A Basic Income Should Be the Next Big Thing

Completely aside from the other response, this point is just...wrong. The vast majority of hotly debated issues in this country are not hotly debated because people share a concern but are divided on the best way to address it, such that there is some policy solution that exists which could "solve" the issue. They are hotly debated because people disagree on the first principles of what goals we should seek, not the mechanics of how to address them.

As well as the obvious culture-war issues where this is the case, this is true of much of the immigration debate, many economic debates (where fundamentally clashing ideas of what constitutes "fairness" that should be sought exist), and so on.

It seems like we currently have 2 buckets:

- living money for people who, for whatever reason, have no source of income

- publicly funded medical insurance

It doesn't seem totally unreasonable to classify medical expenses separately from routine living expenses.

The amount of spending in the routine-living-expenses bucket is enough to pay about $350 per month to each of the country's 320M residents.

I think a good proposal is to instate that $350 universal half basic income, replacing social security and unemployment insurance, and then reduce the minimum wage to $0. Even with the rise of a robotic workforce, just about anyone should be able to find work that will pay the remaining 350 if they're allowed to work for little enough.

[1] https://www.nationalpriorities.org/budget-basics/federal-bud...

Edit / Afterthought: No one currently receiving social security or unemployment will support this proposal because they are all receiving way more than that. More than 700/month, and certainly more than they need to survive.

What would work, I think, might be a phase-out: for anyone who's getting less in SS payments than the UBI, just replace their SS with UBI. For everyone making more, they don't get a UBI, they just keep drawing SS. (Or, you could say they get UBI plus the difference between SS and UBI.) Then eliminate the SS portion of the FICA tax and stop everyone from paying into it going forward. Then there'll be some math involved in figuring out how much people who partially paid into it get, but the end effect is that SS will cost less and less money until finally everyone's aged out (to the point where the amount they'd draw is less than UBI so we can just cancel SS altogether). It'll cost a bit more in the short term to do it this way, but it's more fair to people who paid into the SS system and it won't get the AARP voting against you.

>Edit / Afterthought: No one currently receiving social security or unemployment will support this proposal because they are all receiving way more than that. More than 700/month, and certainly more than they need to survive.

Again, you'll have to phase it out. Unemployment is an insurance program that people have paid into, just like SS, so of course they expect it to be there if they need it. And it may (or may not, depends on the person and their income) pay more than they need to survive, but if they have a lot of expenses like a big mortgage then that's irrelevant. They've been forced to live in a society where having a job is basically required for survival unless you get on the dole (which prevents you from working, so it's a trap), so unemployment is something the society has created to mitigate risk.

But like SS, it could be phased out (and the taxation from that eliminated). It could probably be replaced with privately-run unemployment insurance though, but it wouldn't be as necessary with UBI.

But your $700/month sounds low to me. I know it's supposed to be a bare minimum, but even that seems too little to me to live on with today's rent prices. I do think the government has a responsibility to do something about that; rents have been driven up far too much by Wall Street, foreign investors, speculation, etc. UBI needs to be enough for someone to live on with roommates (and not more than 1 per bedroom at market rates), in an average cost-of-living area, plus reasonable grocery store bills and a bit extra to cover transportation costs. If it isn't enough for that, it won't work, and it needs to be jacked up until it is. If that means instituting a big tax on Wall Street, then so be it, since they're largely responsible for the cost of living being what it is.