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Comment by deepserket | Hacker News Reader

if they automatize too fast then people will call for UBI... that's my guess

I think UBI is further off than you think. Look at how Andrew Yang was treated during the presidential election. Boomers and their rotten ways of thinking need to die off from positions of power first.

Main arguments I saw (from the left, at least) against Yang's UBI proposals were how he planned to gut social programs to pay for it. I think there will definitely be more discussions about UBI in the US political sphere in the coming years.

UBI is often viewed on the right as a cost neutral way of spreading social Security spending around so that Bill Gates, the unemployed and the permanently disabled all get the same $290 check in the mail every month.

The upside being lower spending on things like testing eligibility, the downside being that either the cost balloons to about $4-6 trillion a year or you basically just accept that some people are not gonna be able to survive.

> just accept that some people are not gonna be able to survive.

Their arguments against unemployment benefits are instructive. I don't think a livable UBI is a possibility in the current US political climate, doubly so since it cannot be sustained by income taxes on a shrunken labor base, necessitating more taxes on robot companies.

>I don't think a livable UBI is a possibility in the current US political climate

I can't help but wonder sometimes if that isn't the point for some people.

A raised minimum wage has the potential to become expensive. Pipe dreams, meanwhile, are free.

Many social programs in theory could afford to be gutted if we just stopped checking for, certifying, and auditing eligibility and started paying people directly with fewer questions. To what extent and how the transition would work out remains to be seen.

Yang was treated terribly because he's an outsider and not part of the establishment. See also Bernie, Trump, Tulsi. The GOP, DNC and corporate media were all against them during the primaries.

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