India floats the idea of a universal basic income
Forcibly redistributing income from low resource generators to high resource generators creates an incentive for people with fewer resources to have more children than they are capable of supporting. This dynamic will in the long run lead to more people that produce fewer resources.<p>Currently government is redistributing income upward by economic prohibitions (regulatory barriers):<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;cepr.net&#x2F;publications&#x2F;reports&#x2F;working-paper-the-upward-redistribution-of-income-are-rents-the-story" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;cepr.net&#x2F;publications&#x2F;reports&#x2F;working-paper-the-upwar...</a><p>and it is redistributing downward with social welfare spending, with the US massively increasing social welfare spending since 1972:<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com&#x2F;2013&#x2F;01&#x2F;16&#x2F;what-is-driving-growth-in-government-spending&#x2F;?_r=1" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com&#x2F;2013&#x2F;01&#x2F;16&#x2F;what-is-...</a><p>Annual spending growth on various components of social welfare spending (1972 - 2011):<p>&gt;Pensions and retirement: 4.4%<p>&gt;Healthcare: 5.7%<p>&gt;Welfare: 4.1%<p>Annual economic growth over the time frame:<p>&gt;2.7%<p>The only thing it has to show for giving people more &quot;free money&quot; to spend is a higher trade deficit, stagnant wage growth, and, I would argue, an explosion in the amount of single parenthood:<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;pinetreewatchdog.org&#x2F;500-rise-in-single-parenthood-fueling-family-poverty-in-maine&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;pinetreewatchdog.org&#x2F;500-rise-in-single-parenthood-fu...</a><p>But hey, since 40 years of social democracy has failed, let&#x27;s keep doubling down and giving people more &quot;free&quot; money.<p>The end result of this bidirectional forcible redistribution is the productive middle class being destroyed, and two classes becoming increasingly significant: a small upper class controlling a growing share of national output, and a large unproductive underclass that is dependent on the taxes that upper class pays, constituting an increasingly large portion of the population.