Universal Basic Income isn't about free money – it's about a freer life
medium.com
medium.com
How did COVID relief checks 'send more money to the capital class'? Are you saying that putting money in the hands of ordinary citizens is ineffective because they spend it on stuff sold by the capital class? Perhaps I'm misunderstanding, but that sounds idiotic.
Will they be better paid?
> We won't know all this until such an experiment is done at an economy-wide level.
This is why we need to continue experimenting at larger scales. Next time, we can try with a small city and see what happens.
"To determine whether the measured effects were actually due to receiving the basic income and not, for example, to broader societal developments, the Basic Income Pilot Project was designed as a randomised controlled trial. This ensured that the participants in the control group were so-called 'statistical twins' of the basic income group. This meant that they were very similar in their sociodemographic characteristics and differed mainly in whether or not they had received a basic income.
Both groups were essential to the success of the study. Only by comparing their experiences could scientific conclusions be drawn.
To prevent bias, care was also taken to ensure that both groups included equal numbers of ideological supporters and opponents of basic income.
The study focused on people between the ages of 21 and 40 living alone in a household with a net income of between €1,100 and €2,600 per month. We explain why these characteristics were chosen in our journal."
Arguably, those people won't be productive members of the society either way. With UBI, they could even be less likely to shoplift, mug/rob people, or otherwise cause harm.
To summarize: Universal basic income can be seen as a kind of negative poll tax (a poll tax being a fixed tax per person). Werner argued that the current tax system is unsustainable because it places a disproportionate burden on labor. He suggested that instead of taxing income, we should tax consumption—essentially, by significantly increasing sales tax and eliminating income tax. Of course, this would make life unaffordable for low earners, so a negative poll tax (i.e., a basic income) would be necessary to make higher sales taxes socially acceptable.
In practice, a large portion of the universal basic income would end up returning to the state through sales tax anyway.
Even back in 2010, I sensed that Mr. Werner was promoting a system that would benefit his own financial interests. As an employer with high labor costs, he would gain from lower taxes and fees associated with employment in Germany. And, as a wealthy individual, only a small part of his wealth would be subject to sales tax, since he wouldn’t need to spend most of it on taxable purchases.
When pressed about numbers (how high the sales tax, how high the negative poll tax) he just wouldn't discuss numbers saying society would have to figure it out and potentially one might start out with some amount and then progressively increase the negative poll tax, increase the sales tax and decrease other taxes. It really felt like someone not having done any actual simulations / calculations.
oh and one thing he really emphasized is, that UBI could allow for people to go from like a 40h work week to a 30h work week being employed and use their fridays for example to become entrepreneurs/artists/etc. That really felt like as close to prosperity gospel as one can get in germany.
And here we are talking of giving even more free money to people that don’t work.
Who is going to pay for that? Am I going to have to work even more or are you going to let me keep even less of my money?
It probably won’t but one can hope.
You will have to work more and more, your coworkers will be fired one by one, supposedly replaced by AI, you will take over their work too, then at some point will will be fired too, won't be able to find a job, and when the unemployment benefits end, you will wish to have UBI.
About giving money to people that don't work: get the official statistics and calculate as % of your country's budget. You'll probably want to look elsewhere for the money required for UBI. Maybe at the (corrupt) government's contracts and subsidies. No, there are no statistics on those, i'm sure.
I live in a country where we need unchecked immigration because “nationals don’t want to do the jobs they do” (never mind less than a 3rd of those immigrants are actually working). So, kind of hard to fit reality with your predictions when there’s clearly work to do (hard work for sure), but lot of people already prefer to live off the welfare state than to bother doing it.
How many?
So, get this correctly. More than 11.5% of the population between 25 and 65 are already not working and living off the welfare state.
That's how many. Great, isn't it. May be because all the robots are already doing our work, I guess...
So yeah, every worker, is not supporting himself and somebody else. And even when you discount children and older people, more than 11.5% of them don't want to work already.
This is completely unsustainable and has nothing to do with AI replacing us.
P.S. Never mind that Portugal (and from what I understand, most Europeans countries) don't have a proper Retirement fund, and present workers are basically paying the retirement of retirees. This is because they contributed too little compared to what they receive now, and the state never invested their money - but used it to pay people that came before them and never made discounts for retirement.
49.50% of the Population in Portugal doesn't work and needs to be supported by those who work.
And there are 6 millions capable of working between the ages of 20-65. Of those, only 5 millions work.
So, you need to calculate the budget spent on those half of the population that doesn't work - in some cases because they are too young or too old, and then ask: why is close to a million of those that can actually work, living off the state anyway, instead of working for them, and for the other person they should be supporting.
Maybe they built their own AI robot I guess, and now they don't need to do anything... Surely a case for UBI.
Jobs migrated from agriculture > industry > service. Automating Services will demand a new layer for occupation that doesn't exist.
If anything, and even in percentage of the world population, it created a lot more jobs in the industry sector itself - the main one the doom sayers at the time predicted it would replace.
Not very many people are going to be happy living on $1500/month. Most people will keep working.
https://msutoday.msu.edu/news/2025/msu-study-finds-number-of... (“We found that the percentage of nonparents who don’t want any children rose from 14% in 2002 to 29% in 2023,” said Jennifer Watling Neal, professor in MSU’s psychology department and co-author of the study. “During the same period, the percent of nonparents who plan to have children in the future fell from 79% to 59%.”)
https://www.axios.com/2024/07/25/adults-no-children-why-pew-... ("64% of young women say they just don't want children, compared to 50% of men.")
A record-high share of 40-year-olds in the U.S. have never been married - https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/06/28/a-record-...
The childfree are ungovernable - https://beneaththepavement.substack.com/p/the-childfree-are-...
(us specific, ymmv)
Then it's a simple exercise: how much can you increase taxes to pay for UBI? You can't increase taxes above 100%, so UBI has to be less than the average per-person income, and we still need to fund defence and other essentials, so it has to be significantly less.
[1] https://infosec.exchange/@codinghorror/114606355212363074
This by definition can apply to only 16% of people who are at least one deviation above the mean.
What about the other 84%?