[avatarlite]

From the article:

>Or consider the unemployed young man who fathers a child. Today, society is unable to make him shoulder responsibility. Under a UBI, a judge could order part of his monthly grant to be extracted for child support before he ever sees it. The lesson wouldn’t be lost on his male friends.

> Or consider teenage girls from poor neighborhoods who have friends turning 21. They watch—and learn—as some of their older friends use their new monthly income to rent their own apartments, buy nice clothes or pay for tuition, while others have to use the money to pay for diapers and baby food, still living with their mothers because they need help with day care.

The author seems to be proposing that child support for 3 children can/should be taken from their fathers' UBI grants. Therefore, the mother would receive a larger grant based on her number of children.

[notahacker]

Assuming the father is a living US citizen whose identity and whereabouts the mother knows, of course.

Either way, that doesn't really affect the argument that a BI payment supposed to be a minimum for one person to live off is unlikely to stretch to paying for the food, living space and private health insurance costs for another three, even if another parent's minimum payment is also being garnished to help.

The author's arguments you've cited essentially amount to the view that children of single parents should be punished for their parents' life decisions. It looks particularly crass in the context of accompanying arguments in favour of spending money on adults who choose to "idle away their time" and including those fortunate enough to be "already living off other people’s money".

[gizmo]

Those quotes are about enforcing responsibility and repercussions for unwise decisions, and how that functions as deterrence. Taking money away from the father is framed as punishment, the mother getting money is just a happy coincedence (remember he excludes children from the UBI and then he sketches a scenario where a dad has to lose a lawsuit before having to pay). He doesn't concede that people in some situations simply need more money to live, because that concession would be fatal. After all, if some people need more money than others then you need to do means testing (oh wait, that's what every country is already doing and the root cause of all the inefficiency he seeks to eliminate), which is the exact opposite of the UBI.

[danbruc]

That is certainly correct in many cases but I don't think you can get around gizmo's argument in the general case. The father could not simply leave the mother but for example die in an accident. A one size fits all solution seems really problematic considering the huge differences between personal circumstances.