It Is Time For Basic Income

It was successful when trialed in Canada so I'd say its viable. But ya, I don't trust our politicians to be sensible and cut spending to pay for a new program. [e.g. Use this to remove the most inefficient $ for $ welfare related programs so more of it ends up in the hands of the people that need it]

> And this is why the model would not work. I don't believe that there are enough people who would find fulfillment in flipping burgers, unclogging toilets, roofing in AZ in July...

I think you missed the "worth it" part, which substitutes for the "fulfilling" part. Unattractive but low-skill jobs would see higher wages (and, thus, greater incentives to find labor-saving alternatives) until the utility people doing those jobs provided to others was reflected in the reward people doing those jobs received.

I once stumbled upon a YouTube video consisting of a woman who received ~$1,400/mo entirely supplied by Government Assistance Programs.

I once saw a job posting for a Web Developer/Python position where the client stated: "$1,000/mo is enough in Belarus."

I stopped to think for a bit: "I hardly made $800/mo when I was freelancing, and I was happiest when I was not working."

I think the biggest argument for Basic Income is to normalize what is already an existing systemic exploitation of a broken system. Professional exploiters and accidental/system-justifier exploiters need to be cut off, which might motivate professionals and invalids to assess our system as more just. I'm sure a positive network effect will follow.

Why not just try it? Why not stop arguing these speculative points and just try it?

It only works if you test.

I'm also not an economist. I think, though, that basic income breaks a lot of assumptions that hold for economics today, but wouldn't hold in such a scenario.

Basic income might lead to inflation. It's impossible for the basic income to become worthless, though, unless all money becomes worthless. Even if everyone gets $X a month, any other amount of money can be expressed as a multiple of X.

McDonalds in this situation could pay zero wage, if anyone wanted to work at this price. I doubt many would, though. Instead, they would pay $Y in addition to the $X that everyone already gets.

Ideally, no one works at McDonalds, because it's automated. If it can't be automated, then McDonalds has to pay people enough to make it worth working at McDonalds, not just enough to survive. This increases the price of things that aren't automated, which increases the reward for those who can figure out how to automate it.

(Objecting to this automation by pointing out how far away we are from AI / useful robots is like objecting to flight by pointing out how many joints are in a bird's wing. An automated McDonalds will look different than what we have today. Perhaps insisting on human hands preparing and serving their food will become an affection of the wealthy.)

Really?.. I think BI per se might change the landscape somewhat - and that depends on its scale - but "rapidly change" - no, you don't principally differentiate strangers with passports from strangers without.