The Great American Share – Sam Altman Interview on Basic Income
There&#x27;s two issues that I don&#x27;t think have been adequately addressed, or that I missed, in the banter over this issue.<p>1) What would stop us from recreating the inefficient welfare state that already exists on top of this new one when some people inevitably blow their UBI on drugs&#x2F;cheetos&#x2F;whatever and don&#x27;t have money for rent? It seems that for this to work we&#x27;d have to maintain some intestinal fortitude to say &quot;no&quot; - and that to me sounds like a serious culture change in this country...which gets me to my next, perhaps more contentious, point.<p>2) What role do immigrants play in this? Google&#x27;s telling me there&#x27;s 11m illegal immigrants in the US right now (though I&#x27;ve seen higher estimates from more hawkish folks). What about people on a visa who pay taxes? Would they both get UBI from Uncle Sam? My view for both would be no, but some of my peers who support UBI have argued that they should, pretty emphatically.<p>I guess what I&#x27;m saying is that I&#x27;m detecting, at least in my circles, a lot of overlap between people who believe in the &quot;global citizen&quot; model and those who support this. Perhaps Altman&#x27;s idea of basically just issuing shares of USG is meant to get around this, but that sounds still half-baked at this point, even if it is just a branding strategy. This, at its heart, is more of a rights question and I don&#x27;t think we&#x27;ve been thinking about it that way.