Mincome
The Mincome (a suitcase word from minimum income ) was a social experiment in Canada , which was supposed to investigate the effects of the introduction of a guaranteed annual basic income in the 1970s .
more details
In the Mincome experiment, not only those in need, but all residents of the Canadian city of Dauphin, which had a population of around 10,000 at the time, received 100 Canadian dollars (CAD) a month from 1974 onwards . The amount chosen was close to the poverty line. The annual sum of 1200 CAD corresponds to a current value of around 5500 US $ per person (as of 2015).
Because there was no means test and every resident received the transfer, Mincome was an unconditional basic income . Since the transfer was integrated into the tax system, the implementation involved a negative income tax , here with a fixed tax rate of 50%: “Every additional dollar earned reduced the basic income by only 50 cents, while in traditional social welfare programs often no additional one Rewards beckon if the recipients earn something from other sources. ”This incentive to earn additional money also helped to prevent the labor market from collapsing. The experiment was stopped in 1977 after inflation pushed spending up and a recession made funding difficult.
After the abrupt end of the experiment in 1977, the results were initially not published. The then head of research Derek Hum only gradually published partial results of the study. There was only a slight decrease in willingness to work. Decades later, the economist Evelyn Forget ([ fɔrˈʒeɪ ], University of Manitoba ) brought the social project back into discussion. With her study Town with no poverty (English for “[a] city without poverty” or “[…] neediness”), she takes up Hum's results and tries to research the long-term effects of the experiment by retrospectively evaluating the data.
In the United States , too, there were several experiments that looked at the effects of introducing a basic income. As part of the fight against poverty under President Lyndon B. Johnson in New Jersey , North Carolina , Seattle ( Washington ), Denver ( Colorado ) and Gary ( Indiana ), a basic income was introduced to the participants in the experiments.
literature
- Derek Hum, Wayne Simpson: A Guaranteed Annual Income? From Mincome to the Millennium . (PDF; 35 kB). In: Options Politiques. 1/2001, pp. 78–82 (English)
- Whitney Light: Researchers Examine the Town With No Poverty . ( Memento from October 22, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) In: The Uniter. Issue 13, December 1, 2005
- Vivian Belik: A Town Without Poverty? In: The Dominion. Edition 78, September 5, 2011
Web links
- Evelyn L Forget: The town with no poverty: A history of the North American Guaranteed Annual Income . (PDF; 243 kB) 2008 (English)
Individual evidence
- ↑ Evelyn L Forget: The Town with no Poverty. ( Memento of the original from January 26, 2017 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (PDF) University of Manitoba, 2011.
- ↑ K. Widerquist: What (if anything) Can we Learn From the Negative Income Tax Experiments? (PDF) Review in: Journal of Socio-Economics (JSE) , 2004, p. 6 ff.
- ↑ Whitney Mallett: The city that gave all of its residents a basic income . In: VICE , Motherboard, May 29, 2015.
- ^ Zi-Ann Lum: A Canadian City Once Eliminated Poverty And Nearly Everyone Forgot About It . Huffington Post , December 23, 2014, last updated March 12, 2015
- ^ Philip K. Robins: A comparison of the labor supply findings from the four negative income tax experiments . In: Journal of Human Resources. 4/1985, pp. 567-582.
