Views from Crestmont Drive

• Another take on the idea of “universal basic income”;
• About conservative supermarket shopping habits;
• San Francisco’s ranking among world cities.

Another take on the idea of “universal basic income,” the counter-intuitive (and anathema to conservatives) notion than the government simply hand out money to its citizens, at least the low-income ones. I’ve seen it called by other terms; ‘social dividend’ was one, I think. Alaska already does this (due to the bounty of the state’s rich oil reserves — every resident of the state gets a check each year). The idea makes sense in two ways. The government already takes in taxes, and then spends it on many things including infrastructure — highways and bridges and whatnot — not to mention huge amounts on “defense” and social programs. At one time some Republicans wanted to take the funds allocated to food stamps, or SNAP or whatever it’s been called, and spend those funds *for* the recipients, by determined precisely which foods they thought the poor *should* be eating, and sending some sort of food box to them periodically, rather than letting the poor decide for themselves how to spend that benefit. Talk about government micromanagement! Similarly, why not take a sliver out of the government’s expenditures and instead of spending it for infrastructure and so on, on behalf of the citizens, just take that sliver and give it to the poor to let them decide how to spend it. Yes, it’s a form of redistribution, but it might go a long way toward mediating the extreme inequality that exists today, with trillionaires making more every year however they can (cf. Republican Party) while increasing number of homeless live on the streets.

The second way it makes sense is that idea of a “dividend.” Harari and many others have noted that advancing technology is putting people out of work. The total wealth that society generates stays the same, or expands, because society is becoming more efficient, automated, and computerized, and so needs fewer people to do the work. So why not spread the benefits to everyone? Conservatives, who think the worst of everyone, will say that hand-outs make people lazy, but the evidence, again and again, shows that this simply is not true.

Now let’s see what this new article says.

Vox, Oshan Jarow, 13 Oct 2023: Basic income is less radical than you think, subtitled “A world with basic income is one of less poverty and higher taxes, not utopia or collapse.”
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