The transition problem for minimum income policies  by John
Quiggin on August 8, 2012  I was planning this as a followup to
my earlier post on the feasibility of guaranteed minimum income
(GMI) and universal basic income (UBI) policies[1]. Chris has
opened debate on some of the fundamental issues associated with
a Rawlsian transition, so there might be some benefits in a
parallel discussion of the specifics of these policies, which
seem to me to capture a fair bit of what Rawls had in mind.
Although the two kinds of policies can be made roughly
equivalent in terms of their effects on the distribution of
income net of taxes and transfers, they seem (to me, at any
rate) to indicate quite different political approaches, and
therefore different transition paths, each with their own
difficulties.  For UBI, it seems natural to start with existing
examples of unconditional and universal payments, such as the
Alaska Permanent Fund, and the issue of shares in formerly
state-owned enterprises in some transition econom