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We are so hung up on the idea that "you can teach a man to fish and that will feed him for a lifetime" in reality if you give a man a boat and fishing gear he will figure out how to fish on his own. The US doesn't have the same credit issues as uganda but we instead have the wellfare trap which could be easily solved by raising the minimum wage to above poverty level, heck raising the minimum wage to $30/hr would solve a lot of our economic problems.

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Some economists look at basic income as a theoretically superior alternative to minimum wage, i.e. with a basic income you would not need a minimum wage at all. I think the idea is that the supply of labor exceeds the demand, which necessitates a minimum wage. The basic income solves this by reducing the supply of labor. This post (and parent thread) talks about it a bit more: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5657604

Raising minimum wage to $30/hr would soon be followed by the price of basic essentials quadrupling. Money is just a medium of exchange, a convenient way of saying 20 minutes of floor sweeping is about equal in value to one gallon of gasoline; raise the pay for the former and the cost of the latter will rise in kind.

That sounds very reasonable but it actually isn't true see this MIT study: http://www.irle.berkeley.edu/workingpapers/157-07.pdf

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