Alternative Funding Methods

This chapter explores four different ways of funding a Basic Income. Stewart Lansley envisages funding Basic Incomes through a citizens’ wealth fund, financed by taxes on wealth, without the need to raise taxes on earned income. The fund could pay a citizen’s dividend, and then a Basic Income. Geoff Crocker argues that the only way to fund an adequate Basic Income is by central bank money creation. This is common practice when central banks purchase government debt and thereby create debt-free sovereign money, as they did when they supported incomes during the pandemic. Crocker suggests that such money creation is a preferable funding mechanism to income, wealth, land, or eco-taxation. On the basis that in principle the land belongs to all of us, Mark Wadsworth proposes a Land Value Tax. A particular advantage of such a tax is that the amount of land in a country is relatively fixed, so taxation would not reduce the tax base as it can with other kinds of taxation. Finally, Julio Linares discusses the Circles project in Berlin that pays an unconditional income in a locally generated currency, and he also wonders whether a cryptocurrency Basic Income might be a possibility.