Entirely true, of course, as elegantly demonstrated by the famous SIME/DIME experiments.
This is very similar to the flat tax argument. Although you also incur overhead by taxing away six grand that you then return to each taxpayer. That overhead could be avoided by merely reducing taxes by six thousand dollars per taxpayer. Most guaranteed income plans (similar to the EITC) have such a feature.
That I am not so sure about - I now make sure I get every tax deduction I can find, and I would be plenty sure to pick up a check for six grand if it were offered. My experience is not that rich people, at least those who stay rich, treat their money that cavalierly.
I was so dazzled by the brilliance of your post that I suffered a mental short circuit and repressed the memory. Now, after several hours of expensive regression therapy and getting in touch with my inner self, I have achieved a break thru and now can accept it.
I actually find it quite remarkable that even with the strong disincentive provided towards working, the total hours worked were reduced only by 13.6%. Or, to spin this more positively, poor people still worked 86.4% as much even when they didn’t have to do so. I think this shows there’s an inherent human desire to work, even when it’s not strictly neccesary for survival.
Some of this effect depends on the age of the subject, and also on how long the experiment went on. The younger the subject, the greater the effect, possibly because older subjects were more socialized into a work ethic. The fear is, therefore, that if we implemented the kind of guaranteed income of the OP, the generations that grew up under that plan would be less likely to work. In much the same way, people who grow up receiving welfare long-term are much more likely than the general public to receive welfare themselves. This is for a lot of reasons, no doubt, but one of them is that they tend to be socialized not to expect to have to work.
And I don’t take a 13% reduction in work effort as casually as you do. Someone has to pay the bills or the taxes, and implementing a program that costs trillions and simultaneously reduces the effort needed to pay those trillions does not strike me as a good idea.
I seriously doubt that any bureaucracy could possibly misspend as much money as your plan would. Your plan would be doing well if 5% of the money being spent actually ends up alleviating any poverty.
And I have every right to begrudge somebody buying a neon sign or lobster if they’re buying it from welfare. That money didn’t just appear; you took it away from somebody else. So that person wasn’t able to buy a neon sign or lobster for themselves. Now I can accept the idea that I can’t buy lobster if my money is being used to help somebody else buy rice and beans. But I don’t want to give up my lobster to pay for somebody else’s lobster.
While everyone gets a check, only the poor and lower middle classes would end up being net recipients. And if we’re adding a flat tax into the mix, the lower middle classes have, taking taxes into consideration, a much more scaled back subsidy.
Are they allowed to buy books? Newspapers? Can they own pets? After all, pet food costs money! Would you begrudge them that too?
Maybe we can do some indoctrination in the public schools about the value of working for a living to counterbalance that alleged effect. And it is only alleged, because that study only went on for 5 years and not 25. And besides that, the incentives were different from my idea.
As soon as you are equally outraged against the 500 dollar hammers that defense contractors are charging us for, and the billions (actually, trillions) we’ve thrown at the banks with no strings attached, then I might start to care, even a tiny bit, about your concern about government waste (when it’s spent on poor people). Maybe then I’d be join you in your desire to squeeze every last drop of labor from poor people possible before throwing them some crumbs.
When that day arrives I’ll be checking the skies to make sure pig droppings don’t land on my head.
The system proposed by OP should come with a personalized apology saying, “We’re sorry you had to get your ass of the couch to walk the 20 feet it took to get this check out of the mailbox.”
The flaw of the entire premise is that somehow these people are unable to work. I don’t understand the thinking that someone should get $18K per year simply because they are poor. A system that is currently in place that extends unemployment benefits for people willing to work and are unable to find a job is where we should place the emphasis.
I’d allow for direct deposit, so even that would be unneccesary.
In our modern era of mechanization, where we can produce so much more goods than our ancestors could ever have dreamed of, we don’t need the implicit fear of starvation and homelessness to motivate us to work, and that nobody should have that threat hanging over their heads. A good deal of suffering is caused by poverty, and if we can eliminate poverty it would be worthwhile. Even if it means we have to subsidize a few lazy folk in order to do it.
88% of people in the U.S are above the poverty line. Why are these 88% of people not striking and demanding that their employers give them less hours, if most people loved idleness so much?
