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A comment on A Guaranteed Income for Every American. Parent comment

Re:A Guaranteed Income for Every American by dwc on Saturday June 04, 2016 @04:55PM (#11837980)
You're overthinking it a bit. What it does it remove the worry that you're going to starve or have no place to live, or take you from subsistence to a level that you can invest in the future. That's all. Perhaps that's enough.

Whether this "solves" anything depends. Initial experiments are very limited, but fairly positive. Giving money to people in rural India may not translate too well to giving money to people in New Delhi, much less people in Cleveland. But I think it's worth a try to see how things work out.

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Re:A Guaranteed Income for Every American by danbruc on Saturday June 04, 2016 @05:49PM (#11838271)
What it does it remove the worry that you're going to starve or have no place to live, or take you from subsistence to a level that you can invest in the future. That's all. Perhaps that's enough.

If your income drops below 404.00 Euro per month plus rent in Germany, you get the difference. Nobody will become homeless, nobody will starve. At least in theory. They will bug you to get a job as quickly as possible, make you do courses to improve your skills. The authorities are said to be kind of control freaks, supposedly to avoid abuse.

So it is a basic income. Universal? Well, the authorities won't just let you develop you new product idea for two years. If you don't try to get a job, they will bug you a lot. If you don't play by the rules, they can even cut some of the benefits.

So maybe we should just add a program that allows you to ask for benefits for a certain amount of time so that you can develop a business idea. Maybe there are already things like that. You certainly can get support if you want to educate yourself, attend a university and so on.

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Re:A Guaranteed Income for Every American by sokoloff on Saturday June 04, 2016 @07:14PM (#11838673)
Much of the appeal of UBI is that there is no massive government pork program to determine eligibility, track compliance with rules, etc. The "U" is important to many of us, provided it allows the disassembly of the massive bureaucracy present today.
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