On the 5th, the Helvetians will be voting on 5 major issues:
• The “Public Service” question, which will affect what the Swiss GSEs can do. These are private companies sponsored by the government to provide services like post, utilities, transit; the vote is to greatly limit their profit-taking and funds handling, because some people feel that there is a problem there
• “Unconditional Basic Income” would insure that everyone gets at least something to (try to) live on. Seems like there is a concern that automation is making jobs start to go extinct.
• “Fair Transport Financing” would require that motor fuel tax only gets spent on roads and bridges. Could severely impact the national budget.
• “Reproductive Medicine Act Amendment” affects the handling and culling of IVF embryos. The referendum seeks to lift increased restrictions that have been passed.
• “Asylum Act Amendment” seeks to expedite the cases of refugees and asylum seekers.
Basic income (which might greatly reduce the overhead and paperwork for aid like welfare, since everyone is treated the same) seems to be getting the most attention outside Switzerland, but it does not seem likely to pass. And of course, all Europe is having issues with the influx of ME refugees, so that is a major hot-button issue.
Are there any Swiss here who can enlighten the rest of us on this stuff?
It’s an idea that’s been floating around for a while, and there’s some renewed interest in the UK as well, interestingly across political party boundaries, which makes it slightly less of a non-starter.
But there are no end of potential complications: how large (or small)? what other graded/personalised benefits get lost in the transition (how do you deal with families)? how do you ensure “moral buy-in” from the majority unless there’s some built-in element of contribution for all but the most desperate cases of disability?
It’s the old problem of whether you adopt the idea of the “deserving” and “undeserving” poor or not. And how much it costs - not only in cash terms, but also in terms of socio/economic incentives/disincentives: beware the law of unintended consequences!
If we tried unconditional basic income in the US, it would end up being corporate welfare, subsidizing the minimum wage age feeding the paydayloansharks and every other business trying to surcharge everyone to death.
Well, that was a pretty spectacular defeat for unconditional basic income, which lost by around 50 percentage points. The road tax measure lost nearly as convincingly, and the restrictions on public service providers was not too far behind in its defeat.
Refugee asylum reform and the easing of restrictions on prenatal DNA inspection apparently passed comfortably. So, nothing ground-shattering there.
A universal basic income will become a necessity once automation renders most of the population unemployable, but in an age when unemployment still dips below 5% in good times we’re just not there yet. Plus I don’t think economic output is high enough to make it work. Universal basic income is one of those things that will exist in the future, but it will be a future that is unrecognizable to us today.