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Universal Basic Income isn't about free money – it's about a freer life
12 rbanffy 27 6/9/2025, 7:23:20 PM medium.com ↗
How did COVID relief checks 'send more money to the capital class'? Are you saying that putting money in the hands of ordinary citizens is ineffective because they spend it on stuff sold by the capital class? Perhaps I'm misunderstanding, but that sounds idiotic.
"To determine whether the measured effects were actually due to receiving the basic income and not, for example, to broader societal developments, the Basic Income Pilot Project was designed as a randomised controlled trial. This ensured that the participants in the control group were so-called 'statistical twins' of the basic income group. This meant that they were very similar in their sociodemographic characteristics and differed mainly in whether or not they had received a basic income.
Both groups were essential to the success of the study. Only by comparing their experiences could scientific conclusions be drawn.
To prevent bias, care was also taken to ensure that both groups included equal numbers of ideological supporters and opponents of basic income.
The study focused on people between the ages of 21 and 40 living alone in a household with a net income of between €1,100 and €2,600 per month. We explain why these characteristics were chosen in our journal."
Arguably, those people won't be productive members of the society either way. With UBI, they could even be less likely to shoplift, mug/rob people, or otherwise cause harm.
To summarize: Universal basic income can be seen as a kind of negative poll tax (a poll tax being a fixed tax per person). Werner argued that the current tax system is unsustainable because it places a disproportionate burden on labor. He suggested that instead of taxing income, we should tax consumption—essentially, by significantly increasing sales tax and eliminating income tax. Of course, this would make life unaffordable for low earners, so a negative poll tax (i.e., a basic income) would be necessary to make higher sales taxes socially acceptable.
In practice, a large portion of the universal basic income would end up returning to the state through sales tax anyway.
Even back in 2010, I sensed that Mr. Werner was promoting a system that would benefit his own financial interests. As an employer with high labor costs, he would gain from lower taxes and fees associated with employment in Germany. And, as a wealthy individual, only a small part of his wealth would be subject to sales tax, since he wouldn’t need to spend most of it on taxable purchases.
When pressed about numbers (how high the sales tax, how high the negative poll tax) he just wouldn't discuss numbers saying society would have to figure it out and potentially one might start out with some amount and then progressively increase the negative poll tax, increase the sales tax and decrease other taxes. It really felt like someone not having done any actual simulations / calculations.
oh and one thing he really emphasized is, that UBI could allow for people to go from like a 40h work week to a 30h work week being employed and use their fridays for example to become entrepreneurs/artists/etc. That really felt like as close to prosperity gospel as one can get in germany.
Not very many people are going to be happy living on $1500/month. Most people will keep working.
https://msutoday.msu.edu/news/2025/msu-study-finds-number-of... (“We found that the percentage of nonparents who don’t want any children rose from 14% in 2002 to 29% in 2023,” said Jennifer Watling Neal, professor in MSU’s psychology department and co-author of the study. “During the same period, the percent of nonparents who plan to have children in the future fell from 79% to 59%.”)
https://www.axios.com/2024/07/25/adults-no-children-why-pew-... ("64% of young women say they just don't want children, compared to 50% of men.")
A record-high share of 40-year-olds in the U.S. have never been married - https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/06/28/a-record-...
The childfree are ungovernable - https://beneaththepavement.substack.com/p/the-childfree-are-...
(us specific, ymmv)
And here we are talking of giving even more free money to people that don’t work.
Who is going to pay for that? Am I going to have to work even more or are you going to let me keep even less of my money?
You will have to work more and more, your coworkers will be fired one by one, supposedly replaced by AI, you will take over their work too, then at some point will will be fired too, won't be able to find a job, and when the unemployment benefits end, you will wish to have UBI.
About giving money to people that don't work: get the official statistics and calculate as % of your country's budget. You'll probably want to look elsewhere for the money required for UBI. Maybe at the (corrupt) government's contracts and subsidies. No, there are no statistics on those, i'm sure.
It probably won’t but one can hope.
Once the money dries up, Work camps will be created to ensure production.
Communists don't love the poor, they hate the rich.
[1] https://infosec.exchange/@codinghorror/114606355212363074
This by definition can apply to only 16% of people who are at least one deviation above the mean.
What about the other 84%?