Basic Income: Why and How Should We Build a Basic Income for Every Citizen?

[Newest Reality]

Basic Income: Why and How Should We Build a Basic Income for Every Citizen?

http://www.marshallbrain.com/basic-income.htm


Basic Income: Why and How Should We Build a Basic Income for Every Citizen?
by Marshall Brain
September 15, 2014

Here's the first question: How many jobs does this society need?

The great thing about this highly simplified society is that the answer is obvious: This society needs one million jobs for the one million citizens. Every single working adult needs a job. Otherwise they are unable to live their lives. Without a job , there is no way to afford the normal expenses associated with living a life.

In this society, what happens to someone who does not have a job? If he or she happens to have any savings in the bank, then living off of savings is the only alternative until the savings are exhausted. And then the person becomes homeless. Any jobless person will soon be living on the street, eating out of dumpsters, desperate for a job. If there is no food in the dumpsters, then any unemployed person dies of starvation. If the person contracts a deadly disease or gets seriously injured, the person dies from lack of access to health care. That is the nature of this society.

A corollary to the previous question: What happens if only 900,000 jobs are available in this society? Then there will be 100,000 people in this society who are either homeless, or who are burning through their savings on a path to homelessness.

I wanted to post this because the subject does get mentioned from time to time. Since there are people who are thinking about the details of how to go about moving towards a guaranteed basic income, this might be a good time to bring the idea out for discussion and consideration.

There are many factors involved and some very important issues we fact in regards to this idea. The higher efficiency and increased productivity of modern business, combined with a new onslaught of technological advances in robotics should serve to underscore a need to contemplate and bring forward a way for our population to obtain basic needs without calling it "welfare" and demonizing people who are not able to find work in a system that no longer needs them at all. There are so many people who "hope" to find a decent paying job and that is simply ridiculous and unsustainable, despite the right-wing corporate lackey political and media propaganda to the contrary.

Of course, Marshall Brain is not the only one who has giving this some thought and taken the time to think it through while providing some clear and basic ideas for the format and execution of the idea. Bring attention to viable alternatives may be essential to the well-being of our society at large and the alternative is what I call a potential, slow-motion, passive form of genocide as large numbers of people are washed out into the dark and rolling sea of abject poverty without even a life raft.

[quadrature]

1. first thing...stop the attack on the middle class

stop the TPP (and its 'fast track')

[1StrongBlackMan]

3. If the principles in this article were applied ...

TPP wouldn't matter.

[1StrongBlackMan]

2. Posted to for later ...

This is a interesting thought experiment.

[Newest Reality]

4. Great!

That's exactly the frame of reference I wanted people to entertain it from. It might stretch our thinking a bit, especially as entrenched as we are in the current system and a rapidly aging paradigm that is approaching an obvious obsolescence and a threshold that demands some new, potential solutions.