-five years later all that remains of the experiment are 2,000 boxes of documents that have gathered dust in the Canadian archives building in Winnipeg.