[Mathgod]

Originally Posted by New Era

Spoiler!

Modest user fees? So there would be costs associated with healthcare? That eats into the $1667 a month should someone get sick, or god forbid, they have a catastrophic health emergency. Terrible idea, PERIOD. You don't have to look any further than the United States for proof.

Great. You're still 28K short of the living wage for the cheapest state in the US (Mississippi - $48K a year). So you're killing all of the programs that help poor people to get food, housing, healthcare, education, and so on, but hey, you're giving them $20K to live on. How are people going to make up the difference?

A means test is one very small part of the process in supporting a program of this size. The savings are negligible.

Can I ask a simple question. What do you do for a living? What experience do you have to think you understand how government works in this regard?

Actually, that's 100% right. The system is set up to take all the traffic will bear. If you give the market and inch, they'll take a mile. Corporations are also not going to sit by and let you tax them to what they consider ridiculous levels. They are not going to volunteer to give up the money you are going to demand from them to pay for UBI. For all of these things to happen the system will have to completely collapse and a new set of rules, norms, expectations, and regulations implemented. As it currently is, the larget corporations in the United States don't pay a damn cent of tax (most get rebates) and that is the way the system is set up. It would take a global collapse of the market economies to see a change like this. You try and implement this stuff, prices will skyrocket to maintain bottom lines and investor expectations. This is the reality of the market-based economy we live in.

Again, yes. There would have to be a complete destruction of our systems of government. The constitution would have to be made null and void. A new system of government would have to be established because the one in place right now would never support the idea of a UBI nor have the mechanisms to make it work. Have you never heard the term "no taxation without representation?" It was central to this document called the Declaration of Independence and led to the revolutionary war. The people down here are pretty fanatical about taxes and what is considered tyranny. This would be considered the greatest over-reach since the Stamp Act of 1765.

Some shift? Sure. I guess if eating and having a roof over their head is "some shift." When you're talking about eliminating the very programs people depend upon to meet their basic human needs, and then giving them 41% of what they need to live on, and then fail to acknowledge the systemic problems you're going to create with some of your other ideas to fund this, you're forcing people that already have limited options to have even fewer.

Except that is exactly what this would do. You're killing off the vast majority of social programs that the poor rely upon, and then giving them a pittance to live on. Again, the living wage in the poorest state in the union is $48,000 a year, and you're suggesting that $20,000 will cut it. You have no clue what you're talking about.

Sadly, it looks like we've reached the point in the conversation where you have to resort to strawmen and ad hominems in an attempt to undermine my position.

The US does not have a government-run health care system. Canada does. Absurdly, you're comparing what I'm proposing with the US health care system. I'm not calling for anything close to that. Just a modest fee each time you access a clinic or hospital, to deter frivolous use of the system.

The notion of "living wage" sounds nice in principle, but it implies a rather generously comfortable lifestyle. Don't try to tell me that a person can't meet his or her basic needs on $20k/year. If you must, get a roommate and split rent, to make your $20k stretch farther. Basic needs are met. Beyond that, offer your services to the market to attain more money.

What huge administration costs are you talking about? We're literally just talking about sending out money to each adult citizen... what grandiose bureaucracy do you think needs to be in place to do that?

Ad hominem attempt - not taking the bait. I could just as easily ask about your personal situation, and look for potential sources of bias impacting your viewpoint...

Prices are determined by supply and demand. I don't buy into this notion that corporations have magical powers to crash everything if they don't get exactly what they want. Politicians have been bribed for far too long into doing the bidding of banks/corporations, and it needs to stop.

"Taxation without representation" is an extremely vague statement, far too vague to have major legal pull. If it did, it could have been used to stop anything from FDR's New Deal to Obama's ACA.

Fanatical brainwashed people... yes, and they are directly standing in the way of decency and progress. These people are completely enamoured by the psychotic rantings of Ayn Rand (which are directly antithetical to everything I believe in). At some point, you have to pick a side...

Spoiler!

Here's the problem with your plan. You've dreamed it up with only your perspective in mind. You're a young white kid who likely has some education behind him and had a leg up from mom and dad. You have likely never been exposed to poverty or systemic racism that makes mobility an issue for so many. You get to have a very idealistic perspective on this because you've never had to face the challenges that so many face. It is easy to say that $20K is a great start, because you have the prospects to get a good paying job and will always have the system working in your favor. You need to walk a mile in their shoes and understand the world they live in.

Mississippi



Missouri



Michigan



Maryland



Do you think $20K is going to change the plight of anyone in these locations? This is a systemic problem. UBI does not and never will impact this. Where do these people go to get services once the government pulls up stakes and tells them they are on their own? UBI does not address poverty in any shape or fashion. The only thing that changes poverty is to help people to achieve the mobility to permanently get out it.

At this point, it seems like you're trying to obfuscate the conversation. You've posted a bunch of pictures of people living in poverty, then turned around tried to paint UBI as some sort of bogeyman that will make their situation worse.

If anything, your attempt at arguing this point may actually work against your position. The people in those communities may be collecting benefits from some of the programs you listed, but these conditions have nevertheless occurred. If anything, it shows that the status quo isn't working, and that the current programs that you want to keep in place so badly aren't the saving grace that you see them as being.

At current, when people work jobs and collect income, benefits get clawed back based on how much money they get from their jobs. UBI, by contrast, gives people a floor from which to build on, so none of the UBI benefit gets clawed back as they bring in more income from their jobs.

If anything, I think your "solution", of depending upon upward mobility to solve everything, actually contributes to the problem. It only gets people out of poverty on an individual-by-individual basis. We will never eradicate poverty by taking that kind of approach. Individual problems require individual action; collective problems require collective action. Poverty is a collective problem, not an individual one.

As for systemic racism, yes that is a serious problem, but trying to weaponize it as some sort of argument against UBI, is absurd. If anything, if we lived in a society that didn't have a psychotic obsession with "creating jobs" and didn't see foreigners as "stealing our jobs"... maybe, just maybe, there would be less racist attitudes out there...