There's no way you'd be able to get rid of them all. What happens when people spend their entire income on lottery tickets? You can't let them starve, you'd need a way to divorce money from services in that case, which is part of what the US welfare system tries to do in part.

At the risk of downvotes, why can't you? At some level, personal responsibility must come into play. There's a limit on how much you can protect people from themselves, though where that limit is can be a very political topic.

People aren't responsible though, especially not people who are needing social services like welfare. People think short term, and some need to be protected from themselves.

Poor people don't always make the best financial decisions, but I think the number of people who would waste all their money without buying any food is relatively small.

Because then the right lobbyists contact either FoxNews or MSNBC (depending on who's apparently to blame) and ignite a two-minute hate about how horrible this is by trotting out a few tragedies and the sheeple get their outrage on, no?

Sure, there's also stuff regarding disabilities, health and probably way more that simply didn't slip into my mind right now. That's why I phrased it as I did.

However, I suppose the existence of basic income could also change the character of those remaining social programs. If someone spends their entire income on lottery tickers, they probably need different kind of help than more money from welfare.

What happens when someone sells their EBT for money and spends that money on $addictive_substance? Fundamentally, forcing adults to not die requires quite a bit of coercion.

There will still be soup kitchens, which will have low demand anyway. If we really want to, we could just send those folks to CCC-style work camps I guess?

Exactly. Once the government takes responsibility for something society will never let them take it away. Basic income with no other welfare might be plausible, Basic income on top of all the existing welfare is a socialist dream

Nobody who has money in hand and is starving is going to buy lottery tickets instead of food.

Exactly. If you're worried, just give in small amounts, so that one can never blow the month's income when they're well-fed.

They are very likely to buy drugs though

Sadly, it will be difficult to explain why we will give Donald Trump and Warren Buffett a basic income of the same amount we will give to a homeless person.

It seems we don't discuss the details of any plan and all the news outlets want sound bites that they can repeat every hour. Even NPR hourly news seems full of sound bites.

The explanation would go something like this (I think, but I'm not a proponent of the system):

You'd give them the same payment, but you'd take back a much higher payment in taxes. Giving people $40k just to send a bill of $100k seems inefficient to me.

It's just an accounting movement, you don't need to actually transfer them the money so that they can pay it back. You calculate their balance and just tell them to pay $60k.

I support Universal Basic Income. In my opinion, the main problem a UBI would tackle is non-participation. We can get more people to take benefits if we show that everyone takes the benefits.

Of course, other supporters will talk about the savings with decreased bureaucracy costs but those are like nice bonuses to me. Personally, I want everyone who is eligible for a program to enroll and benefit. Yes, this could mean increased taxes but I think it will be well worth it.

UBI is often described as a negative income tax for a reason. You don't send those people the money, you give them a tax credit for the money.