There's this thing that keeps surfacing in the year of the Democratic Socialist, a pie-in-the-sky idea that government should protect the people from the long-term repercussions of their choices. That thing is called the Universal Basic Income, and it's such a bad idea that I hardly know where to begin. For starters, the name is a falsehood, because it's not universal.
Some things in this country are universal. Like freedom of speech. Everyone has it. The rich, the poor, the educated or uneducated, even the Christian or the heathen. Likewise the right to remain silent. It is a universal right. This Universal Basic Income is not universal because everyone will not get it. Only the poor. Or, more likely, some of the poor.
It's certainly not basic. It won't be enough to live on. If we go to one of the basic tenets of social scholarship, we find Maslow's hierarchy of needs/ It says basically, that we all need the same things. Shelter, food, safety, for starters. (Yeah, yeah, all you psych majors, I"m over-simplifying.) So, if we all have the same basic needs, and it's universal, then the gov should supply everyone, the rich, the poor, the... you get the idea.
It's not even basic. It's certainly not enough to buy shelter and food. If it were basic and universal, every citizen of the jurisdiction would get enough money to buy basic rent and groceries. So, if it is neither basic nor universal, all we're left with is Income, From all I'm able to read, it is income for the poorest of the poor, as defined by some government functionary, which means that there is yet another opportunity for graft. And graft is something that Democrats are past-masters at
The Universal Basic Income is a lie. And Chicago is toying with the idea. Which should tell everyone with two working synapses that it is a bad idea.
2 comments:
Stockton CA is trying this now - they call it "universal" but they are only providing it to 2,000 of their 300,000 citizens. They are also only providing $500/month, which isn't much income in Southern California.
Refrigerator boxes are free for the taking. Rice, grits and beans are so cheap they might as well be free. A few hours of work or scrounging is enough to meet those minimum needs. The crunch happens when they don't want what I consider minimum needs, it happens when they define their minimum needs as what their parents had to work 25 years to achieve.
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