He does somewhat address his own premise. He is basically saying that figuring out who to exclude is simply not worth it. Maintaining a system for deciding "who is worthy of help" is more costy than just giving everybody help.
He says that the current system is handing out Oculus Rifts and water-jetpacks to everyone. Which means... any number of things.
I understand why people are supportive of the idea of basic income. But I dunno how to interpret his description of the current system. Is the current system wasteful? What is the analogy to Oculus Rifts actually mean? Are we really trying to teach people how to swim with virtual reality headsets?
Maybe if we stopped handing out Oculus Rifts and Water Jetpacks, we'd have a good system? Is his argument that we should improve our current welfare system?
Somehow, I don't think so. By the end of the blog post, it becomes clear that he's a supporter of basic income. But it takes _far_ too long to get to that point. His thesis needs to be earlier, and he needs fewer analogies and more facts.
Anyway, I think it is clear we need to reform our welfare system. But the blog post is almost the perfect textbook example of how to NOT make an argument. So much analogy, so little substance...
"Does it make more sense to spend a lot of time and resources making sure that only those that absolutely require help get it? Or does it make more sense to just guarantee everyone gets help and make adjustments after the fact?
What's more efficient? All the interviewers, interview equipment, calculations, personal judgments, and spending of resources on stuff we don't even need? Or is it more efficient to just skip all of that, and cover everyone, no questions asked?"
Again, more verbose than the post you're replying to but the point is the same.
I don't know? Do you have any facts or data that actually compares the cost of those two?
And the answer is: no, he doesn't. He just has a broken analogy. I've posted an article in a post (somewhere else...) which actually details _real_ costs and _real_ expenses of some welfare programs, and then compares it with a basic income. But the blog-post linked does not.
https://medium.com/basic-income/breaking-down-without-a-spar...
There is hard data out there for this very subject. Its called look at the costs. Our government is relatively transparent, we know the costs of food stamps. We know the cost of every single social worker on the government. We know their pay, their salary, their qualifications (these sorts of things are standardized upon the GS-levels)
http://www.fns.usda.gov/pd/supplemental-nutrition-assistance...
If you refuse to discuss data that is readily available about various programs, that makes you a lazy writer.
The blog post is terrible. There are much better articles out there that discuss the pros and cons of basic income.
I've previously written about our present welfare system in this article here: https://medium.com/basic-income/breaking-down-without-a-spar...
Additionally, I've written about how much money we could be saving with UBI and why/how: https://medium.com/basic-income/universal-basic-income-as-th...
And here's an article that includes just how much we are spending on a whole lot of things as a society, and how UBI would reduce these costs: https://medium.com/@2noame/how-we-can-transform-americas-bro...
This particular blog post of mine was purely an analogy made to make a single point.
I appreciate you getting back to me, but your blog post suffers from "false analogies". http://onegoodmove.org/fallacy/falsean.htm
Its a common fallacy to make arguments from analogy. And honestly, it weakens your argument significantly compared to the article you wrote elsewhere.
Arguments by analogy "feel" good because it sounds like you're getting the point across in fewer words. But really... you're preaching to the choir at best. An argument from analogy is only as strong as the connection between your analogy and reality.
Unfortunately, talking about water jetpacks and occulus rifts break your analogy wide open. It is clear that you aren't talking about reality anymore, and the analogies barely serve their point when they're so disjointed to the reality on the ground.
If you do take this argument form again in the future, please stick to something more real.
Politicians will divert tons of your funds to programs which address "related problems" that are not actually current problems (Martian terrorists), monolithic solutions that are not known to work (jetpacks), and to other programs which get nerfed.
A good example of a program getting nerfed: there's a nice free-and-reduced-cost lunch program for kids in the US: poor kids should be able to get a good meal at school. Unfortunately, this program has completely lost its ability to provide poor kids with a high-calorie meal, because of Mrs. Obama's crusade against obesity. It's not that the First Lady's plan is unilaterally bad, but rather that it is bad if this meal is the only substantial meal that you're going to get, so that fighting malnutrition is the same as providing lots of calories.