UBI could allow the elimination of minimum wage entirely, along with a ton of other scattered welfare programs that have lots of administrative overhead and the typical middleman industries that leech off of government programs.
It’s a no-brainer!
It’s a no-brainer!
Don't make UBI subject to garnishment/attachment to pay debt and exclude it from income considered available when determining bankruptcy terms. Lending behavior under those conditions will prevent the use of credit you are concerned with, and bankruptcy itself will resolve problematic cases to the extent that lending behavior does not prevent it.
Most minimum wage earners are not in poverty because they are taking too many vacations and buying too many luxury items: they are in poverty because rents are consuming 40-60% of their income, costs of essentials to live and commute to work are rapidly rising, and a single medical debt can wipe out all of their savings in an instant.
Avocado toast is not destroying the middle class - corporate greed is.
People aren't poor because they are lazy and stupid, as ultra-capitalist pundits would like you to believe to prevent you feeling empathy. America is systemically broken in a way that it is no longer 'the land of opportunity': poverty today is a trap that hardly anyone can escape by simply working hard and spending wisely.
And of course, economists don't find it has the negative effects it used to theoretically have, because throughout the 90s they switched from just making things up to actually doing real-world empirical studies. (That is, it doesn't seem to have them up to "60% of local median income" IIRC.)
I prefer sector-specific minimum wages though. Somewhere in the neighborhood of Denmark or Australia.
what are these "extremely unproductive jobs" you speak of? Is the job of a burger flipper really so bad that we should eliminate it from the economy? Is it so bad, that if someone's skills only allows him to do that job, that it's better for him to stay at home and twiddle his thumbs than to show up to work?
I was thinking of things like servants, typists, textile workers.
I don't think they were eliminated because of minimum wage. They were eliminated because of a combination of outsourcing/globalization, which set an upper bound on how much those jobs can pay (at least in the US), and baumol's cost disease, which set a lower bound on what workers were willing to accept. The two forces combined to make those professions unviable. Getting rid of the minimum wage probably won't bring those jobs back. If anything the jobs will go to more productive sectors (thanks to baumol's cost disease), rather than to the utterly unproductive ones like you mentioned.
Of course everyone gets UBI…
…except the polluters …and CO2 emitters …and meat eaters …and porn watchers …and weed smokers …and tobacco smokers …and alcohol drinkers …and maybe it’s distributed on a curve, depending on race
It could be corrupted so easily. And it’s a single point of failure.
Unfortunately, non-cash welfare has tons of the manipulation you describe. You can get kicked out of public housing for using drugs and food stamps have all kinds of arbitrary limitations on them based on what the state legislature thinks you should be eating.
Uh, no, it's not.
The byzantine structure is because of (and in part to disguise the way that) every component of the system is agenda driven, and often by an agenda rather divergent from the overt purpose of the programs.
UBI is the epitome of a cocktail party idea: https://danluu.com/cocktail-ideas/
...aside from how it's funded.
>along with a ton of other scattered welfare programs that have lots of administrative overhead and the typical middleman industries that leech off of government programs.
That sounds great in theory, if everyone is the type of person that can take care of himself for $15k (or whatever) a year. But what about people with special needs? eg. people with mental health problems or medical conditions requiring expensive therapy? Unless you think we should let those people fend for themselves, you'll still need welfare programs to help those people, which mean all the "administrative overhead and the typical middleman industries that leech off of government programs" that you're so against.
Speaking from experience, such people already have to fend for themselves...so nothing really changes.