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Failure is actually the stimuli and it pushes people to succeed more than anything.

A favorite saying of comparatively wealthy (or potentially wealthy) people, where "failure" means something on the order of "not being able to retire very comfortably by 40" or "not being able to make a high salary and do what I love for a living." Rather than "getting evicted", "never having decent health insurance", "being stuck in an $18 an hour job for the rest of my life because I felt too discouraged / stressed out / too scared of being in debt for the rest of my life to finish my college degree".

You know, heavy, real, life-choice-limiting and existence-threatening failure like that.

Seriously, the basic income proposal is a very complex topic, with many tradeoffs involved. You can't just deflate even a partial aspect of it (its effect on innovation, for example) with a cute little pinprick like that.




Okay, I'll bite.

In response to your failure comment: I meant being evicted or not having food on the table if you don't succeed. Not being able to retire by 40 is a very strange idea of 'failure'.

Who thinks this way?

Most businesses in the US are started with loans or personal money and failure means you can't pay the rent.

It will inflate our currency. The middle class will get a pay decrease and money will not go as far because the cost of many things will increase. Wages in many different industries will be increased because it will be difficult to find anyone to work for less than what they are receiving from the government. This sounds great, but it just means an increase in overall costs for many goods and services and the minimum to survive will now be more expensive.

It won't work in the long-run. Everyone seems to think we will have exactly what we have now, but with free money. Free money means we will have more and more people staying out of the workforce and we will eventually run out of people to tax.

Welfare destroyed the lives of many people in my extended family. Most people aren't that ambitious and UBI, which is basically just welfare with no strings attached, will only create generations of people dependent on the government.


If your chief concern is about rising prices, I suggest reading this one next to really get into the weeds on that one: https://medium.com/basic-income/wouldnt-unconditional-basic-...

As for comparisons with welfare, it's the strings that are the problem with welfare. Think about it. If you are receiving $12,000 in welfare and get a job earning $20,000 you are likely to have a new total of around $20,000. That's because welfare gets pulled away with paid work.

With a $12,000 UBI however, getting a job earning $20,000 would leave you with a new total of $32,000. See the difference? With UBI there is more incentive to work because it's not pulled away with work. UBI doesn't punish you for working. Welfare does.

Do you understand?




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