As such, should never be allowed to happen.
People love free things, but nothing is ever truly free. You're either paying for it or someone else is, but eventually, you'll pay for it still.
It always circles back over the long-term.
Every article I've read on UBI are just speculations and the feasibility of it all is discussed as “possibilities” backed only by estimations of events that can lead to this and that.
Oh, and taxes are a huge part of it, so I guess none of these people understand that taxes are how inflation is created and that in turn means more debt issuance?
OK, maybe we've moving too fast. Let's look at what UBI is and what it looks to solve for starters.
Universal basic income (UBI) is the concept of a government program in which every adult citizen receives a set amount of money regularly. The goals of a basic income system are to alleviate poverty and replace other need-based social programs that potentially require greater bureaucratic involvement. The idea of universal basic income has gained momentum in the U.S. as automation increasingly replaces workers in manufacturing and other sectors of the economy. — Investopedia
It's very convenient that the excerpt above mentions the one thing that's causes this “need” that's leading to the proposal of a UBI.
Jobs, the problem is the job market, we have to take note of that.
It's important to understand that some people who've discussed this over the years may have totally had the people's best interest at heart but the realities of our economic system does not just support anything like this.
The first thing to note here is that the word “universal” means that this isn't unique to a specific country alone, but to the entire world.
The problem here is that for a universal income to exist in the first place, a lot of large economies have to sacrifice a lot to accommodate countries with huge populations but weak economies.
Are top economies ready for this? What will be their incentive to do this? What will it have to cost these countries and what happens when said countries no longer have something valuable to trade?
Everything we do as humans is a trade. This is why the concept of anything being free is quite flawed. We constantly have to give something for something.
Funny enough, that very reality is what needs focus, not trying to make our debt crippled money and economic systems worse with UBIs.
There are about 8.2 billion people in the world and an estimated 8.5% or approximately 700 million live in extreme poverty. What the world bank defines as “extreme poverty” is surviving on less than $2.15 per data.
You know, the more I look at this data, the more I think of how stupid Trump has to be with these tariff wars. Unknowing to him that this is what keeps America's smoke screen of “wealth” solid. Either that or he's just massively exploiting the system for personal gains.
Of course, this is something I might discuss more broadly in a secondary post but let me tell you a secret, what Americans spend daily on just breakfast is enough for a full day’s meal in most parts of the world and this has zero to do with food quality or poverty.
It's just very possible to eat a good day's meal for $2.15.
These differences are an essential piece of the system, without them, everything crashes and the tariffs are very crucial to keep this system running, otherwise well, the rest of the world would have no incentive to hold the USD.
But we've digressed. Back to UBIs.
If you want to implement a universal basic income, it has to be the same value, across the board and already from the above paragraphs, it's obvious how this would make living outside the US more profitable for low-income earners.
Essentially, a UBI becomes counterproductive for large economies like the United States economy. But asides this, said income has to come from taxes. It does not matter if you tax the poor or the rich, taxes generally will increase costs and that just makes the UBI near worthless at the end of the day.
You want to solve world hunger? Start by stopping the wars, both the real wars and the financial wars by banks to cripple economies and populations for profit. Not when all these greed-based systems are in place, you want to slap taxes on them to feed the people that were exploited, what do we think that will lead to? Smiles?
Everything UBI leads to increased costs, inflation and more debt being issued. There's no work around that with our current economic system.
The job system is broken, the financial system is designed to exploit and debt remains the channel to expand.
Some shit UBI changes nothing in the grand scheme of things.