>>The answer is, unsurprisingly, everyone who pays taxes.

1. Not every one would work to pay taxes, when there is a way to not work and still get paid.

2. Lesser the number of people who work lesser the pool of money to share among the remaining.

3. Those who still continue to work feel cheated all the time to be working and making up for everyone. While they push insane hours to make a living, punished all the time for earning, endlessly being asked to pay for others, or be called greedy and evil otherwise.

4. Mass exodus of people follows to places where there is a decent rewards in return for work.

5. Ecosystem as a whole has endless iteration of fewer and fewer contributors, and more and more people who think are entitled to free cash. At some point it all collapses in its own weight.

1 - 5 is basically the story of every single socialist economy in the past 150 years.

I'm not aware of any socialist economy collapsing simply due to mass underemployment. Most socialist ex-economies collapsed primarily due to the effects of the end of the cold war. They were generally already devastated by WW2. It is by no means certain that a capitalist economy would have fared any better.

Not that it necessarily matters, since most "socialist" economies didn't really have anything like a basic income. The closest was probably the USSR, where everyone was notionally guaranteed an income, but only because everyone was guaranteed a job, and voluntary long-term joblessness was illegal.

The fact of the matter is that there has never been a country-scale attempt at implementing a basic income. Nothing even resembling a basic income has been employed in a country that didn't also have its economy devastated by war - whether civil, cold, or world. The small-scale trials of basic income have had either neutral or positive outcomes.

>>socialist economy collapsing simply due to mass underemployment

The problem here is not underemployment. Underemployment is a situation where people want to work, but don't have jobs. The situation I mentioned systematically disincentivizes working making it very easy to get by life without work. The net situation is people feel they are entitled to free stuff without doing any work for it. And its always somebody else responsibility to provide for them, while they do nothing at all to contribute anything back.

>>Most socialist ex-economies collapsed primarily due to the effects of the end of the cold war.

Cold war was the perfect test of which country could retain their best. There were barely any incentives to stay in socialist countries. At any given point of time a minority was slogging till death to feed the remaining mouths in their countries. Why do think you so many people from countries like India(Largely still socialistic society) want to move to US?

Robbing Peter to feed Paul only works that long.

>>They were generally already devastated by WW2. It is by no means certain that a capitalist economy would have fared any better.

That's strange since none of the socialist economies did better even those which didn't participate in the world wars.

>>The fact of the matter is that there has never been a country-scale attempt at implementing a basic income.

Sorry, you say- since nothing like it with 100% match existed before we should discard cases with 99.99999% match.

Today we have automation on a scale never before experienced. Ultimately we will need approximately 0% of our population to work. This is not a problem; its actually the goal. We are not there yet, but a BI is a step.

Nonsense. Automation was the same 12 months, and largely the same 10 years ago.

0% working for some definitions of work. People want to be and do all sorts of things and will continue to, automation should help us live more comfortably and more gently on the earth, not make us redundant.

Factory automation today means almost nobody is needed to work factory jobs. And there is no longer a path from the factory floor to technical, engineering or management roles. Just minimum-wage standins for broken/missing equipment (moving a box from one conveyor to another during a rush).

34 million Americans resort to minimum-wage jobs because there's nothing else. This is not a fad or a downturn; its the new normal.

Citation: this article calls manufacturing automation "an explosion" in the last decade. http://www.automationworld.com/manufacturing-trends-2015

I don't know of any western democracies collapsing under the weight of their taxation system.

Why break it down by state except to make a politically charged generalization? The modern economy is dependent on cities and states are a mostly arbitrary political division inherited from a time when cultivated land area determined economic value.

Because most welfare is paid for by the states...

The link is about state economic dependence on the federal government, not which layer of government distributes welfare benefits.

It's just a rehashing of the red state-blue state federal dependence argument, which is really the rural-urban dependence argument.

If you want to knock rural areas as being net welfare recipients, just call them rural areas rather than red states. But even that's still an unhelpful generalization.

If you really want to be granular, you would single out the urban neighborhoods, suburbs, and yes rural areas (such as oil patches) that are net contributors.

And as one of the comments pointed out, many of the rural states are completely at the mercy of the Federal government. When the Federal government controls 48% of a state's land (Wyoming), yet doesn't allow logging, mining or agricultural activities on most of it, what exactly is the local population supposed to generate revenue from?

Logging, mining, and agricultural activities is hardly an exhaustive list of economic activity. It is also strange to think about what people should do with land they don't control. Or even to assume that natural resources are the only resource of importance.

Connecticut has 3.6 million people, Wyoming has roughly 0.6 million people. 6.2% of Connecticut's 5543^2 miles of land is public 56% of Wyoming's 97818^2 miles of land is public.

So Wyoming has about 8 times as much private land as Connecticut and about 1/6th the number of people.

I realize that there is a lot more involved than just land, but it looks like in the aggregate, there is about 50 times as much private land in Wyoming per person than in Connecticut.

It is easy to poke holes in my analysis, but I'd be surprised if scarcity of land is the roadblock to a healthy economy in Wyoming.

I'm also not trying to take an opinion on whether the federal government should hold all that land, just pointing out that there is a lot of land in Wyoming on a per-capita basis.

Are the least dependent states that way because of logging, mining or agricultural activities? No. 52% of the Wyoming's land, ~50,000 sq. miles, is still more land than 18 other states have in the Union.