Well, the idea of a basic income is that the government provides some sort of standard
payment to pretty much everybody, every month, and it's enough to live on.
What's the broader social and cultural effect of having this kind of program in place?
What's the effect of raising people in a society where they know that, as they reach adulthood,
they won't actually need to start working to make ends meet if they don't want to?
While a lot of the basic income debate focuses on very technical questions of how you design
it and who would get it, underneath it is a much more fundamental debate about what
the role of government is in society.
There are a few different arguments for having a basic income.
One is that it's just a better way to do the safety net that we have now.
It's a very clunky system, doesn't always meet peoples' needs.
And so, one thought is that if we took all of that money and all those programs and threw
them away and just had a basic income instead, it might be a better way to meet peoples'
needs, and certainly a more efficient way.
The other big argument in favor of a basic income is that you don't have to phase it
out the way our welfare programs phase out.
One of the biggest problems with the way that welfare tends to work is that as you start
to earn your own money, your eligibility for benefits declines.
If you use a basic income that's universal instead, then you say, you're gonna get this
money if you don't work, and you're gonna get this money if you do work.
One of the huge challenges for a basic income is its cost.
If you imagine actually sending $1,000 a month to everybody in the country, you get to a
program that's three or even four trillion dollars in size.
That's just not what we spend on our safety net today, which is maybe $1 trillion, but
that's everything our government spends today.
And so, when you're talking about still needing the government to do what it does plus adding
a basic income on top of it, you start to get in to- to the idea of nearly doubling
the size of the government or-or needing to double all the taxes that we collect to pay
for it.
If you truly wanted to fund a basic income out of spending we do today, you'd have to
use not just our safety net, but all of Medicare and all of Social Security as well.
We already provide to each elderly citizen more support in Medicare and Social Security
than we would offer through a basic income.
So, if we actually want to replace all of those programs with a basic income, among
other things, it would be mean dramatically slashing the support we provide to the elderly,
dramatically slashing the support we provide to the disabled.
The best argument in favor of a basic income is that the United States truly has become
wealthy enough as a country that we could, in theory, send everybody enough money to
meet their basic needs.
And for people who see that as an attractive vision, that people don't need to worry about
supporting themselves anymore, that's something to be celebrated and something to be pursued.
If you had this support that you could count on whether or not you worked, you might choose
to spend more time on your education, you might take a risk to start a business, you
might stay home to raise your kids, and all of those things you'd still be able to do
because you were still earning the basic income.
The best argument against a basic income is that it represents a really fundamental redefinition
of peoples' obligations in society and the role of government.
What we define as the obligation of the individual, what he or she is expected to do, what he
fulfills when he performs work and contributes productively to a community, those kinds of
things are foundational to how we organize our society, how we raise children, uh, and
how we define success in life.
A basic income shifts so much of that to the idea that actually providing for basic needs
is no longer the individual's responsibility.
It's now the government's responsibility.