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Comment by nradov | Hacker News Reader

Perhaps that might happen in hundreds of years but in our lifetimes there won't be robots that can do trail maintenance in rugged terrain, or babysit small children, or paint an original mural on a public wall. So I'll never support wasting tax money on UBI. Bring on a public jobs program, like those we had during the Great Depression.

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Why won't we have those things in our lifetimes? None of those seem like insurmountable problems even given today's technology.

A public jobs/infrastructure program would work something like this: various states would lobby for money to spend in their states, $billions in large contracts would be awarded to politically connected corporations that would bill at $100/hr keep a large percentage and subcontract the work at $40/hr to smaller businesses that in turn would keep a percentage and hire people to do the work for $15/hr. That is trickle down economics.

If instead you distributed the $billions to every citizen in the country, the vast majority of the money would be spent in local economies on things like day care, car or home repair, taking your kids in for dental cleaning. That is a trickle up economy.

I too reasoned that UBI was liberal social nonsense. But I've been following Andrew Yang's presidential campaign and his justifications make sense from a capitalist point of view. As Yang points out - this is capitalism that doesn't start at zero. It has benefits. Check out his long interviews on Youtube. The Joe Rogan interview is a good place to start https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cTsEzmFamZ8. If you don't have the time check out his talk with the AARP https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NXQ3DEFI1eg or the AFL-CIO https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nlt3nyZdnmI

> the vast majority of the money would be spent in local economies

Or on amazon which is pretty much a front for sending money to China.

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