Universal Basic Income: Elon Musk responds to trials in US

[Chase]

I can already see the Republicans blow their ‘who’s going to pay for it?’, ‘no tax increases!’, ‘there’s no money‘, ‘people no longer will want to work’, ‘they’ll spend it on drugs and alcohol’ horns reflexively.

I’m not sure I like the idea very much, I’d be more interested in raising wages/lowering taxes at the low end of incomes (and raising taxes at the other end, trickle down economy, my ass)

That's what I find interesting about something like UBI, because when you really think about it, UBI can make a lot of sense from a conservative/Republican/right-wing point of view.

A UBI could be a replacement for welfare checks - which means a fraction of what we would have to pay for it is already covered.

Republicans often say welfare keeps poor people complacent in their low-earnings because earning too much would take away their entitlement to welfare, so giving a UBI check to everybody would mean there is no disincentive to take on more work hours.

While the UBI system proposed by Yang is a check with no strings attached, it doesn't have to be. Yang's no-strings-attached approach was to save on administrative costs in running the system, but I don't think it would be hard to make a UBI type of debit card that can only work in authorized transactions. Every citizen could be issues a UBI card, and businesses would simply apply for approval to have their goods purchasable by UBI accounts. Whatever administrative cost this would incur could be covered by businesses paying for the licenses to have their goods and services approved, or by merchant fees like a typical credit card.

From this, various types of conservative talking points could be accomplished. The US could create a disincentive for Americans buying foreign goods by only authorizing American made goods. Because no tariffs or embargo would be officially enacted, it would make it hard for foreign countries to counteract in a trade war (since usually, countries counter a tariff with a tariff, and would have to create their own UBI if they wished to give a tit for a tat).

The main problem I have with it is I think we should create a single-payer healthcare system first, but that's just me being a pinko commie. Healthcare prices in the US are ridiculously inflated. Most of it is related to oligopolic price gauging, like how a vial of insulin costs over $320 in the US, yet only $30 in Canada, causing countless Americans to have died from simply not being able to afford their own insulin.

Another problem is the ridiculous system where the uninsured actually have to pay higher prices for healthcare services and products than what health insurance companies are being charged. Uninsured people are being charged more than 10 times what insured people are - and the uninsured have to pay it themselves, while insured don't. So, if two people need stitches that are identical, the insured person might be charged a $1000 and pay no more than their deductible, where the uninsured person is charged over $10,000 and have to pay all of it themselves. The uninsured are of course all poor, and have no money to fight or negotiate the bill at all. In fact, it's something that health insurance companies are allowed to negotiate lower bills, but uninsured people can't.

And you might find this interesting - a lot of those hospitals that are destroying poor people with sky high hospital bills are in Florida: https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/why-some-hospitals-can-get-away-with-price-gouging-patients-study-finds/2015/06/08/b7f5118c-0aeb-11e5-9e39-0db921c47b93_story.html

The system we have now is truly dystopian. A world where it costs more money to be poor. If that's not a dystopian nightmare, then I don't know what is.