[jasonkester]

I'm pretty sure I'm on record here on HN complaining about receiving covid relief checks that I don't need, and that I would much rather that money went to people who were actually struggling.

Personally, I want people on the high end of earnings (such as myself) to be taxed more so that a basic income scheme like this can be available for anybody who wants it. Charge me an extra $300/month and give it to some random 24 year old so that he can smoke weed and play his guitar. He'll get more use out of it than I will.

One day, that kid will decide that living in a crap shared apartment is getting a bit old and he'll grow some ambition, get a real job, and eventually start earning enough to help sponsor the next round of deadbeats.

[TheSpiceIsLife]

> One day, that kid will decide that living in a crap shared apartment is getting a bit old and he'll grow some ambition, get a real job, and eventually start earning enough to help sponsor the next round of deadbeats.

Wow! You’re optimistic!

The data shows that having at least one patent on welfare is a strong predictor that a child will grow up to spend their life on welfare. Having both parents on welfare almost guarantees it.

Having single young men on welfare is one of the worst things a society can do for young men. They’d be much better off spending four years in compulsory service and learning to be useful.

[jasonkester]

The idea is to give people enough of a safety net that they don't starve to death. But really, it's kinda crap to live in a shared apartment with a bunch of broke college students, living off giant bags of potatoes. Most of us have done that, and now that we can afford not to, we don't.

I'm sure there will be plenty of people with low enough ambition that they'll just stay there, subsisting. But I don't doubt they'd be doing that in their mom's basement without basic income, so I imagine that society will survive just fine.

[TheSpiceIsLife]

> But I don't doubt they'd be doing that in their mom's basement without

I’m 110% on board with that. It’s exactly one of the functions of family: communism is a perfectly function system of governance up to the level of the family.

> basic income

I’m 120% not on board with that. Men need to work, especially young men. WPPP - Work / Protect / Provide / Procreate. There is nothing worse for a society than idle young men with time and money in their hands.

I’m voting for Compulsory Service before I’m voting for Basic.

You work to earn your keep.

[inglor_cz]

"anybody who wants it"

The extent of "anybody" is the detail that contains the devil.

Anybody who? Citizen? Asylum seeker? A person who obtained asylum or other forms of protection? A 'tolerated' person who was not deported? (Duldung in Germany.)

Europe is already politically ablaze, and one of the factors of this blaze is "too many foreigners from the Third World as recipients of welfare". If you introduce any basic income scheme that doesn't totally exclude non-citizens, you can expect the people smuggling gangs of Libya and Turkey to advertise it tomorrow as a next pull factor for their business.

[joe_mamba]

Illegal mass unskilled migration to EU, only for them to leech off welfare and be an overall net negative to society and the state's coffers, is intentional by calculated design.

Here's how it works: You take 1000 Euros in taxes from a productive German/West-EU citizen, and then redistribute that to 5 migrants giving them 200 Euro each, so you lose one angry voter but you gain 5 happy new ones.

The government is using your tax money to buy and replace your votes, this way the mainstream politicians cemented in the status quo parties, can keep making your life miserable with no accountability or repercussions for them and their careers, because your votes now become irrelevant.

And for good measure, in case the citizens vote for the so called "extremist" parties that promise to counter this obvious scam, you just slander them as nazis/$-FOBES/Putin-supporters with no proof, and form a 'cordon sanitaire' around them to take away their democratic representation, or just ban those parties altogether from elections so you can rule undisputed while masquerading as democracy.

[CalRobert]

“ One day, that kid will decide that living in a crap shared apartment is getting a bit old and he'll grow some ambition, get a real job, and eventually start earning enough to help sponsor the next round of deadbeats.”

In Ireland their best chance of having their own place is emigration or waiting for their parents to die.

[xienze]

> Personally, I want people on the high end of earnings (such as myself) to be taxed more so that a basic income scheme like this can be available for anybody who wants it. Charge me an extra $300/month and give it to some random 24 year old so that he can smoke weed and play his guitar. He'll get more use out of it than I will.

You know you CAN donate money to the government any time you want, right? Do you do that? Practice what you preach, don't hide behind "oh if only the government made me do it."

> One day, that kid will decide that living in a crap shared apartment is getting a bit old and he'll grow some ambition, get a real job, and eventually start earning enough to help sponsor the next round of deadbeats.

This is the critical problem you and others like you make: assuming that everyone is a reasonable, honest, ambitious person just like you are. Many people -- not all, but a big enough proportion to be a problem -- aren't. And when we make it possible to actually make "do drugs and play videogames all day" a viable lifestyle, there's loads of people who will take the government up on the offer. And remember, they can vote themselves UBI raises.

[jmye]

> You know you CAN donate money to the government any time you want, right? Do you do that? Practice what you preach, don't hide behind "oh if only the government made me do it."

You know we can also advocate for higher taxes, given that it's astronomically more meaningful for everyone to give ten cents than for me to give a few dollars, right? Or did you think this was an insightful, valuable addition to the discussion that no one has ever suggested before? Is this the comment section of a local newspaper? Good god.

> there's loads of people who will take the government up on the offer.

Prove it. How many are loads? What, specifically, do you think UBI actually amounts to?

[xienze]

> You know we can also advocate for higher taxes, given that it's astronomically more meaningful for everyone to give ten cents than for me to give a few dollars, right?

And you can ALSO voluntarily pay more in taxes while doing so. It's called leading by example. Warren Buffet and Bill Gates get called out on this and they do the same thing; "oh I'm just one person, my extra tax money is but a drop in the ocean, so why bother." If you and everyone else saying "tax me harder" actually put up, it might amount to something! And at least it would make people respect your position a bit more.

> Prove it. How many are loads?

Well let's see, anyone who's lived their entire life on welfare (we have families of multiple generations who have done so at this point) would qualify. So would all the homeless people more content to live on the street and do drugs than go to rehab.

> What, specifically, do you think UBI actually amounts to?

Enough for people with low ambition to live on! And their vote counts just as much as the productive members of society paying for them.

[jmye]

> And you can ALSO voluntarily pay more in taxes while doing so.

You're just repeating the same fundamentally silly thing I argued against like saying it louder will make it somehow less childish and silly. Did you have an actual point here, or do you think "people's respect" has any slight value in the context of the discussion?

> Well let's see, anyone who's lived their entire life on welfare (we have families of multiple generations who have done so at this point) would qualify. So would all the homeless people more content to live on the street and do drugs than go to rehab.

So you have no actual clue, but you think hand-wavy bullshit that feels good will suffice for numbers. Fantastic. I'm glad you have such strong opinions on things you clearly know absolutely nothing about.

> Enough for people with low ambition to live on! And their vote counts just as much as the productive members of society paying for them.

Is "low ambition" angry-posting on social media? Do you think vibe-coding React bullshit, or whatever, is "productive"? Do you think engineers at Meta, busily finding new ways to make teen girls depressed are "productive"? Or is this just more stuff you have convinced yourself is true because it makes you somehow "better" than other people?