Harking back to UBI

This is February, my lazy season, and today is Sunday and Shoroshshoti pujo to boot, so I have had the whole day off: not a very common thing.  I shall have to saunter off presently to show my face at the cultural soirée they have arranged in my neighbourhood park – they don’t love me, but they love my money, and since I contribute handsomely, they then feel very bad if I don’t show up at their feasts and do’s – but meanwhile, time to write in my diary.

I am glad that my recent post on the prospects of a universal basic income has drawn the thoughtful attention of a few of my readers. Rajdeep’s link to what the historian Rutger Bregman said at the World Economic Forum in Davos recently is so important that I am re-linking it here. Bregman points out, tellingly, that people should stop talking ‘stupidly’ (and, I’d add, with false piousness) of things like philanthropy and talk about ‘taxes, taxes, taxes…’ instead. Indeed, no less successful and dyed-in-the-wool a capitalist than Warren Buffett has gone on record saying that people like him, the über rich, are taxed too little, and too unfairly: men who actually work for wages (his driver and secretary and bodyguard, for instance) pay much higher tax rates than those who earn vast sums idly through interest, rent and profit! A far more equitable tax regime, one that really bites the stinking rich (who do not really ‘earn’ their fortunes, at least beyond the first few years of setting up new businesses), would go a long way to giving governments much more money for social  welfare services, including UBI, thereby making society far less cruel and unfair to the vast majority who are poor or badly off. What could be more urgent in a world where in almost every significant country a few hundred people control the bulk of the nation’s wealth, and only a few hundred thousand could be called even well off?

[As an aside, if I were planning to recast the income tax regime in our country, I would exempt all single income family folks with monthly earnings of up to Rs. 50,000 – 80,000 if they invested in important savings like life, medical and unemployment insurance – entirely, charge only 5% for incomes between 50K and 150K a month, 10% upto 300K, 20% upto 500K, 40% upto 1 crore; then the rates would really begin to bite, until, for those who made more than 10 crore a month, the marginal rate should be something like 80 or 90%, unless they gave it away to charity. And – the really crucial thing – income in all forms must be clubbed together, including perks that come with jobs, from five-star accommodation in hotels, luxury villas, fancy cars, first-class travel, astronomically-priced gifts,  company-paid dinners, as well as domestic, secretarial and security details. Hiding incomes, and accounting sleights of hand that put large parts of it in low-tax brackets must be made impossible. As no less a personage than the head of the Central Board of Direct Taxes has put it publicly, it is a national shame that in a country of 1.2 billion plus, with a growth rate of 7%+ a year, where luxury consumption is shooting through the roof, the number of people who have declared incomes above a crore a year is only about 150,000, and most of them are in the salaried category. Obviously the real fat cats, whether they are in business, politics, sports, movies or crime, where they make the really big money, get away under the present dispensation almost without paying any taxes at all… what a ‘socialistic democracy’ we have made indeed!]

In that same video linked above, I would like to draw everybody’s attention to what the director of Oxfam has said: don’t just talk about jobs, talk about jobs that give people some dignity as human beings. Such jobs are few anyway and vanishing at an alarming rate, and what provisions are we making for the hundreds of millions who are falling by the wayside?

But all this, while good in itself, does not address the main issue that I raised in my blogpost. Far too few have noticed, understood and thought about it. So please read the last two paragraphs of that post very closely again, and reflect. Even if we could create a society where most people are mostly unemployed yet comfortably off in material terms, can such a society avoid dissolving into anarchy for long? I think not, I am very fearful about the likely scenario, and find it most disquieting that far too few people have even begun to think about it.

Meanwhile, my daughter has written a post on her own blog about how she has begun to despise the moneyed class, especially as they exist in and pollute our own country, and I am as proud as I am glad that she has grown up to be not only possessed of a strong and clear mind of her own, not only far more articulate in expressing what goes on in that mind than 99% of people in the 18 to 50 age group, but very closely resonating with my own – very settled – outlook on life. My only prayer for her is that she never has to know harsh and humiliating want, and, that much assured, that she never becomes another member of the affluent trash. In this context, look up once again Chesterton’s wonderful essay titled The worship of the wealthy.

And – I cannot help bragging about this, though I have held myself back for months now – she has become the fourth member in our immediate family to have won a gold medal for a university first. If there are ten people in this world who truly love and respect me, I hope they would pray she has a good, happy, fruitful life hereafter. Do that if you really care for your own loved ones.

I have been reading voraciously and watching movies equally avidly of late … but about that, in the next post.