A Basic Income Should Be the Next Big Thing
The reason UBI has such broad appeal is that, well, people are able to do basic math.<p>Take for instance the amount spent on the bank bailouts, which were supposedly done to help stimulate the economy. If you&#x27;d just let the banks fail, you could have spent the same money giving everybody a check for somewhere around 20K (the number is debatable).<p>Hate poverty? The U.S. has spent more than 5 Trillion on it over the last few decades. That&#x27;s another 20K or so per man, woman, and child. The national debt is closing in on 20T. Would you rather have a balanced budget and a check for 100K? (I understand the math is way fuzzy here. It&#x27;s to make a point.)<p>We&#x27;re reaching the point where the average person who supports helping the poor can figure out that we could have just set up an endowment for each poor person when they were born and spent less money than this. And at the same time we would get rid of a lot of folks doing useless overhead simply because the system is so complex.<p>For those reasons and more I like the UBI idea.<p>But ideas are worthless. Execution is everything. We need about a thousand different experiments -- ran for 10 or 20 years -- before we can begin to start saying what might work or not work. When I look at other charitable causes (aid to Africa comes to mind first), the rhetoric got way out ahead of the actual results for many, many decades. Tons of time, effort, and money were spent on strategies that didn&#x27;t work but sounded pretty cool. We&#x27;d be idiots not to recognize that this is the danger here too.<p>The first question we have to ask is this: What is UBI? Is it a reliable income <i>in place</i> of a bunch of other services? Or is it <i>in addition</i> to a bunch of other services? The difference matters. Once that&#x27;s defined, I sure would like to see if a majority of people doing nothing &quot;rubs off&quot; on ambitious, driven people. Or maybe it works the other way around. Maybe a small percentage of ambitious, driven people, in a society without external pressures, can persuade more and more folks to find meaning in helping others. Beats me. Sure will be fun to learn more.<p>Slogans are great. Results are better.