Re:Moving Forward on Basic Income
by AnthonyMouse on Wednesday June 01, 2016 @12:37AM
(#11812073)
Your argument actually generalizes to a broader one -- if people get money from the government then it weakens family bonds because family members don't need each other as much when they have government money. But it fails for the same reasons all the other ones do, which is that UBI is unequivocally better than the status quo of means tested welfare.
Welfare has the same problem with creating deadbeats but much worse, because if the father does actually pay child support or for that matter stays with the mother to raise the child, then the mother loses the welfare benefits. When you have two parents who are very poor but love their child it creates the unconscionable incentive for the father to leave so that the mother then qualifies for welfare while the father sends what money he can in cash under the table.
UBI at least improves the status quo by eliminating that.
Furthermore, I have read up on the history of the American welfare program. It was dreamed up as a means to "help poor, single moms" at a time when intentionally getting pregnant out of wedlock was essentially unthinkable, so most poor, single moms were widows, not women who had given birth out of wedlock. The design of the program fundamentally changed the social contract and actively promoted the numbers of poor, single moms in the U.S., in part by making it less stigmatizing to have kids out of wedlock.
So, whether it is intended or not, if you pass a UBI, an awful lot of people will feel like deadbeat dads are not such a big deal and you will further change the social contract. The indicators I am seeing is that many of those changes will be negative changes rooted in a presumed lack of responsibility for our actions.