basic income

The idea behind my totem poles is that (1) lots of people would put in a lot of time working on them (2) rich people would pay piles of money for them because it would keep them up with the richie Jones's (3) the people would use that money to buy stuff they needed which would be manufactured by the richies which would make them more money to buy more totem poles.

Or you could just cut out the totem poles.  I heard on NPR last morning when there was a proposal to just give poor people money, the negative income tax. proposal: https://www.fastcompany.com/3055679/a-dutch-city-is-experimenting-with-giving-away-a-basic-income-of-1000-a-month
It's called basic income and it's brought to us by the ever progressive Dutch and surprisingly the lethargic and laconic Finns are not far behind..  It seems like they are giving 250 people a thousand bucks a month and one fifth of them get it with no strings attached, One fifth will have to do good deeds and if they don't part of that money will be withheld, Another fifty will get more for extra volunteering.  Another fifty will not be allowed to work at all.  And I'm not sure what the deal is with that other fifty.

It's not quite what I am thinking of, but it's something that might well be tried rather than my pie in the sky totem pole idea which will soon expire amid yawns in the ivied halls of Beaglestonia.  By the way did we ever take a vote on that?  And why is it ivied halls, isn't the ivy on the outside, shouldn't it be ivied walls, have I been misunderstanding all these years?  No, google says it's halls alright.  Go figure.

Anyway that Nordic thing seems more like a possibly more efficient way to administer welfare.  No need to fill out complicated forms, no means testing.  What if we just gave everybody a cool twelve grand a year?  It would be a little like a graduated income tax in that it would mean a lot to poor people and not much to rich people.

I guess the idea is that poor people have so much shit to deal with, broken down crappy cars, lousy education, just keeping a roof over their heads that they are constantly scrabbling from hand to mouth and have no time to actually get ahead.  Maybe that extra money will give them the breathing space to get ahead, get better jobs and pay more taxes and a win win for everybody.

Sounds a little like those tax cuts that the reps are always pushing, except that the lion's share of those always go to the rich who a paltry thou a month won't make much difference to them so they always get like a gazillion because otherwise they aren't motivated enough to create all those jobs.


I'm a little confused about this gold standard thing.  If you have inflation won't the price of gold go up, and now that gold is worth more won't it be able to cover the redemption of those bills?Remember when bills said payable on demand?  But of course ''not really' should have been beneath that in parens,  Whatever happened to the silver standard?  What would happen to the gold standard if a mountain of gold was discovered in Mexico.  Would the value of our currency go down justlikethat?


I did look at that beaver leading the cows.  Actually I had misread the intro as herding a bunch of cows, but maybe instead of leading them from behind he was herding them from in front.