At basically every aspect of her job it felt like her employer did not respect her as a person. Her work hours weren't steady, her pay wasn't good, she was constantly at risk of losing her "full time" status and if she did lose that she could drop down to random ~5h/week slots. Her employer wouldn't even fire you, they would just drop you down to basically no hours until you had to quit and miss out on unemployment.
Most of the staff she worked with in fact, most of which I'd argue were full time employees were withheld hours just so they wouldn't get full time benefits. Looking around for jobs was also difficult as most other employers did not want full time employees either.
Employers in lesser skilled fields get away with murder because employees have very little ground to stand on. They don't have the income to build financial independence, nor does the government help them out in many cases. Even unemployment is gamed and withheld.
I don't know if UBI is the answer, but something needs to be done.
Also with UBI you are guaranteed a certain amount of income for the duration of your life. You can go to a bank and take a loan against your UBI. A big portion of the UBI will end up at the banks because basically the loans are guaranteed by the government.
Work ethic might be engrained into our culture, but someone who is brought up in a society where UBI is normal and they are just a few years away from becoming "rich", I think not-working-ever is a very enticing idea and many teens will fall into that trap.
#2 Switzerland has a very high cost of living so I'm not sure 2,300 Swiss Francs is that high.
#3 Your second paragraph is 100% begging the question. I'm open to the idea that UBI might be good or bad for work ethic but there simply is not enough data for you to have the confidence you do in your conclusion.
Trying to figure out how this would work. Presumably a bank would only lend a portion of the UBI to you
Therefore, the loan would have to be dismissable in bankruptcy. So a UBI loan basically reduces down to nothing more than an unsecured "personal loan", which is something you can get today, albeit at very high interest rates:
https://www.nerdwallet.com/personal-loans?annualIncomeFilter...
Which is exactly why Employees like the idea and employers hate it.
> I'm happily paying taxes because other people paying taxes put me through college and into my current job
Me too. I came up very poor, but access to a good education allowed me to learn how to code at 16... We need to raise these people up. We are paying the taxes to support it, we just need a government who doesn't misappropriate funds.
The biggest problem is that we don't really have a good way to measure the value of free time or well-being. While someone could spend every penny of a minimum wage job on daycare services and it would boost productivity figures, it would be a pretty silly decision for someone to make in terms of actual prosperity.
Society has decided for a long time to continue working the same or more hours as productivity rises, but at what point does it make more sense in terms of prosperity to cash out some of that productivity in the form of free-time rather than dollars?
So by giving UBI, you are decreasing the resources that pay for it.
That doesn’t mean that food production went up, or that more houses get built cheaper, or that new doctors are cloned, or anything of the sort.
It just means stocks went up.
Most of the economy is people providing stuff to other people, or working to import stuff. If people don’t work, you don’t get the stuff they provide.
To a certain extent you can sell off assets abroad and import stuff using a trade deficit. But that doesn’t work forever, and you can’t import haircuts or clean floors or construction labour or nurse shifts. At a certain point work is needed.
Some people have more money than they need, it can be removed from them - the intricacies of how they got that money should be very carefully considered when it comes to structuring how UBI would be funded - but they clearly have more money in absolute terms. And that wealth is transferable.
Also, in the western world, we have enough of everything. No one starves in America because there isn't enough corn, they starve because they don't have enough money to afford it - no one is homeless because no homes could be built, they're homeless because nobody wants to pay for the home to be built.
These are all solvable problems.
Now we can certainly say that "hey maybe if these guys all didn't have such a big mansion or as many cars everyone else would be better off", but you have to be explicit about that. It's about taking away things people like and to put that effort elsewhere.
Some ways are better than other, but this idea that the powerful can hide their power through accounting tricks alone is a failure to think at multiple layers of abstraction.
It's why this article is from the CBC, since Canada (while not perfect) is much better than the US in pursuing good things even if it hurts the powerful.
You can spend that government money on any number of services: Prisons, Childcare, Libraries, Transportation, etc. UBI is different in one major detail:
UBI assumes that people are, at this stage of human technology and society, smarter about how to spend that money the government is ALREADY going to spend on them than the government itself is.
Furthermore, to differentiate itself from mere "welfare", any attempt at means-testing to try and ensure that only "worthy" clients get UBI is just going to add further cost to the system. Specifically, it will cost more than simply distributing the money involved. After all, drug tests cost money. Paperwork costs money. Employing enforcers costs money AND office space AND equipment for them to do their job.
It's a radical notion -- after all, doesn't figuring out if giving out "free money" actually saves money still itself cost money? Still, we're not comparing UBI to a mythical "perfect system"; we're trying to compare it to the imperfect system we have right now, where the cost of NOT doing it gets reflected in things like crime, mental illness, drug abuse, preventable deaths, etc.
There is already a cost associated to continuing to do things "the way we've always done them". UBI is that same cost spent in a different way.
For example - currently a trucker driver will pay state tax, federal tax, pay taxes on the things they eat/buy. When a self driving truck comes...all of that above won't occur anymore. And the company saves money.
Shovels, cars, tractors, computers, pens, paper etc? A truck driver can do the job of many cart drivers! And a cart driver can do the job of people who carry things with their own body.
You can't eat money, nor can money cut your hair. refurb's point is that a UBI leads to a decrease in wealth, not in the amount of money in existence.
1. Please note, these numbers are off of raw income tax - both Canada and the US have other employment related taxes that I'm not counting here (like payroll) since their proportional contribution is pretty minimal.
And hypothetically speaking, say the government is spending $10k/year on assistance to a disabled individual. If you instead give $10k/year to that individual in cash he would not be able to buy the same level of care for the same price on the private market. He'd get massively short changed. Welfare is far more efficient, financially speaking, than handing out cash to people and letting them fend for themselves.
How do you know that? Countries with much worse welfare than the US often have much better prices than the US when it comes to healthcare.
Maybe healthcare prices were allowed to grow so much only because insurance pays for most of it anyway. If that changes, healthcare providers would have to charge more realistic amounts, especially for common procedures like dental checkups and medications like insulin.
That's just income redistribution from the most vulnerable, right wing would love this.
Less work means less is produced, so society as a whole becomes poorer. There's simply less goods.
Less produced also shrinks the tax base, so tax rates must be raised to continue to pay for the basic income. Higher taxes would then dissuade more people from working, or leading them also to work less. Now there's more people wanting basic income, so more needs raised......
Sure free money gives some people nicer lives, but in this case it is not free - it is taken from other people. Maybe instead of calling it basic income, call it "larger tax transfers for those not needing it as much as current tax transfer systems."
Productivity equals production.
A small team of engineers who design and create a machine to build brick walls en masse, could have the same productivity as hundreds of thousands of bricklayers working 16 hours a day.
A good example of this are Silicon valley, Singapore or New York, which are small social groups that have more economic and social output than most countries with a much larger population.
To be more productive and have a richer and better quality of life (richer is not necessarily more quality of life), it's generally more efficient and sustainable to have better education and social conditions for workers, than to exploit them.
I believe a good teacher is 100 times more productive than a software engineer. But that guy that wrote some tracking code earns a boat load more money. So you consider him more productive. That's just a huge fallacy. Value cannot be fully quantified, we use proxies for that reason, but we should always remember that.
OP just explained why people (or rather, the upper middle class tech workers) of these two cities for out produce potentially thousands of people. A team of software engineers who can nail software for flipped classrooms will replace thousands of teachers AND improve educational outcomes
Yep, and when significant numbers of people simply stop working, as has been demonstrated in every experiment on basic income, production drops similarly. 0 work * any finite rate of production = 0 output.
Recessions/depressions are caused by smaller drops in production than those seen in basic income. Production includes food, medicine, services, and things that make life better for all.
>A small team of engineers who design and create a machine to build brick walls en masse, could have the same productivity as hundreds of thousands of bricklayers working 16 hours a day.
Then let them do it. That they have not done so thus far is not because we didn't have basic income. Postulating this mythical event as a counter to the empirical evidence that production did drop significantly during actual basic income is not compelling.
>generally more efficient and sustainable to have better education and social conditions for workers, than to exploit them
Then start such a company, and your better, happier, more efficient workers should beat out those other inefficient companies.
Again, this hasn't happened, despite many people trying to make such companies, only to realize that things don't work this way for valid reasons.
NY for example has lots of high paying finance jobs, but without all the industries those bankers serve, those finance jobs wouldn’t exist.
Society doesn't become poorer, in fact UBI will probably lower stress and allow more creative thinking and longer life spans with lower medical costs. Even if it doesn't I'd just be happy to know that the people struggling at the bottom have to struggle a little less because, as a person in the middle, I'm happy to give a little bit of my income to someone who needs it more.
If we were all just moving rocks around, that statement might be true. But human productivity is a much richer equation than time work in == value produced.
Where would we be if we took that to its logical conclusion and put kids to work rather than send them to school? If we all worked 16 hour days?
Your model doesn't consider productivity/unit time, nor the case of win-lose bargaining in the case where the 'lose' party is at a disadvantage and bargaining to lose less rather than for gain.
Disincentivizing work (in the near term) can be a net positive over time if the person that turns away from that trade uses their unsold time to increase their overall productivity/unit time or if they use their enhanced alternative to a negotiated agreement to turn a negotiation that would have otherwise been a 'lose but lose a bit less' or 'tread water' situation into a gain for themselves.
My only question is whether the productivity and value gains from enhanced productivity/unit time and employee/employer negotiations where the employee always has a workable alternative to employment will be more than what is lost in the reallocation through taxes?
Considering how much the top has and how little it would take to move those still in desperate poverty to merely being poor, I'd be willing to bet the overall value creation would far outstrip the losses in taxes. But it's a fair question.
This works the opposite of that. Everyone always gets the basic income, so there is no "more people wanting", but if the tax base was hypothetically reduced then less revenue would be generated to fund the UBI. At a lower UBI amount, more people would work. It's self-balancing.
?????
Less time worked correlates with less things made. Less things made means less sales. Less sales means less sales tax. Less people working means less income. Less income means less income tax....
Sure this doesn't shrink the tax base? After all, when a few percent of people are put out of work during a recession, there are severe tax revenue issues. Basic income experiments so far show that 10% of people simply drop out of the workforce.....
>if the tax base was hypothetically reduced then less revenue would be generated to fund the UBI. At a lower UBI amount, more people would work. It's self-balancing.
So your UBI pays people a fixed percent of the tax base, not a dollar amount? So during a recession, those UBI people will get really screwed....
Everyone gets the UBI, not just people who don't work. If hypothetically fewer people were to work, more people wouldn't start receiving it because everybody gets it either way.
> Less time worked correlates with less things made.
In general this goes the other way. The history of progress is to make more stuff in less time. If people had more "disincentive to work" then companies would have to pay them more -- which increases the incentive for automation, which creates more stuff with less people working, which solves the problem.
This is also why your "disincentive to work" calculations are off. If you pay <1% of people a UBI, it's not going to affect wages. If you pay it to everyone and there is a "disincentive to work" then to get people to work, companies will have to pay more. Which creates a countervailing incentive to work that keeps people working. It also increases wages (and correspondingly spending), which increases the tax base, so there goes that too.
> So your UBI pays people a fixed percent of the tax base, not a dollar amount? So during a recession, those UBI people will get really screwed....
Taxes are (approximately) a percent of GDP, not a percent of the stock market. Have a look at the GDP graph:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GDP
Difference from the height of the housing boom to the bottom of the crash was ~3%. Not a huge difference. And it was back to where it was at the height after one year. (Compare to ~50% drop for the Dow. The stock market is not the economy.)
That money comes from taxpayers. If less people work, less pay into it.
>In general this goes the other way.
If less people work today, less will get made today. When a few percent of people suddenly don't have work, we have a recession, tax revenues fall drastically, raising deficits. The last recession makes this perfectly clear.
The UBI experiments so far have around 10% of people stopping work. That would be devastating to any modern economy.
>Taxes are (approximately) a percent of GDP
Because people are working. Drop 10% of workers, you lose a massive amount of tax base. Expenses are still fixed for many items, which is why when less people work deficit spending increases.
>And it was back to where it was at the height after one year
Because people were getting back to work.
I also never mentioned the stock market as the indicator to measure - that is a strawman you brought up.
But none more receive it.
> If less people work today, less will get made today.
What do you expect companies to do if some of their employees quit? Give up? No. Either they'll pay higher wages to get employees again or they'll automate the job.
There are millions of jobs that could be automated right now, this year, except that the automation equipment costs slightly more than paying current wages, so they pay the wages instead. If it becomes somewhat more attractive to not work and employers have to pay higher wages, some of them will get automated instead. The same work gets done with fewer people.
> When a few percent of people suddenly don't have work, we have a recession, tax revenues fall drastically, raising deficits. The last recession makes this perfectly clear.
Tax revenues fell and deficits rose because they cut taxes and increased spending. The reduction in GDP (i.e. the tax base) was, again, only ~3% and only for one year.
> The UBI experiments so far have around 10% of people stopping work. That would be devastating to any modern economy.
I have already explained this. If you give one person a UBI and not everyone, they don't need work as much, but everybody else still does, so employers don't have to pay higher wages since they can still hire any of the other >99% of people who didn't get the UBI and pay them the existing wages.
If you give everyone a UBI, employers do have to pay higher wages to retain employees, so they do, and then more people stay working.
Someone else also pointed out that your 10% also mostly "stopped working" so they could go to school. Which is obviously not a permanent condition and generally precedes taking a better job, which pays more and generates more tax revenue.
> Because people were getting back to work.
The unemployment rate went from 5% in 2007 to 9.9% in 2009. It was still at 9.3% in 2010 when GDP had fully recovered. Apparently the economy did just as well without the other 4.3%.
Somebody has to do the work though, until robots do everything (and then declare war on us), you need somebody to take away the garbage, pick the fruits and unclog the toilets. Disincentivizing work doesn't make that go away, it just means you'll put that load on fewer shoulders.
I do know that asking people if their job is bullshit is not a good way to truly understand. It’s natural to hate many jobs, that’s why I’m paid to do them.
I once shoveled horse stalls. I hated it. It was. Horseshit job. But if the job stopped existing, it would have negative impact.
I think it will be cool when we have the luxury of working only fun, happiness creating jobs. But someone has to shovel out the stalls.
Under this definition, a lot of dirty or otherwise maligned jobs are still essential to society (including stall cleaning, depending on your perspective of how essential having horses is) and are thus not bullshit jobs, but a lot of others (rubber stampers, make workers, flunkies) are bullshit jobs.
If people were not in desperate need of a paycheck and were able to negotiate/hold out for better jobs, or spend more time on career training, then a lot of the business would not exist, or would be forced to treat their employees better.
I remember years ago I was talking with a friend of a friend who worked for a small 3-4 person software company. In the same conversation ve said ver job was bullshit because the software was written years ago by the two owners, who did nothing now, leaving all customer service to the friend of friend. So the argument was that ve should be paid more since ve creates all the value. So the argument was that the owners had bullshit jobs. There was a counter argument that small bugs had to be fixed, not by owners, but by the friend of friend who thought vis job was bullshit because the owner should fix it since the owner knows the software well.
I think it’s hard to get a straight answer because of this limited perspective as well as the natural falseness in responses to “is your job bullshit and we’ll pay you UBI so you can do something cool?” Or “is your job bullshit and we’ll fire you?”
In the case of horse shit, for sure it is better if someone cleans it, but that someone can also be the person that trains or rides the horse.
There isn't an intrinsic need for a job that performs only that task.
So I think a job is just a task that involves payment. It doesn’t change the argument. Someone has to do the task. If you give the horse owner UBI to free up more time, it’s unlikely to be spent shoveling horse manure.
The question is always: who is benefiting from this?
If people had more "disincentive to work" then getting people to work would require paying them more money. Jobs that self-cancel their own profession could then hire fewer people industry-wide and result in a net productivity boost, since whatever they do in the alternative can't be more useless than what they were doing.
As far as I can tell, none of these lesser programmes has had any effect above and beyond inflation on cost of living. Wasn't the sky supposed to fall when Washington State passed that ballot measure for a graduated minimum wage increase back in 2016?
Meanwhile, there are plenty of examples of awfully expensive large scale "back to square one" experiments that have been undertaken by other political ideologies with little to no opposition—where is the economic growth that was supposed to have happened as a consequence of the Ryan/Trump tax cuts in 2017?
The truth is, a lot of business ventures simply aren't profitable. It isn't profitable for me to start a business where I deliver whitecastle to remote areas by flying couriers there with the food - but it could be profitable if enough market changes occurred.
As these bloat businesses die off we'll see a shift in the market - either there will be a surplus of employees (that will drive down the cost of employment and enable more bloat businesses) or those employees will find other businesses to work at that can survive in the margins that exist.
You'll have to give up a significant part of your (real, not nominal) income to make a difference there. You might be happy to do that, my guess is that most of your peers are not.
The reimbursement of janitors might go up with UBI, that's fine, if it's going up then it means that something in the current market situation was artificially holding back their reimbursement. The market can correct pretty easily for UBI and make sure that the jobs that need to be done are indeed done (or else they aren't jobs that need to be done) and maybe janitor, as a profession, is scaled back to just waxing the floors and we discover that people working in an office should, once a week, empty their own trash cans - it's a very plausible outcome from UBI and one that will happen naturally if it'll happen at all.
> maybe [...] we discover that people working in an office should, once a week, empty their own trash cans
They can do that today, it's just more efficient to pay somebody else to do it than to have you, a highly-paid software developer, do it. It's more efficient to have you do complicated software things than mopping floors and emptying the trash can.
I'm all with you that there's a disconnect in today's wages where high-skill knowledge workers get out-of-proportion amounts of money while low-skill manual labor is basically priced at the minimum amount you need to survive.
I don't believe that UBI will solve that if you keep everything else (that is: markets) the same. And I don't see any compelling argument that some (new or old) alternative system that you or I or some people that are way smarter than us could come up with would work more efficiently than our largely-self-optimizing market system. So I'm not a fan of "well, out with the markets if they are what's holding us back", because the risk of it failing catastrophically are just too high to go "well, maybe it'll work this time".
I'm happy to be wrong, and I'm far from an expert on any of this, but there's too much hand-waving in UBI suggestions for my taste. Some proponents seriously claim that "doing away with be bureaucratic overhead" would be enough to finance UBI, and I'm dumbfounded that they haven't even done any rough guesstimates of the numbers to realize that they are wrong by orders of magnitude.
Controlling inflation will be a massive issue, and I don't haven't heard any convincing answers.
If you find a way to convince the super majority that "more more more for me me me" isn't going to make them happy in the long run, that more cooperation etc will benefit everyone (including themselves), the chances are certainly better, but let's find a way to convince them first and then change the system and not change the system and pray to any and all gods that they will become convinced to avert a catastrophic failure.
That's the part of automation that no one wants to discuss. What happens when we're like 90% automated and there simply isn't enough jobs for everyone.
Who do we force to work and is that ethical?
"Pay more" is meaningless when most of what you want is provided for you. What are you going to use that money for?
For some godawful reason people think near to full automation is going to look exactly like today, but without driving or something.
It's not. It's going to look radically different. It will be unprecedented. It's very naive to believe the current methods of incentives will work for a society that doesn't need them.
So your plan is to make sure some people will die of starvation unless they accept to do these jobs?
If no one is willing to do these critical jobs voluntarily, perhaps we should either pay them large amounts of money to convince someone to do them, or spread the work between more people - perhaps on a rotational basis.
https://ourworldindata.org/parents-losing-their-child
The human condition evolves.
Having said that, while I am supportive of UBI, I share your concerns over its impact on society. We do not understand the all what the knock on effects of such a program are. How it would be used/misused and how it would reshape incentives. We definitely need to dip our toe in the water before considering jumping in.
And I think the hope with UBI is that people in general will find enough reasons that they continue to learn skills, and not just live off society as purposeful freeloaders.
I used to think that there are some types of people that would freeload whenever they possibly could.
Then a young family member proved that they will basically do whatever they can to avoid even finishing school, let alone getting a job and keeping it.
I would like to think that people would learn hobbies and create art and science for the sheer joy of it if they didn't have to put food on the table... But the truth seems to be that there are many people who would just consume the massive amount of entertainment that we now produce and no contribute anything of their own, ever.
I can only speak for the Western tradition, but for most of history, the wealthy took great pride in making sure their male children were at least trained in soldiering, knew the family business, and were well-educated. It was the bare minimum to be considered a gentleman.
Also, how is learning how to fence a good skill to avoid destitution? The rich had leisure time and invested that time in cultural skills, this isn't actually a bad thing either - it's my hope that everyone can afford to develop a hobby and be creative in their life... but that has nothing to do with avoiding destitution.
There are rich who live their children much, but most children of the rich who remain rich have to work to stay rich. Yes there is a big advantage that being born to wealth gives to keeping it - but that advantage isn't any guarantee.
I have in my lifetime seen plenty of starving cats - we took pity on them and took them in. I've seen evidence of mass freezing to death in wild animals after the herd eats all the food.
The skill that they must learn is how not to lose the money.
This skill is difficult to sustain over more than a generation or two — grandparent earns it, parent might keep it, child usually ends up destitute both in terms of financial capital and social capital.
If the “child” in this scenario is lucky, they have some social capital that will save them, and their branch of the family tree is at an inflection point.
Seeing a family self-destruct like this is tough to watch and surprisingly common within that class of people.
Rich people literally just need to not be complete idiots - if you've got 300 million in the bank put it in some low interest stable investment and you'd be able to live off the investment earnings alone. There, I just explained all the life skills you need as a rich person - there is no equivalence between the road the rich and the poor need to walk to survive.
There are existential questions that gnaw at some of these people that hinder them from taking the seemingly simple path that you have presented.
I would also argue that it is not as easy as you would think to park millions in some "low interest stable investment" that also does not have substantial (for generational wealth) counter-party risk.
> there is no equivalence between the road the rich and the poor need to walk to survive
I agree with this, but I think you are being overly dismissive of the skills that someone born into a wealthy family needs to keep that wealth.
It requires a healthy amount of self-awareness among other things.
That doesn't change the fact that being rich is easy mode for life. Yes, it isn't just a stroll in the continuous orgy park of happiness and funtimes, but there are a lot of difficulties in life that arise out of not having enough money, rich people essentially get a pass on all of these problems.
So, while I'm not saying that rich people never struggle with being a human being and all the existential doubt that can accompany that. I am saying that they never struggle to eat. I think everyone has their own struggles through life and really don't want to minimize problems that can arise in dealing with human issues like poor mental health - but seriously, everything is on easy mode for the rich, and if you don't think that's the case then you should really reach out to other communities and see what low income people have to deal with on a daily basis.
I think another perspective on this issue is worth making.
I, for one, am happy to not be sleeping in shifts in order to stand guard against predation.
People should die of diseases, its the natural human condition. Women should die in childbirth, its the natural human condition. Men should die in wars, its the natural human condition. People should be hunted by sabre-tooth tigers, its the natural human condition.
When I lived in a urban poor neighborhood I had one neighbor who drove a asphalt truck while the other was on benefits and drank on the porch all day. As an external observer there was little material difference in their standard of living.
Maybe, instead of getting all social darwinist, we could actually take stock in the fact that we have enough that we can afford to share with those less well off than ourselves.
https://www.amazon.com/-/de/dp/0674979850
Spoiler alert: income from wealth is on its way of becoming close to being as concentrated as it was in the 19th century (especially in the US), and the share of income from work in total national income is decreasing almost anywhere. So yes, increasingly you can only accrue significant wealth by already having significant wealth.
Here you go: "The fading American dream: Trends in absolute income mobility since 1940", Raj Chetty et al. https://science.sciencemag.org/content/356/6336/398
I think that everyone feels like we've totally solved gender discrimination forever while it's still really deeply seated in our culture.
It's beyond me how anyone can claim a group that represents 85% of consumer spending is somehow financially burdened and suffers from inequality. It's almost unfathomable, but here we are.
No one is saying that, it's more of a strawman you want to use to, I'm not sure, maybe accuse people who disagree with you of sexism. Or could you explain why you use those words rather than assume we think it's, let's suppose, just a choice based on differences in average values men and women have?
TL;DR: go away troll.
Then add jobs like teaching, nursing, health care aides, and social work that positively impact the lives of many but in many places pay extremely little. People are called to these jobs for reasons outside of wealth. UBI allows these people to continue to serve the rest of society in a sustainable way.
You can't confiscate social capital or favours someone's parent did to someone as "young adult" then that young adult did it to these parents kid and barter continues.
Because in the current economy, a lot of people have to work unreasonable hours, multiple jobs, and have all people in a family work to make ends meet, at the cost of personal health and well-being, personal time, having children at all or having more children, getting married and buying a house, etc.
Right now I'm stressed because I'm earning less than I spend, my girlfriend is stressed because she doesn't have a job yet and due to personal reasons may find it hard to get, keep, and work enough hours at a job, etc. If she earned a basic income we'd be out of the woods already. If I then also earned one on top of my job we'd be VERY comfortable.
(And keep in mind I would already pay for both of our basic incomes through the income taxes I'm paying at the moment. I'm happily paying taxes because other people paying taxes put me through college and into my current job)