Basic Income Could Be the Moonshot of Our Generation
&gt;<i>They don&#x27;t really suggest that, unless you are counting things like social security and medicare in your calculations.</i><p>You must definitely count these programs, especially Social Security, which is effectively a UBI for old people (it is sold as a public pension plan that you buy into, but there&#x27;s been much analysis that debunks this. Social Security is: 1) A tax program and 2) a welfare program that is vaguely and in some circumstances somewhat based on how much of the tax you payed.)<p>&gt;<i>In a society where everyone is given a basic income of 20k, then wages will have to rise to incentivize people to do any kind of work at all. What this means is that we can do away with the minimum wage, and allow wages to float freely in response to supply and demand. The market rate will always be a &#x27;living wage&#x27; because people simply won&#x27;t work for it if it&#x27;s not.</i><p>The market rate for wages will not be a living wage. For unskilled labor, I could see it being as little as a quarter of the UBI. Most certainly not enough for a low-skill worker to sustain themselves without a UBI.<p>I actually agree that it would be a good thing to stop taking low-skill immigrants, given our surplus of low-skill labor. Why are people so adamant about keeping the southern border open then?<p>&gt;<i>That is a nice story, but if it were true, it&#x27;d suggest that the richest people, who presumably have more free time also have more kids. But, they do not [2]. Now, this chart doesn&#x27;t break it down beyond &gt;200k a year, but what you see is a very steady decline.</i><p>Your data proves nothing of the sort. 200k a year for a household is not &quot;rich&quot;, they would certainly not call themselves rich.<p>The actual rich do seem to be having more children. <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;grist.org&#x2F;population&#x2F;2011-03-03-are-rich-americans-having-more-kids&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;grist.org&#x2F;population&#x2F;2011-03-03-are-rich-americans-ha...</a>