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Support For a Universal Basic Income Is Inching Up In Europe (qz.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Finland and the Netherlands are running modest pilots, and others are being considered by governments in France, Switzerland, and the UK, and by a host of nonprofits. To gauge public enthusiasm for the idea, Dalia Research, a Berlin-based market research firm, has been surveying Europeans' attitudes toward basic income since 2016. They've found a warm welcome. In a March survey, 68% of Europeans said they would vote yes in a basic-income referendum, up from 64% last year. The survey was put to 11,000 citizens in 28 European Union states and has a 1.1% margin of error. But not everyone is ready to see it implemented right away -- 48% said they wanted to test the policy first, while 31% advocated for adopting it as soon as possible. The 24% of respondents who opposed a UBI in both years were most concerned about the economic impact, including the expense, the risk of reducing the motivation to work, and the possibility foreigners would take exploit it. Those in favor of a UBI were most convinced by the promise of increased security and freedom, namely a reduced financial anxiety over meeting basic needs, more equality in opportunities, and the prospect of greater financial independence and self-reliance.
I suppose, it depends on how the question is phrased:
Would you like to be given money even if you do not work? Hell yah! Would you like to pay higher taxes so that some of it will be given to others even if they do not work? Hell no!In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Except nothing is free, and the rich are going to leave the country with their money.
Good luck! This sounds great on paper, but if you can't get the rich to play ball, it's doomed from the start.
We are talking about that here in Canada as well.
"Imagination is more important than knowledge" - Einstein
Are Europeans suffering rising wealth distribution inequity as much as the US? It seems possible to me that as more people fall into lower wealth percentiles, they become more likely to have a positive view of UBI. Is this a real attitude shift, or merely people feeling they are being left behind? Or, are those even two different things?
For the record, as a convicted felon trying to make a new start making $8/hr, I have a very positive view of UBI, but I'm not very sanguine about the economics of it.
Although you could put in a minimal volunteer requirement.
In particular, some studies have shown that sole income providers do not significantly reduce their work even after getting a basic income, although people do reduce hours for second jobs - whether they be 2nd jobs done after normal working hours or second jobs done by a mother whose husband provides the main income while she takes care of the child.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
Let me first point out that I'm in favor of experimentation with UBI because I think that in a decade or two the coming wave of automation will make it both necessary and affordable. But I still find it bizarre that people would say they favor UBI in order to have "greater financial independence and self-reliance". What? In what way does UBI give you greater financial independence or self-reliance? Relying on government payouts, funded by taxes collected from others, is not independence except in the narrowest possible sense and it is pretty much the opposite of "self-reliance".
As I said, I think UBI will be necessary, and I think it's a much less invasive, condescending and economically distortive form of public safety net than more traditional means testing. But self-reliance it is most definitely not.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
Most European countries already have systems in place to make sure that people without income doesn't end up starving or homeless.
The cost is already there. The point of UBI is to reduce the administrative overhead.
Instead of figuring out who needs the extra support you give it to everyone wether they need it or not.
For those who didn't need it it will seem redundant that they are first taxed and then have the money given back to them, but in the end nothing much happened.
UBI isn't as radical as some people make it out to be.
Cardinal rule: If something is given away for free, it either has no value or YOU are the product.
Once you are beholden to a government for something, they own your ass. You will do what they want. But you probably won't realize it until it's way too late.
What I find seriously disconcerting is that only 48% wanted to pilot-test the nationwide gamechanging life-altering economy-revamping policy before implementing it!
Well... yes, of course everyone generally wants free money, right? Of course they're going to vote for it.
But someone please correct my thought experiment here to understand who will pay for it:
Suppose our society is just 100 people. We're going to give everyone $30,000 in basic income, for example. Where does it come from? Everyone pays $30,000 in taxes to fund the pool of money that pays everyone $30,000 each? What would be the point of that?
No, it must be that people at the top of the income scale are taxed (in a sliding proportion up the scale of course) to pay for the people at the bottom of the scale who aren't making any income that can be taxed? The guy making $1M at the top of society gets taxed 50% to fund 16 people at the bottom who get the basic income and don't have income to be taxed. The 2nd guy making $900k gets taxed 40% to pay for 12 people earning the basic income, etc. etc. and down the scale.
How else would it work?
So this is basically a large wealth transfer (which all taxes in principle are), not some utopian new idea that somehow pays for itself, right?
What am I missing? The role of corporations? The internet? What makes this different from just another kind of tax and welfare system, or somehow magically paid for because of today's economic dynamics? Scale it to a country's population size, and all we're doing is saying that the very wealthiest at the top can afford to pay this tax, and they're a very small portion of the population, right? (this tax is all the more affordable to the general population, the more the income inequality curve is distorted from a flat distribution - in fact in a flat distribution you cannot afford to pay a basic income)
Or am I missing something?
I mean, if it's not universal, than it's not a Universal Basic Income.
I could see doing it on a regional basis -- but you'd have to be kind of a hard-ass about it and be fairly committed to it.
Restrict it to only residents of the region at the time it started. Actually dismantle that region's regular welfare system, so you know exactly what cost savings you are gaining. I don't see either of those as being easy or palatable.
Which seems to be the major problem with a UBI -- you can model the shit out of it and say it makes sense, but until you do it -- and make it Universal -- you don't know.
And it still leaves a lot of uncomfortable questions -- what about immigrants? How long are they there until they're eligible? Diverse welfare payments are easier in that situation, because you can say "well, immigrants should get housing and job training, but not actual unemployment payments" or however you slice it.
FWIW, I think a negative income tax type of UBI makes sense, especially if it allows for marginal, low-wage employment without completely eliminating UBI payments (they should get zeroed out by taxes, but only once income rises above some level greater than UBI itself). I think providing people an incentive to work, even at low wage jobs (ie, more total income) makes sense, and would have a lot of positive impacts on working conditions. Low wage employers wouldn't be able to treat workers like slaves because homelessness and starvation wouldn't be the alternatives.
Serious question. If you made UBI, which is income that is BARELY enough to scrape by, without being able to afford anything else but scraping by, are you seriously going to stop working and stop making the money needed for things outside of bare necessities?
The whole "people will stop working if you pay for their bare needs" argument is a massive lie. You may have increased worry over under the table jobs, but people are not going to stop working, just like they dont generally stop working on welfare, because no one wants just enough money to pay for your house, utilities, and putting cheap crappy food on the table, they want a vehicle, they want vacations, they want Netflix and other entertainment.
When you cant win, ad hominem.
Where that free lunch would come from, given that most of European states (with notable exception of Germany) cannot even provide a decent pensions for their elderly? Perhaps, they should have been reminded that voting for free lunches for everyone does not magically makes it happen.
One one hand you have unemployment, which depending on your situation is 1,000 - 1,600 euro per month.
If you don't qualify for unemployment, you can still get a "living wage", which is 870 euro if you're single (570 if single and living together) and 1,150 euro if you have kids.
Historical example, USSR in 1992. Modern example, Venezuela.
The poverty threshold, poverty limit or poverty line is the minimum level of income deemed adequate to cover total cost of all the essential resources that an average human adult consumes in one year. In the US, this is presented as an income level based on household size (number of dependents). For a single person household, the poverty line is $12,060 (2017).
Perhaps worth noting is that a single person household working a full-time minimum-wage job exceeds the poverty line (50 weeks time 40 hours times $7.25 is $14,500), so by definition a full-time minimum wage worker is not living in poverty. But if that same person has a child, then both are living in poverty, as the poverty line for a two-person household is $16,240. In a very real albeit statistical sense, children cause poverty.
An assumption of a UBI is that it provides sufficient income to survive on, so let's use the poverty line as the basis for the UBI. That is, a single person household would receive a UBI of $12,060; A two-person household would receive a UBI of $16,240; and so on. Note that even this basic assumption leads to perverse outcomes (e.g. two adults living separately would get $12,060 each, but if they live together they "lose" $7,880 in UBI), so at least some will avoid getting married, or even living together (or lie about living together, thereby defrauding the system) just to maximize their free money.
Using census data, there are 124.5 million households. The average household size is 2.54 people. Let's interpolate the poverty table to get an average expected UBI of about $18,497. Multiplying that out we can get the tab for providing UBI based on these assumptions, a total of about $2.303 trillion.
Coincidentally, that is almost exactly the amount of money we currently spend on all social welfare benefits programs, including Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, foodstamps, etc. A reasonable idea--indeed, this was put forward in a WSJ essay by Charles Murray--would be to eliminate all those programs in favor of the UBI. Of course, this ignores the howls that would arise from a populace deprived of their SS checks and foodstamps.
Exploring the notion of replacing the most basic welfare programs, e.g. foodstamps, section 8 housing, while not disrupting the SS and Medicare that the elderly view as an earned right. After all, the UBI based on poverty level should by definition cover those sorts of expenses. There will still be screams from people concerned about drug addicts not buying food for their kids and that sort of thing. So it seems unlikely that the overhead of those programs, let alone the programs, would be completely done away with.
So it seems almost a certainty that a UBI would be adjacent to at least SS/Medicare. Those totaled about $1.473T of the welfare expenditures, so add the $2.303 to the SS/Medicare $1.473T for a total cost of $3.776T. Perhaps the UBI reduces SS income dollar-for-dollar in an either-or situation reduces this a bit.
A worst-case cost would be adding UBI on top of all the existing programs, for a total cost of about $5T. Or perhaps the UBI in lieu of all other programs can actually be rammed through so that the cost remains a minimum of $2.303T.
Total federal revenues collected from all sources (taxes, royalties, etc.) in 2014 (last year available) was $3.27 trillion. So UBI would consume somewhere north of 70% of all federal revenues. And the math here assumes that no one receive UBI drops out of the workforce or reduces their taxable income at all--i.e., that revenues stay constant.
I'd be happy if the paupers receiving public assistance were not allowed to vote while at it... But somehow this is anathema to most people.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
"If we were to give you free money, would you be ok with that?"
There are entire industries that are completely dependent on a pool of workers that are able to be paid a low wage, such as seasonal farming, retail, and restaurant staff. If UBI were implemented, it would an easy choice for the median-to-low wage earners in the industry to forgo work and take the basic income, when many were relying on assistance anyway. As for the owners of the industries, either they would forced to close shop or raise wages to the point where a full-time worker would receive a living wage.
It is not an "all or nothing". The fact acknowledged by TFA itself is that people receiving assistance begin working less than they used to.
This is not true in the least. First of all the survey asked what they WOULD do. That is speculation, and only 3% surveyed said they would stop working, which would probably end when they realize the amount would not even pay their rent.... 8% said less, but how much less are we talking about, without numbers you really cant point out the problem.
And they are happy to have others help them pay for it...
Please point out, mathematically, how say 960 euros a month (the Netherlands experiment) would be able to pay for rent/mortgage, a car, food, utilities, vacation, and other entertainment, please show your work. This is the only
When you cant win, ad hominem.
Or automate. UBI could be the thing that finally forces industries to dive head-first into automation if their low-wage pool of employees dries up.
UBI will only work if it is combined with something that cuts the balls off the political elite. Otherwise, UBI becomes a vote buying scheme for leftist, all the way up until the collapse of the country.
For instance, Fair Tax, which is a libertarian tax proposal for the United States has a form of UBI. The Fair Tax eliminates all taxes in favor of 1 single sales tax of around 20%. This removes politicians ability to "hide" taxes from people behind payroll taxes, corporate taxes, etc. At the same time, the Fair Tax provides a UBI to everyone equivalent to what the standard of living would pay in taxes due to the fair tax. (Memory serves me it was around $350/mnt in 2010.)
Remember, the majority of the population (if you're on /. you're probably not the majority) has no idea how much taxes they pay. You ask someone on April 15th how much they paid in taxes and they'll reply, "I didn't, I got money back!" That's the entire reason payroll taxes remained after WW2. But if someone is reminded everyday when they buy something how much taxes they're spending. They'll be less inclined to vote people who tax the shit out of them in the first place.
Who says? And you are saying that those low paid workers would not keep their jobs to actually be able to do more with more income?
In addition with the increased money in peoples hands you would actually see larger demand, and more economic growth from a demand spike.
When you cant win, ad hominem.
people are not going to stop working
Not true. There have been many UBI pilot programs and they all found that some people stopped working. Other people worked fewer hours. Even more common was that two-earner households became one-earner households. Women with young children are the most likely to drop out of the labor force.
Until it runs out.... See Greece and Venezuela if you don't believe me.
OR...
Those who rob Peter to pay Paul can always count on the support of Peter....
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
What I said is entirely true — although few people (TFA cites 3%) would stop working completely — the strawman you put up initially — many will work less. TFA says so:
and
So, 3% would stop working completely, and "most people" would work less. Just as I said.
I did not claim, it will "pay". I said, "help pay". It certainly would — in a country, where average pay of a Software Engineer is €41,227, the €11,520 you are citing is nothing to sneeze at.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
In Maine they added a welfare requirement to work/volunteer 20 hours per month. A large percent of the people dropped out. There are people that are too lazy to work.
Sounds like the perfect way to beat the stagnant wages we've been under for the last forty years.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Even more common was that two-earner households became one-earner households. Women with young children are the most likely to drop out of the labor force.
Isn't this the way it used to be back in the days when America was Great. You know, how we're supposedly trying to Make it Again?
Only crack the nuts that crack. You don't put the ones that don't crack in the sack.
What do you do when, say, 50 or 60 percent of the workforce is only capable of doing jobs that aren't profitable to pay people to do anymore? I don't think that you're going to be able to instantly break the cycle of "work--earn--consume" that has driven life since forever. Telling people who have spent their lives saving for retirement or amassing wealth that their money is no longer useful in the way it once was isn't going to go well.
In my opinion, most people who say people who want a universal income in place are lazy freeloaders who just want to sit around all day haven't worked with a large cross-section of humanity. They work as IT people, or developers/engineers, or doctors, or some other profession that requires a lot of education and are surrounded by smart people all day long. Out in the rest of the world, there exist people who can't handle anything more than a menial job. You don't just turn paper filers and customer service people into data scientists and biochemists. The job-replacement train ran out of gas a while back. It worked well when it was farming, then factory work, then corporate factory-style work like clerical/secretary work, then service jobs. Once those service jobs are gone, what high-salary, low-requirement job replaces them? Economies are built around consumers having a good job, taking on debt, spending, and keeping that cycle going. Universal income would allow this cycle to continue for a little longer, allowing employers to pay people less but keep them employed if they wished to earn beyond the minimum income. It basically buys us time to figure out how to deal with what could end up being massive unemployment and poverty for a formerly stable portion of the first-world workforce.
So it is Basic Income that does not meet the Basic needs?
How long will that last before they are screaming for a raise?
Libertarian does not mean what you think it means.
It's always so much easier to decide how to employ other peoples labour
Yes and no. People who don't need to work look down on those who do. People who work look down on people who need to, but don't.
Be specific. Then we'll figure out how much those programs cost, and weigh that against the cost of a UBI--I guarantee those numbers will not add up. Ready to play?
We lack the willpower to let those who mismanage their UBI payments die in the streets. Lots of people are poor because they lack the capacity to plan ahead. Not all, of course, but many. Those people are going to waste their UBI payments, and we will not be willing to let them starve or die of exposure. So, we will either add a new government program to spend their money wisely instead of letting them waste it, or we'll recreate the same old system of free housing and food stamps that we have now, just this time with higher taxes.
See that "Preview" button?
> you know that at least part of your income will be steady
Until the next election following implementation of UBI. Then you'll be scrambling looking for a job [along with several million other people] while you have "smoked pot in Mom's basement" on your resume for the previous 4 years. Good luck with that.
Pulling money out one end and putting it in the other does not actually improve the economy. Even if it benefits restaurant owners at the expense of other taxpayers.
There are places in the US where you would make less money working than you would on welfare. And since basically any kind of income can disqualify you from welfare, not only is work discouraged buyt working your way up is discouraged as well. Basically, since welfare isn’t on any kind of sliding scale, it actively discourages working.
UBI would be abused. For sure. But if you’re not at risk of losing the income, then plenty of people will get part time jobs just to deal with the boredom.
Maybe a bunch of the rest of them will spend their free time making more minecraft videos for youtube. (Did you know that there are a lot of people who make a comfortable living just playing video games and recording them for youtube? Amazing. This one guy Mumbo owns a Merc!)
What I’d like to know is how much the welfare system, with all of its admin overhead, costs that doesn’t go to people’s welfare checks. Compare that to the admin overhead of just issuing everyone a check. Of course, different places have different costs of living, and that complicates things too, because it’s hard to work out what’s fair and equal.
Profit is what makes things happen.
No, it is not the despicable "profit" — it is because government can't do anything well. Take a look at the VA hospital system — do you really want the same thing in all of the nation's hospitals?..
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
> This is intended as a REPLACEMENT for other programs, like job insurance, retirement programs, family income programs, etc
To the first order, $0 is spent on "job insurance" and "family income programs". So you are basically talking about taking the budget from social security and redistributing that to all people regardless of age. The budget for Social Security is about $900B per year.
$900B / 325M people == ~$2800/year.
Should be easy to live off that, right? BTW, the average recipient of SS currently receives ~$14K/year, I'm sure it's totally easy for them to live off 20% of that.
The whole "people will stop working if you pay for their bare needs" argument is a massive lie
It is a psychological question masked in economics. Are you saying you can predict human behavior and ensure economic stability in an untested system with varying assumptions and ever changing outside influences?
how say 960 euros a month (the Netherlands experiment) would be able to pay for rent/mortgage, a car, food, utilities, vacation, and other entertainment, please show your work. This is the only
When the electorate figure out they can vote to increase that monthly stipend... What is to stop that figure from rising?
Burn the economy down before the refugee invaders can possess anything
The difference is, back then one earner could provide a middle-class life for a family. Nowdays, two earners barely provide a working class life, and that's with at least one working 2-3 jobs.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
Except when you are paying them for it.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
I hate to break the news to you and your so called "libertarian" friends, but you are not what the label you want claim if you think UBI is consistent with a traditional libertarian stance. Progressive? Socialist? Communist? Marxist? perhaps one of those is a better label to claim.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
It's funny how "Everybody else does it" is considered a logical argument FOR doing something, when the exact opposite is usually the better argument... Examples?
Buying stocks...
Selling Stocks..
Starting a business..
Military Tactics..
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
The exit path is bloody revolution and re-instatement of a capitalist based economy... The problem though as this flows through a couple of nasty phases after the current government goes bankrupt usually including dictatorship and/or communism (See North Korea) before you get the final bloody upheaval.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Actually it does... Studies have shown that cutting taxes on the poor and increasing them on the rich generates economic growth, where as if you cut it on the rich and raise it on the poor it constricts the economy.
When you cant win, ad hominem.
The program that is presently being tested in Canada is not UBI. It incorporates means-testing, graduated payouts, and classing, none of which are components of UBI.
Because of this, the results will reveal absolutely nothing about UBI. They will provide information about a standard welfare system.
Any claim that this is a UBI trial and that the results reveal information about UBI is roughly equivalent to feeding people bananas, asking them what they think, and declaring that the results describe people's opinions on watermelon.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
I created no strawmen, every quote I used was your statements entirely...
Your statement was still NOT proved..
Trials during the 1970s in Canada and the US found people worked slightly less
is VASTLY differnt from
It is not an "all or nothing". The fact acknowledged by TFA itself is that people receiving assistance begin working less than they used to.
A) it was 1 study
B) not all people were shown to reduce their work.
When you cant win, ad hominem.
It is not an "all or nothing". The fact acknowledged by TFA itself is that people receiving assistance begin working less than they used to.
You mean less than 96 hours?
Oh, right, you're a child. You grew up with the eight-hour day. Sorry, I forgot, most people haven't had the adults educate them about work yet.
So let's start with how lazy and entitled you little shits are.
First off, back in the 1830s, your kind were already crying out about how utterly lazy they were and how the government should fix it so they don't have to work. "From six to six", they used to say. Twelve hours--twelve hours--and with two full hours of meal breaks! Not even twelve hours of straight work for six days a week (nobody worked on the Lord's Day), for a halfway-unreasonable 72 hour work week; they demanded sixty hours of work.
The French, the laziest people in the world at the time, achieved a 12-hour, 6-day work week by 1850. America started going downhill in 1868, when Federal employees--the most entitled employees, after anyone who's ever been marginally attached to the military--achieved an eight-hour work day. Most Americans still worked a good, solid 12-14 hour work day in 1905, until people like Ford started cutting back to 8-hour shifts and giving pay raises.
America didn't lose the war against laziness until the Adamson Act of 1916, establishing 8-hour days with additional overtime wages for railroad workers. After that, it was all over; the Fair Labor Standards Act was so ludicrous as to cut all good laborers down to 40 hours per week, except the good farm workers who still considered 50 hours full-time, and establish a mandatory minimum wage.
So that ship has sailed, and I don't see you out there working three full-time jobs like any real American would. You laze around for most of the week and complain just as much about too much work while you don't really work anyway; you may as well complain that other people might work 32 hours one day too, I suppose.
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Most UBI pilots do not work that way, either from the start or after a a certain amount, you lose some of your benefits per dollar you make. It is designed to encentivize work
When you cant win, ad hominem.
A) it has been tested and so far has always worked
B) I can guaranteed people desire things, and as long as that is the case they will keep working.
When you cant win, ad hominem.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt03...
No, they can't.
Wherever the problem is, we do know something that does work — free market. It is beautiful not only because it happens to work, but also because you simply can not have a free country, if you prohibit people from selling goods and/or services to each other.
But it also works. So well, China and Russia — neither valuing personal freedom very much — have adopted it and watched their economies take off. While Venezuela, which abolished it, descended into a verifiable shit hole in less than two decades — despite being among the world's top oil-exporters.
Unfortunately, the US had no free market in the health-services industry for decades. Nor in the health-insurance industry either...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
which would probably end when they realize the amount would not even pay their rent
Please point out, mathematically, how say 960 euros a month (the Netherlands experiment) would be able to pay for rent/mortgage, a car, food, utilities, vacation, and other entertainment, please show your work.
Don't have Netherlands data. I worked it out for the United States only, and would be interested in other economic units like England or Germany. Designing a UBI policy requires a strong understanding of a government's finances, the economy's structure, tax systems, welfare costs, retail pricing, and the like. You can't design any sort of UBI policy by knowing or estimating the cost of goods, because the gross cost of a good doesn't tell you about the total cost of producing it--shipping, logistics, business administration, cost of risk, and the like. For highly-competitive goods like food and clothing, the current price is likely the lowest-viable price, although that comes down a bit when a market gets bigger (that's actually doable with rent, in the form of selling smaller units by reducing the risk of empty units at the relevant income levels).
I didn't record the full analysis or write any sorts of papers on this stuff even in America. After performing as much research as I could, I used the current retail prices and added risk margins--that is, if I could find retail of a month's worth of food for $25, consistently, I'd estimate the risk of trying to sustain that as an individual, and then put down a 300% risk reserve ($100/month budget). Some of the rambling on that from an age past made its way online.
The big one is housing. Rent per square foot easily scales down to a 224sqft single-occupancy apartment in $1-$1.06/sqft circa 2013 (my Universal Social Security takes a percentage of all income as a funding source, so gets bigger each year--faster than inflation). That's a maximum estimate of $238/month at the same margin as a 700sqft apartment; I originally budgeted $300/month, providing a 26% risk reserve (up to 33%, in the case of scaling against $1/sqft). I know the actual costs scale; that risk reserve is entirely a coverage of landlord risk (potential for additional costs as consequence of renting to a low-income tennat), not the risk of me misestimating standard costs.
It's not exactly cramped, but it's smaller than most Americans want to deal with. It's actually something like twice the size of a cozy hotel room, and I've spent time examining hotel rooms and expanding the planograms into microunit apartments with full amenities. Thing is, it's still better than living in a soggy cardboard box.
So, again: they'd quickly realize it won't pay rent for a place in which they'd actually like to live.
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Are there going to be any restrictions on what the money can be spent on? (use technology to restrict purchases on the UBI card - think WIC program on steroids)
Because without any, this is a colossal waste of money.
Way, way too many people currently spend what little money they either earn outright or is given to them via social programs on booze, cigs, lottery tickets etc. crap that no person of poor financial means should be buying. These folks have no financial fortitude and is mostly the reason they are where they are to begin with.
Do this with a taxpayer funded UBI program, these people will be no better off than before except the taxpayer will be holding a massive bill in his hands.
No, they had been getting welfare checks for doing nothing. Making them put in 20 hours a month was not a burden.
Stagnant wages is a myth. A median income in 1970 could not purchase the standard-of-living of a median income in 1980; a median income in 1980 could not purchase the standard-of-living of a median income in 1990; nor 1990 for 2000.
I've lived my life through a constant run-up of technology. Cars getting better with new safety systems, more power out of smaller engines, better mileage, highly-complex mechanical and electrical systems like EFI, improved braking systems, high-end radios with digital media and bluetooth integrated, and even things like traction control and pre-crash systems built into the $1,500 options package on economy models. We traded away $30/month landlines and $10/month dial-up for $17/year smart phones and $87/month 200Mbit Internet. Televisions aren't giant, bulbous tubes anymore. Even the new things I have--game systems, computers, cell phones--have changed, substantially, since they became available.
People eat out of home more instead of preparing food in home, and they spend less on food every year despite eating more-expensively year after year--at the median income level; the lowest 20% still spend roughly 16% of their income on food. Clothing has fallen from 12% to nearly 3% of our income.
Medical care is ridiculous: prescription drugs have gone through the roof; yet people in 2005 spent 6% of their income on medical care instead of 4% of the 1950s, purchasing more and better-quality medical care. Today it's just under 8%, and people go in for regular wellness care much more consistently than anyone did in the 90s--part of that is their insurance plan gives them 100%, no-deductible coverage, but charges them $40/month for any year in which they didn't get a sign-off from their doctor stating they've had appropriate care at the full discretion of the doctor's professional opinion.
The percentage of median-income household spending that goes to purchase the same things is constantly falling; and for many goods, either prices stay mainly-level (small goods like cell phones and computers) or they keep to the same percentage of spending (large goods like cars). Housing costs as rent or mortgage payments (not house sale prices) have generally trended downward on the span of decades; on shorter spans (notably in recent times), housing trades as a commodity and is heavily-influenced by fluctuations in perceptions about the housing market. This is confounded by new single-family homes constantly getting bigger, and so housing prices have to adjust against square footage to get a good read on the price of housing.
I've been around to see things get more and more affordable for the average American, and the average American continue to complain about getting poorer and poorer. Stop spending all your money and you won't be broke all the time; you won't have all this new stuff, either.
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Yes, you did. When you pretended, that the opponents of the UBI claim, beneficiaries of the program will all simply "stop working". Though nobody made such a claim, you pretended somebody did — and attacked it. That was a strawman. By definition.
As opposite to what? Of course, it is a study — do you demand some divine intimation?
"Most" and "all" are interchangeable synonyms in this context. You know it, I know it, any reasonable reader of this exchange knows it. But the point stands — whether all or simply most individuals will work less, the overall work done by people will be less.
Ahh, but may be some people would work more? Nope, if there was such an effect to report, TFA — hugely sympathetic to the idea of UBI — would've put it into title.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
The Slashdot of Today basically comes across as a communist propaganda machine what with so many postings along the lines of "capitalism is bad, robots are taking your job, universal basic income is what everyone wants." Seriously, scroll through today's lists and that's literally what's there.
I say this as the headline leaves out the fact that Switzerland already had a referendum on this topic which lead to a defeat of the proposal. 76.9% were for it, 23.1% were against it. https://www.admin.ch/ch/d/pore...
Human progress — and the concomitant rises in productivity — are a wonderful thing and your historical facts are fascinating. But why should the reduction in work-hours be government-mandated? As long as people are free to work for whoever they wish and hire whoever they please, why wouldn't an employer gain better employees and/or higher productivity by offering shorter work-days and longer vacations? Indeed, it is happening all the time:
But let's stay on topic, shall we? The discussion is not about how many hours to work — it is whether or not people are entitled to other people's monies just for living in the same country or even on the same planet.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
... and so the government must compel the rest at gun-point — which is how all taxes are collected. Yep.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
A collective solution to a problem is the anitithesis of individual freedom. No one ever said libertarians were smart.
Freedom yes... self-reliance? I suppose it might create a *feeling* of self-reliance, but the opposite is the truth.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
If you make me a high enough offer, you can decide how to employ my labor.
Free markets are great, aren't they?
A powerful state confiscating earned wealth and distributing it someone that did not earn it, is not libertarian. It is authoritarian to it's core.
Yes, you did. When you pretended, that the opponents of the UBI claim, beneficiaries of the program will all simply "stop working". Though nobody made such a claim, you pretended somebody did — and attacked it. That was a strawman. By definition [logicallyfallacious.com].
So no one claimed people would stop working with UBI? Maybe want to read the parent? here let me quote it..
We expect people to work here if they are able, and contribute to the country. People that don't work are generally looked down upon. If you think trying to implement universal health care is a cluster, just try UBI. Conservatives need people working and generating revenue so they can skim their % from the top to support their lifestyle.
So please tell me again how no one was making that argument
"Most" and "all" are interchangeable synonyms in this context. You know it, I know it, any reasonable reader of this exchange knows it. But the point stands — whether all or simply most individuals will work less, the overall work done by people will be less.
I thought we were arguing logically? If so most if the opposite of all. In addition there is no evidence that even MOST indiviuals work less in the trials, let alone in general. We know that OVER ALL the number of hours dropped slightly, so please stop with the over generalizations.
Ahh, but may be some people would work more? Nope, if there was such an effect to report, TFA — hugely sympathetic to the idea of UBI — would've put it into title.
huh? This makes no sense in the context. Unless you make wile assumptions that massive amounts of people just completely stopped working then you wouldnt need people who worked more to get the small losses that were reported in ONE study.
But what should I expect from someone who things that during Obama all protesting was racist, not the manner, or things, you were protesting.
When you cant win, ad hominem.
Why make up supposed questions when the people who did the survey make the questions and data available here?
It's almost like someone has an agenda and isn't willing to even look at anything that might conflict with it.
The difference is, back then one earner could provide a middle-class life for a family. Nowdays, two earners barely provide a working class life
The average new house today is twice the size of a house in 1973. Cars are better, TVs are better, etc. So people aren't working more to "scrape by", they are working more for a much better quality of life.
If you want to live like a one-earner household lived in 1973, you can still still easily do that on one income.
Those tests aren't that conclusive because it was A) never nationally implemented (one city isn't equivalent to a nation) and B) known by the participants that the test would end. It is an untestable system unless you jump in with both feet.
B) I can guaranteed people desire things, and as long as that is the case they will keep working.
They why do lots of people stay on welfare even though they are able to work? At the very least it undermines the assumption you are making. People may desire things, sure but that doesn't equate to people working if they don't have to.
Actually it does... Studies have shown that cutting taxes on the poor and increasing them on the rich generates economic growth, where as if you cut it on the rich and raise it on the poor it constricts the economy.
That's odd, the people currently in power have assured me that cutting taxes on the rich (according to the Treasury secretary, the "biggest tax cut in history") is what generates economic growth, in fact it will generate so much growth that we don't even need to reduce government spending to pay for the proposed $3-$7 TRILLION (10 year) reduction in revenue.
Enigma
That's socialism.
From what I understood, implementing UBI will go together with removing many other social benefits.
One major selling point of UBI is that everyone will get the same thing. It means you won't have to justify anything, and there will be no need for processing applications and fighting against fraud. Which, by the way, will kill a lot of administrative jobs.
Minimum wage, unemployment, housing, family, etc... All these benefits will have to go.
The result is that some people currently getting a lot of social benefits (for good or bad reasons) may find themselves with much less. It will make the transition difficult. I expect the actual implementation of a UBI to be a joke, with complex rules making the end result the same as what we have now.
The Finland experiment has nothing to do with a true UBI. The amount is not enough to live decently in Finland without further help and only unemployed people are selected.
Pay people a reasonable wage to attend university or job training instead. If their particular skills aren't needed in the labor market, they can either develop new ones or use their skills to benefit society through research or the arts. Yes, this would require creating new schools and universities.
Use of the words "good", "bad" or "evil" is almost invariably the result of oversimplification.
I don't know about that. My mom bought our first house about 1975, and paid about 7K! My current house, in the same poor neighborhood, and probably around the same age (not even close to new, even in 75), cost 40K, and needs a lot more work than that older one did. Granted, it's significantly bigger than that first house, but there's no way in he** you'd even get a house that size in that area for less than 30K.
I'm sure you can get a crap TV for a low price, but nobody would want a crap car, and good ones cost plenty.
Meantime, the stuff you really need like housing (whether you own or rent), food, and drugs are dramatically costlier than they were in the old days.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
That requirement wasn't for welfare, it was for SNAP, basically modern food stamps. Perhaps the people who dropped out just didn't feel like jumping through a bunch of hoops to get the small benefit that SNAP provides. For example, according to this calculator, a family of 4 that makes $36k a year will receive $134 per month in SNAP benefits. It's a lot lower for childless or single people, for example a single person making only $15k per year (and paying $12k per year in rent) only qualifies for a $36/mo benefit. I couldn't find any analysis of the demographics of the people who stopped claiming benefits after the change but there is certainly a level where people who formerly claimed benefits would no longer do so due to the more extensive documentation requirements. Do you have any data to back up your assertion that they are "too lazy to work" or could there be other factors at play? Perhaps it is the people who are working the hardest that no longer claim benefits, because their benefit is lower (because they have a higher income than non-working people) and they have less free time to make claims. If you have data on exactly which people were removed from the SNAP rolls I would love to see it, otherwise your assertion is just an opinion and very possibly false.
Enigma
Even if you try to fire all of them, you'll still be paying them with UBI. In reality, what will happen is a power grab at every level of government, and the same useless fucks will merely be moved to different government agencies.
Nah, you pass a law that says that anyone over 50 in a welfare agency job eliminated by UBI gets moved to retired status as if they had moved up one level in the pay scale and gets to collect their pension early. Anyone under 50 gets permanent preferential hiring treatment for similarly skilled jobs in other bureaucracies. Nobody new gets hired for a job in these agencies.
My guess is that it would take a decade or two to wind down these organizations (settle accounts, offload buildings, land, equipment, etc) and most of the people who work for them could do that winding down work.
You'd basically end up employing most of the employable people at dismantling the organizations, something which would have to happen anyway, so it'd be a net-zero cost. The really influential employees would be those over 50 retiring on a full pension, so they wouldn't really fight it much. The younger ones would wind up just finishing their careers in more or less guaranteed jobs.
The bonus would be that the longer it went on, the fewer people there would be working there and no expansionary spending on the organization.
Call it socialism, communism, or whatever you want; the fact remains that technology is changing economic realities for large swaths of people and that means we need to rethink ideas about how wealth should be distributed. As an economist I can tell you that commonly accepted economic theory puts great weight in the significance of Labor. Those models break down when Labor is being done by machines, and not workers. When a farm that once employed 100 farmers now only employs 10, and some machines - what are the 90 unemployed farmers reasonably Supposed to do. Changing your livelihood is easier said than done, and many jobs that they might be eligible for are suffering from the same problem. Should they just commit suicide? Is that really morally acceptable? Or, should the farm that now produces as much if not more with fewer laborers, have some sort of obligation to support those they have turned away? Some day, 95% of all human labor will be completely automated. Not today. Not tomorrow. But when that's our new reality, and billions of people cannot work through no fault of their own, do you just tell them to all commit suicide? Or, will we redistribute. I dont know about you, but redistribution seems like the right call to me. I dont love the idea of "freeloading", but I don't think that it should be thought of that way - everything that is produced will be so from the earth, and by the creations of man - at that point, it's only natural that the whole of mankind share in the common heritage of man.
Let me know when one appears.
Meantime, the stuff you really need like housing (whether you own or rent), food, and drugs are dramatically costlier than they were in the old days.
Wrong. Housing costs have barely changed when measured by the square foot and adjusted for inflation. Food is far cheaper today than it was 40 years ago. Drugs are also cheaper today if you buy the same drugs.
And the people that reduced their work were: Mothers of young children. Adolescents who stayed in school instead of working. (In the Canadian experiment).
Please stop using the word theory when you mean hypothesis.
The thing is, $1000 here in rural Montana and $1000 in silicon valley or urban New Jersey are completely different levels of support.
I am all for the idea of UBI, but the fact of the gross imbalance of actual cost of living across the country tells me that there's a lot more to fix before it could even remotely achieve its goals.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
But why should the reduction in work-hours be government-mandated? As long as people are free to work for whoever they wish and hire whoever they please, why wouldn't an employer gain better employees and/or higher productivity by offering shorter work-days and longer vacations?
Your original argument was that a person would decide, through the forces of capitalism, to not work as much because they were relatively well-off with shorter working hours and thus valued their time more than work. Government-mandates are the recent history of working hours, but different from your original point:
people receiving assistance begin working less than they used to.
As to the question, eh. A government mandate of labor standards gives the individual and the workforce as a whole the ability to cite a fair labor standard to work from. Published standards and mandates as such increase individual negotiating power. So long as your UBI policy is actually functional (there are a lot of dangerous and destructive ways to implement a UBI, and a few viable plans), the self-sufficiency of a UBI also increases individual negotiating power and reduces the need for such things as minimum-wage standard.
A government mandate of maximum working hours without penalties (e.g. 40 hours, then wage costs 50% more) is necessary for any sort of wage standard. It becomes a battle between people who will work long hours for low pay and other people who need exactly the same income but will only work fewer hours. Without the ability to walk away, employers have the power to push the trend toward longer hours and lower pay; individuals who try to push back will run out of money and become homeless and unemployable. Then we get small, unstable governments called "trade unions", who in turn can only function because the big government forces the businesses to negotiate with trade unions on whatever terms they demand.
Thus it can be argued that a government mandate of maximum working hours provides the capacity for individuals to independently scale their labor, as they can identify what a "working-hour" is as a proportion of "a job". Wage suddenly has one dimension instead of two. This in turn allows the economy to function stably due to less fluctuation in working conditions and compensation between businesses.
This largely affects part-time work and full-time expectations. The current Fair Labor Standards Act, for example, exempts salaried workers from overtime. This means a "full-time job" is 40 hours--that's a published standard codified in law--but working 60-hours won't get you 20 hours of overtime unless you're paid by the hour. It's codified in law that your employer can but isn't legally required to provide you compensation for overtime; we only expect a 40-hour work day because the law actually defines full-time as 40 hours, although some businesses define it as 37.5 because a half-hour daily lunch is accounted for your 8-hour day.
As a final thought: Historically, the government mandate has been a response to the voice of a people who feel powerless to drive change. Any argument for or against a government mandate must examine the history of the will of the people, and their success in implementing their will. Lack of a government mandate is an action of government as well, in that a government selects for the outcome of a null action by taking no action. This means that 100 years of people demanding shorter working hours and not getting them makes a government null-action position an effective mandate for current, longer working hours. That can be valid, as shortening working hours cuts back productivity per person by cutting back hours per person without increasing productivity per hour; this makes people poorer, and our choice is basically a scale between larger material wealth and no free time to enjoy it or smaller material wealth and much free time to enjoy it.
Bu
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Finland, the Netherlands, France, Switzerland, and the UK already has systems in place to make sure that people doesn't starve or end up homeless.
Yes, they all have social welfare.
But nope, unlike Netherland and Finland who are or were actually running pilot experiment, Switzerland voted against.
Note that Switzerland practice direct democracy. i.e.: no mattter what, the population has always the final say on everything.
And in this case, democracy has spoken against UBI: apparently the population was indeed genuinely afraid of rise costs.
The cost is already there. Switching to UBI doesn't necessarily require higher taxes. Especially since you no longer need government workers investigating who is entitled to extra support.
That is the general idea behind UBI :
- keep giving out money as before, under welfare programs.
- except now you give out the money indiscriminately to absoluetely everyone.
- because you blanked give money to everyone, you don't need to pay that many people to take care of the minute details.
- saved money = extra money to redistribute.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
No. It's not. For example, you buy food, you pay the costs - that includes the salaries of the people at the grocery store, the produce truck driver, the service people involved at every stage, the land taxes, the fuel taxes... everything that food costs is in the price. Including, and this is the critical fact, the taxes on every factor. You're poor, the cucumber costs you $1. You're rich, the cucumber costs you $1. Both pay in equal share into the (huge) taxation that underlies the cost of that food item, and every other food item, and fuel, and etc. The cucumber, or more accurately, all purchased food in general, has a huge tax load added to its cost. Which no one gets out of.
The actual difference in who gets taxed what is basically in income tax and a few other taxes. But a very large amount of taxation is hidden in payment transfer for almost all goods and services.
Say you pay a plumber $100. He's in a 30% tax bracket. You're in what you've been told is the "0% tax bracket." You think you're going to get $100 worth of plumbing work? No. You're not. You're going to get, at best, $70 worth of plumbing work, because the plumber is only going to get to keep $70. Your other $30 went right to the government.
You see? There is no "poor people pay no taxes." That's just nonsense for the math-impaired (most everyone, near as I can tell.) Poor people pay taxes all the time - that is, the things they have to buy are taxed at a distance - but it's just the same in actual dollar effects as if you took the money right out of their pockets.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Nope. The top 10% hold 76% of the wealth. And the top 10% are nowhere near being "middle class."
Try again. This time with numbers.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
A review of our current economical situation is needed for how we need to move on for the near future. Advanced in robotica and A.I. are enormous and will only make bigger leaps, which will mean a lot of people will loose their jobs (yes even office-people) and there won't be any new jobs created. So we have to figure out how to get around this and how people are gonnan 'pay' for stuff. Maybe we need to move to a system were one does not 'pay' anymore. It's a very difficult subject and it will be hard to figure out how to solve (as humans still want power and fortune, that's just the nature of us)..
Yes. Hell for the poor, the unskilled, the handicapped, the classed to the bottom by social or governmental ostracism, the simply unlucky.
Proud of it, are you?
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
No, the argument is to abolish the silly — yet horrendously expensive — "War on Poverty" and allow the taxpayers to spend the monies thus left in their pockets however they see fit.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
The difference versus 'getting it back' is that you have a monthly pay check.
In other words, if you are e.g. close to broke on a vacation, you get money soon again.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
I really hope these trials continue and expand. A UBI would (I think) solve so many problems with market-based economies. If people have the genuine option of not working, then they will be more able to do things that will improve their productivity in the long run, such as pursuing more education. The chronically-ill can also be supported without having to continually prove to the government that they are chronically-ill. Employers who are abusive to their employees will very rapidly find themselves without employees. And for people with good jobs already, they'll have the security of knowing that they'll be able to manage if the shit hits the fan and they find themselves out of work, even if unemployment benefits are limited.
More interesting to me, if they do something simple like fund the UBI with a flat percentage tax on income, then more than half of the population will end up with more money with the UBI than without (e.g. in the US, you'd need to make more than ~$70,000/year or so to end up with less money, and way more than that to end up with noticeably less, though the precise number depends upon the structure of the tax and the structure of the benefits).
You're not supposed to acknowledge that the cheats are working full time for cash. Didn't you get the memo?
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Remember the Bernie Sanders' paradise of Venezuela ? Ever wonder why he doesn't speak of it any more?
With Venezuela it was more of a case of them being too reliant on oil than anything else. A number of oil reliant capitalist countries in the middle east were also getting to the point of being seriously in trouble, ultimately they had enough cash reserves to ride it out though.
As for Greece, they were going crazy with their money, even wasting a huge amount on the Olympics. It was more stupidity than socialism. The fact they were part of the euro severely curtailed their options though, e.g. being unable to devalue their currency.
People are self interested, and socialism fails to account for that
You can't really just say Socialism. It all depends on the figures. You can tax enough so that you can keep the poor healthy and at least keep a roof over their heads or you can go crazy and tax so much that their is little to be gained from anyone putting the effort in to anything. Then again you can tax so little that only the rich can afford health care and shelter and let the poor rot. The argument is all about where you fall on that axis.
Also, the idea of socialist countries being crazy borrowers (like Greece) isn't always the case. In the UK the conservatives (capitalists) have spent more than Labour, it's just that they like to spend it on big stupid projects where their corporate friends get rich rather than helping out the poor.
Average SS recipient gets about $14K annually. How much does that person get with the USS system described in that link?: $7K?
Answer me this: If this scheme saves $1T in federal tax revenue, what was that money being used on before? Are we really expected to believe that out of maybe $1.5T in total funding for the programs you are displacing, that $1T of that was waste?
What good is the 'new stuff' if nobody buys it? And statistics are great until you get tagged. And if you want to play the 'I've seen it all' thing, I happen to remember when single income families were livin' large without sinking into the abyss.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
That was kind of the point I was making.
Only crack the nuts that crack. You don't put the ones that don't crack in the sack.
The point of UBI is to reduce the administrative overhead.
So it increases unemployment and provides fewer government jobs. What is in it for the politicians?
You look to Venezuela for what happens when there are no longer enough resources from the rich to provide for the entitled masses.
Venezuela basically did universal basic income with oil profits.
But then those dried up.
Because the rest of the world figured out that they could sell oil for a lower price than some goofy country that put the entire citizenship as worthless middlemen collecting a profit but providing no value.
And that fixed the glitch. The middlemen are out of the market.
In Alaska and other places there are profits given to the citizens. But nothing that would allow you to stop working. Because that would require the price of oil be substantially higher than other producers could sell their oil for.
And you'd have to be a socialist to not see the problem with inflated prices to support middlemen no one needs.
Work Safe Porn
The average new house today is twice the size of a house in 1973. Cars are better, TVs are better, etc. So people aren't working more to "scrape by", they are working more for a much better quality of life.
All of those products have become easier and less expensive to produce. So why should we work more to have them?
Eat the rich.
While some people starve? The poor generally pay no taxes, therefore reducing taxes in no way helps them.
When you cant win, ad hominem.
What about the food quality? I've spent a few years buying cheap pizza from the supermarket and sometimes sillier things but I'm finding it harder to stomach some of it. What garbage.
I'm beginning to think most of what I see at the supermarket is prison food.
And I'm in France where it's supposed to be so much better than everywhere else. Maybe not anymore as the pre-war generations are dying out.
I think eating well while spending 10% income on food is reasonably doable here, with an upper middle class income. Not counting "eating out" in the food budget.
That's what I think about the kind of post you make above and especially bluefoxlucid's posts, maybe you're the proverbial $100K software devs and thus living in a bubble where everything is cheap (and even cheaper, e.g. if by chance you bought 32GB RAM for $100 (or a bit more, whatever it was) : most people wouldn't have a spare $100 to buy the RAM when the price had crashed to such low. And you need a compatible motherboard)
You might be right overall still!
Albeit from the bottom half of the society, people don't see it that rosy.
You missed the part where by implementing a system like that, we would make you, personally, poorer.
There's only so much work available in the economy. It's only able to trade around so much labor. Divert more of that labor to replacing the rotting parts of the labor force and you can make less of other shit--meaning more people live at a lower class, and middle- and upper-class people are at a lower standard-of-living than they would otherwise be.
The point of welfare is to cost less than not having welfare. If you can't figure out why, I encourage you to save money by never brushing your teeth or using condoms again.
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You need to figure out how to answer a simple question in fewer than 2000 words.
>> Average SS recipient gets about $14K annually. How much does that person get with the USS system described in that link?: $7K?
Your answer (as best I can tell): They get $7K. But they received the USS for their entire life [even while they were working]--so they should have saved some of that money and set up their own retirement account.
>> If this scheme saves $1T in federal tax revenue, what was that money being used on before? Are we really expected to believe that out of maybe $1.5T in total funding for the programs you are displacing, that $1T of that was waste?
Your answer (as best I can tell): Unicorns.
---
I genuinely do appreciate your responses--they were thoughtful and informative. For example, I now know that at least some of the push for UBI comes from closet libertarians trying to masquerade as fiscally responsible social progressives.
Why not just work for it?!
How about a requirement to actually put in some minimum of hours on some qualified work in order to qualify for the income?
It could be some part time position that allows an individual to continue seeking more gainful employment.
Then, when we have mastered having robots do nearly all our work, we can just sit back and wait for judgement day!
Self-importance and self-indulgence is the root of ALL evil.