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It's simply laughable to use a $900 Alaskan dividend or dollar a day stipends for the extreme poor in the developing world as "empirical evidence" of what would happen if a developed country offered >$10k per annum with the stated social purpose of discouraging people from taking jobs they don't want.

Sure, demand-pull inflation fears are slightly overblown since any remotely feasible plan relies on taxing the hell out of the middle classes responsible for much of the discretionary spending in the economy, and the poor generally get enough to eat through other subsidies anyway. But basic income will have a whole host of negative effects, many of them region or size specific, and those will undoubtedly include things like huge relative price rises in certain types of labour, sharp rises in property prices in working class districts of expensive cities and "baby farming" if the child grant is the same as or a sufficiently large portion of the adult grant. This is true of most welfare programmes, but BI happens to be the most expensive and least flexible of all possible options.




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