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The Basic Income Grant: Poverty, Politics and Policy-making
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3. What did the Taylor Committee propose?
The Committee recommended a framework for Comprehensive Social Security for South Africa. This covered retirement provision, national health insurance, social insurance funds, administration and institutional arrangements, etc. - not only the BIG (though the BIG has grabbed the headlines).
The Taylor Committee recommended a universal social security package to address income, service and asset poverty. However, the Committee found that income poverty was the biggest problem. The Committee found that the lack of income was undermining government services and asset programmes (where, for example, people cannot pay for transport to access services, and people are selling the assets that the government is transferring to them thus creating some perverse secondary markets).
The Committee proposed that a BIG (which is called a solidarity grant) be phased in by 2006, starting with children up to the age of 18 years. Such a phasing-in would reduce the financial and administrative risk to government.
The Committee found that such a phased-in approach would make BIG both "affordable and feasible".
I will not go into all the details on the Taylor Committee report, suffice to say that all the key government departments were on the Committee, including the National Treasury. And in the almost two years of the Committee investigation and debate, there was never a substantive argument that could be mustered against these conclusions.
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