If it wanted, central government could run a UBI-AA for the benefit of all the population. It could make that decision today and materialize it in a few months time. No serious administrative or financial hurdle is stopping it, and no real problems would be arising concerning the country’s management. On the contrary, it would only simplify current fiscal and social protection systems, plus public accounting and the economy itself. However, such move would imply a self-imposed loss in power for the government making it – at the onset by leading to smaller state budgets, therefore a reduced capacity for the executive to handle the country and the population – as well as profoundly disruptive and riddled in controversy. An uncomfortable challenge and of dubious interest, as seen by any typical decision maker within the conventional political arena.
Hence, it is not expectable that UBI-AA starts being implemented at the country scale, in one stroke. The path will be another, slower, but safer. And so it can be started immediately. At any moment, anywhere, any mutually supportive group of people can do it. Whoever they may be, owning whatever they have, together they can. They need only to organize free entry comunities and share, inconditionally and equally, part of their individual income. This way they will build, all and for all, an income guarantee and material dignity which can free each person for whatever occupations and life choices most valuable to her, no matter the economic value the “market” tags this choices with.
It will make sense to see the first UBI-AA iniciatives being implemented among alternative communities, already inspired by solidarity, in this way applying its principles on their members actual lives. The same can be replicated in local State fiscal units, when managed by the adequate political leadership, moved by public service plus the necessary vision and courage to allow their populations to stand on their own. In this case, local poverty alleviation schemes can be rendered obsolete, freeing up public resources and all that human potencial related to economic, cultural and social life, today blocked by fears of material unsafety.
Over these pioneering communities, with whatever size and shape, the UBI-AA implementation must be preceded by a formal definition of its operating rules, as well as of its correct application control mechanisms. These rules and the guarantee of their enforcement are key to unlock the potential participant’s trust in the whole process. The aim is such that, before the UBI-AA starts working, all participants feel safe about their contributions not being trampled with by eventual corrupt members, and that input and output cycles from the common fund will be, from all and for all, the right ones, at the right times and without deviations. Above a certain scale, over which participants will not know every other participant individually, trust building among them, which determines their decision to accept the program or not, will depend on the adequate definition of processes, rules and controls, including clear attribution of all necessary tasks to responsible people.
It is also important that first UBI-AA initiatives start off by already relieving participants of income tax. That will enhance their capacity to contribute to this new process, boosting its reach. Over these small scale pioneer applications, such relief will not be – obviously – a consequence of supressing the referred tax, or in some other way exempting these participants of its payment. These solutions would make progress of these initiatives dependent on difficult and possibly time-consuming law-making changes.
Instead, first community members will still be subject to income tax, and the referred tax relief obtained through a financial compensation system, in which one or more financing entities would replenish the UBI-AA fund in each community, of the income taxes due to the State by each member, or paid to the latter on their behalf. This way, whoever starts participating in UBI-AA pionner communities will be able to honor his or hers income tax obligations. This effort, however, will also be a contribute to the UBI-AA fund the person is linked to, and the correspondent value will efectively add to this fund, as transferred by the financing entity which, generally spreaking, mirrors the first money flow onto the State[1].
The financing entity, or entities, can be whichever. However, if not at the onset, at some later moment must the central State take over and fulfill that role. This will be the most natural solution because, in each UBI-AA community, the State will benefit from financial savings – according to the analysis and calculations performed for the portuguese reality – which will almost match its revenues concerning those participants income tax.
This way, the State, by repaying the community for a maximum value close to that it is saving by having the latter build its own social security net, is acting out of a mere reciprocity logic. Moreover, there is also a simplicity logic: taxes are directed towards the central State, therefore this is the only entity which, in a direct and immediate way, knows the ins and outs of these exchanges, and so more easily and directly is able to redirect them to UBI-AA funds.
One might argue that, if a convencional government is not expected to be inclined in pioneering an “uncomfortable challenge and of dubious interest” in implementing a country-wide UBI-AA, then it will also not want to place the State as a co-financing entity in its implementation over small communities – even if using, mostly, savings occurring within those same communitites. And rightly so: neither scenarios will spur enthusiasm in the typical political decision-maker. However, the second scenario cannot be compared to the first one: it does not carry the same sudden disruptive character, it does not represent significant risk for a national government, nor does it imply any relevant loss in power. And, if this may be a clearly expressed wish by the people of such communitites, and if the legal framework for such an endeavour places over the government hands the right to, at any moment, expand, diminish or extinguish its fiscal support, then this initial tendency should reverse, since, in these terms, justifying an eventual refusal would signify an even greater “uncomfortable challenge and of dubious interest”, than accepting it.
Be it as it may, no matter what the government stand on this state program for repaying pioneer UBI-AA communitites their income tax collection, the power to start, expand, reduce, generalize or extinguish UBI-AA communities will exclusively belong to people. Only these will make the process evolve, by volunteering to join it or not.
Moreover, any fear that a government involvement could, in these terms, pervert the popular nature of UBI-AA, would be unjustified. UBI-AA is the people’s reoccupation of comunal space, which naturally belongs to them, like a vacant plot, filled with solidarity instead of dirt. At the financial level, with its taxes and poverty alleviation conditioned programs, the State currently occupies an important room in such space, just as it did in Portugal, during dictatorship years, by occupying vacant plots traditionally held by local populations.
The State giving back the income tax to communitites wishing to implement UBI-AA equates, solidarity wise, to the post revolution movement in which the State let go of vacant plots, that were then taken by local populations: it will be the liberation of yet another natural vacant space, so that people, in community, can fill it with their own solidarity networks. In order to keep the original UBI-AA spirit intact, no government, or any other form of power “above” common people, shall decide over the process operation, or withold common funds. If that is safeguarded, any legal or administrative settlements aiming at returning the necessary financial space to populations, or that offer logistic or administrative support, can only facilitate and do nothing but help build UBI-AA.
Even if a financing entity cannot be found, other local UBI-AA forms are possible. However, that will imply participants contributing to their common funds on top of all enforced taxes, which will carry aditional challenges and, in many cases, limitations to how intense the process can be. These solutions will have to be tailored, as a function of the type of community searching for them. For instance, for populations with uniform, relatively low income, UBI-AA might work well with contribution rates close to optimum level, even when siding with all current taxes. On another hand, in places where more wealth and fiscal collection are concentrated, common fund contribution rates will have to be significantly reduced, reducing as well the processed redistribution. Another way, this one especially interesting for UBI-AA applications at communities with some internal commercial activity, can be to tie the process to local currencies. This and still other ways to adapt UBI-AA to communitites are possible to find and explore.
Once running, first UBI-AA applications will serve as beakons towards a new economy, with less inequality, more people friendly, adapted to this civilization which emerges from science development and technological explosion. These will also be in tadem with the widening of consciousness about the variety of meanings a human life can represent, within a world in constant progress, one that is more connected to “being” instead of “having” or “doing”. Once on sight, more and more people will follow this “light”, leading them towards the kind of life which, probaly in most cases, they already wish for a long time but have always thought impossible to reach. This way, UBI-AA will spread to more and more communities, then entire regions, until becoming common place.
When, at national level, participants are no longer just a few in local communities, but a significant parcel of the country’s population, inevitably tax legislation will change, wether to exempt that population from tributation, or even by simply getting rid of the income tax entirely. From here, everything gets simpler: a single UBI-AA fund for the whole country, direct participant contributions, matching these contributions with the tax is no longer necessary and the financing entity disappears from the process.
Implementing UBI-AA will set in motion the profound transformation which we believe is lacking in society and the world. Putting it in place can be done immediately, as long as people are willing to create communities in solidarity – wherever it may exist – with, ideally, the help of local powers with their administrative capacity, and with the permission of central governments. It is hard to imagine, today, a more timely, viable, democratic and transforming political project.
[1] The financing entity will only limit its coverage over the values paid to the State when these, eventually, exceed the contribution of a given contributor to the UBI-AA community (for example, in a community which ruled that its members should put in the common fund 40% of their income, someone that delivered 45% of her earnings to the State would not see that perfectly mirrored by the financing entity, onto the common fund, which would only happen up to the 40% limit). On the other hand, whenever a participant’s contribution to the UBI-AA fund is supposedly higher than the owed income tax to the State, the participant is responsible, and not the financing entity, in filling up the difference over to the fund.
Translated to English by André Coelho.