So I have this radical leftist idea that nobody should die just because they can’t get a job.
I know, it’s really out there, wild stuff that could just never be accepted in the mainstream,
but hear me out.
What if we just guaranteed everyone a base standard of living?
Food, water, shelter -- that sort of thing.
That way, people wouldn’t have to be homeless and wouldn’t have to starve.
Because whatever we’re doing right now, it’s not working.
So many people are homeless or face food insecurity.
It’s time to try something new.
And maybe our best way of ensuring that everybody has a base level standard of living is just
to give them a monthly income, no strings attached.
This is called the Universal Basic Income, or UBI, and it’s been gaining traction for
a while now.
Small trials have been put into place in various cities, and more and more people are seeing
it as a viable way to ensure that everyone has a base standard of living.
The basic idea behind UBI is simple: every person deserves to survive, and in our current
system, that means they need money for food and shelter and basic necessities.
It’s a simplified version of the welfare system where every month, the government just
writes a check to every resident -- regardless of their income or job status or anything
like that.
What this does is it guarantees everyone has their basic needs met.
Everyone can survive.
As it stands in our current system, if you don’t have money for rent, you get evicted
and become homeless.
If you don’t have money for food, you starve.
And obviously, we have some measures in place to counteract this.
The US runs a bunch of various welfare programs, private organizations and nonprofits often
work to help homeless people in various cities, and we have things like food banks to help
people who face food insecurity.
And while all these programs can help some people, they can’t help everyone, and that
means that many people still live in poverty, still can’t find a stable place to live,
or still can’t reliably put food on the table.
And that’s a problem, because as a society, we should want everyone to be doing okay.
We should want everyone, at the very least, to be able to survive.
If you don’t want that, ehhhh I think you have bigger issues to work through than I
can really address in this video.
But, assuming you want everyone to be doing okay, UBI could be one really good method
for doing that.
Because for one, our current systems have too many strings attached.
To be accepted into one of the US government's many welfare programs, you need to go through
a lot of bureaucracy and meet a lot of specific requirements.
And the government will be watching you closely to make sure you don’t ever slip up, because
if you do, they’re taking those benefits right back.
This is bad because not everyone can meet those requirements, and sometimes people are
going to make mistakes or do things that would disqualify them from those programs.
That shouldn’t mean their entire livelihood is revoked.
If you give everyone a basic income, it can’t be revoked for any reason.
If you exist in the country, you get a basic income.
No matter the mistakes you made.
No matter how bad you are at dealing with bureaucracy.
You get a basic income so you can survive.
No matter what.
Now one of the things that people often worry about when it comes to UBI is the incentive
to work.
A lot of people have this idea that work is something people only do because it allows
them to survive, and they believe that if you take away that incentive, people will
stop working.
I just don’t think that’s true.
Working isn’t always just about earning money to survive.
Many people work because it’s something to do, because it gives them a sense of accomplishment,
because of the status it brings them, because it allows them to socialize with coworkers,
because it’s a creative outlet, or it’s just something they enjoy.
There are a lot of reasons that people work beyond money, and I think there’s no way
that if you gave everyone a basic income that they would all just stop working.
Would you?
I wouldn’t.
I mean, you can see an example of this in the world today that lots of rich people who
have enough money to sit on for the rest of their lives, they continue working.
And clearly, at that point it isn’t about the money.
Some folks who have retired still continue to work in some form.
Sure, some people might stop working, but that’s not the end of the world.
They would definitely be a small minority of people, and we always have a small percentage
of folks who aren’t working, that’s what the unemployment rate is.
But actually this brings me to a related point which is that: not everyone needs to work.
I might do a whole video on this eventually, but I’ll give you the short version.
We seem to have this idea that an ideal society is one where 100% of the population is working,
but, there’s no need for that.
For society to function, we don’t need 100% of the population to be working.
This isn’t the olden days where everyone had to raise their own crops.
Today, wealth is concentrated in the hands of a relatively small percentage of the population.
So all we have to do is redistribute that wealth to everyone else, and we have enough
to get by.
You don’t need to make people do pointless jobs just because you think everyone needs
a job -- because the truth is, they don’t.
And if they want a job, which I’m betting a lot of people will, they can find something
that they enjoy doing, like something creative, or something that helps other people -- instead
of some repetitive boring task created just for the sake of there being an official “job”
for the person.
And the need for us to recognize that jobs aren’t essential is growing fast, because
of automation.
Robots are taking over a lot of the more dangerous and tedious jobs, and that’s really good
for keeping people safe and freeing up people’s time, but that also means that if nothing
changes, those newly-unemployed folks are gonna be in a lot of trouble.
That’s where UBI comes in.
Automation is already taking people’s jobs, but instead of fighting that and keeping people
in boring repetitive jobs -- a solution that wouldn’t work for very long -- we could
instead embrace automation and give everyone a basic income.
We could get people out of those dangerous meaningless jobs and free up their time to
do other stuff.
Right now, lots of people have a hard time being creative or entrepreneurial because
they’re just fighting to make rent month by month.
With that burden lifted off of them, imagine all of the new amazing art and literature
and other projects that people could come up with.
They could create beautiful amazing things, or they could start organizations that help
people, or any other number of things.
The potential is out there -- a lot of people just don’t have the time or energy to do
it when they’re trying to survive.
And, in some cases, there will be dangerous or gross jobs that can’t be done by robots,
and in those cases, a UBI would give workers the ability to demand safer worker conditions
and higher pay.
Because right now, a lot of jobs have unsafe working conditions and low pay simply because
employers know that people will take these jobs because they need them to survive.
But if people no longer need your job to survive, you’ve gotta sweeten the deal.
So people would still take those jobs, but they’d be much safer and better paid.
Because under this system, people would still have jobs and be paid.
So if money is a huge motivator for you, you can still work to earn above the amount you
get from UBI.
So maybe you’re wondering, how do we pay for all of this?
Giving everyone a livable income every month sounds expensive, and it is.
But it’s definitely possible.
And the main solution is to tax the rich.
They have so much money they hardly know what to do with it, and income inequality has been
rising for years.
So that would be the main funding source.
But also, if a UBI were to be put into place, it would make a lot of welfare programs redundant.
There might still need to be some much smaller programs for certain things, but the vast
majority of money going to current welfare systems could be redirected into the UBI.
That means that we’re not just making money appear out of nowhere, we’re just taking
it from the rich and from the programs that we’re replacing with the basic income.
This is something we could afford.
And, it would actually be good for the economy because people who had been too poor to really
buy much would suddenly have disposable income, and that means they’d be spending more.
More spending and more demand would result in a better-functioning economy.
So yeah, that’s the idea behind UBI.
Give everyone money.
Allow everyone to survive.
Raise the standard of living for everyone.
And improve the economy.
It might be awhile before we can get there, but I have to believe that we can do it.
Anyway, that’s all I had for you today.
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Thanks for watching, and I’ll see you next time.