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Nobel economics laureate Paul Krugman has argued a mincome is an appropriate response to the increasing share of income going to capital as opposed to labour, but he fears for the idea’s political popularity.

One popular version of the idea works like a refundable tax credit. “If an individual has no income from any source at all, they receive a basic entitlement,” Forget wrote in an op-ed this year. “As earned income increases, the benefit declines, but less than proportionately. As a result, low-income earners receive partial benefits so that they aren’t worse off than they would have been if they had quit their jobs and relied solely on income assistance. This means that there is always an incentive to work, and people who work are always better off than they would be if they didn’t work.”

Other small scale tests are in the works, in places such as Utrecht, Holland.

Unusually for an economic policy, guaranteed income is popular on the economic left and right, on libertarian grounds, or for efficiency or institutionalized fairness.

If an individual has no income from any source at all, they receive a basic entitlement

It has had proponents such as Milton Friedman, the iconic free marketeer who liked it as a simplification of welfare, and leading Canadian Tories from Robert Stanfield to Hugh Segal. No less a neo-con pair than Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney once oversaw a mincome pilot project for the Nixon White House, aimed at measuring labour market reactions.

But the big boosters tend to be left-wing anti-poverty activists, such as Joe Ceci, a former Calgary alderman who was the provincial NDP’s star candidate and is now Alberta’s finance minister.

He might be uniquely placed to try out this theory, which has had so many champions but so few pioneers. He has the support of the mayors of his biggest cities, Calgary and Edmonton, who have offered to host pilot projects.

For Alberta, this would be in line with the province’s history of experimental economic policy, such as prosperity bonuses, or “Ralph Bucks,” paid out of a massive surplus in 2006.

For Canada, it would be unusually dramatic. But as official policy of the ruling party, it is set to get a serious hearing.

National Post

jbrean@nationalpost.com

Twitter.com/JosephBrean