Basic income as product of the pandemic
Officials of the Economy and Citizenship ministries were tasked with shaping a basic income program meant to replace structurally the emergency aid created during the pandemic. The goal is to make the money reach about 50 million people who are in the informal economy and who received the R$600 payments of the aid. The ideal would be to have the basic income, named Brazil Income, to reach these informal workers at the end of another two R$300 payments in the extension of the emergency aid for July and August.
The minimum income is likely to come from the merger of cash-transfer program Bolsa Família, the continuous cash benefit (BPC) for poor elders and disabled people, the salary allowance paid annually to formal workers who earn up to two minimum wages and other public policies meant to reduce Brazil's terrible income inequality. It will also include the unemployment insurance for fishers during the off-season and the subsidy to some drugs.
For this, the officials will suggest to the government to shake up the federal budget in search of funds now going to social programs, but that don't reach those who really need them, for being badly focused.
The government view is that now it has the exact measure of the size of poverty in the country. Part of the 50 million beneficiaries of the corona voucher, the nickname of the emergency aid, were invisible informal workers who are now registered as poor citizens.
The minimum income will be a policy in the line of negative income tax, which assumes a certain income line, above which one pays a percentage of tax and below it the person gets a fraction of the tax.
The original proposal is not to work with the hypothesis of additional revenues coming from tax hikes. The idea is to make a big rearrangement of projects and programs already existing in the budget. But the government doesn't rule out in advance the possibility of creating new brackets of income tax or taxing dividends for the higher income brackets, among others.
In a political assessment, the agreement with the Centrão would gain the status of "big bargaining chip" of the basic income program. Centrão is a group of political parties which aims to get close and provide support to the executive branch in order to get advantages.
The basic income value has not been defined yet, but it is believed it may range between R$200 per month, first amount of what the emergency aid would be, and R$300, which is the figure defined for the extension of...
Para continuar a ler
PEÇA SUA AVALIAÇÃO