There are two parts to this question: In order to know what we are funding, we shall need to know precisely how large a Citizen’s Income we are attempting to fund. We shall also need to know how to calculate the costs of a Citizen’s Income. Once these questions have been answered, we shall need to study the funding options.

How large should a Citizen’s Income be?

There are several ways of answering this question:

• • Ease of implementation: Turning existing tax allowances into a Citizen’s Income, and reducing means-tested and most contributory benefits by an amount equal to the Citizen’s Income, would be the easiest way to establish a universal benefit. The amount of Citizen’s Income paid to every citizen would therefore be determined by the current levels of tax allowances and benefits. This is the approach taken by Hermione Parker: see the next section.

• • Political testing: One way of testing the political sustainability of a Citizen’s Income would be to start with a small one and let it grow, while testing public opinion along the way. The level reached after several years would thus be democratically controlled.

• • A needs-based approach: We could argue that all members of society have certain subsistence needs in common, and that all other needs and desires are subsidiary. This suggests that an assessment of common subsistence needs is required – though whether we should take a normative approach to this, based on some extrinsic notion of what human beings need, or whether opinion sampling should determine the basket of basic needs, is of course an ideological question. (London Weekend Television was a pioneer of the opinion-sounding approach in 1983, and useful work has been done more recently by the Family Budget Unit, government statisticians, and the Institute for Fiscal Studies.) Once a decision is made as to how much money an individual needs in order to satisfy basic subsistence needs, the Citizen’s Income could be set at that level (though see Chapter 16 on the problem posed by differential housing costs). Such a needs-based approach would match an equal Citizen’s Income to equal subsistence needs, and a variety of variable sources of income to variable subsidiary needs and desires.