How did you check? Most research I've seen shows that welfare reduces poverty but does not drag down gdp.
Anti-welfare people tend to ignore the positive benefits of entrepreneurs being able to take more risks when they know that a bankruptcy won't be catastrophic and that they could still send their children to school and get treatment when they're sick.
One's a life of poverty and misery, the other is education, opportunity, social connections, etc. People can get the former already on welfare programs. Why don't we divert that 3 trillion we'd spend on BI and spend half of it in targeted ways that actually increase opportunity?
...all of this makes it weird that the biggest proponents of UBI are ultra wealthy.
Or, in terms software engineers should understand: why a complete rewrite when there's lots of low hanging bugs that we all know about?
How do you know? How many poor people have you asked?
(P.S. Don't assume that everyone who reads HN is wealthy.)
A sibling comment pointed out the diffrence of money, but there's also a gap in the quality and quantity of opportunities to succeed.
If you're looking at non-US, or non-technology entrepreneurs, I think you'll find that this conception of an entrepreneur doesn't fit. (E.g., see this article on global entrepreneurial activity https://grasshopper.com/blog/where-do-most-entrepreneurs-com...).
Even if you're talking about non-US, tech entrepreneurs, I also think this definition falls apart. The many, many new super-wealthy tech entrepreneurs coming out of China and India grew up in a time when neither country was particularly rich.
People engage in entrepreneurship for numerous reasons, but I think it's foolish to discount the sheer number of people who do so out of financial necessity, i.e. the need to earn enough money to put food on the table and support your family.
Coming from a wealthy enough background that you can fall back on your parents if you fail is a form of welfare as it allows you to take risks without it being a disaster that leaves you homeless.
Welfare serves a similar function.
Its a safety net that allows you to take risks w/o ending up starving/homeless/etc.
That assumes that the entrepreneur would have no job skills and no get-up-and-go, and so would be unable to get another job, which seems unlikely.