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human
CMV: I don't believe that the basic income could work

I've seen a lot of articles in favour of the basic income, but none that really go into all of the issues that it'd create. Firstly, is there enough money to do this - I don't mean just hand wavey arguments - but has anyone actually done a proper mathematical and economic analysis?

What about all of the other economic effects? Some jobs are undesireable and so no-one would want to do them without a huge salary boost. Will we really be able to fill all necessary positions by simply boosting the salary? What about all of the inflation that this causes? How will this impact the financial feasibility of basic income?

Lastly, if this is such a great thing, why does no-one anywhere implement a basic income without external funding (like aid) or oil money?
gpt
>Firstly, is there enough money to do this

No, that's not the first question at all.

The question is how we want resources to be distributed. In all developed countries, there is enough of food and shelter for everyone to get some. There's plenty, in fact; the currently non-poor people would be able to retain roughly the same standard of living. So it seems clear that, if anyone *isn't* getting enough food or shelter, we're badly allocating resources and need to fix it.

Once we've established that, the only question is how to do it best. Fortunately, the money needed to secure these basic needs is not super prohibitive. The yearly rent for ~610k homeless people would be about $7.32 billion, while the yearly food budget for all the ~50 million food insecure people would be about $181 billion. These are big numbers, but manageable. But:

>What about all of the other economic effects? Some jobs are undesireable and so no-one would want to do them without a huge salary boost. Will we really be able to fill all necessary positions by simply boosting the salary? What about all of the inflation that this causes? How will this impact the financial feasibility of basic income?

We're artificially subsidizing those undesirable jobs now, because welfare programs generally require you to have or look for a job. There's no reason to believe that removing this subsidy will cause significant inflation. And if we really have "necessary positions" that nobody would take if not threatened with starvation, that's a pretty serious moral failing on our part.

>Lastly, if this is such a great thing, why does no-one anywhere implement a basic income without external funding (like aid) or oil money?

Because many people are still stuck in the last century. They think of money as some kind of concrete thing, not just a social tool for allocating resources. So while unconditionally giving poor people *food* is generally not controversial, people get kinda weird when you talk about unconditionally giving them money.