So basically welfare.
Which doesn't work in making poor communities any richer.
Reviews for "Why Basic Income?"
adamanimates responds:
Look up the basic income study in India. Poor communities absolutely got richer, and stayed richer, after the study ended.
Basic income? So you're basically saying then that someone who doesn't work can earn a minimum wage while there are people, including myself who have to work their pants off for it??! Why bother working then! This is fallacy, total absurd rubbish, it will never work but if something were signed it would essentially be a tax on the poor and the idiotic folk who signed it. This to me just sounds like another step towards a welfare nation, nice going.
What we need are more incentives to get people trained and into employment, and more job opportunities created instead of blowing billions of tax payer dollars on lazy folk who don't want to work worth shit. As Rattower said in these comments, the genuinely poor are all too happy to change their situations and a little nudge in the right direction would be all they need, I would suggest a read of the book, "homeless to Harvard" it's a good read on the subject.
As i said, fallacy... Basic income will never work, but the video was somewhat well made, too bad the argument wasn't. 0/5
adamanimates responds:
I think that the evidence offends your ideology, so it gets discarded. The poor do in fact want to work. All of the studies cited saw an increase in entrepreneurship and new small businesses. More people finished school and so were able to train for new jobs effectively.
The design of basic income is what matters. Either everyone gets the same amount, including you, or there is a gradual reduction until you hit something like $60,000 so that there's no work disincentive.
The 'lazy poor' was a myth fed to America in the 60s so that the lower classes would blame each other for their shitty situations, and not the rich. It is propaganda and is extremely effective.
I might give that book that read, but it sounds to me like a rags to riches sort of thing. If this one person can do it, then maybe we all can go to Harvard by pulling on our bootstraps.
I give you 2.5 stars because I appreciate that you at least put some effort into making this, but this is a fundamentally bad idea on so many different levels. You are pushing a narrative in favor of policies that would essentially force the government to subsidize people simply for existing and not actually producing any valuable goods or services, while simultaneously exasperating the problem by reducing the tax base. It's economic cannibalism. The only reason we even have all this infrastructure and quality of life today is thanks to the capitalist system of "earn your keep". You'd be turning the driving force behind hundreds - no, thousands - of years of human progress on its head in the name of collectivism, and this would send society back into a new dark age.
adamanimates responds:
I agree that it goes against what many Americans believe. But it's not an anti-capitalist program. It enhances entrepreneurship and new business start-ups. All of the studies cited have found evidence for this. You need some capital to start things, and it's incredibly risky so many who would try just don't.
Whatever the basic income starts at, it's not going to be much... likely just enough to keep people off the streets. I suspect that both you and I would be motivated to do more than just subsist. The evidence from the studies in the US in the 1970s supports this conclusion as well. Everyone feared people would just stop working, but it didn't happen. The only people that reduced their working hours were new mothers and high school kids.
So if it turns out people keep working, your fears about the tax base shrinking are unjustified.