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If the US did not spend more than ever Western country combined on "Defense", and stuck to just, IDK, 75% of every Western country combined, we could do it today. At a bare minimum, we could eliminate homelessness and starvation, today. But we live in a society that believes cronie capitalism for capitalism's sake is more important than people's lives, because of the off chance some of them might be "lazy". UBI is never going to happen.

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You could completely eliminate US defense spending and you would only be able provide every individual with roughly $3000 annually.

Also, your comparison to other countries is confounded by the fact that Western countries (i.e. Europe) maintain a low level of defense spending because they have an explicit guarantee of defense under the North Atlantic treaty and a promise of being covered by the US’s nuclear umbrella. If the US were to cut defense spending, other Western countries would need to substantially increase their own.

If the US stopped getting into futile wars, the world would be very different

I'm not from the US, but the reason to want to have jobs is disbelief that UBI could not happen then? If there was a way to make grounds to get to UBI, would it be fine?

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