Who is going to pay for that? The broke US government? If 1/3 of the US pop was given $25k/year, it would amount to 1/4 of our GDP.
Until we have ubiquitous power sources, food replicators, cheap teleportation, solved all health problems and sturdy insta-houses, its just a pipe-dream.
The social implications would be even worse. You would have about 10% of society supporting about 50% of society, which would easily create the biggest class divide the US has ever seen. The bottom would ask for more, the top would own the government (because government that size would be corrupt to the core, theres no way it wouldnt).
It would ultimately lead back to a feudalistic society.
Milton Friedman (of all people!) had a pretty worked-out proposal for it, though he was going more for a poverty-line basic income. Basically, everyone (rich and poor) would get a refundable tax credit roughly equal to the poverty line (something like $11k), rather than having a specific cutoff or phase-out. It would implicitly phase out for richer people because a flat $11k credit just doesn't equal too much if you're making a lot of money.
At the time, at least, he argued that it could almost entirely be paid for just by rolling all our current welfare programs into it: instead of this patchwork of welfare, food stamps, section 8 housing assistance, etc., just have one refundable tax credit, thereby massively reducing both the bureaucracy and the market distortions while still providing a social safety net.
Not that I necessarily agree with the views of the parent post (I don't know them well enough), but I think you're looking at "now" to argue the impossibility of "then". In other words, I don't think our current society really reflects much of what society will have to become in the fairly near-term future.
We already have effectively unlimited energy in the form of the sun (we currently collect only a tiny, tiny fraction of its full output), I don't see how teleportation factors into it, food production seems likely to become almost entirely robot-driven within, say, a 50 year time-frame (by competitive influence), we're progressing by leaps and bounds in the area of human health, and population management will obviously be necessary to balance quality-of-life and resource concerns.
Androsynth|13 years ago
Until we have ubiquitous power sources, food replicators, cheap teleportation, solved all health problems and sturdy insta-houses, its just a pipe-dream.
The social implications would be even worse. You would have about 10% of society supporting about 50% of society, which would easily create the biggest class divide the US has ever seen. The bottom would ask for more, the top would own the government (because government that size would be corrupt to the core, theres no way it wouldnt).
It would ultimately lead back to a feudalistic society.
_delirium|13 years ago
At the time, at least, he argued that it could almost entirely be paid for just by rolling all our current welfare programs into it: instead of this patchwork of welfare, food stamps, section 8 housing assistance, etc., just have one refundable tax credit, thereby massively reducing both the bureaucracy and the market distortions while still providing a social safety net.
georgieporgie|13 years ago
We already have effectively unlimited energy in the form of the sun (we currently collect only a tiny, tiny fraction of its full output), I don't see how teleportation factors into it, food production seems likely to become almost entirely robot-driven within, say, a 50 year time-frame (by competitive influence), we're progressing by leaps and bounds in the area of human health, and population management will obviously be necessary to balance quality-of-life and resource concerns.