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Originally Posted by CoccoBill
Perhaps, but that's the concept of UBI and that's what we're talking about here.
No, I mean, that if UBI were a reality, there's no plausible scenario that I see where it would be the only form of government entitlement. You seem to be ignoring the fact that Pandora's box is already open. People are getting free food, free healthcare, free housing, free phones, free internet service, disability benefits, and who knows what else.
UBI is either going to cover all of that, and extend that coverage to hundreds of millions of people who already pay their own way. Or existing benefits will be reduced (diluted), and then extended to hundreds of millions of people who already pay their own way. You either have to completely soak the rich to redistribute massive amounts of money. Or you have to shaft poor people.
Which catastrophe are you advocating for here?
I'm not a small government fanboy but I still think creating useless government jobs just for the sake of creating jobs is inane. You're already "giving away free money", why not do it vastly more efficiently?
It's not a useless government job if it's ensuring that taxpayer dollars are not spent fraudulently, abusively, or wastefully.
Also, you still need a backup plan. Sally gets her UBI check on the first of the month and then blows it on crack within 3 days. It's now the 4th of the month and Sally's two kids are hungry. Sally can't get a job because she's got two kids to take care of. Being addicted to crack doesn't help her chances either.
Where is Sally going to turn? You've already soaked the upper class and redistributed those taxes to ALL citizens regardless. Supposedly everyone's "basic needs" are already covered. Are there any charities still in business?? likely not. So how are Sally's kids going to eat??
The government is going to have to feed those kids somehow. And I don't see anyway it could do it without allocating funds to Sally's family beyond UBI.
Furthermore, I can't see how giving Sally a check next month makes any bit of sense.
So now we have this need for a bureaucracy of government oversight. Someone has to make sure that Sally buys milk and bread instead of crack. One way to do that is to issue the UBI in a form of exclusive currency that can only buy milk and bread, and can not buy crack. So now we have UBI, AND a food stamp program.
That's just one example of one potential complication. The administration of this UBI for a country of 350+ million people would be a fucking nightmare. You make it sound like one guy loads some checks into a dot matrix printer, pushes "print", and then suddenly everyone's got money in their mailbox.
It's not even close to that simple.
I've ready enough on UBI to know what a bad idea it is. When you find a source that can explain, with data, what happens when UBI is in effect across multiple generations, then you'll have my attention. All these "experiments" that you find so promising are rigged. The UBI receivers know it's an experiment. They know it's a test. They treat the money like a bonus, like pennies from heaven, and spend/invest it accordingly. I want to know what happens when people's perception of UBI changes from "bonus" to "entitlement". No link provided anywhere in this thread, or by any advocate of UBI that I've read, answers that question.
Once upon a time, if you wanted to retire, you had to save money. You needed to be able to support yourself if you wanted to stop working. Then one day, the USA invented "social security", which was basically a forced savings plan. They tax your paycheck a little bit every week, and when you're 65, you can cash it in and collect a payment every month.
Savings didn't fall off a cliff as soon as that was enacted. Yet here we are 4 generations later and 1/3 of American adults can't pull together $1,000 on a day's notice for an emergency expense. Tell me how UBI will be different???
Every living person in the country gets the same amount every month, be that $500 or $1000 or something else. Please give some examples of how you're going to exploit the system?
Well if we go back to my original comment, and the context in which I used "exploitation", then I fail to see how UBI would be less exploitable than any other government entitlement program. Political power will be amassed through the manipulation of benefits. It's just a shitload easier because now the benefits touch every citizen, not just those in need.
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