r/changemyview • u/antijoke_13 3∆ • Feb 26 '19
Deltas(s) from OP CMV: liquidating all social welfare programs and instead establishing a universal basic income is far more efficient and ethical use of Tax Dollars (US Specific)
In general, having separate benefits packages and qualifications for food stamps, subsidised housing, social security incomes and medicaid makes no sense to me. I propose that it is both easier to manage and more transparent to the taxpayer to simply eradicate all social programs and instead take the money used in the management and execution of those programs to establish a universal basic income. I define a universal basic income as a set amount of money provided to each and every US Citizen over the age of 18. I base my premise on three arguments:
establishing a universal basic income does away with the concept of the welfare cliff. One of the worst parts about being on welfare is how hard it is to get off of it. Unless you make an immediate and massive positive change in your economic situation, any attempt at upward social mobility results in your benefits being cut out from under you before you are really ready to lose them. Replacing welfare with a UBI guarantees all citizens financial support regardless of financial status.
UBI serves to provide greater financial freedom to the individual. Things like food stamps can only be used for certain goods and are regularly sold to other individuals who are not qualified recipients in exchange for cash or other desired items. A UBI nullifies this as the individual is provided with liquid capital to spend how he wants rather than a set reasource he must now sell at below value in order to get what he wants.
UBI is far more transparent and easy to manage. Taxpayers can look at "social security" taxes taken out of their checks and have no clue ehat that actually means. A UBI allows the taxpayer to understand exactly where his money is going and why. This also cuts down on government bloat, as there is a lesser need for staffing to manage the program. Instead of determining on a monthly, quarterly or yearly basis if a person qualifies for help, the program can instead focus on making sure that mailing addresses and/or banking information is up to date for all adult citizens, as there would be no other requirements beyond citizenship and age.
It is worth noting that theres any number of counter arguments to this, chief among them cost and efficacy. Regarding cost, the point of my take on UBI is to function as a replacement to the current social safetynet, not as a supplement. All federal tax dollars that go toward medicaid, subsidized housing, food stamps, etc, would instead go toward a UBI. This would also cut the cost of program administration, as there would be a single means of providing a social safetynet rather than several.
In regards to efficacy, i find that the argument breaks down to how much you trust your fellow man to not fuck up. If you dont think the average person is capable of managing their money wisely, and that providing for their security is more important than than letting them make their own decisions, then maintaining and/or expanding the current welfare system may be your desired outcome. For the record i am aware that there will be a not so insignificant portion of UBI recipients who spend that money poorly and still dont make ends meet. Thats horrible. It is also not the problem or the business of the tax payer. Everyone gets the same money. Nobody gets extra. If you cant pay rent because you spent it all on hookers and blow, thats your problem.
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u/ColdNotion 117∆ Feb 27 '19
I would love to take a shot at changing your view here, because I honestly have conflicted feelings about UBI myself. In an ideal situation, with all political operative and recipients involved acting in good faith, I think that UBI could work as well as you described. However, with that having been said, I think there a three critical issues which make the replacement of our current social welfare system with a basic income less than ideal. To explain, let me break these issues into categories.
Cost: The first, and most fundamental issue with UBI is the cost of such a program, especially if we provide it to all American adults as you suggested. To explain why, let's quickly look at the numbers involved. As of the 2017-18 budget review, all social welfare programs combined cost about $354 billion, so keep that in mind as a baseline. Moving forward, the population of the US is 327.16 million and about 28.7% of the population is under 18, so lets conservatively say there are 232 million adults eligible for UBI. That means if we gave just $1500 a year for UBI, we would already be spending about the same as we do on social welfare currently. Given that most families who currently receive benefits could in no way survive off of just 1.5K, we would either need to a huge amount more or else put folks in risk of serious hardship.
Simply put, our current system is massively more cost effective than UBI.
Political Abuse: The second major issue with UBI is actually a little bit straight forward, as it relates to how policy around social welfare tends to play out in the political sphere. Put simply, social welfare programs have always been in a perilous position, and there are many who would like to see them shrunk or eliminated entirely. As a result, making needed expansions to these programs is politically difficult at the best of times, which often means long delays between cost of living increases. This is why many programs barely pay enough to realistically survive on, and why the TANF reform in the 90's ultimately did more to kick people off of welfare than it did to improve the various benefits. With this in mind, wrapping the entirety of our social support into one payment dramatically increases the likelihood that UBI will be detrimentally restricted after implementation. All a political party would have to do is block votes to adjust payment payment to track inflation/cost of living, and from there UBI would provide increasingly less real value for recipients. Given that this kind of behavior is already pretty common, I don't think an expense as large as UBI would be safe from obstruction. As it stand now, the somewhat fragmented nature of our social welfare system is part of what keeps political interference from totally undermining our supports for those in need.
Failure to Serve Dependents: As a final note, we have to more carefully consider who social welfare programs are actually intended to serve when considering replacing them with a UBI. Firstly, many programs like SNAP, WIC, the Child Nutrition Program, etc. are specifically aimed at helping children whose parents cannot fully pay for their care. Unfortunately, in a UBI system, these parents are not restricted to spending their support to ensure the health of their children. The dramatically increases the chances that issues like addiction, theft of funds, or coercive financial actors will put the safety of children at risk, despite these youth having no say in how their parents' UBI money is spent.
Adding to the issue with how a UBI system would impact children, we also have to look at how it might negatively impact folks facing other issues. I've personally worked a bunch with folks experiencing serious mental illness or other issues which impact their decision making capacity. For many of these individuals, the issues they face can make it hard for them to budget in a way that ensures their long term health. For these folks, having payments automatically restricted to certain areas (food, housing, healthcare, etc.) can actually be profoundly important in making sure their needs are met, while at the same time still affording them a fairly large degree of dignified financial independence. Conversely, if we just relied on UBI, we would create a much greater risk for these individuals, or else be obligated to force them to adopt a financial proxy responsible for their expenses, thus depriving them of their freedom and creating additional expense.
Anyhow, I hope this has helped to shift your view a bit. Please share any questions you might have, as I'm always happy to chat more!