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The Swiss may have just voted to reject a proposal for a guaranteed minimum income — also known as a guaranteed annual income, basic income guarantee or, increasingly, just basic income — but that hardly means the idea is dead. Pilot projects and feasibility studies are in the works across the developed world, from the Netherlands to California. In Canada, the federal Liberals, along with governments in Ontario, Quebec and Alberta have expressed interest in the concept.

What the Swiss vote did highlight, however, is the widely diverging notions represented by that deceptively simple label. While the basic income is often said to enjoy support across the political spectrum, it’s clear that left and right have very different ideas of what it would mean, both in terms of how generous the income guarantee would be, and how it would be financed.

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The model on which the Swiss voted was at the outer limits of what anyone has imagined a basic income could or should entail. At 2,500 Swiss francs a month (about $40,000 a year) for every man, woman and child in the country, the gross cost of such a program in Canada would come to about $1.4 trillion, or more than two-thirds of our gross domestic product. Even netting out the money not spent on the programs it replaced, the Swiss plan was reckoned to cost a quarter of GDP in additional taxes. No wonder voters rejected it.