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Comment by sdenton4 | Hacker News Reader

It's not about fairness at all: it's about poverty traps, and getting people out of them. With the learned understanding that if you give things to the poor, you also have to give them to the rich, because the rich are unable to look at any pie they can't have a slice of without wanting to destroy it.

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I always saw the "also giving it to the rich" as much more about avoiding the bureaucratic overhead, social stigma and other associated downsides of trying to ensure that only the poor get it.

And the rich are so few that you wouldn't save much by exlucding them.

That's the thing. Not very expensive to also give money to the rich, and also there are extenuating circumstances. I know multiple people who had no jobs and no savings yet didn't qualify for covid checks from the US because they had high paying jobs in 2018.

If you just pay everyone, wealth still disproportionately moves towards the poor.

This, and also the removal of welfare.

Since you lose welfare when you get a job often there is an opportunity cost decision, should I really work 40 hours a week to make a little more than welfare.

with UBI the salary is always additional.

Aye to take it a step further: there is a professor at UCSD who pushes for UBI Libertarianism, for that reason. Don't add conditions or requirements, just mail everyone a check and ditch all of the bureaucracy, EBT, etc.

The problem is that it makes poverty traps smaller, but doesn't make them go away. Like, if Johnny Hobo isn't able to feed his kids and blows his welfare on smokes and 40s, UBI isn't going to magically make him a better father or better at spending his money, he's just going to buy better booze.

That's a separate problem, his kids should be taken away if he's endangering them.

> you also have to give them to the rich because that's what "Universal" means.

Any UBI system that is funded through a free market economy will necessarily have the rich paying far more in taxes than they receive in basic income in return.

The important thing is to not have arbitrary levels of "rich", when the basic income disappears. That means, to avoid situations like "if I make an extra $1 now, I am no longer eligible for the welfare, and I will lose $100".

I would extend that last bit to every group in America, not just the rich

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