The Netherlands May Become the First Country With a Universal Basic Income (as a pragmatic centrist solution to welfare reform and automation)
https://scottsantens.substack.com/p/the-netherlands-may-become-the-first-country-with-universal-basic-income-ubi
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### Submission comment:
The recent electoral success of the Dutch D66 party was driven by a social liberal platform featuring an “individual basic amount,” a UBI proposal to replace complex welfare benefits. This policy draws on evidence from municipal “trust experiments” conducted in the Netherlands around 2017-2020. In these trials, a “trust” group of welfare recipients was freed from mandatory job-seeking requirements, while a separate “earnings release” group, which still had work obligations, could keep more of their income from part-time jobs.
The results showed that **removing obligations did not harm employment but significantly improved health and well-being, while financial incentives increased part-time work**. This allowed D66 to frame its policy as a pragmatic, evidence-based way to simplify bureaucracy and improve lives without disincentivizing work, shifting the idea from a fringe concept to mainstream political policy and a pragmatic solution to automation and the future of work.
I am Dutch, and this is never going to happen. Just because the centrist party is the largest party doesn’t mean that the conservative right isn’t didn’t get by far the most votes. It’s just split amongst 5-7 parties that share basically the same ideas with different nuances and people that don’t like each other. The votes for something like UBI simply aren’t there.
Hopefully not. Some proponents want it at like a 1000 euros a month, which is way, way less than what I get in disability benefits (if it’s going to replace that).
This was hardly a talking point and will never happen in a coalition with VVD.
when the world is divided between palantir shareholders and everyone else, these ideas won’t seem crazy anymore
This article is not only tonedeaf but utterly oblivious of the political reality in The Netherlands. For the first time in history not a single party has gotten more than 20% of the vote. “Winning” the election here doesn’t mean “ruling”, it means having first dibs on making a coalition.
And all in all this would just be a simplification of several systems already in place achieving much to the same effect, even if in a convoluted way.
>The key takeaway D66 likely leveraged for their successful 2025 campaign was that the expensive, bureaucratic apparatus of monitoring and punishing people was effectively useless at getting them into work, but very effective at making them miserable.
This was literally not even remotely a major part of their campaign.
I can assure you not a single person interested in UBI voted for D66 for the sake of getting UBI.
My dyslexia read that as neanderthals. I was like “Why would neanderthals need universal basic income?”. Maybe lack of UBI is why they went extinct.
ubi would need to be implemented globally at the same time rather than single countries otherwise the immigration to said country would go beserk and financially not feasible