The ultimate welfare state: Dauphin, Manitoba's successful Guaranteed Income experiment
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Source - [url=http://www.sott.net/articles/show/235840-A-Town-Without-Poverty-Canada-s-Guaranteed-Income-Experiment]Sott.net[/url]
[release]Try to imagine a town where the government paid each of the residents a living income, regardless of who they were and what they did, and a Soviet hamlet in the early 1980s may come to mind.
But this experiment happened much closer to home. [b]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.[/b] 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.
Until now little has been known about what unfolded over those four years in the small rural town, since the government locked away the data that had been collected and prevented it from being analyzed.
But after a five year struggle, Evelyn Forget, a professor of health sciences at the University of Manitoba, secured access to those boxes in 2009. Until the data is computerized, any systematic analysis is impossible. Undeterred, Forget has begun to piece together the story by using the census, health records, and the testimony of the program's participants. What is now emerging reveals that the program could have counted many successes. [/release]
What did Evelyn Forget find in the data? The results were surprising.
[release]Beginning in 1974, Pierre Trudeau's Liberals and Manitoba's first elected New Democratic Party government gave money to every person and family in Dauphin who fell below the poverty line. Under the program - called "Mincome" - about 1,000 families received monthly cheques.
[b]Unlike welfare, which only certain individuals qualified for, the guaranteed minimum income project was open to everyone.[/b] It was the first - and to this day, only - time that Canada has ever experimented with such an open-door social assistance program.
In today's conservative political climate, with constant government and media rhetoric about the inefficiency and wastefulness of the welfare state, the Mincome project sounds like nothing short of a fairy tale.
[b]For four years Dauphin was a place where anyone living below the poverty line could receive monthly cheques to boost their income, no questions asked.[/b] Single mothers could afford to put their kids through school and low-income families weren't scrambling to pay the rent each month.
For Amy Richardson, it meant she could afford to buy her children books for school. Richardson joined the program in 1977, just after her husband had gone on disability leave from his job. At the time, she was struggling to raise her three youngest children on $1.50 haircuts she gave in her living room beauty parlour.
[b]The $1,200 per year she received in monthly increments was a welcome supplement, in a time when the poverty line was $2,100 a year. [/b] [/release]
[release]Initially, the Mincome program was conceived as a labour market experiment. [b]The government wanted to know what would happen if everybody in town received a guaranteed income, and specifically, they wanted to know whether people would still work.
[highlight]It turns out they did.
Only two segments of Dauphin's labour force worked less as a result of Mincome - new mothers and teenagers.[/highlight] Mothers with newborns stopped working because they wanted to stay at home longer with their babies. And teenagers worked less because they weren't under as much pressure to support their families.[/b]
The end result was that they spent more time at school and more teenagers graduated. Those who continued to work were given more opportunities to choose what type of work they did.
"People didn't have to take the first job that came along," says Hikel. "They could wait for something better that suited them."
For some, it meant the opportunity to land a job to help them get by.
When Doreen and Hugh Henderson arrived in Dauphin in 1970 with their two young children they were broke. Doreen suggested moving from Vancouver to her hometown because she thought her husband would have an easier time finding work there. But when they arrived, things weren't any better.
"My husband didn't have a very good job and I couldn't find work," she told The Dominion by phone from Dauphin.
It wasn't until 1978, after receiving Mincome payments for two years, that her husband finally landed janitorial work at the local school, a job he kept for 28 years.
"I don't know how we would have lived without [Mincome]," said Doreen."I don't know if we would have stayed in Dauphin."
Although the Mincome experiment was intended to provide a body of information to study labour market trends, Forget discovered that Mincome had a significant effect on people's well being. Two years ago, the professor started studying the health records of Dauphin residents to assess the impacts of the program.
[b]In the period that Mincome was administered, hospital visits dropped 8.5 per cent. Fewer people went to the hospital with work-related injuries and there were fewer emergency room visits from car accidents and domestic abuse. There were also far fewer mental health visits.[/b] [/release]
The article is far too big to quote it all here. But to summarize, the town of Dauphin, Manitoba decided to ensure everyone in town, regardless of their employment, got a guaranteed minimum amount of money every month. (As either a supplement to employment or to help the unemployed) Surprisingly people still worked, everyone was happier and more educated, and hospital and mental health visits decreased substantially. All of this happened in [b]only four years.[/b]
In today's political climate, "giving people money for nothing" is practically poison but it's very interesting to see that when everyone is guaranteed a decent standard of living, society doesn't fall apart into a giant hippie drum circle.
Socialist mind control drugs in the water supply were the real cause. I mean, you can tell by looking at Africa, Latin America or parts of Asia that poverty really helps people sort their lives out.
[QUOTE=thisispain;33015395]well, uh, duh?
i mean everyone knows it's true, it's just some people aren't willing to believe it for political reasons.[/QUOTE]
I think some people get jealous that the poor get money from tax which is really the problem to why most people don't like it.
[QUOTE=Vasili;33015586]I think some people get jealous that the poor get money from tax which is really the problem to why most people don't like it.[/QUOTE]
Which is like getting jealous at people who are terminally ill because they get morphine.
[QUOTE=Vasili;33015586]I think some people get jealous that the poor get money from tax which is really the problem to why most people don't like it.[/QUOTE]
This program was open to all who needed it, not just people considered poor. If you're a lower middle class bloke having a hard time paying the rent, then there you go.
bring the effective tax rate for the rich to even half of what it was in the 50s in America and I bet this would be affordable
Skewed results.
We canadians are too nice.
my mom is from dauphin
[QUOTE]It wasn't until 1978, after receiving Mincome payments for two years, that her husband finally landed janitorial work at the local school, a job he kept for 28 years.[/QUOTE]
So a man is directly given tax dollars, to only to find a job that is paid for by tax dollars.
What other success stories are there?
The money still has to come from somewhere. Whether people still work or not is largely irrelevant to the primary issue, which is the massive cost of such a program. Not that the OP isn't a very interesting story, but it's hardly an overwhelming argument for such a system.
See comrades? Socialism works.
[QUOTE=Sobotnik;33016173]See comrades? Socialism works.[/QUOTE]
Of course it works, it's been working in almost every developed countries for decades.
[QUOTE=catbarf;33016167]The money still has to come from somewhere. Whether people still work or not is largely irrelevant to the primary issue, which is the massive cost of such a program. Not that the OP isn't a very interesting story, but it's hardly an overwhelming argument for such a system.[/QUOTE]
The money comes from taxes, just like anything else. Only with this, the the poor have enough money for food and a roof over their heads, and the middle class don't have to worry about affording putting their kids through school. If that's not the most worthwhile endeavor in the world I don't know what is.
[QUOTE=Contag;33016243]Of course it works, it's been working in almost every developed countries for decades.[/QUOTE]
But that kinda talk is anti-jesus talk and what obamacare liberals, communists and hippies perpetrate.
[QUOTE=Sobotnik;33016356]But that kinda talk is anti-jesus talk and what obamacare liberals, communists and hippies perpetrate.[/QUOTE]
the marxist environmentalist islamists are trying to stomp out freedom
[QUOTE=snuwoods;33016135]So a man is directly given tax dollars, to only to find a job that is paid for by tax dollars.
What other success stories are there?[/QUOTE]
A man doing janitorial work at a school is contributing more than what he's getting paid
That's the basis of every job in the history of jobs, the value of your work is greater than the amount of cash you get
[QUOTE=Megafanx13;33016293]The money comes from taxes, just like anything else. Only with this, the the poor have enough money for food and a roof over their heads, and the middle class don't have to worry about affording putting their kids through school. If that's not the most worthwhile endeavor in the world I don't know what is.[/QUOTE]
Suppose a third of all Americans were eligible for this, and drew just $20k a year from it. If you're not part of that third, you're paying for them. That would mean your taxes jump $10k. That's a lot of money, and the resulting drop in spending power for the middle class would likely have a negative impact on the economy, as well as standards of living.
I'm not saying it's a terrible idea and shouldn't even be considered, but this isn't a black and white issue. Just outright giving money to the needy is overly simplistic and in the long run can do more harm than good, and until we see what the sum effects of the change were (including changes in tax rates), there's no enough data to draw a useful conclusion.
Socialism doesn't work in a society like America which has such a large amount of immigrant families, sorry.
[QUOTE=rickperryfan148;33016629][IMG]http://gaysimpsons.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/09/gay-simpsons-14.jpg[/IMG][/QUOTE]This doesn't have to do with socialism?? And it's gross.
[QUOTE=rickperryfan148;33016629][IMG]http://gaysimpsons.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/09/gay-simpsons-14.jpg[/IMG][/QUOTE]
That's so fucking disgusting...
