Scrap the Welfare State and Give People Free Money

It's also a catalyst for the kind of lifestyle that quickly stifles further education. As it stands, unskilled, uneducated or partially-educated, non-wealthy individuals often have one realistic option: low-wage, long-hour labor which seems to tend to form a trapping cycle.

Now consider for a moment the line of work for (I think it's fair to assume) the majority of users of this site (software development) and the nontrivial number of people in the business who are largely self-educated. It would be silly to promote self-education and free-time online learning as an exact analog to accredited institutional education, but this field in particular presents an interesting case study in individuals simply choosing to get educated in a subject and succeed on their own time.

Is it likely that a subset of the population would simply settle for the minimum income lifestyle? Of course. But I'll wager without a second thought that freeing up a large other portion of the population to pursue their interests will in fact raise the number of educated individuals entering the workforce. After all, the promise of a higher standard of living is still a huge motivator with a basic income of only $10,000/year (still below national poverty level.) And societal attitudes towards the former group are not likely to change -- in fact the sense of tax-dollar ownership is liable to increase stigma on nonworking or nontraining individuals.

There are no modern examples of such a system to draw concrete conclusions from, so it's all hypothetical in the end. But I think you are looking at it a bit narrowly and missing the greater economic good that could come from removing "basic survival" from the top of the list of concerns of a huge portion of the population.

Let's suppose we have a basic income of $1,000 per month per citizen. This is barely enough to get by in someplace like eastern Washington and not enough to get by in someplace like Seattle but it's a nice round number so let's go with it.

The US population is about 300 million. But let's assume only adult citizens receive basic income. If you want children you have to provide for them yourself. How many adult US citizens are there? Well, Barack Obama won 51.1% of the popular vote in 2012 with about 66 million votes with 58% turnout. By my calculations that's a voting-eligible population of about 220 million.

220 million people receiving 12,000 a year is around 2.6 trillion dollars. Total federal tax revenue is around 2.8 trillion dollars, and total expenditures are around 3.5 trillion. You think you can make up the difference by eliminating other entitlements? You can't. Look it up. Basic income + defense + transportation already exceeds the current budget, with nothing left over for courts, embassies, Medicare, the space program, or the Coast Guard. And that's with a particularly low basic income that isn't really enough.

So you're left with having to raise taxes. Fine, you might say, just tax the rich--except even if you subtract out a lot of entitlements to close the budget gap, including social security, you still have to raise maybe an extra trillion dollars in tax revenue just to keep a comparable deficit.

The only way to really make basic income work is if it's effectively means tested. One way of doing this might be to say: if you get paid 72,000 a year, your salary drops to 60,000 and the government taxes your employer for the 12,000 that you receive in basic income; either that or you just don't receive basic income anymore, it's mathematically equivalent. But that is more of a guaranteed minimum income than a basic income anymore, and it's politically that much more difficult.

Not to say that actual racism doesn't exist; of course it does. But I think when most people think "I'd rather not be around 'those people'", if they thought about it they'd find that 'those people' are really defined by either their culture or economic status, rather than their race, and that their race is just a visually-obvious proxy.

The right theory for a basic income should be that all people deserve a stake in the accumulated knowledge and technology of mankind, just as they deserve equal stake in the land and other natural resources. As general advancement accelerates and allows for greater production with less labor, a greater percentage of that wealth ought to be shared with everyone. So in the thought experiment where no one really needs to work and the robots take care of all of our basic needs, eventually distribution of resources should be more or less uniform.

If you view basic income as handouts then you have to answer all of the objections that you'll find in this thread: you're stealing from someone else to pay for them, you're disincentivizing work, etc. Basic income should instead be viewed as arising from principles of fairness.

Instead of enjoying your wealth on your own terms, now you're in a cycle of vetting your drivers, your nannies, and anyone else who comes within physical vicinity of you. Your physical movements are restricted to routes and destinations that are vetted and secured.

And as the wealth gap increases, the threat to your life increases also. Kidnapping a millionaire may not be worth risking your life - but what about kidnapping a billionaire? As inequality rises the lengths people will go to to harm you increases also, resulting in ever-higher fences, ever more advanced security, and a non-stop arms race between you and the poor.

This is already reality in a lot of places. I for one don't want it to become the reality here.