Solely with respect to this person's comment, what we call such an arrangement matters a lot less than the high quality of the life he/she describes.
There are a lot of menial part time jobs you can get if you want to live as he describes. It's not fun.
- I have health insurance. It's pretty far from free, and it's mandatory. I wrote a very detailed guide about how German health insurance works [1]. It's not comparable to the US system, and I want to write a separate guide to explain this more accurately.
- My take-home is slightly above what a full time minimum wage worker would make. My expenses are around 1400€ a month. It could be brought down to 1000€, but I insist on certain luxuries and planned my exit accordingly.
1. https://allaboutberlin.com/guides/german-health-insurance I'm happy to answer more questions.
€1,500 ($1,700) per month gross for full-time workers, Germany has one of the highest minimum wages in the European Union.
So it seems you made about $20k. Obviously, this isn't much money, so props to you for that. It is about double what UBI could offer (at least in the US) in a country with one of the greatest social safety nets in the world.
Don't mean to castigate you nor be overly personal, but do feel like it is important to put into context.
Is anyone saying this is appropriate for the US right now?
In my opinion, the US has a long way to go before even beginning to consider such practices. The UBI is something EU nations can experiment with, not the US.
Those structural issues aren’t present in most European countries due to the expanded social safety nets. The US needs to implement a lot of infrastructure between the government and the citizenry to facilitate and distribute a program like UBI effectively.
I’m an American who wants a ubi, but we’re not ready structurally to handle it in the current political climate of any foreseeable political future in the next decade, IMO.
US's Overton Window is extremely far away from this kind of social policies. If the US can't agree on the fundamental importance of a socialized healthcare service then more daring experimental social policies such as a livable basic income is too far out to even contemplate.
But it would be awesome if they did, though. Perhaps if they slapped a "Milton Friedman approves this" sticker on it.
How much are you willing to tell us about the income source?
I’m finding it difficult to think of anything that generates a small but consistent revenue stream with no babysitting, that is also completely unresponsive to low-effort attempts at scaling it.
Usually if there’s no babysitting, that means low-effort scale. Or if it is hands-free but still can’t scale, it’s because you’ve found the boundaries of the market opportunity (but when is that ever just 1k?)
I guess my question is what niche product/service did you find that the entire world only wants $1000/mo of??
My niche is "make knowledge of Germany approachable to non-Germans".
This website works because moving to Germany implies paying for certain things, like health insurance. It also works well because most of the existing information is only available in German. This content also ages rather well, unlike programming tutorial or cellphone reviews for example. I don't need to constantly create new content.
I can't think of any other topic I understand this well that provides this much value to the readers. I know a thing or two about long distance motorcycle travel, but nothing I couldn't summarise into a few articles, and nothing that could generate affiliate income. I had some other ideas, but none of them withstood scrutiny.
Instead, I'd rather grow the website to cover more complex topics that I'm currently dealing with, such finance and retirement planning in Germany. It feels good to help people answer the same questions I had.
How do the website generate money though? I haven't seen any ads or paid content.
> I know a thing or two about long distance motorcycle travel, but [...] nothing that could generate affiliate income.
It's also not the usual argument you hear from UBI proponents (we can reduce costs because we only need UBI).
I don't say this to be a dick, but political change has to happen within political realities.
The article in question is about Finland, where healthcare is already universal, largely free, and much liked by the populace.
UBI wants to change nothing abut the socio-economic structure that drives millions into extreme poverty. It just wants to slightly reduce the rising flood of people that are just run so far down into the ground by the system that they are abandoning society altogether and threaten collapsing it.
Make sure all your people have decent healthcare, housing and food. It is obvious that in some (rich) countries these basic levels of social security are failing hard.
UBI just wants the current rent-seeking financialization machine to keep churning even when its forced in the extreme to trow the bottom of the pyramid some breadcrumbs to prevent them from bailing out.
Anyone here a fan?
Criticizing the post about a specific vision of UBI strikes me as overly combative (and putting words in OP's mouth).
Nor is an additional $3 trillion/year expenditure feasible forever. That's what's so disturbing about discussions around UBI: there seem to be people who, genuinely and unironically, believe that the reason some of us are concerned about the concept is because we don't realize how happy not having to work would make people. They appear to believe that, once they've demonstrated that yes, it will really make people happy, they'll have won the fight for UBI.
For anyone else that has a hard time knowing how much taxes the US has to play with, I checked the US military budget and it's around $721.5 billion for 2020.
Let's try to make our lives better.
Remembering that governments with fiat currencies don’t tax for income, they tax for constraining money supply.
If you get $1,000/month right now, things would go smoother, and you still have to pay tax on your new higher wage.
UBI is not a "never work only consume" solution.
There is plenty of land and resources for everyone in America. But the oligarchs are super greedy, and force a fake scarcity, in order to have a supply-and-demand problem.
They just printed $4 Trillion USD, so it’s apparently quite easy to print money out of thin air. And then they gave it to their other rich buddies that don’t need the money. It was a pure and disgusting money grab, at the expense of everyone else.
I don't know about you, but living off $1k a month where I live (and it's a relatively cheap area) isn't feasible. Either you get roommates or you are going to end up in the cheapest most out of the way apartment you can find for $500 a month. If you are eating off $10 a day (which is reasonable, and isn't accounting for the odd pint), you're down to $200 for your monthly budget. You still have to pay for utilities and this isn't taking into account any modern necessities (phones, etc), nor certainly not a car, which you probably need because your cheap apartment isn't close to anything.
You, even with this extreme skimping, basically have no room for anything to go wrong. Hopefully your shoes that you're walking everywhere in don't wear out. Doesn't sound peaceful to me, it sounds like something that would put me always on edge (I've lived making 3x that and it does put you on edge). You felt comfortable because you were lucky enough to have a website that you could make income on by babysitting it. Is that really anything like UBI?
If we're going to discuss UBI, then we need to discuss UBI, not any form of passive income or welfare program, which by their definition are not UBI. Seeing stuff like this get upvoted only leads me to believe that a lot of UBI proponents aren't taking serious how many obstacles there are to overcome actually implementing it, nor what it will look like in practice.