Not the real thing

I am an advocate for Universal Basic Income.  (UBI).  I like to read about it in the media to see what people are saying, and a friend passed along an article about UBI as it relates to Alaska in the US.  The article mostly showed how people misunderstand UBI, and how they fail to see what UBI aims to achieve.

In Alaska people used to get between 1000 and 2000 per year from the state.  This is sort of like UBI, except that the amount is simply too small to be a useful comparison.  It does reduce poverty, which is great, but the point of UBI is to allow people without jobs to be able to securely afford a place to live and food to eat.  2 grand doesn't do that, especially in a place where health care is expensive and privately run.  Even calling this UBI is misleading because of the difference of scale.

UBI aims to make it so people can leave jobs that are miserable, dangerous, or otherwise untenable.  They can stop working to try to start a business, have a kid, or take care of someone in need.  They can contribute to society without having to pull a salary.  2k doesn't allow that at all.  It is like studying the effects of long exposure to combat in a foreign country by quizzing people at a paintball competition.  It is kind of related, and perhaps better than nothing, but the information just isn't useful.

There are a lot of worries about UBI out there.  One of the primary ones is how it will be paid for.  This is a serious concern!  Clearly we can make it happen if we want to, as it is purely a resource allocation problem, not a resource creation problem.  However, we have to have a plan, and that plan is going to involve sacrifices.  Sacrifices like taking massive amounts of wealth from the upper classes, for example.  How exactly we take that wealth isn't obvious, but what UBI fundamentally needs to do is transfer wealth downwards, so there are many ways to do that.

In Alaska an incoming politician wanted to increase their payout to $6700 per person.  He had no plan for paying for this of course, so the idea was to massively slash services in order to make it work.  That is nonsense, because letting the roads fall to ruin and cutting back healthcare and other things even further isn't a sensible way to pay for this sort of thing.  This isn't a problem unique to UBI, of course.  Politicians will always promise massive quantities of money for one thing or another and ignore the costs that will be incurred - that is just how democracy goes.

Seeing this foolishness in print though gives me doubts about actually getting UBI implemented.  If people see articles like this and get the impression that UBI is a grand or two a year and think that it is unwieldy even at that, it seems like it will be extremely difficult to get them on board with ten times that much.

And all this from Vox, which is hardly a right wing news source!  I shudder to think about what they would be saying about UBI on Fox News.

We need UBI for many reasons.  Demographic changes make taking care of elderly relatives more necessary, automation eliminating whole industries in short time frames make jobs shifts more difficult, and improving worker bargaining power are all good reasons for implementing it.  But when I see it in print... the misunderstandings make me tear my hair out.