Dynamic Basic Income
A better solution for social security
Flexible solution for dynamic worklife
Traditional social security models were often created when most people had long term employment and needed safety coverage between jobs. Typically this meant that you had to be employed for some time before qualifying and it can take a while before you can collect benefits. This does not work well in current environment of microwork where the employment length might be only for few days or the hours worked varies from week to week. This easily leads to situations where accepting work is a net decrease in income as you might lose several weeks of benefits to work for a few days.
Dynamic basic income has no qualifications or limits but level of benefits increase towards the salary when you work and pay taxes and decrease towards the base benefits when you collect it. When your work revenues increase, the amount of benefit that can be collected decreases until you no longer need the benefit. It's also possible to collect partial benefits to save the benefits for a later date.
Try It Yourself!
Test how dynamic basic income would work in your life situation by adjusting how much you earn salary and collect benefits.
All Work Is Worth It
Central problem in traditional benefit systems is that it can be beneficial to not work as it would lead to net decrease of income. In dynamic basic income every earned dollar will increase both your net income and available benfits. You can work a day or a week and there is no additional bureacracy or penalties, making every dollar count.
Cost Neutral
Dynamic basic income can be balanced to existing benefit levels by adjusting how high and fast benefits change, making it a cost neutral change requiring no new taxes. Compared to traditional models with fixed periods salary dependent benefits, the peak benefit can be made higher without increasing the costs.
Income Transfer Neutral
Fundamental problem of most basic income models is that they create new big income transfers from the rich to the poor, making it a political challenge to implement. They make everyone a beneficiary which means you need new taxes get it back from most people. Usually there is a tradeoff point in income where you don't gain or lose anything, but everyone with more income will lose money. That's not to say this could not be done, but it makes it harder politically to get such solution approved.
Structural Unemployment
Most western countries suffer from structural, long term unemployment caused by existing professional skills becoming obsolete by disappearing industries. In a situation there is no work of your competence available, options are to re-educate, relocate or minimum wage work. Especially if you are older it's easier and safer to rely on social security rather than try start from scratch. Dynamic basic income allows people to safely try different employment options and be partially employed.
Development Challenges
Dynamic basic income is currently a concept that needs further analysis to study if there are unknown problems or people that are not suitable. Model has many parameters needing more detailed modelling like how quickly the benefit goes up and down, how much income affects collectable benefit, how low income situations are handled etc.
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