The immediate effects of the UBI are twofold.
The first is that involuntary poverty will be ended. By involuntary poverty I
mean people who are trying real hard, doing the best they can but cannot make
enough money to live a decent existence. That kind of poverty goes away with the
passage of a universal basic income. A second thing that the UBI does is it
utterly changes the incentives facing people.
It completely changes the incentives that a woman faces in deciding whether
to have a baby,
for example. Other things such as retirement for the elderly become much
simpler with the universal basic income.
Guess what? Social Security doesn't cover everybody. We have lots of elderly in
poverty. That doesn't happen under a universal basic income. In that in many
other ways, we are looking at a system in which problems that have been unsolvable
by the welfare state are solved pretty much as soon as the bill is passed.