Swiss Initiative Would Give $2,800 a Month to Everyone—No Strings Attached
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A movement to give every person an “unconditional basic income”—no work required—is gathering speed in Europe. In its biggest victory to date, earlier this month supporters in Switzerland garnered more than 100,000 signatures on a petition and managed to get an initiative onto the national ballot.
“It will be the first time in history that a country will actually vote on whether they want a basic income for all,” Stanislas Jourdan, a “mediactivist” in France who is working on a similar Europe-wide initiative, told me in an interview today. The Europe-wide initiative requires 1 million signatures to get on the ballot and has acquired about 100,000 since the start of 2013.