It Is Time For Basic Income

Well, then McDonalds can offer more money to work there. Obviously, McDonalds wants to stay in business, so it has to offer up some incentive to get people to work for them. If they offer enough money, there will certainly be people who would work to flip burgers.

The jobs' salaries match what they are actually worth, and can't be offered as minimum-wage jobs that people take because they don't have any money and can't get a job elsewhere.

There are many huge cultural and socioeconomic implication of Basic Income.

Inflation is dependent on money supply, you don't need to print new money to apply basic income. You would worry as much of its inflation impact as you would for bailing out banks, if its the same printing. Its not a BI specific concern. Pricing, on the other hand, would probably change drastically, as there would probably be a solid market of goods for people that want to get by with BI alone, so essentials will probably be priced to fit perfectly with BI.

On the second point: Basic Income is guaranteed, regardless of other jobs. So you would work at McDonalds if you wanted more money. Otherwise it creates the perverse incentive not to work which you described.

BI could be nefarious or the savior socioeconomic rule, and it deserves experimentation.

Personally, I find its socio-economic impacts the most interesting and important in shaping a society. With BI, the jobs nobody wants to do will experience a reverse Supply/Demand.

Cleaning toilets today is cheap because you have enough people that need it to survive: when they dont need it anymore, the supply for those jobs will plummet, and suddenly they will start earning way more money. I find this to be such a strong positive force that this alone justifies doing BI to me.

Also, it will very quickly destroy crime. Petty theft and small crimes have no reason to exist anymore, since you dont need to steal to eat or to try to get out of a desperate situation. Specially if being in Jail means you dont get your BI (because its used for prison budgets) it creates a magnificent economical incentive not to do crime and to get out of jail as fast as you can. Organized crime like drug dealers would likely plummet as well: as most organizations they are heavily pyramidal and require a vast number of poor people to work for peanuts and take all the risk. Take them away, and they have no supply chain, so even large organizations will get wrecked quickly. Suddenly, White-collar crime goes way higher in the scale of important.

In terms of society education, you will prevent and help millions of people to be able to pursue education without having to sacrifice it to make ends meet.

Another strongly positive force is to eliminate government "fat". Firing government employees that are useless or provide little value is a very politically expensive move no-one makes, because nobody wants to throw people on the street. Now, this is not the street anymore, they have a strong safety net so we can stop worrying about politics and focus on making things productive.

I clearly see a lot of potential on BI, and I also appreciate it could have devastating downsides. But thats what experimentation is all about finding out.

I doubt lump-sums-in-advance would be permitted. I'm sure that predatory payday loan places would jump at the chance to fill the gap, though. I hope that if BI is ever implemented, that kind of stuff will be regulated.

Obviously this is not a new idea... Twenty years ago I sat around with college mates, in Canada, listing the merits of the "Guaranteed Income" and quite frankly I still support the idea today.

If you took all the salaries, property and operations cost associated with distributing old age security, welfare, disability, unemployment wages etc etc, it would probably pay for much of the cost associated with the Guaranteed Income (even if you had a small group dedicated to counter fraud abuse).

I could list out the many benefits and the nay-sayer objections with counter arguments, but after twenty years I've come to realize money distribution is not the problem. The problem is money = power and society is hell bent on gaining power.

The real solution is to move to a resource managed economy that eliminates money all together. But quite frankly we as a society are not there yet and I doubt we will be in my lifetime.

> Child support

Presumably, Child Support would no longer exist for anyone.

Children are people, with no income, they would essentially get a child-version of basic income, paid to their parents, to raise them, regardless of all other circumstances.

(Similar to US taxes today, where the government effectively pays you some a small amount of money simply for having a child)

If a couple conceives a child, and one parent abandons the other, the single parent keeps the whole state-provided income for that child, and uses it to raise the child.

It eliminates the whole "penalty" system for distant parents, and if those people eventually get jobs, they pay into the basic income system just as anyone else does (so they aren't dis-incentivized to work).