It probably qualifies as self-harm, but I set my alarm clock to NPR instead of a buzzer every morning. This probably ends up with me waking up even more angry and agitated than with a buzzer, but whatever.
Marketplace, PRI's economy news segment, runs for the last 8 minutes of the hour. One of their useless 2 minute interviews drifted towards discussion of a UBI, and then the guest said this:
The problem with a UBI is that it gives money to rich people as well as poor people. If you give everyone $1200, the poor will spend it while the rich will put it in their bank accounts, increasing inequality in the long run.
I'm somewhat UBI-skeptical, but this seemed self-evidently stupid to me. But the more I think about it the more I realize that that's not true. It's an ever-expanding spiral of stupid. It's illuminatingly stupid. Every prior that went into it is stupid. Every implication of it is stupid. It's just an incredible Zen Koan of Liberalism. You could fill a book with all the reasons this is not-even-wrong and the implications it makes against the ideology of the person who said it.
I kind of don't want to write down any more of my thoughts here, just like you wouldn't explain a Koan. I just want to provide this to you guys to contemplate with me.
Can you explain it for my lib brain? My first intuition is that the people who can put it in the bank, already have more than enough money they are putting in their banks and 1200 wouldnt matter much. But the further down it goes the more impact it has, even if it isnt put in a bank account or anything....
The money is taken from an undodgeable progressive income tax. So any money the rich get is taken straight back out again and then some. The one exception would be someone with no capital accumulating wealth or income but lots of assets.
So, by definition, a UBI cannot increase inequality.
Oof, I completely forgot about taxes.
It's the holistic nature of it. It really is Zen-like. What you wrote is the first layer.
Here's another: if inequality is measured by the size of your bank account, and money given to poor people will be immediately spent, then no amount of money given to poor people can ever address inequality.
Yet he says that the problem is that the money given to poor people wouldn't be adequately means-tested.
Here's another: a means-tested UBI is by definition no longer a "universal basic income" and is instead just a normal welfare program. Like the ones they've been gutting for 50 years. But they're in favor of this one and definitely not lying.