Quote from: Hydrogen on May 07, 2018, 12:42:28 AM

There are a few good points made here.

This is one potential scenario under which universal basic income might have a hope of succeeding and balancing out global economies.

It could easily turn into a disaster like social security where excess collected taxes are consistently spent on things which have absolutely nothing to do with social security. Many taxes like road taxes, which are supposed to be utilized towards maintaining roads. And telecom taxes which in theory, are supposed to be spent on maintaining or upgrading internet or telecom infrastructure are often spent on war in the middle east / programs which are 100% unrelated to those things.

The potential for disaster or misuse of funds is very high. But there is a slim chance the program could be successful and achieve its intended end goal of redistributing wealth from the rich to the poor, like robin hood, in an effort to stabilize economies and prevent societies and civilization from ultimately collapsing. And things like that. Whatever the worst case, scorched earth, scenario is here in regard to things like UBI. Wink

Firstly lets call it "USA Basic Income scheme" instead of calling it Universal, because that's what it is. Secondly, the scheme looks good in theory but hard as hell to implement. It seems like the government has to take up a job like Robinhood. get money from the riches and distribute it to the poor segment of the society. This is not a sustainable model at all. If the government wants to provide basic income to the poors, they should look at two very important factors,

1. Providing basic free education till graduation and provide subsidy after that for higher education.
2. Look at the health of the production and heavy engineering industry and facilitate for more such industries.

These are the only ways to ensure a basic income to every household of the country. Government need to empower people instead of distributing free fund to make it sustainable in long run. Providing free fund to every household will certainly boost the retail market for a while because some people will have higher purchasing power, but it will be stagnant soon after the initial boost. The growth will be capped upto that limit.

However, empowering people and the future generation by providing free education will have a very significant impact on the economy along with facilitation to open up new production industry. People will be more equipped with knowledge and the production industries will be there to provide them with jobs, which will in turn ensure a certain level of income to them. This is how a sustainable economic model can be built. Taking funds from the riches and re-distributing them to the poors will have a very limited effect and not sustainable.