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Do you think that that's a good idea? Who is going to pay for this?
No.
In this example, it would be the handyworkers who pay some of their gains to offset the devworkers' losses.
I've seen social security mechanisms work for some people, but I often feel like it doesn't really structurally help, not even when there are strict limitations because those just seem to piss people off. "It is my right... bla bla bla".
But it did not help for myself, so I'm biased: a long time ago when I was eligible for it and I got fired, it felt like leeching to me so I just worked hard to not need it and survive a few months without pay while searching for a new job. Later on I opted out of it entirely, and although life for me has been (and still is sometimes) harder than for people that kept their entitlements, it has also been a great motivator.
A safety net can be good, but I think that it needs to be deliberate: I pay a ever-inflating amount of fiat into private insurances like disability and unemployment insurance... but those costs are of my own design. I know what I put into it and why I chose to do so. I'm also aware that the best outcome is that I never need to claim any of these, and that the insurance scheme means someone else that does claim it will get part of my dime. I'm fine with that.
UBI would go directly against the deliberate action and worse, it encourages fraud and therefore mass surveillance in every aspect of our lives as a counter reaction to that fraud. If people get commoditized into some human resource that are owned by the state - after all the state is keeping them alive with that UBI - then we're all slaves.
One of the arguments for UBI is that it's much harder to abuse and is far less prone to fraud because everyone just gets the same check, regardless of any personal details.
Another argument is that the incentives are better, because you get the same check whether you work more or not. With other welfare programs, people lose benefits as they earn more.
How big of a problem is outright murder for other government transfer programs?
I imagine UBI would work however well or poorly the existing systems do.
Didn't DOGE find all those old people that didn't exist?
I'd have to ask people that are in the handing out tax payer money business on the unemployment side to be sure, but the way I understand it most of the current "handout" programs in the US are, like the ones in the EU, conditional to some actions being taken by the receiver, like evidence of actively chasing jobs or re-schooling. If you don't do it then the flow doesn't come your way anymore. You can actively do that for a subset of the population, but probably not for the whole?
So you'll solve it with things like: scan your eyeball for money - which coincidentally happens to be Sam Altman's sc(he/a)me for future UBI. I remember this kid from my childhood that was always beating up other kids to steal their smokes. He'd have a nice collection of eyeballs, I'm sure.
Most of what DOGE "found" remains totally unsubstantiated and quite a bit of it turned out to be them misunderstanding what they were looking at.
I still don't understand why you think this is harder than verifying both identity and that specific conditions have been met. With those systems, you could cheat on either dimension, identity/qualification, whereas UBI has no qualification dimension to cheat on.
UBI makes sense theoretically but my main beef with it is that the society itself cannot commit to not giving more welfare on top of UBI.
and by theoretically i mean it makes sense to a non-existent benevolent utilitarian social planner
I basically agree, in the sense that I'd support converting the entirety of spending on government assistance into a UBI if the other programs couldn't possibly grow back.
And this leads to the argument for UBI, which becomes a side payment to bring everyone above where they had been.