Anon:
TIL, secondhand, that some people won’t accept the earned income tax credit (a US federal tax credit for people with low/moderate income, especially ones with kids. As income increases the credit amount increases, then flattens, then decreases) because they think it’s “welfare” or “political control of their lives”, or that it’s somehow wrong to accept help from anyone other than family or church. What can you even do. :|
Anyway, I guess the lesson here is it’s only okay to receive government assistance if it’s very heavily disguised as being something else, preferably through an unrelated third party (such as a corporation that’s being “incentivized” to build factories near you or whatever). Sort of like money laundering, in concept.
yes, one of the downsides of basic income that I think about a lot is that it’s going to piss some people off to think of themselves as dependent on others unless they can reframe how they spend their life as providing some vital function that everyone else benefits from.
Isn’t that rather easily solved by making it something you apply for, and automatically granting it to those who apply?
My feeling here, as all such similar questions that devolve to “would you tell this to a 55 year old Walmart stocker that (we wont give her free money to live on because her job gives life value)(her job has no value)?” is to ask the people involved. We should like, poll some working class people and ask them which system they’d prefer.
If it’s significantly split, well you’re fucked no matter which policy you go with. But you know, you asked, rather than played some thought experiment about What The Middle America In My Head Wants.”
(Not faulting anyone in this thread for this, just, the dynamic shows up in way too many discussions about UBI)
Unfortunately, I think your proposed (reasonable, common-sense) approach fails on basic predictable human-psychology grounds. In this case, anyway, and cases like it.
Like…I’m pretty sure we know what most people’s first-best choice here is. “I want a job that rewards me both with a substantial wage and a substantial status boost, in which I provide a needed good or service to the world, demonstrating that I am a worthy worthwhile person deserving of pride and also that I am better than all those lazy unskilled slobs who might have some use for welfare.” We could run a poll to see whether that’s actually the outcome that people would prefer, if you believe it valuable, but I’m really quite confident in it. It is the ideal promulgated by pretty much every facet of American culture, and if it’s not your first-best choice, it means that you’re some kind of weirdo who’s broken away from your cultural training.
But of course that doesn’t get you very far, because that option is Definitely Not Available for many many many people. The real choice is often between, say, Welfare or Subsidized Makework Job or Poverty. (Or something like that.) That’s the polling data you actually want.
Except that…
A. It is really hard to get people to believe that their first-best choice (to which they feel entitled) is unavailable and that they have to consider second-best options. If it is at all possible for them, they will find a way to delude themselves into believing that one of the proffered options will lead to the thing they actually want.
B. It is really really hard to get people to believe this when “your first-best choice is unavailable” continues into “…because you have no presently-desirable skills and the free market has no use for you as anything more than a warm body.”
C. It’s especially really really hard to get people to believe this when you have malicious actors actively lying to them about it. And make no mistake, that is a thing that is happening, and will continue to happen. Someone is going to be pushing the line that the Republicans are pushing right now: “as soon as we gut the welfare state and free the market, all those Real Jobs that gave you Real Dignity will come roaring back!”
I am strongly of the belief that there are many people for whom decent welfare would be much better than any job they could ever get (or at least “extremely desirable as a supplement to wages”), but who will never ever admit this even to themselves, because they are strongly invested in not being the sort of losers who would need to think that way.
In short: poll all you want, but good luck getting people to face up squarely to the question long enough to give you a genuine answer.