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Comment by gndjdnncfn | Hacker News Reader

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gndjdnncfn·

Five trillion dollars to protect inflated equities markets? Standard procedure.

A basic income to stimulate demand and take pressure off broken labor markets? Heresy.

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Nice, I like how you ignore that the government made all its money back in a few years plus interest.

...and the economy would not benefit from a BI? With increased spending, decreased public support programs, better education and community participation? Life is about more than a balance sheet.

Couldn't UBI end up in a death spiral where it does destroy the economy? If the BI is too generous people will stop working. Cost of goods and services go up. Tax base shrinks. The people vote in a larger BI to make up for it?

For as little as 15k a person, I'd strongly consider never working again.

If no ones working then no ones providing anything. At that point either everything's being made by a robot or we're all dead. I'm pretty sure society is going to find a way around that problem.

That's too binary. We could just go into a depression and then society degrades somewhat. It's happening in Venezuela right now.

Or big business might overthrow the government.

Or maybe people figure out it was a bad idea and elect the GOP to dismantle it.

Fewer people need to work every year. All those factory jobs? Never coming back in this civilization. Next - fast-food, bank teller. Eventually most all of them. We have 35M people in minimum-wage now; there are not and never will be enough Engineering jobs for all of them (and neither would they all want to).

We used to write fantasy stories about when robots took the yoke of work from our shoulders. Now that its happening, we resist with all our might. I wonder why?

The jobs from 150 years ago have been almost entirely replaced by now. With new jobs.

Maybe this time is different. But our current unemployment numbers aren't bad.

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