I have been advocating for a basic income ever since I heard about it a year or two ago. Seeing this video makes me happy that there are more people out there that understand that we, as a country, can afford to support people in need without putting stress on the middle class. Thank you for making this video, and doubly thank you for responding so thoughtfully to every comment that is attacking you for "supporting the lazy" or being "communist". Only by letting people know that it isn't just wishful thinking and has actually been studied in-depth can we increase support for a better life for everyone.
Here's a link for anyone that wants to know about some research:
http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2014/12/23/mincome-in-dauphin-manitoba_n_6335682.html
Reviews for "Why Basic Income?"
Thanks very much! I think that the ideas about the lazy poor are gradually falling away, now that we have much more access to information. The new basic income study taking place in three cities in Ontario will help bring evidence to even more people. I think that it's better than the one from Dauphin... It's still a Negative Income Tax with a high clawback rate, but even that helps a lot, and it could work as a political stepping stone to a better UBI in the future if we push for it.
Welfare is giving money to the less educated and the most lazy, and taking it away from the people who actually work. We have generations of people being raised without parents and a lot of foodstamps.
And another thing, poverty does not cause crime, crime causes poverty.
Your view is common, yet contradicts evidence.
"Using data from the Edinburgh Study of Youth Transitions and Crime, the Edinburgh university researchers found that poverty is a strong driver of violent offending amongst young people. However, systems of youth and adult justice, far from tackling violence and lifting young people out of poverty, serve instead to entrench poverty, thereby reproducing the very conditions in which violence can flourish."
https://www.criminallawandjustice.co.uk/features/Link-Between-Poverty-and-Crime
Look, we have this sort of thing in Israel, the result is that unemployed people can have more children cause each child is another paycheck. Many (the majority) of those children are similar to their parents and are not as excited or competitive about maintaining a job. This is how our society nurtures them to be and it is in the nature of their parents.
People like myself who are working hard, are paying for these children and exhausting their savings and recreational money, staying at home after work and mostly sleeping cause tomorrow is another day and we have to work hard to support the freeloaders. We are basically forced to work for free to help strangers by paying taxes. I know this may sound strange to you but knowing that a large portion of my income will be drained by taxes does not entice me to work harder which means there is less for everyone.
People who are poor don't deserve to be poor, just like people who are short don't deserve to be be short and people who are painfully ugly don't deserve that either. People like myself who are bad at sports, deserve to be bad at sports? no. People who are bad at satisfying the needs of others, get less value back from these strangers who owe them little. Sure they don't "deserve" to be born less gifted in the practicality domain but it happened. You are not breaking people's legs because they are highly gifted at sports or pouring acid on their face cause they are pretty, so why would you want to forcibly take money from people who are gifted at working and doing what people need and want?
It wouldn't be bad if poor unemployed people wouldn't procreate but they do at a higher rate than hard working "rich" ones which means their lives are not as terrible as you claim. In fact, the level of life afforded by a poor person today is far better than that of the same person 100 years ago.
To be honest, I am all for what you say, a basic income for artist and people who follow a more non-conformistic life. Just as long as they don't have children and not because I want to decide for them, it is just unfair to ask me to support other kids when because of my job, I hardly have time to see my own child.
I think it's a shitty situation that you barely have time to see your family. I also don't think that you should have to pay so much in tax to support the poor. There is more than enough money at the top of the income scale to pay for everything I'm talking about. The rich don't need to work at all because all their money comes from capital gains. They tend to own the media and so thoughts like "the poor are lazy" and "taxes are bad" get pushed into the culture. They even call themselves "job creators."
Really they're just working you to death for their own benefit and trying to get you to blame the poor for not working as hard as you.
And where is all that money going to come from? Taxing the people who have jobs, right? That would basically be making charity mandatory and shifting the stress from those who don't work to those who do. Resources are limited, and for one person to have more, someone else must have less. A LOT less, if you're talking about feeding/clothing/supporting every homeless. You can't just pull money from the air and give it to the poor. The problem, at heart, is that there are far too many people. Resources are scarce as it is, and the need for employed individuals is getting smaller. A campaign to educate people on the problems of overpopulation and to GREATLY reduce the rate of procreation is the only thing that will provide any kind of relief to the species.
(While the politics of this video is beyond sophomoric, I'm under the assumption that we're meant to rate based on the quality of the animation and video itself, which is why I'm giving 4 stars. It was very well done and professionally executed, even if it did lack a lot of spice and character.)
You don't have to tax working people to finance this. Just tax capital. Taxes on the rich are now half of what they were in the 40s. We have income inequality at the same levels as just before the Great Depression.
Homeless people cost cities a lot of money. A few cities have started just giving them homes, and it saves taxpayers money because all of the associated costs with homelessness go away.
Studies also show that when people have money and security, people tend to get educated and birth rates drop.
It is rare to see such a high quality animation for a social-political topic. Images, keyframes, audio, comparisons and script are outstanding! It really keeps my attention and I don't feel information overloaded.
Maybe it could still be improved by adding a comparison for the hard-sceptics, who are not open to the mentioned facts. A thing like the combustion-engine could do, where people could not imagine a motor that works with explosions inside could do anything good.
Thanks a lot. I've been trying all sorts of things to reach the hard skeptics. I think the most effective way is to find out who they respect that supports the idea.
No one seems to know how close the US came to passing this sort of legislation. There used to be 90% support and everyone thought it was inevitable. So I'm thinking of making a new video about Nixon's basic income plan, and how that would have totally changed American society.