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Experts say that giving everyone a basic income can actually *help* the economy.

By Channing Joseph

What if every month you got a paycheck for almost $900, whether you worked a job or just spent the whole time Instagramming pictures of your toenails?

Well, if you live in Finland, you could soon know what that feels like. The Northern European country is considering plans to be presented in November 2016 that would provide a universal basic income of 800 euros a month tax-free (roughly $860) to all of its adult citizens (while cutting existing benefits). Nearly 70 percent of the country supports the idea, which would start gradually, beginning with a pilot stage in which the monthly paycheck would be 550 euros.

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Crazy? Maybe not. Experts say that giving everyone a basic income can actually help the economy rather than discouraging people from working. That’s in part because the Finnish program will replace all its other social welfare programs, saving the country money in the long run.

“For me, a basic income means simplifying the social security system,” Finland’s Prime Minister Juha Sipilä has said.

But universal basic income can also encourage people who receive welfare benefits to start working because in Finland (as well as in the United States), people who receive government benefits can lose them or see them reduced if they take on a part-time job. Under the new system, Finns receiving benefits could take short-term or part-time work and still get their 800 euros a month.

Believe it or not, experiments with a universal basic income have been tried before, including in Mexico; several Dutch cities; the Canadian town of Dauphin; and the African countries of Uganda, Kenya, Liberia and South Africa -- all with promising results. Switzerland is also set to hold a popular vote in 2016 on whether to implement a basic income of 2,500 Swiss francs per month (about $2,500).

The experiment in Canada was conducted from 1974 to 1979, but the results were not analyzed until more recently by Evelyn Forget, an economist at the University of Manitoba, who concluded in 2011 that the basic income had improved health incomes, reduced costs, and increased high school graduation rates.

“Men were less likely to drop school, which has an influence in lifetime earnings,” Forget told Quartz, “and women took longer maternity leaves.”

In the Ugandan study, young people from the country's war-ravaged northern region were given one-time stipends of just $382, approximately “twice their annual income.” After four years, researchers found that recipients of the grants invested in learning new skills and in buying supplies and hiring labor. Rather than working less, the participants actually increased their work hours by 17 percent.

After three similar experiments in rural India, funded by the United Nations, researchers concluded that a basic income not only resulted in more economic activity, it also improved sanitation, nutrition and school attendance. In addition, it helped farmers pay down their debts and build their businesses, and it equalized power dynamics in local villages -- because everyone (more than 6,000 people in total) received the same amount, regardless of their age, gender or ability.

In poorer countries, studies found that receiving a basic income can have a particularly powerful effect on women.

“To appreciate the full extent of the emancipation, one should hear the story of the young women who at first wore veils and were reluctant to offend their elders when having their photographs taken to obtain eligibility for the basic income,” Guy Standing, a professor of development studies at the University of London, wrote in The Guardian. “Within months, they had confidence enough to be sitting and chatting in the centre of the village unveiled. They had their bit of independence.”

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The idea of a universal basic income has also cropped in the U.S. from time to time. Back in 1969, President Richard Nixon advocated a negative income tax program that would have provided a guaranteed minimum income for American families.

Also, a so-called natural experiment occurred among the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians in the Smoky Mountains of North Carolina, when the tribe decided in 1996 to distribute $6,000 a year in casino profits to each of its members. The result was that behavior problems among kids improved and, again, high school graduation rates increased. For many tribal members who depend on seasonal summer jobs, according to The New York Times, the payments dramatically “eased the strain of that feast-or-famine existence.”

Experts say a basic income of just $3,000 a year in the U.S. -- where 46 million people now live in poverty -- would reduce that number by half.