From Minimum Income to Basic Income

The objective of ensuring a decent quality of life for all citizens is sought through various programs of income guarantees or minimum income. The system currently in force in Spain is unanimously qualified as deficient by complex, heterogeneous, inefficient and bureaucratic; it produces delays in perceptions, induces the trap of poverty, stigmatizes the perceivers and does not reach most of its potencial recipients. The basic income clearly exceeds all these problems. It is not ignored that it can have others that, except the financial one, are also analyzed in the article. It is concluded that an automatic and unconditional rent that favored fundamentally the people with fewer resources and at risk of social exclusion, and, in a decreasing way, to the rest of the population, is an more effective and efficient policy to fight against poverty than the tangle of existing policies.