Re:Basic income is just the beginning as Finland looks to ci...
by rsync on Sunday October 01, 2017 @12:45PM
(#15378607)
"Will someone lay out a realistic plan detailing how you'd implement BI in the US?"
I have been open-minded about BI, however, the so-called "opioid crisis" in the United States has made me more skeptical.
The accounts I have read in books and periodicals have confirmed my own experience growing up in a poor, semi-rural town: poor whites in the United States already have resources that are effectively equal, or greater than the basic incomes being proposed.
Poor white people in rural America have a roof over their heads (perhaps not their own) they have some amount of disposable income (walmart, unemployment, disability, whatever) and they almost always have access to grandmas Buick or dads Chevy truck. They are very likely to be obese. These people killing themselves with Heroin have food and shelter and cars.
Their problem is that there is no point to their lives. They have no narrative to attach themselves to and no meaning to their days. I don't see how Basic Income solves this, since they have what amounts to a (admittedly, precarious and haphazard) basic income already.
I have been open-minded about BI, however, the so-called "opioid crisis" in the United States has made me more skeptical.
The accounts I have read in books and periodicals have confirmed my own experience growing up in a poor, semi-rural town: poor whites in the United States already have resources that are effectively equal, or greater than the basic incomes being proposed.
Poor white people in rural America have a roof over their heads (perhaps not their own) they have some amount of disposable income (walmart, unemployment, disability, whatever) and they almost always have access to grandmas Buick or dads Chevy truck. They are very likely to be obese. These people killing themselves with Heroin have food and shelter and cars.
Their problem is that there is no point to their lives. They have no narrative to attach themselves to and no meaning to their days. I don't see how Basic Income solves this, since they have what amounts to a (admittedly, precarious and haphazard) basic income already.