These ideas of "helping everyone and feeling good" fail to understand human behavior. Basic income would reek havoc on the real estate market as people (of the trashy uncivilized variety) would try to move into nice neighborhoods with their new funds that they didn't work for and earn and "fuck up the neighborhood" basically.(This already occurs with section 8 housing) Another consequence is that rent and housing would rise substantially.
The price of a home isn't just determined by the value of the home itself but by the highest price the local market can afford to pay. People who are not in real estate don't understand this.
The flawed assumption to this plan is that all or most poor people are poor because they just haven't been given enough chances or nice things. This emotional ideology usually belongs to young collage students who have never worked with the public and seen the real asshole-ery and primitive baboon-ism of humanity and believe everyone is a nice person. Or adults who grew up in their parent's nice neighborhood miles away from reality. I know you're going to think I'm the biggest most evil asshole in the world but after working with the public (everyone in my family does) NOT a cool startup in a collage town I have to tell you the truth: Quite a few poor people (not all of course) are poor for a reason. Sitting down and talking with them will usually give away these reasons immediately. They don't bring value, they can't hold jobs because they have poor impulse control, they're short term decision makers, they don't want to educate or better themselves, they're hyper-sexual, were born with a lower IQ, they can't commit to jobs they do have, they smoke pot like crazy. Basically they don't have nice things for a reason. And every time you try to give them nice things they ruin them and don't appreciate them.
I used to be one of those "help everyone and make the world happy and good feelings and gosh I just wish we could all hold hands". I have completely left that ideology as it's a fantasy. A lie. These smart intellectual folks with ideas on how to help the poor completely forget to include the above mentioned human problems. All they see is numbers and an equation and they want to balance it all out on the table. But it never works like that in real life.
I know during this recession a lot of people who deserve nice things have had them taken away, but any attempts to correct this through government, welfare, and basic income is just going to go in the wrong hands.
There are devastating repercussions for paying people to do nothing or giving people something they haven't earned. Let's stop chasing pipe-dreams because they "sound nice".