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Comment by duchenne | Hacker News Reader

If you want a bigger scale experiment, you could have a look at the French RMI/RSA, it is not exactly a basic income, because it is given only to unemployed people. But, it is 550 euros/months, it has existed since 1988, and it is given under very loose conditions. It is now given to more than a million people. People that have recently lost their jobs receive another bigger help.

It is unclear what is the outcome. Some people will say that it is helping poor people, others will say that it demotivates people to find a job and is contributing to French high unemployment rate. It is really unclear.

edit: To receive RMI/RSA, one also need to be looking for a job, but it is not really enforced.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revenu_minimum_d%27insertion

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One of my friends received this. He was previously a rugby player and coach, but was feeling heavier and heavier every day. So he quit.

I think this type of income is best when 'between careers'.. when someone desires to walk a new path.

The alternative seems to be to leap into a new job, which could perpetuate misery.

But if a person has time to step away, and create stillness and clarity, then that decision can become obvious.

For him, the income was enough to live, for him to become a more conscious spender, and when he stopped receiving the money, he chose a new career in door-to-door sales which he's loving.

Unemployment benefits =/= basic income

Unemployment benefits (Chômage/Pôle Emploi) are only allocated to people actively looking for a job after they lost a previous job. They are typically 70-80% of your previous income and are granted for 2 years. It comes with monthly oversight and training program. Entrepreneurs are welcome to it and can ask to be given a lump sum and have dedicated training.

RSA (Revenu de Soliarité Active) is given to anyone, based on their resources: young graduates without a first paying job, refugees waiting for immigration decision, people who haven’t found a job in more than two years, even unpaid members of religious orders. It comes with medical coverage (“universal” medical insurance is based on your status in France).

Both are revoked when you find a job. It used to be possible that a part-time job would pay not much more than either stipend; because of that, both programs were described a possible “disincentives” by opponents (typically right-wing small-government, aka “Libéraux”). Even proponents saw a lot of edge-cases: people having to wait, seeing their hours cut or being fired soon after they changed status and struggling in the transition. To ease the transition, partial stipends were made possible.

Social welfare keeps people in Ghettos and drives them into a life of criminality, drug addiction, tax and social welfare fraud, and pretty much ensures that their children will never get any higher education and move up on the 'social ladder'. As if someone in France could live off 550 EUR/month - and German welfare levels are similar, to make this clear. The levels are unrealistically low, because politicians are detached from the reality of being poor, most of them have never even remotely experienced that life, and the budgets for social welfare systems are extremely high in percentage of GDP. Moreover, social welfare recipients are not a large voter group. So the budgets are cut down every now and then.

The whole idea of real BI is that everybody gets it indiscriminately and that it's high enough to be able to live off it.

RSA is not at all a basic income... Basic income should be unconditional and would affect every one in our society.

RSA just prevent people from dying too soon.

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