Basic income or citizen’s income is a proposed system of social security that regularly provides each citizen with a sum of money unconditionally. In contrast to income redistribution between nations themselves, the phrase basic income defines payments to individuals rather than households, groups, or nations, in order to provide for individual basic human needs. Except for citizenship, a basic income is entirely unconditional. Furthermore, there is no means test or impact as a result of other income; the richest as well as the poorest citizens would receive it.
Basic income is related to the concept of a social dividend, and is one of the proposed means for distributing the surplus value or economic profits created by socially owned enterprises in a hypothetical socialist economy.
Basic income is not to be confused with Guaranteed minimum income, a similar concept but where the income that is received may be conditional upon participating in government enforced labor or other conditional means testing. Basic income is distinct in that the only requirement for receiving it is to be a citizen of the country.
In everyday usage, the phrase basic income is often inaccurately conflated with means tested guaranteed minimum income alternatives such as a negative income tax. A basic income of any amount less than the social minimum is referred to as a partial basic income.
Similar proposals for "capital grants provided at the age of majority" date to Thomas Paine's Agrarian Justice of 1795, there paired with asset-based egalitarianism.
Read more about Basic Income: Aggressive Distinction With Minimum Income or Basic Income Guarantee, Arguments For Basic Income, Affordability, Origins, Funding, Criticisms, Further Reading
Famous quotes containing the words basic and/or income:
“The research on gender and morality shows that women and men looked at the world through very different moral frameworks. Men tend to think in terms of “justice” or absolute “right and wrong,” while women define morality through the filter of how relationships will be affected. Given these basic differences, why would men and women suddenly agree about disciplining children?”
—Ron Taffel (20th century)
“A sociosphere of contact, control, persuasion and dissuasion, of exhibitions of inhibitions in massive or homeopathic doses...: this is obscenity. All structures turned inside out and exhibited, all operations rendered visible. In America this goes all the way from the bewildering network of aerial telephone and electric wires ... to the concrete multiplication of all the bodily functions in the home, the litany of ingredients on the tiniest can of food, the exhibition of income or IQ.”
—Jean Baudrillard (b. 1929)