Believe it or not, there are some conservative/libertarians who have brought up this possiblility. I believe it was Charles Murray, for one. His idea is to replace all welfare system payments with a basic guaranteed income. Would come out cheaper than the current welfare system, plus it would encourage better behavior economically. I would like to see it implemented somewhere else for a while, just to see what happens.
Even Milton Friedman supported the idea of a negative income tax, which amounts to the same thing.
If you are going to provide a safety net, how you do it matters a great deal. It's far better to figure out a way to do it that doesn't need the huge bureaucracy to administer.
Also, the issue of what happens to people when more and more productive activity is replaced by machines is a real one, even if it's still on the horizon.
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Believe it or not, there are some conservative/libertarians who have brought up this possiblility. I believe it was Charles Murray, for one. His idea is to replace all welfare system payments with a basic guaranteed income. Would come out cheaper than the current welfare system, plus it would encourage better behavior economically. I would like to see it implemented somewhere else for a while, just to see what happens.
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The 5th/13th, A1S8, 9th/10th say otherwise.
Welfare, of ANY sort, is out of the purview of govt.
I’ve championed it for exactly the same reason. At the absolute least we end up with what we have now, at best we get rid of all the Democrats ‘employed’ running the welfare distribution system and possibly slightly better behavior from the great unwashed. Yes a GBI is not Constitutional or Biblical...but folks, let’s be brutally honest with ourselves: at the point our system is at we can’t sink much lower. It’s at least worth a shot.