The current system in America provides a disincentive to work.

Social programs generally are not considered as income and do not preclude you from being eligible for other social programs (i.e. the benefits stack). This creates the unfortunate situation that some people that don't work at all receive more annual income (in kind) from the government than their working neighbors. It works out to nearly $60k per year in benefits.

I support the idea of a basic income that strives to create an equitable situation for the working class.

>The current system in America provides a disincentive to work.

It also artificially eliminates jobs that need to exist via austerity (e.g. not building necessary infrastructure), offshoring (moving manufacturing jobs abroad) and massive transfers of wealth to the already wealthy (e.g. wall street bailouts).

The techno-utopian notion of us approaching a post-work society glosses over these three things in a major way.

The solution to beat this problem is to reduce the benefits in a gradient as people make more of their own income. Here's the key: Benefits must be reduced more slowly than the increase in income. I.e. at all possible incomes, it must always be the case that if an individual were to make $1 more income, benefit reduction is significantly less than $1.

Absolutely - and UBI would free people who want to work from having to find dead-end jobs. They would have the financial freedom to pursue education, volunteering or educational unpaid internships.

This idea of a "dead-end job" is foreign to me. Only privileged, spoiled people talk like this. All job experience is valuable and will teach you lessons if you let it. If you can't look at even an entry-level job as a chance to gather experience and use it as a stepping stone to something better, and you'd rather sit back and be idle and privileged with some welfare check over working then you're the problem, not the economy.

No, dead-end jobs are very much a real phenomenon. Working as a janitor is not a stepping stone to anything except more minimum wage janitorial work.

Meanwhile as a software engineer, the work you do can be put on your resume and used as leverage for better opportunities.

Not unless you make it so. No one who's ever determined to educate themselves or earn their way to a better position has ever been stuck as a janitor their whole lives.

Clearly you have never worked at mc.donalds.

No but I have been a busboy. And I did work my way through college while working a lot of other so-called "dead-end jobs".

"Breeding for welfare" is a myth. Children are a major economic burden, even with welfare subsidies.

That said, there's no reason offhand to provide basic income to minors. Parents can choose to have as many children as they want, at their own expense. One of the key advantages of basic income is getting rid of the complexities and irregularities of the current welfare model. Subsidies for children are one of those complexities.

One solution would be to not give basic income for children, but to give it to children once they are working age (~16) or when they become an independent adult (18). Everyone gets a certain amount to provide a very basic life on, where they get to decide how their money is spent. If they rather spend their BI on children instead of some other area of life, then that is their choice. If they want both, then they should continue getting a job to acquire funds beyond the BI amount.

I think the bigger issue is that women are having children that they would otherwise not be able to afford. We know that people respond to incentives. Between free healthcare, WIC credit, free or low cost child care, public education, and more, there's massive subsidization.

UBI still permits people to have children that they'd otherwise be unable to afford, but at least the absence of other sibsidies will force individuals to decide how they'd like to budget that income, on children or otherwise.

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> The idea of basic income is commendable, but do we really want a system that incentivizes large families?

> Simply stating something does not make it a fact.

Your first quote makes it sound as if it was the inevitable outcome.

SOME people. Not all. It's a slippery slope fallacy.

What if the same type of people that try to manipulate the system do it because it seems like the only reasonable way to stay afloat?

It could be possible then that some of them would not have more kids to get more money.

"Simply stating something does not make it a fact."

Indeed.

Oh how clever you are. And also most likely wrong. So it's good that you chose to be clever rather than trying to defend your assertion.

A foster care system is, in my opinion and at least in poor areas of large metros - is a good (and pretty depressing) example of what many people are willing to do for money. To some extend - childcare subsidies demonstrate the same.

In a lot of cultures, realized or not, having tons of children is a form of retirement insurance. Having basic income eliminates this uncertainty.

I'll reply to the implied point in a second post.

I'm really surprised to see anyone making this kind of argument. Do you honestly believe it or is this just devil's advocate stuff?

Addressing the implication of breeding for money, I actually prefer the solutions explored in Larry Nivin's main fictional universe.

Importantly, in that universe, different regions of human colonization had different limits for births; including un-affiliated areas (space between planets) having unregulated birthrates.

For the context of Earth/Terra:

I forget if it was one or two children, but for sure, for two parents 'the first child is free'. Let's simplify that and say that for each contributing parent (to society) the first child is free.

After that additional children slots can either be obtained through exponentially larger tax payments, performing a significant contribution to society (E.G. Nobel Prize winners might be granted unlimited reproduction rights), or winning a lottery.

Obviously in the case of massive global war, famine, or disease (age death waves included), additional children might be built in to the quota to keep the population at desired levels.

> ...I actually prefer the solutions explored in Larry Nivin's main fictional universe.

Was he advocating that? I thought it was just a setup for plot points explored in Ringworld.

There is absolutely nothing that indicates that people would want large families just because they have more money. Having a kid is expensive both money wise and timewise.

So I think it's kind of a pseudo problem.

You could solve most of that by making sure that people use condoms and that it isn't religiously wrong.

> The idea of basic income is commendable, but do we really want a system that incentivizes large families?

In Europe and Japan, yes. Birthrates are down and that leads to a number of bad social and economic consequences.