Ok, but work (productivity) is how you actually pay for UBI.
So by giving UBI, you are decreasing the resources that pay for it.
So by giving UBI, you are decreasing the resources that pay for it.
It's why this article is from the CBC, since Canada (while not perfect) is much better than the US in pursuing good things even if it hurts the powerful.
That doesn’t mean that food production went up, or that more houses get built cheaper, or that new doctors are cloned, or anything of the sort.
It just means stocks went up.
Most of the economy is people providing stuff to other people, or working to import stuff. If people don’t work, you don’t get the stuff they provide.
To a certain extent you can sell off assets abroad and import stuff using a trade deficit. But that doesn’t work forever, and you can’t import haircuts or clean floors or construction labour or nurse shifts. At a certain point work is needed.
Some people have more money than they need, it can be removed from them - the intricacies of how they got that money should be very carefully considered when it comes to structuring how UBI would be funded - but they clearly have more money in absolute terms. And that wealth is transferable.
Also, in the western world, we have enough of everything. No one starves in America because there isn't enough corn, they starve because they don't have enough money to afford it - no one is homeless because no homes could be built, they're homeless because nobody wants to pay for the home to be built.
These are all solvable problems.
Some ways are better than other, but this idea that the powerful can hide their power through accounting tricks alone is a failure to think at multiple layers of abstraction.
Now we can certainly say that "hey maybe if these guys all didn't have such a big mansion or as many cars everyone else would be better off", but you have to be explicit about that. It's about taking away things people like and to put that effort elsewhere.
You can spend that government money on any number of services: Prisons, Childcare, Libraries, Transportation, etc. UBI is different in one major detail:
UBI assumes that people are, at this stage of human technology and society, smarter about how to spend that money the government is ALREADY going to spend on them than the government itself is.
Furthermore, to differentiate itself from mere "welfare", any attempt at means-testing to try and ensure that only "worthy" clients get UBI is just going to add further cost to the system. Specifically, it will cost more than simply distributing the money involved. After all, drug tests cost money. Paperwork costs money. Employing enforcers costs money AND office space AND equipment for them to do their job.
It's a radical notion -- after all, doesn't figuring out if giving out "free money" actually saves money still itself cost money? Still, we're not comparing UBI to a mythical "perfect system"; we're trying to compare it to the imperfect system we have right now, where the cost of NOT doing it gets reflected in things like crime, mental illness, drug abuse, preventable deaths, etc.
There is already a cost associated to continuing to do things "the way we've always done them". UBI is that same cost spent in a different way.
For example - currently a trucker driver will pay state tax, federal tax, pay taxes on the things they eat/buy. When a self driving truck comes...all of that above won't occur anymore. And the company saves money.
Shovels, cars, tractors, computers, pens, paper etc? A truck driver can do the job of many cart drivers! And a cart driver can do the job of people who carry things with their own body.
You can't eat money, nor can money cut your hair. refurb's point is that a UBI leads to a decrease in wealth, not in the amount of money in existence.