Spain is moving to permanently establish universal basic income

1) out of everyone I know, working- to middle-class, only three people 'own' a house. One of them inherited it from their father, and the other recently bought one with a mortgage and has an unusually stable job. Of the rest of us/them, I'd say a good 70% live in a flatshare (regardless of whether they're in their twenties of thirties), 20% live in a small apartment with their partner, and the remaining 10% or so have some kind of studio apartment because they make decent money or because their student organization provided them with cheap housing.

2) with the exception of those who have jobs where a pension is built up automatically, none have bothered. Which is probably about 80% of them (100+ people). And in conversation the general assumption is that any kind of pension will probably not exist by the time we need them, so why bother (not saying I agree, btw).

That said, I'd say my social network skews toward working class and educated-but-not-STEM. And urban, which favors the precariat.

However I currently live in Amsterdam, where the 47 m2 apartment I inhabit costs around 350k euros to buy, which is quite a bit for a matchbox in a 120 yr old house.

On top of that, I suspect that in NL the age of retirement for me will be around 72, which is ridiculously late; plus, whatever pension I get will almost certainly not be enough for me to have a decent life on. The state pension here is minuscule and the private ones are a racket, like everywhere else.

My point is that you can't really rely on a pension and you should act as if you won't get one (even though that's what's owed to you).

As a self-employed programmer with a decent breadth of experience and as an autodidact with low needs, I consider myself very lucky too, but I worry for a lot of my friends.

Fortunately, other states already have tried this, and shown that it causes immense economic harm. Specifically, we have the examples of Venezuela (53,798,500% inflation since 2016), Zimbabwe (peaked at 79,600,000,000% per month), and Weimar Germany (merely 29,500% per month at its peak).

So you should be asking, what if we manage to print all this money and something truly terrible, horrible, and damaging to the lives of everyone in the country happens? And what if it's something easily predicted by almost any economist and with massive historical precedents? And what if it sets the stage for genocidal dictators and the most violent war in history, as it did in the case of Weimar Germany?

As for not benefiting the upper 50% I think you might be arguing against some position that doesnt exist. UBI would not benefit everyone directly. In fact if your on the upper end of the spectrum it would dramatically hurt you.

I would simply guess that it is the ideology of redistribution that you oppose, which is fine. But the math of this kind of redistribution works out. (The economics of it is a much more interesting question)