Basic income is not radical

In UBI discussions there is always this idea, which they even state in the article, that it "a means of unleashing the population’s creative potential". But I always have to look at this idea as not rooted in reality. Maybe some people would have their creativity unleashed, but a far larger amount would just burn all day on tiktok or on drugs given enough free money to meet their needs.

This is before the effects of a hugely disastrous increase in taxes on the middle class (who is the one's that are realistically most harmed by high taxes) and rampant zimbabwe style inflation take hold.

If you want to raise the lowest, you need ownership in something, not just giving things away for free. When people are given free rent, they trash the place since they don't care about. Free money they will just burn it on whatever. But people that own homes, people that own business, people with assets care about them and will raise up the community. If you're going to give a trillion dollars away, instead of giving it as free money to be eaten up by landlords and entertainment companies. It would be better to spend a trillion dollars building homes or condos and giving people them or giving bonds or shares in businesses so people have wealth.

But UBI will never work, imo itll lead to the Earth in The Expanse, where people "on basic" are just in abject poverty with low desire for work, and a ruined economy where jobs are extremely scarce.

This seems like a scheme to get people to cluster around the mean and not actually make a meaningful impact to get people to move to higher income brackets. There is one core thing that is curiously lacking in this that providing everyone with some sort of a universal Payday on a regular basis will have zero impact on inflation. That is hilariously untrue. If you give people a thousand more dollars to spend most people are going to spend a thousand more dollars. Where do those new goods and services come from? They cannot just appear out of nowhere because if there was demand for those services people would have been working and providing those services and getting paid for those services thus not needing the universal payday. So materializing money out of thin air with underpinning of having to earn it will result in it being spent on goods and services that people are unwilling to produce therefore inflation will go up.

All you've done is raise the floor and squashed the middle class but you've made zero impact to the ultra rich 1%. Your graph makes it seem like we're taking money from the rich and giving it to the poor and it's going to improve their lives. What's going to happen though is the same thing that's happening right now without universal basic income. The poor will continue to spend all of their money because it's what they have to do and that money is going to funnel up into the rich. So by giving the poor more money to meet their needs their needs will grow to consume that new money which will then get funneled right back up the chain to the rich. I can totally see why the wealthy have no problem with this kind of scheme. They're basically doing the same thing Walmart does when Walmart promotes more and more subsidies for the poor. Walmart knows that has more subsidies are granted that a significant portion of those subsidies get spent at Walmart very nice loop for them.

But the real hit is to the middle class and it will greatly curtail the middle class and force it to be the lower class financially. Because middle class people have disposable income beyond their needs to spend in a completely disposable ways or to save. Now you're trying to push the lower class into a financial bracket of the lower middle class but that's not going to happen due to the inflation increase. Instead the middle class is going to shrink greatly and have less disposable income.

Universal basic income is the greatest con job of the rich that we've seen in decades. They pushed through the Great society and the great welfare benefits and realized all this does is line the pocket of the Rich and does nothing to change the status of the poor. If anything it incentivizes people to remain at that level because there's a hill to climb out of. Universal basic income does the same thing it's squashes the middle class and it makes a lower middle class person have a giant Hill to climb to get to upper middle class. And the side effects of all of this are massive there is less incentive to travel from place to place or to move from place to place so you have people locked into communities. This means less cultural exchange less exchange of ideas.

One of the great things about the United States in the past was the ability of people to be mobile. To not be tied to some ancient piece of land but to move where the jobs and opportunities are as needed. There are no deep Roots we can move where is needed and we can travel as needed. All of this has wide-ranging effects to undermine it. And it's all a false way of saying we need to help the poor.

There is no help for the poor here it is simply continuing to lock them in to a cycle of remaining at the socioeconomic status they are today. We have ample evidence that social programs promote generational socioeconomic lock-in. If there is a desire to meaningfully help the poor then we would adopt cultural attitudes around alcohol abuse and drug abuse that are horribly detrimental to the poorest among our society. We would also have cultural attitudes about childbearing and sexual proclivity which causes childbearing. Again these are problems among the poorest of us and they are social problems that can be solved with cultural attitude shifts. Then this leads into better education and better money management the understanding that you should work for what you get and it is not instant gratification. That long-term outcomes are affected by short-term thinking. Universal basic income does zero to address these things as they are cultural. All it is is a funnel to make the poor think they're getting a great benefit while stealing their potential future away from them and locking them into a lifetime at a fixed socioeconomic status.