Comment by grandalf

As a tax reform idea this is extremely promising.

I hope that one or more silicon valley billionaires run for national office on this kind of platform.

Sam is smart to point out that one of the main friction points is how this kind of thing pertains to immigration.

What's missing is an updated version of the narrative behind give us your tired, your poor, your huddled masses. Instead we get the vile rhetoric of Donald Trump that blames immigrants and minorities for all sorts of problems.

The American version of this sort of program needs to be fundamentally different from the "stipend" given to Saudi citizens by their elitist monarchs, and it cannot be designed to serve a similar political function (keeping the masses content).

Instead, we must view basic income as a system of positive and negative taxation that preserves the incentives individuals have to work hard to improve their own outcomes.

It must also eliminate the many perverse incentives and psychologically defeating categorizations (welfare, workers comp, etc.) that assault the dignity of those receiving income from the state today.

There are many costs of poverty that are not typically accounted for properly -- the harm done to children whose parents can't manage adequate prenatal or early childhood care, the human capital wasted by those who experience a setback that makes their planned investment in their own skills financially unwise, the time and energy wasted attempting and policing all sorts of major and minor fraud related to state payments, etc.

The biggest enemy to progress in America is the zero-sum mindset that plagues so many people and fuels their resentment toward immigrants. The areas of the nation facing the most decay and the least hope are the ones that seem to have adopted this mindset.