On the subject of incoherent policies... what do you think of the Green Party's batshit crazy manifesto ? I must admit I was kind of hoping they'd take a few votes away from Labour this time round but the more I see of them the less confident I am. Surely you'd have to be stark raving mad to vote Green. Thi post I just read on the Guardian sums it up for me:

I like the Green's free money for everyone, every week policy. Not sure why the other parties haven't attempted that one, it's a sure fire winner!

I don't like their open the borders policy. When the queues at Calais start stretching all the way back to Italy and people start swimming the channel for their free money, things could get hairy. Think of the disruption to shipping.

Scrap the military... Use the associated manufacturing resources to make windmills. Hmmmmm --- Best to think of the free money for everyone.

Allow people to openly belong to terrorist organisiations. Ok. Can anyone recommend a good one? One with panache? Suave dress code? Not so sure about Al Qaeda - Those nighties look awfully flimsy and not weather friendly, and they're almost transparent!

Free money every week!

Was it quarter or half a million new houses? At £60000 each? Will that be enough? I hope they're stackable and reasonably waterproof. Hopefully they'll float. When the free money and open borders and no military and freedom of terrorism swells the population over 100,000,000 -- And the economy collapses, you can carry your house to the nearest shoreline and attempt to paddle it off to somewhere less crowded and rioty. Oh and caps on trade imports - Grass is a good dietary supplement, and plentiful, where it hasn't been trodden into the dust under bazziliions of milling feet.

Did I mention free money? Every week? Every Week! For everyone!

I can't wait.

Believe it or not I actually voted Green in the last council election. I did it to tactically to keep Labour out. Now that I stop to think about it I can't give you a single coherent reason for why that made any kind of sense...

I like the Green's free money for everyone, every week policy.

I recommend they call it, the Basic Living Standard or BLS. Then they can change the name of the country from the United Kingdom to the People Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.

The actual policy is so crazy as to be practically beyond satire anyway. They call it the 'Citizens Income'. The idea is that every person over the age of 18 will be given £72 a week whether they have any need for the money or not, with a higher rate for pensioners. The estimated cost for this largesse is approximately £240B a year, which is broadly equivalent to what we currently spend on health, education and defence combined.

To be strictly fair, this wouldn't all be new spending. the idea is that this new blanket benefit payment would replace a lot of existing state benefits (jobseekers allowance, in-work benefits, state maternity payments, child benefit, housing benefit and state pensions). If that were actually to be the case then it arguably pays for itself since £240B is roughly how much we spend on various social benefits if pensions are included. Hang on though, this doesn't make any sense. If you're disabled right now you currently receive way more than £72 a week when you add in disability benefits, housing benefit etc. If strictly applied the CI policy would strip most of that away and replace it with a flat rate payment of £72, out of which they'd need to find money for accommodation, food, bills and anything else. When you put it that way it starts to sound a bit more like the way Milton Friedman would devise a welfare system. This is the Green Party though, and there's no way they'd ever do that. As such they say that nobody who currently receives benefits would end up any worse off under CI. I'm sure they mean it too, so this policy isn't 'fully costed' at all. They're basically talking about adding tens of billions of extra spending to the national budget and all to give free money to people who don't actually need it.

Calling it a 'Citizens' Income is a bit misleading as well btw. They actually propose to pay it to every British resident regardless of citizenship. Combine that with their policy of opening up the floodgates and letting more or less anybody settle here with minimal immigration controls and what do you think is likely to happen ?

If the leader of the Green Party can't even understand their own policies, and a senior member of the party is so worried she'll flub again the same day that they try stop her answering questions at a press conference, then what could anyone think?

The Greens are in a way like the Lib Dems were, in a position to promise anything because they don't have a chance to need to answer for it (until, as in Brighton they do and then it all goes a bit wrong).

So, local Greens here oppose housing development. National policy is to build a load of houses.

And yet they're currently sitting at about 9% in the polls. This will surely drop substantially by May, but it still seems that an awful lot of people are willing to vote for them anyway in spite of their obvious lunacy. A couple of my friends (lifelong Labour voters) say they're planning to vote Green this year. I suspect they haven't bothered to research any of the Greens' policies, but then since it's just a protest vote they probably don't care anyway.

I have no right to criticise really. In the past I've also voted Green, twice !. I'm about the least green person I know. I did it the last time for the aforementioned tactical reasons and the first time because I happened to be sharing a house with a guy who was standing for Parliament as the Green candidate that year. He was up against Nick Clegg as it happens. Rob can proudly boast that he was the first man in Sheffield to develop a deep-rooted hatred of Clegg. I felt I had to vote Green in sympathy with him, even though their entire platform was antithetical to what I believe in. I won't be doing it again though.

Sassenach wrote:The actual policy is so crazy as to be practically beyond satire anyway. They call it the 'Citizens Income'. The idea is that every person over the age of 18 will be given £72 a week whether they have any need for the money or not, with a higher rate for pensioners. The estimated cost for this largesse is approximately £240B a year, which is broadly equivalent to what we currently spend on health, education and defence combined.

BLS is what it was called in the Honor Harrington Series. They should read it to see how it works out.

I'll butt in long enough to ask, if there are any economists in the room, "What would that do to the UK's rate of inflation?"

JimHackerMP wrote:I'll butt in long enough to ask, if there are any economists in the room, "What would that do to the UK's rate of inflation?"

Depends upon how it is financed.

They are not promising to implement it if elected, though. Just as an aim over the medium term.

I have seen American Libertarians make a case for a Citizens Basic Income.

It's only going to be inflationary if they print the money to pay for it.

Dan is right, this is an idea that's been proposed by some libertarians. It's one of the attractively simple solutions to a complex problem that appeals to people who can't be bothered to think through the implications. In theory it does have a lot going for it. If you replace existing pensions and benefits with a flat rate payment that applies to all regardless of circumstances then it saves a large amount of money in administration costs, eliminates fraud and allows for much more flexible working patterns, thereby removing the benefit trap that disincentivises the long term unemployed from getting a job.

That's the theory anyway, in practice this idea doesn't really pass muster. The first problem is that while most people benefit from the policy (at least until the economy collapses anyway), many of the most vulnerable people in society would see a drastic drop-off in their incomes. This shouldn't bother libertarians too much but it's a slightly perverse outcome for a party that's positioned way out on the far left who claim to care about the poorest in society. They'd end up having to provide all kinds of additional means-tested top-up payments to compensate for this, which essentially brings us right back to where we started with a complex benefit system that's open to abuse, the only difference being that we now have to find vastly more money to pay for it.

I also think there's an element of moral hazard about this concept. Once we start getting into the realms of free money for everyone then it's sure to become the ultimate form of electoral bribe. Cutting the Citizens Income would be politically impossible but pledging to raise it is a sure-fire vote winner. I'm sure we all know where this ends.

Sassenach wrote:Dan is right, this is an idea that's been proposed by some libertarians.

That's interesting. While I consider myself of a more libertarian then conservative, I am still pretty much a main stream Republican. This means I do not really follow the policy position of Libertarian positions. However, this seems to be quite contrary to the ideology of extremely limited government support of anything.

Friedman and Hayek have both proposed something along the lines of this, albeit with differences. This is a reasonable summation of the libertarian case for it:

http://www.cato-unbound.org/2014/08/04/ ... -guarantee

It doesn't convince me, but it's by no means a wholly left-wing idea.

It's only going to be inflationary if they print the money to pay for it.

Well, governments do not "print" as much money as they used to. In fact, out of the entire "money supply" of the United States is 2% to 3% "physical" money (e.g., actual notes and coins). If I am right to assume that the UK, its banking being as sophisticated, or maybe even more so, than that in the United States, then H.M. Government would also not really "print" much of its money.

"Is there an economist in the house?" [cough.....] How does a modern government, like yours or ours, "print" its money, if it no longer literally prints the vast majority of the money supply? I do not mean to change the subject or invite delay, but I've always been curious about this.

Well no, they simply press a button a computer screen and the money magically appears. This is still referred to as money printing for convenience.

Banks "print" money by mainly creating it in their computerised accouhts - primarily loaning it out by leveraging their assets.

Governments tend to use central banks to do it.

If CBI were paid for by increasing taxes, it would not necessarily be inflationary, but it would if all done at once create a lot of economic turmoil.

Waitwaitwaitwaitwait.....are you telling me the government can electronically print more "money" with the click of a mouse???!!!