6d ago

Do you have strong opinions about universal basic income?

You're viewing a single thread.

176 comments

UBI is great, but First there's gotta be separate publicly-funded social nets for essentials like food, housing, water, electricity, heating...
Giving everyone $5000/mo to buy everything you want and need is far too volatile, and with poor budgeting people will end up trapped in debt spirals, needing microfinance loans to survive. I'd rather the government give $1000/mo to buy everything you want, then having public services to provide food, rent, and other necessities.
I fear that giving free-range UBI on its own will spawn a bunch of extreme examples that get disseminated en-masse by reactionary outlets to breed resentment of UBI and "handouts" in the eyes of the people. You'll have folks who are physically and/or mentally ill, who spend the whole allowance on drugs or gambling or porn or other controversial expenditures; then have to turn to charity to survive until their next UBI check. I'd need to know people would have that stable base before I'd feel comfortable with them being thrown that rope.
This is coming from seeing decades of USA arguments against welfare, then watching the "For The Children" fearmongering against the open internet. I just don't want a few extreme examples to have us all strung up.
- This is great point.
  There should be a powerful collective owned provider run as a non profit for every basic need.
  Innovators can still sell an improved more expensive option all they like.
  Today's "Innovators" hate this because they aren't innovators, they're rent seekers.
  Real innovators aren't afraid of competition.
  
  I really like this idea on its own. Multiple public options providers for multiple different products. Water/Electricity should be government run imo; but for Food? Household items? I'd love to see a multitude of government-stamped collectives that we could support. Actually... this was exactly what President Franklin Delano Roosevelt was attempting with his National Recovery Administration.
  
  Yes. The key thing is that when the dominant actors in the space start rent seeking, the government should be responsible to step in with a minimal cost good enough alternative.
  We have collective action through violence already. We should strive for collective action without the violence.
  Even the rent-seekers are better off, if we can figure it out, because they don't have to live in fear of being Brian Thompson-ed.
- To filter that, mandatory rehabilitation would be needed to ensure UBI would be in the right hands
  Want the money? Get help. Otherwise we just can't trust you because of your past reckless history.
  Should a single cent ever go to porn, alcohol, drugs or gambling. Well, they better enjoy that check because it will be their last.
  D'awww, people don't like the concepts of accountability and responsibility. Awwwww. Boo hoo, we need regulation of some sort so money isn't being pissed away on people who waste it on stupid shit like I had mentioned.
  
  Wouldn't this approach require a massive bureaucracy for enforcement?
  As a simple example, let's say I earn $100 at my job and take in another $100 from UBI. I now have $200 in my bank account. Once it's in my account, $1 is $1. If I turn around and spend $10 on the devil's lettuce and porn (quite the bargain if you ask me) how is the government going to prove it's UBI dollars I'm spending? I can think of 3 possible solutions and they all have serious potential problems:
  I keep and provide all of my receipts for the month to prove that $100 or less total was spent only on things that weren't marijuanas and porn (not really feasible for most people, and also easy to defraud)
  I have a separate UBI account and a special debit card that won't let me buy certain things or only works at certain places (similar to how EBT or FSA work already, but government could interfere with this account for arbitrary reasons)
  We create a new currency, a "digital dollar", either alongside or as a replacement for USD (the really worrisome one, everything here is fully tracked and controlled at the whim of whoever is in government)
  In my opinion, UBI should be given without strings attached. Even ignoring the moral questions around controlling how people spend their funds, trying to do any of the above would result in massive overhead from having to create and administer these new controls, possibly exceeding the loss coming from a small minority who would possibly misuse the funds, or it just gives the government way too much control. This could actually serve to entrench inequality and disenfranchisement rather than providing a way to ease them.
  
  That's some Reagan speech rage bait NGL. What you wrote is eerily similar to what Trump and Republicans are pushing against homeless and "mentally ill" people.
  Also, after all we've been through, I'd let people do drugs and porn with their money. Fuck it, we're all hurt and traumatized. I'm not going to funnel broken people into the psychiatry complex. Just do a bit of research into mental hospitals in the present-day USA to see why this loaded "get help" is a really dangerous demand.

176 comments