Universal Basic Income is 'best way to distribute equity stake in productivity’

Two things I can think of off the top of my head.

People more easily help people that are similar to themselves, simply because they can easily see themselves in their shoes.

You'd have similar productivity throughout the population, i.e. you won't have some distinct part of the population do most of the work while other distinct parts of the population are primarily taking but not contributing. Having cemented net transfers where, say, protestants to all of the work and catholics sit around collecting welfare will make for unhappy protestants (and you need those to be happy, because they do the work).

If we introduce UBI it would probably be one of the first times in history that society addresses major changes without war, revolution or other upheaval. My prediction is that inequality will grow, a lot of people will lose their jobs, but nothing will change fundamentally without a major conflict.

We see that already with climate change. There clearly is no will to really address the issues. We'll have sea levels rising, millions of refugees and somehow deal with that. We will not prevent that.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/aparnamathur/2018/07/16/the-u-s...

Countless studies show it's basically impossible to live on minimum wage jobs anywhere in the US now. I'm more than 50% confident that a quick internet search will show them so I won't bother listing them here.

The inheritance tax is low and in constant danger of being eliminated by the Republican party. All income should be taxed the same way (meaning we should eliminate capital gains tax and other unearned income taxes) and income brackets need to be shifted to account for inflation. Payments shouldn't begin until around the $30k/yr threshold, the average career job at $60-80k should pay about 25% tax, and the top income tax should be near 50% above about $125k. The social security tax cap at $132,900 should be eliminated. This is my mathematical optimum, you might have your own, but a fact of life today is that current tax policy is anything but fair or ideal. It's been coopted by lobbyists and special interests and only works for millionaires.

UBI creates wealth because currently we have no "human potential" gross national product (GNP) metric. The majority of jobs today are a waste of human resources. For example, is a human life worth more than its potential to flip burgers? The answer is self-evidently yes, so that means that the fast food industry subsidizes its profits by under-employing its workers and depending on government handouts in the form of food stamps and welfare. We can repeat that analysis for pretty much every industry and see that underemployment is one of the great problems of our time.

Even if we use the conservative measure of part time workers who want full time work, it tends to hover between 12 and 18% in the US:

https://www.statista.com/statistics/205240/us-underemploymen...

But I'd argue that it's really much higher than than. Is anyone really more than 6 hours productive in an 8 hour workday? That puts underemployment at more like 25%. If we count all the people with degrees working at non-career jobs, or hackers/makers/inventors valued only for their ability to make money for their employers, then I think it's around 50%.

UBI gives workers a lifeline out of underemployment. Then they can start their own businesses, which leads to more employment and productivity. If our GNP is $20 trillion, then I would expect UBI to gradually raise that to perhaps $40 trillion (in today's dollars) and beyond over a decade or two if underemployment is 50%.

I tried to keep this brief but truthfully I could go on indefinitely. My personal underemployment hovers near 100% because I've never gotten ahead of the curve enough to make any of the inventions I'd like to. I spent many years of my life thinking about how to automate the jobs like painting houses and moving furniture I held that paid above minimum wage but had no upward mobility.

In other words - at their root are things like classism/racism, fear of socialistic solutions to fundamental problems with capitalism, or flat out greed and the "I've got mine" mentality that's so prevalent in the US.

That fear/uncertainty is a distraction from what we are capable of today with automation. It's a 20th century zero sum worldview where giving to someone requires taking from someone else. I don't subscribe to that, because we could largely automate basic sustenance production (food, water, energy, shelter, transportation, etc), charge very little for it, require substantially less human labor, and turn any profits from that into a stipend that we all get for being US citizens. I think that's more in line with a 21st century or Star Trek future.

Given that UBI replaces most other social programs, you'd have to consider if you let people who waste their stipend go hungry or not. If a single mom waste's theirs, do we now introduce SNAP/WIC back into play to cover that? How about disabled people? In my mind all of these programs will slowly be reintroduced to cover edge cases and then we are back where we started.

No of course not. The company he built from the ground up did.

Those workers are paid as per their employment contract. That's it. That doesn't give them rights to take pieces of ownership in that company.

The next inclination would naturally be to say "Well, you just force the growing of rice, beans, potatoes, and broccoli." You have now landed on a planned economy, which doesn't work very well.

So healthy staples can't actually be "free for all". I do think that providing the food directly for people who need it would be a better idea, but you get associated issues of government price-fixing and dumping of lower quality food-stuffs.

Federalism is all about experimentation. One of the features is to permit the autonomy for local governments to attempt local solutions to the specifics of the problem as it is faced locally. There may be something to be said for a central (federal) facilitation of local programs, but this almost always takes the form of funding.

> Wealth redistribution doesn't work and never has.

Is a HUGE sweeping generalization that has literally zero substance in a discussion - and technically it's false off-the-bat because I'm certain almost anyone can think of at least ONE example where the "redistribution of wealth" has worked to lessen human suffering. Also, don't let someone come through here and try to redefine what they meant by those words - they mean that they don't believe in wealth re-distribution plain and simple.

When you see binary arguments like that it's a flag to run for the hills.