Dec 2022: Playground, taxes and that time of year

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December 2022 → Subscribe to Monthly Updates

Playground, taxes and that time of year

Global redistribution

We presented Social Income alongside the ETH Zurich and the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC) at an event in Bern. Our takeaways:

• Cash transfers are not reinforcing North-South dependencies, but are an effective tool in global income redistribution.
• You don’t have to be wealthy to make a difference (CHF 1 is worth CHF 2.5 in low income countries).
• We have never had more resources, technologies, data, and methods to fight poverty effectively than today. But that alone does not equal automatic progress.

A playground for now

We asked social media’s newest star, ChatGPT – an AI chatbot that tries to answer questions like a person – what might be a good slogan for Social Income. Artificial intelligence answered: Ending poverty starts with you. We agree.

Lower your tax bill

We are a tax-exempt non-profit in Switzerland. That means you can deduct your donations from your taxes if you are a Swiss resident. Confirmations will be sent out in the beginning of January.

It’s that time of year

While there are many new year’s resolutions out there, not all are meaningful. Here are a few that we found inspiring:

• Volunteer or donate to a good cause like Social Income
• Reduce your carbon footprint
• Learn a new skill to keep your mind active (especially if you are bored at work). Some team suggestions: learn to use Mastodon, sharpen baking technique, expand coding skills, and meditate more
• Improve an aspect of your personality
• Quit a bad habit

Newsworthy

This new recurring newsletter segment is for readers who want to keep abreast of developments with direct cash transfers and universal basic income initiatives in Sierra Leone and around the world.

• 8 out of 10 Sierra Leonean households were food insecure in August. (NYTimes)
• The president of Sierra Leone insists on investing more than 20% of government funding in education. (The Guardian)
• Unconditional cash programs are increasingly promoted to state-level policies. (Next City)
• While direct cash transfers don’t have a negative impact on inflation (Oxford), inflation in turn can erode the power of direct cash transfers. (Bloomberg)
• Multinational corporations from the mining and agribusiness sectors have land-grabbed a quarter of the territory of Sierra Leone. (Weltblick)
• Chelsea Eats, a guaranteed income pilot project in the US, has been successfully running for two years. (Harvard)
• What happens when anyone who has been unemployed is guaranteed a job? (The New Yorker)

On behalf of the Social Income team: We wish you the best possible start to the new year, happiness and health in 2023!

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