15 votes

More than 50,000 people are set to get a basic income in a Brazilian city

2 comments

  1. skybrian
    Link
    From the article: [...]

    From the article:

    [T]he Maricá program stands out for a few reasons. It’s not a pilot program, as with other basic income forays, it’s a policy being adopted across the municipality. Everyone who has lived in Maricá for at least three years and with low-enough income to qualify (well above Brazil’s minimum wage) will get the benefit. As a consequence, the scale is considerably larger than those of pilot programs.

    [...]

    Like a number of municipalities around Rio, Maricá gets a share of Brazil’s oil royalties; the country is the ninth-biggest oil producer in the world, just after Iran and the United Arab Emirates. The basic income program is funded out of the city budget, mostly from those royalties. That means it has a stable funding stream and is not reliant on taxes, much like the Alaska Permanent Fund dividend or the basic income program in Iran, which are both oil-funded and have proven pretty resilient.

    6 votes
  2. Kuromantis
    Link
    I did not know my country was gonna be the one to take this risk, wow. But seriously if this works it's going to be a major stepping stone for UBI acceptance and it will finally give Brazil some...

    I did not know my country was gonna be the one to take this risk, wow.

    But seriously if this works it's going to be a major stepping stone for UBI acceptance and it will finally give Brazil some hope of growth and innovation for the regular citizen.

    (Although it's not perfect, since the testing environment, Maricá, is a small city which means any outside influence like the oil industry might disrupt the experiment and affect the opinion of UBI as a whole based on an isolated experiment,and there's always the chance some politician will mess with the experiment or take it's funding.)

    4 votes