Basic income... an idea whose time has come?

It's a well kept secret that in the 1970s a joint federal-provincial study was conducted between the Schreyer government in Manitoba and the Trudeau administration in Ottawa on a program called "Mincome". It involved paying a basic income to residents of Dauphin and a like number of people in Winnipeg. The study was aborted when the feds decided to pull the plug on it. The date of the cancellation depends on who you read; according to the Uniter it was killed in 1978 (thus in the dying months of the Trudeau government), while Wikipedia claims it lasted until the following year (perhaps under the Clark government). Either way, the data from the study sat in vaults for decades before Evelyn Forget dusted off the old files and tried to draw some conclusions from the study. What she found was interesting:

Originally designed to test what impact guaranteed income would have on people’s decision to work, Mincome provided Forget with a unique natural experiment to look at the impact of poverty through health and education outcomes.

“Kids [that were part of Mincome] stayed in school longer and people used hospitals less, especially for accidents and injuries and mental health reasons,” said Forget.

What was surprising, she notes, is the strength of the findings. Even though only 30 per cent of the families qualified for support, “many people benefited from Mincome, and not only those who received payments under the scheme,” said Forget.

Participants at Mincome’s sister site in Winnipeg had similar outcomes. Even with guaranteed income, participants still chose to work.

From the previously cited Uniter article (my emphasis). If you think about it, it makes sense, considering the way welfare works right now. After all, if you're on welfare and get a job in a fast food hellhole, you're not going to be making any more money than you were on welfare, so you might as well just stay on the dole in the hope of finding something better. On the other hand, with a basic income, your income from your crappy job is on top of your Mincome payments. So it makes a lot more sense to find a job under a basic income regime than it does with conventional welfare.

Obviously, the elephant in the room is that running something like this on a provincial or national scale would require significantly higher levels of taxation than most Canadians, not to mention Americans, are accustomed to. The folks at Worthwhile Canadian Initiative have looked at the economics of this in more detail, and it's noteworthy that they like the idea in spite of the tax drawbacks. Noteworthy because the WCI folks are pretty mainstream economists, and pretty free-market oriented at that.