Comments by "josh fritz" (@joshfritz5345) on "UBI Failed and Everyone Is Pretending It Didn't" video.

  1. Abolish property tax. If I buy land, I should own it.
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  2. Sure, and the people being taxed to pay for it have to get a second job. UBI isn't free money. This study doesn't show the damage caused by taxing working people to fund this program.
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  3.  @tjpaiva3296  UBI is an extremely, ludicrously expensive program. UBI, practically implemented, would cost about a quarter of the US's GDP (26.667% based on my rough calculations). To try to fund UBI would require the kind of tax hike/ inflation that can kill a nation.
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  4.  @ThatsMrPencilneck2U  Yeah, I'm not a fan. I believe in private property, unlike the US government.
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  5.  @BaddeJimme  Neither should pay any tax. If you own land, you shouldn't have to pay rent to anyone to keep it.
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  6.  @ThatsMrPencilneck2U  That's how it should be, that's not how it is. Just like how the US should have private property, yet we have to pay rent to the government or be evicted from "our" property.
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  7. Printing money to pay people to not work is a recipe for inflation, not to mention, as you said, the possibility for abuse by the government. Self sufficient people are more resistant to government tyrrany, and no one is less self sufficient than someone who is paid by the state to not work.
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  8.  @teagancombest6049  The US armed forces costs 211 billion dollars per year. $12k x 400 million Americans means that UBI would cost 4.8 trillion dollars per year, not including administrative costs. UBI would cost over 22 times as much as the entire US military.
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  9.  @tjpaiva3296  The US GDP is 15 trillion dollars per year. That's the entire GDP, not just the part that is taxed. To give every American $12k per year would cost 4.8 trillion dollars. Here's the math: 12k dollars times 400m people equals 4.8 trillion dollars. Feel free to check the numbers with a quick search, use a calculator if you want. In short, I was wrong earlier. UBI would not cost a quarter of the US GDP, it would cost a third of it.
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  10.  @tjpaiva3296  You're just refusing to do the math, assuming there is some magical fountain of money to draw from. There isn't enough money to fund UBI. UBI would, not including administrative costs (which would likely double the cost of the program) cost nearly as much as the ENTIRE US government.
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  11. Price controls are really terrible in their own way. If it's illegal to charge enough for a commodity to be profitable, people will stop making and selling that product, creating shortages.
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  12.  @ThatsMrPencilneck2U  I'd get rid of income tax too, or vastly reduce it. Of course, overall tax revenue would fall, but that's fine. Government is a bloated mess and can afford to shrink. The only taxes I'd leave intact are things like capital gains. There would necessarily be less taxpayer funded financial assistance programs, but people would be much wealthier overall, so there would be less need for such programs. Likely private charitable organizations such as churches would step up to help fill any gaps, as they do already with food banks and such.
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  13. Great, where does that free money come from? People who are working. People like me. UBI doesn't magically create free money out of thin air. It steals wealth from people who work and "redistributes" it to people who do not. Oh, but the working person gets $1000 per month too? Great, now they pay $2000 more per month in taxes, $1000 for their own UBI check, and $1000 for the unemployed bum who lives off their paycheck. That's not even counting the other money that is wasted on government workers who manage the program who also produce nothing of value.
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  14.  @meneldal  There are people who will be driven homeless by even a small tax increase, let alone 2k a month. You don't understand, or more likely, refuse to understand the scale of UBI. 1k per month UBI would cost more than welfare, medicare and the entire military budget combined. It would be the single most expensive government program by far.
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  15. Friedman wasn't really an advocate of UBI, he just said that reverse income tax was the least harmful way to do it.
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  16. Somehow the answer to socialism not working is always more socialism. It doesn't work. Get over it. Get a job too.
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  17.  @ThatsMrPencilneck2U  Communism isn't anarchism. They are exact opposites.
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  18. Great, now what about the harms caused to the people who are forced to pay much higher taxes to fund UBI? What about the people who will never be able to afford a home, or have children, or need to get a second job to earn a livable income because of the increased tax rate?
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  19. I read a history book once, and I knew it.
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  20.  @Wayofthegamer7  Nah. The prices would rise for land, of course, at least in areas in high demand, but land would still be for sale.
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  21. I'd rather just have a tax cut. I'm lazy, I don't need another reason to not work. It might help some homeless, but for others, it will enable their addictions. California tried something like this, handing out money to the homeless, and overdose deaths skyrocketed.
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  22. ​ @justtiredthings  Why should I care if someone else is wealthy? I care about improving the lives of working class people like myself. That means reducing the tax rate on the money I earn.
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  23. Explaining to a college kid how me being forced to pay their debt is a net harm to society and definitely a harm to myself is pointless. They have a problem of their own making, so anything and everything is morally acceptable to them in order to dodge responsibility.
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  24. Youtube has decided that I am not allowed to comment on this post. Yay. I'm just testing to see if this one gets deleted too.
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  25. Abolish taxes on overtime.
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  26.  @chrisl4999  So you want communism. Yeah, no.
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  27. That's exactly what the government wants
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  28. $1000 less net worth on average. That is easily enough to be statistically significant. Additionally, keep in mind, this money is coming from somewhere. UBI would be funded by raising taxes on productive people who actually work in order to have taxable income. Essentially, it is stealing from the productive people to subsidize the lazy people. That only works for so long before the productive people get tired of being host to parasites and either move away or stop working themselves. I'm not the hardest worker in the world, and I certainly won't work for free. If most of my income is being taken, why should I bother working when I could just work less hard and collect UBI?
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  29.  @Living_End  If UBI had zero net effect, these people receiving 1k a month for 36 months would be on average 36k richer by the end of 3 years. The baseline isn't zero, it's plus 36k. If these people are not only NOT 36k richer, but are actually even poorer than the people in the study who received almost no aid, you are actively and severely hurting these people's ability to be self sufficient. Yes, putting people on UBI makes them incapable of earning money for themselves, this study was evidence of that. All of that, and now you have to justify taking $36k from someone who is working full time. You are taxing someone 36 thousand dollars and using that money to ruin someone else's life by permanently killing their motivation to work and improve themselves. Everyone loses, literally no one comes out ahead.
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  30.  @SulkySkull  A lot less people would be poor if they got to keep more of their paycheck. When most people are well off, suddenly the need for socialist programs goes away.
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  31. I just don't want to lose $1000 more per month to taxes. That would easily be enough to push me over the line of losing my apartment, or else getting a second job to survive.
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  32. Correct. And UBI punishes people who work and contribute to society by stealing the value of their labor to redistribute it.
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  33. People who do not understand this should not be allowed to vote.
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  34.  @gauloise6442  The primary cause of inflation is the US government printing tons of money. Some other factors can contribute such as a shortage of goods, but rising wages is actually a consequence of inflation, not a cause of it. It also has absolutely no upsides because those wages take time to catch up with the rising cost of goods, meaning that workers get poorer overall.
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  35. Their leisure time is being funded off the backs of people who are working harder and being taxed more. It's fundamentally immoral to take from someone who works hard to give to someone who doesn't.
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  36.  @KateeAngel  Corporatist economy, but otherwise yes, carry on. Capitalism implies a free market. What we have now is much worse. Corporatism is when the corporations lobby (bribe) the government to pass laws giving them an unfair advantage, allowing them to drive their opponents out of business and form monopolies or near-monopolies.
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  37.  @ctrlaltdebug  That wouldn't be enough to fund UBI.
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  38.  @aluisious  I pay nearly 40% of my income in taxes and I do not make enough money to ever own even a modest home
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  39.  @tjpaiva3296  So you really know nothing about currency or inflation and think everything is the cause of evil rich people wearing top hats and monocles. Well, yes, kind of, but not for the reasons you think.
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  40. I am an advocate for lowering taxes to the absolute minimum necessary to have any public services. That being said, if some kid can demand taxpayers foot the bill for their college debt, why shouldn't some Mexican guy have the taxpayers buy him a $60,000 pickup truck so he can start a landscaping business? He'll do more good than some 22 year old with a degree in underwater basket weaving.
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  41. It's a bit of both. It's part of the reason why poverty can be "sticky" or hard to escape. I've been in that situation. I'm generally a long term thinker, much more so than most people. But when I was on the borderline of being homeless for a couple of years, I could not afford to think ahead more than a week or two. It took a while to transition out of that.
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  42. Your taxes would go up sharply to subsidize all the people who stop working to live off of UBI.
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  43. The problem with socialist wealth redistribution is that money isn't free. To pay for it, you need to tax the hell out of productive, working people. You're causing harm to working people in order to subsidize the lifestyles of those who work less or not at all, and thus have no taxable income to contribute.
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  44.  @vfwh  If you work more, you will be taxed more, all to pay for UBI. When the government wants to raise taxes, the working class are the first target.
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  45. I've been there. I'm slightly better off now, but not by a ton. I'm still never going to own a house at this rate. If I didn't lose 38% of every paycheck to taxes, I'd already have a down payment on a house. UBI isn't the solution because it's just going to cause my taxes to go up by the same amount, if not more.
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  46.  @justtiredthings  Most tax increases happen on the working class. Rich people have the money to pay consultants to find tax loopholes. Middle class people don't. Thus, governments take the path of least resistance and tax the middle class.
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  47. ​ @justtiredthings  Democracy in western nations is largely a placebo. Western governments very regularly completely ignore the will of the voters on major issues. Western governments act primarily in the interests of corporations, special interests and NGOs. Youtube will remove my comment if I list specific examples. I agree we need a revolution, but the solution is not to abolish free trade. We need more of that, many of our problems stem from excessive restrictions on people's behavior by government. UBI is a pipe dream, and will remain so for a long time. It is simply not feasible to fund a program of that scale. I'd go into the math behind it, but my comment might get removed, and it'd be wasted effort. Suffice to say, it'd be the single most expensive government program by far of whatever country adopts it.
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  48.  @justtiredthings  It's not a bug, it's intentional censorship. And my last reply to your long response was deleted. So yeah, we can't talk here, sorry about that.
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  49.  @justtiredthings  I just don't care, I'm not participating in a rigged game.
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  50.  @rika8484  We do need a country that takes care of its own, and we need to do that on a local level. The government cannot be trusted with that responsibility. The larger the state grows, the more corrupt it becomes. If you want a health care system or UBI, make it opt in, no one should be forced into a system like that against their will. Part of taking care of your citizens is knowing when to leave them alone and let them handle their own affairs.
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  51. Great. How do you pay for it?
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  52. Someone getting free money gets poorer. That's not even accounting for the harm caused to whoever is being forced to pay them that free money. UBI is a net negative.
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  53. Wouldn't even get the chance to. They'd be paying $2000 more in taxes each month to fund their own $1000 UBI checks.
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  54. I have a place that meets all of your criteria. It's called prison. Everything you need is provided for you. You never have to work at all, you've got all day for leisure time.
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  55. My theory is that if you get UBI, your taxes go up by the same amount, plus more to pay for the government burecrats managing the program.
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  56. They'll vote for us to pay for their student loan debt
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  57. Hmm. Overrated pop rock? Or keep some of my excess income and maybe own a house some day? Hard choice, but I think I'll take the house. Fuck taxes, abolish socialism.
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  58. Abolish social security
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  59. So we tax a worker $1200. $200 goes to the government burecrats running the program and the other $1000 goes to the UBI check of that same worker. Congratulations, your financial assistance just made every working class person $200 poorer every month.
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  60.  @Living_End  They were covering the essential expenses before. The point of this study was to see if giving people 36k made them richer, as in, richer than 36k, the theory being that with the essentials taken care of, they can start earning money. Not only did they not make any additional money, they earned so much less that they ended up poorer than the control group who got almost no additional money. They literally wasted every penny of it and then some. UBI is a complete failure on every level.
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  61.  @gustschina7558  Taxes don't solve wealth inequality, and wealth inequality isn't even the core issue. The main issue is poverty. Reducing the income of the top earners does nothing to help the people at the bottom. Welfare programs often do more harm than good, often encouraging people to limit their income to avoid losing benefits, keeping them perpetually poor. The best thing we can do to help the poor is to limit welfare benefits and to greatly reduce or eliminate tax on income for them.
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  62.  @Rob-me8vp  I'd like the vast majority of government services and their respective fees to be opt in.
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  63.  @acgrizzle7530  Off of someone else's labor. Yeah, fuck socialism.
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  64.  @emiel89  The core issue is that socialism doesn't work, and socialists are too stupid to understand why. Mouse traps work because mice don't understand why the cheese is free.
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  65. Why go through all that effort? Just let people keep what they earn, lower the taxes on working people.
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  66.  @FirstLast-vr7es  Yeah, that's fair. But we aren't there yet, and we aren't even close.
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  67. UBI is stealing the labor value of the workers to subsidize the unemployed. Nothing new is created, all you do is punish people for working by stealing their income.
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  68.  @jax5683  I'm actually having a hard time finding that exact story, I think it was a program in Chicago. Every time I search something like "California program to end homelessness" I get a ton of results about more than a dozen different harebrained programs which almost invariably make things worse. California is so dysfunctional that a private rail company left to build a rail system in Africa because most African countries are better functioning than California is. Feel free to look up some of California's nutty nonsense, you won't be disappointed.
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  69. I need to keep my paycheck. Stop taxing me. That's all I need to thrive. Why is that never, ever an option? Why is it always how much of someone else's money I'm entitled to?
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  70. I agree, and somehow my reply got deleted by the Youtube gods, yet someone else was able to see it to reply. Ugh.
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  71. Because economics is a good way to measure relative wellbeing. It's not a perfect measure, but it's better than nothing. UBI sucks. It doesn't create wealth, it steals it from the workers and gives it to the unemployed. Punishing the productive and rewarding the lazy is the kind of thing that brings a society to its knees.
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  72.  @acgrizzle7530  If I wanted to, I could become a billionaire tomorrow by buying a bunch of zimbabwe dollars.
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  73.  @acgrizzle7530  Yes it is. I can become a billionaire in a day by exchanging a few US dollars for Zimbabwaian dollars. I won't be any materially wealthier, but I can brag about being richer because I have tons of worthless currency.
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  74. Fuck youtube. Won't let me say shit, keeps deleting my comments.
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  75. Socialism sounds nice, but the results are terrible. UBI is basically just socialist style wealth redistribution. Still, many people choose to believe in it because they want the nice sounding thing to happen. It does sound nice to get my living expenses paid for so I can do what I want no matter how productive it is, but we don't need 50% of society to be "influencers". We need truck drivers, coal miners, welders, auto mechanics, plumbers, engineers and electricians.
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  76. I encourage people to spend their own money on things that make them happy. Their OWN money. Not someone else's. UBI is funded by raising the taxes on working people.
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  77.  @sheriffliberty9302  There aren't enough billionaires in the entire world to fund UBI for the US alone. If the US government confiscated every single penny from every billionaire, that amount of money would sustain the government's spending for about 6 months. UBI would be our most expensive program by far, more than medicare, social security, and the entire defense budget combined.
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  78. Congratulations on basic economic literacy. You're smarter than 100% of socialists.
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  79. Okay, the taxpayers should buy me a $60,000 truck. I want to start a landscaping or construction business. Once you're making 6 figures with your liberal arts degree, I'm sure you won't mind paying 75% income tax and living paycheck to paycheck in a studio apartment to pay for everyone else's free stuff.
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  80.  @augurcybernaut4785  Thing is, previous generations had a lot more buying power than us. Boomers really could afford to buy a house off of an average, or even below average salary. Those days are long gone. Our wages are shit, and the government takes a bigger chunk of our already diminished wages. We aren't going to tax and regulate our way out of this. We're becoming a psudeo-feudalist corporatist dystopia where a handful of billionaires own everything while the bottom 98% are scrabbling to get more crumbs than their neighbors handed to them by the corpo-state. Free college education won't fix shit.
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  81.  @alihenderson5910  Bingo
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  82.  @KateeAngel  UBI won't be funded by billionaires. Billionaires are notoriously hard to tax, if it were easy, there wouldn't be any billionaires. Even if the government went to every billionaire and held them at gunpoint for their bank account details, that amount of money simply wouldn't be enough to fund UBI. UBI is a colossal expense. Just a basic 1k per month for every citizen would require over 25% of the entire US economy dedicated just to funding UBI, not counting the administrative and procedural costs, which with government tends to more than double the cost of any program. Practically speaking, to implement just a basic 1k per month UBI would cost the entire current budget of federal government and the entire budget of every state government combined to fund it. About half of the entire current GDP would go to funding UBI. It is economcially completely unfeasible.
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  83. He's completely right. Get off your high horse. Socialism is stupid, my income should not be stolen to fund some junkie's next hit.
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  84. I don't want to live in a communist hellhole
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  85. Socialists are dead set on misunderstanding economics hard enough so it makes sense for them to get everything for free.
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  86. Great, we have a perfect ongoing example spanning over 100 years in the US. Native American tribal lands receive huge taxpayer subsidies from the US government. Native Americans living on tribal lands are among the poorest, most depressed, most drug addicted groups in America. Socialism has completely ruined their culture.
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  87. Logic doesn't work on socialists
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  88.  @Tuxfanturnip  Not one single person who thinks UBI is a good idea understands the scale of it. Just 1k per month UBI for every American would cost about the same as the entire current budget of the whole US government, local state and federal. You cannot fund a program of this size. It's literally not possible.
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  89. Who pays for the free money?
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  90. Great, now what about the people who are taxed even more to pay for this? Sure, they get $1000 too, but their taxes go up by $2000 because they are paying for both their own UBI and someone else's who doesn't work, thus doesn't pay taxes. It's just theft.
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  91. We have it. Native Americans living on tribal lands are given taxpayer money by the government. They are one of the poorest, most drug addeled and least happy groups in America.
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  92. I can't think of anything that cheap with government. It's rare for it to not cost 10x or more the real cost. 3 million dollar public restroom stalls, 80 billion dollar electric car charging stations, 30 thousand dollars to fill a pot hole...
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  93. I want to own a home someday. If my taxes go up more sharply for every extra dollar I make to fund UBI, I am trading the upwards mobility of someday owning a home and being able to retire for the temporary comfort of monthly checks paid for by the increased taxes coming out of my paycheck.
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  94.  @anderbiguri6771  You seem to be under some kind of delusion that everyone can win in socialism. Socialism is a zero sum game. If you aren't creating wealth, you're just taking it from someone else who earned it. It's not some imaginary class of billionaires who are going to pay for UBI, it's the working class who will pay. You want evidence of that? If you confiscated every single dollar from every billionaire, that amount of money would fund the US government's operating costs for about 6 months. There literally is not enough billionaires in existence in the entire world to fund UBI for Americans, let alone in America by itself. The only place the money for UBI can come from is the working class.
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  95.  @meneldal  There literally isn't enough money in the economy for UBI. I know you don't understand this, but there isn't some hidden untapped supply of rich people whose money you can confiscate to fund your socialist free money for all program. I'll even do the math for you. The median salary in the US is about $45,000 per year. The modest $1k UBI per month is 12k per year. 12k divided by 45k is 0.26, or 26%. Your UBI would cost 26% of the entire economy. UBI would be the single most expensive government program several times over. You literally cannot fund that without completely destroying the economy either with hyperinflation or mass wealth confiscation at a scale that would completely destroy commerce in the US. The economic calamity caused by implementing UBI wouldn't just affect stock traders and bankers, every single shop would have to double their prices for every item, rent would increase by 50%, property taxes would skyrocket, the entire economy would be in shambles. 1k per month UBI would plunge us into a second great depression.
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  96. Congratulations, you're smarter than every socialist.
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  97. Great. Who pays for the UBI?
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  98.  @vfwh  You're mostly right here. We live in a corporatists system where the corporations lobby the state to pass regulation to enforce their monopolies, or at least make it harder for competitors to enter their market. The cure isn't more government though, it's prohibition on corporate lobbying, and a reduction in regulation/ taxation on industry to allow market competitors to thrive, forcing the corporations to lower their prices to compete. Totally right here, huge portions of congress use insider knowledge on the industries they regulate to game the stock market. Insider trading is completely illegal for normal citizens, but our political elites are above the law. Additionally, many politicians "retire" to a corporate boardroom for a company who they benefited by passing regulation favorable to that corporation. It's all graft. It's an argument for getting the government out of the economy. You can't regulate corporations with a government bought and paid for by those same companies.
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  99.  @vfwh  "Organized economic activity" is stuff done by people. Transactions are made by people. Profit is made by people. The only thing you can tax is people. Taxing goods just increases the cost of those goods for the people buying them. Taxing landlords increases the cost of rent for the tenants. Money is "free" in that the federal reserve can magically print an unlimited amount of it, but doing so is a poison pill for the economy. Printing money causes inflation. Practically speaking, the more money is in circulation, the more expensive goods and services become. This is why many classical economists advocate for commodity backed currency, because the government can't be trusted with the money printer.
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  100.  @vfwh  They already have all of that, and they get it for free. The government is in the pocket of peoples whose names you will never know who are as rich as Elon or Bezos. Those two have quite a bit of sway too, of course, but there are equally rich and much more influential people who choose to remain anonymous. If a billionaire doesn't like that a competitor is squeezing out their market share, they call up their friends in government and have the federal agencies go and shut them down. The billionaires all share a private army, it's the entire US government. A totally free market is far superior to what we have now. The game we play in the corporatist economy is rigged in favor of the elites. The elections exist only as a placebo to keep you content. If you feel like you have a say, you won't rebel against the system for rigging the game against you.
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  101.  @vfwh  If I have 50k saved up, then the government prints a ton of money, doubling the money supply, my 50k dollars now only has 25k worth of purchasing power. Even if I got a raise and make twice as much money, I'm still out 25k dollars that I had saved up. Inflation is a tax on savings. The whole point of a commodity backed currency is to tie the value of the currency to a real world item so that there is something more than simple confidence in the currency to keep people's trust in it. It is way harder to create inflation in a commodity backed currency as long as that commodity is very difficult to replicate at scale. For example, gold is finite, so any currency backed by gold at a fixed rate will retain its value forever, or at least so long as it can still be exchanged for gold at the same fixed rate. To put it very simply, inflation taxes people's savings, devalues debts and messes with the economy in other ways too. These negative effects disproportionately harm the middle class (rich people hold assets which are generally inflation proof, and may even gain value, such as land and stocks), so lowering or eliminating inflation is desirable to maintain a strong middle class with good upwards mobility.
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  102.  @vfwh  Shit... I had a really detailed reply to this, but Youtube removed it. The short, hopefully not auto-delete version of it is that we can't vote ourselves out of monopoly because elections are a placebo, and the billionaires are the ones who actually decide policy, not the voters. Also, fuck Youtube.
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  103. We have them. Native American reservations are given lots of taxpayer money for free. They are some of the poorest communities in America, with extremely high rates of gambling and drug addiction. Socialism doesn't work.
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  104. You can't teach an unemployed socialist economics. You're better off trying to teach a dog to sing.
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  105. UBI is just socialist wealth redistribution. We have hundreds of historical examples of it crashing and burning. One ongoing example is the Native American reservations. They receive taxpayer funded subsidies from the government and remain some of the poorest communities in America.
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  106. 100% of socialists fail this logic test
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  107. Great, now what about the people who have to get an extra job to pay for all the taxes required to fund this socialist BS?
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  108.  @bluevayero  Exactly. But lazy people love anything resembling socialism, because it enables their laziness.
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  109.  @justtiredthings  Democracy only really affects things that the people who run society don't care about. Everything the elites have a strong opinion on is not up for a vote. Agreed. We do not have a free market economy. Any attempt by upstarts to start competing is generally crushed by the government on behalf of the monopolists. The idea that AI will replace everyone is a common view among technophiles, but I think it's often overstated. I do believe it will happen someday, but I think it's a lot further off than recent advancements would imply. For one thing, the AI singularity, while a popular idea among technophiles, is a deeply flawed concept that will probably never happen. What we are likely to see are gradual improvements in AI technology which slowly discovers new applications and requires a ton of work to make economically viable in each new field. UBI is an extreme measure that would become necessary if AI's capabilities suddenly lept forward as would happen if the AI singularity happened, but given that the premise of a continuously and rapidly self improving machine is itself flawed, this won't happen. We have plenty of time to figure out how to deal with people whose jobs are replaced by AI. It will happen slowly over time, not all at once.
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  110.  @justtiredthings  Fuck Youtube. I spent 15 minutes typing a very detailed reply and Youtube deleted it. We can't have a real conversation on this topic here, sorry.
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  111.  @justtiredthings  The cnuts at Youtube deleted a very detailed reply I made to you on this subject. Sorry, we can't have this conversation here.
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  112. I'm sure things will be better if we give them even more free money. Lotto winners all seem happy and successful.
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  113. I work 40 hours a week consistently, and have worked as much as 70. UBI will make you and I both poorer. That free money comes from the paychecks of working people like us via taxes.
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  114.  @rika8484  If you want to do that, make the donation directly, or through a private entity. The government spends your tax dollars funding wars in the middle east and bailing out the banks.
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  115.  @rika8484  You're a lot more open minded than most. A lot of people who advocate for larger government are utterly opposed to decentralization. Even if a large state wasn't corrupt (which is quite rare), it will simply lack the information necessary to make decisions on behalf of citizens as well as a local government will, which in turn won't be as good at making decisions for people as the citizens themselves. There's a thought experiment that proposes that gift giving is inefficient because the gift giver will rarely know the receiver well enough to give them a gift better than they could buy for themselves. I'm certainly no advocate for abolishing Christmas gift giving, but that same logic can be applied to people buying services vs. the government taxing those people and providing those services but making them mandatory. Here's an example. If you are buying home insurance and live in a hot area which hardly ever gets snow, you probably don't need or want insurance that protects against damage caused by hail. If the government was buying everyone home insurance on their behalf (using tax dollars collected from their paychecks, so no, it's not free), the government would likely give everyone the same plan. Governments are lazy like that. This means that you're paying for insurance on hail damage when the last time your hometown saw snow was 30 years ago. It's easy to not realize that you're over-paying because the money is withdrawn from your paycheck, and anonymized into "public funds" before being redistributed, meaning it's very difficult to know if your money is being wasted or not.
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  116. Not something to aspire to
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  117.  @ProfestionalCrayonEater  Youtube appears to be on a spree of hiding and deleting all of my comments. I can't even see my own comment that you replied to. The censorship is BS.
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  118. 100% of socialists fail to understand this.
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  119. Congratulations, you failed economics. Please never vote.
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  120.  @victoriap1561  That's a common theme with socialists.
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  121.  @mrca9344  If people can afford to not work, they won't work. If few people work, everything stops working, everyone starves. Many people would choose to not work, or work very little if they could, way too many for society to support.
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  122.  @mrca9344  No they won't. Many people will work the absolute minimum necessary to survive. Most people aren't driven enough to work more than that, especially when most of their surplus labor is taxed away to pay for UBI for those who work less or not at all. This is basic human psychology.
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  123.  @chrisl4999  It's literally impossible to implement currently. UBI is too expensive. to give all 400 million Americans 12k per year would cost 4.8 trillion dollars. That's nearly a third of the US's 15 trillion dollar GDP.
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  124.  @mrca9344  Outside the box thinking and all that doesn't defeat basic math. UBI is not affordable. I know you've heard all the nonsense claims about it somehow being cheaper than existing welfare, it's not. UBI requires nearly infinite resources to fund, at least, nearly infinite from our perspective. I already gave you the numbers, it'd cost a third of our GDP. What would happen if every single thing in society suddenly cost 33% more? A massive recession, millions of homeless, people fleeing to other countries to escape state enforced poverty.
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  125.  @Graeberwave  Well, Youtube has seen it fit to delete my anti-corporatism rant where I described my frustration with the US economy, corporate-government corruption, and how I feel those responsible should be dealt with. I'm an anarchist, use your imagination.
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  126.  @Graeberwave  I'd love to, but Youtube won't let me. If I type a three paragraph response with tons of detail, it vanishes into the void because Youtube hates free speech, just like socialists do.
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  127.  @Graeberwave  Literally no point. I could spend 20 minutes writing up a detailed critique of the state and corporations, and Youtube would delete it. I'm not playing this game on a platform controlled by censorious scumbags.
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  128. People like myself who actually make shit will be pissed off that we're being robbed and will stop working. With less income to tax, you either need to end UBI, raise taxes even higher, or print tons of money to fund it, creating inflation.
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  129.  @gerrardcorner6199  Healthcare isn't free in Europe either. The taxpayers pay for that with higher income tax.
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  130.  @Llortnerof  More expensive, yes, worse, no. The quality of care is generally as good or better than anything in Europe, with some exceptions. Sometimes new drugs don't get approved due to corruption/ enforced monopoly for a competing, inferior drug. American health care is extremely expensive due to, frankly, corruption and lobbying of the medical industry. The US health care system is what is called a "public private partnership" which is a nice sounding way of saying the government enforces a monopoly of the industry on behalf of "private" companies. This system has the superficial appearance of a capitalist system since private companies are the primary forces behind it, but in reality, it is much closer to the psudeo socialist system used by the armband enthusiasts and bad spaghetti man from the world war sequel. The corporations are private in name only, they are basically extensions of the state in every way that matters.
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  131.  @uncreativename9936  "Forgive" the debt? The US government doesn't hold all that debt. Even if they did, it's the taxpayers being forced to foot the bill either way through either increased taxes, or higher inflation. There is no way you can make it out where giving students free college doesn't end up basically stealing money from those who don't attend in order to pay for it. If our public schools were better, I wouldn't consider it a waste. Considering how ideologically captured the schools are and how poor the quality of education they provide is, I'd encourage everyone to seek alternatives wherever possible. I'm a huge advocate for charter schools, and tax credits for home/ private schooling. People are already paying to send their kids to school, at least let them choose where to send them. I'm a huge advocate for people seeking trade jobs/ apprenticeships rather than college. Our public schools have been infected with what is effectively a huge ponzi scheme that is funneling tons of unsuspecting young adults into decades worth of debt for a degree that will be useless to them, all for the benefit of "private" colleges. Any "private" institution which receives huge amounts of public funds or support from the government (on taxpayer dime, of course,) is private in name only.
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  132.  @Llortnerof  Part of this is that our food is very unhealthy. And yes, part is the cost of the care, as you stated, combined with increasing rate of poverty in real terms. The private-public partnership arrangement is what leads to the prohibitively high cost.
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  133.  @bodiless99  Yes, that's the point. I'm being forced to pay into a pyramid scheme which I will never get a penny out of.
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  134.  @williamjacobs  UBI is like feeding a duck in a park. It gets fed every day, so it no longer forges for food. If it ever had to fend for itself again, it would likely starve because it hasn't practiced the skills necessary to forge in a long time.
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  135.  @williamjacobs  Yes, or else reinstating strict limits on how long someone can stay on these benefits.
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  136.  @williamjacobs  There would be a lot less working poor if 20% or more of their income didn't go to taxes. Sure, minimum wage still wouldn't be doing great, but virtually no one stays at minimum wage for long, minimum wage jobs are held almost exclusively by people who are just entering the work force for the first time.
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  137. We have structured our welfare system to punish anyone who tries to make money. It's only purpose is to keep people poor and unemployed.
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  138. Or we could just lower taxes on people who work for a living.
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  139. Look at any socialist country, or Native American tribal lands. It's not good.
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  140.  @acgrizzle7530  You have completely failed to address the core point. Giving them $36,000 made them poorer than giving them nothing at all.
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  141.  @Living_End  You failed to address the main issue. Giving them 36k made them poorer than giving them nothing at all.
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  142.  @Living_End  That was the ENTIRE POINT of UBI. To give them a chance to make themselves self sufficient. It did exactly the opposite. This study had impossibly good conditions way better than real world UBI would. It was literally free money with no strings attached and no economic consequences, and it made them poorer, straight up. Real UBI would require a colossal tax increase, cause an extremely high rate of inflation, cause the cost of food, clothes, housing, rent to all rise sharply. All of this to make people less self sufficient and poorer, even before factoring in the increased cost of everything. There are literally no upsides to UBI.
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  143.  @Living_End  If you're just a socialist who is determined to ignore evidence of why socialism can't work, just admit it. Stop pretending to be objective if you're going to choose to ignore all the evidence that socialism is garbage.
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  144. That was socialism for the rich. The banks were bailed out on taxpayer dime. They didn't lose a cent, the taxpayer lost trillions.
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  145. It's training people to be pets to the government. That is not how you create functioning members of society.
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  146. Socialism doesn't work, who could have guessed?
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  147. UBI is just socialist wealth redistribution. I can hardly think of a better way to destroy wealth than punish people for creating it and reward those who don't.
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  148.  @BaddeJimme  Police in several states such as New York actually protect squatters from being evicted by the property owner, in some cases arresting the home owner for trying to enter their own home which was taken over by squatters. The government is totally illegitimate. It's better to take matters into our own hands. I am perfectly capable of evicting squatters myself.
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  149.  @BaddeJimme  I'd love to respond to that, but last time I tried, Youtube deleted my comment. 1. The government of some states facilitates squatting and arrests homeowners for trying to enter their own home once it's been occupied 2. I don't need to rely on police to deal with them.
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  150.  @ThatsMrPencilneck2U  No he wasn't, he was a communist.
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  151.  @ThatsMrPencilneck2U  I'd like if Youtube would stop hiding my comment, I can't even find it if I open the whole thread. Censorship is quite annoying. Marx was the perfect communist. He was lazy, gross, never showered, abused his wife and children, refused to be productive even as his own family begged him to get a real job, was always begging his rich friends for money, and his ideas killed millions of people.
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  152.  @gustschina7558  I won't say that AI is a non-factor, it absolutely doesn't help the situation. However, there's another reason many people are unemployable. A lot of college graduates have completely useless degrees for fields which are over-saturated with workers, or which have very few career opportunities. This is compounded by the fact that they need to make more than non-degree holders to pay off their debt, meaning they demand higher salaries despite having no useful skills and no workplace experience. I don't blame these kids, not really. They were lied to, told that they'd have a job lined up for them once they got their degree. They didn't realize how bad a situation they would be putting themselves in by going 40k into debt for a piece of paper, because their entire high school experience was teachers and staff telling them they needed to do that to succeed. But now it creates not just a crisis for these poor kids, it also creates an entire generation of debt slaves who are virtually unemployable, refuse to take entry level jobs, and have no work experience to get a better job. And if these kids have their way, I'll be paying their debt for them via taxes.
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  153.  @julian_hesse  None of those things need to be funded by extortion
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  154.  @manw3bttcks  It's a nasty practice we can do without, but it pales in comparison to the death tax. It's essentially the abolition of inheritance, punishing people for trying to leave property to the next generation. It's pure evil, to punish selfless thinking and reward those who think only of themselves.
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  155. The people who are working are going to be hit the hardest. UBI is funded by taxes. People who don't work get $1000 for free. People who do work are taxed $2000 extra, 1k to pay for their own UBI, and 1k to pay for the UBI of someone who doesn't work. It's theft, plain and simple. And sooner or later, the victim of the theft is going to get tired of being robbed and will stop producing anything to steal.
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  156. Well, I can't commend on this because Youtube keeps deleting my comments, so I'll keep it simple. UBI makes people poorer, end of story.
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  157.  @smergthedargon8974  If your system relies on parasitism, it deserves to fail.
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  158.  @acgrizzle7530  I have read theory, I'm much better informed than someone whose entire knowledge on the subject came from public school.
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  159.  @acgrizzle7530  Socialism is the abolition of private property. As the socialists would put it, "the collective ownership of the means of production". Practically speaking, nearly any piece property could be used in a productive manner, and socialists intend to make it illegal for a lone individual to own anything. Collective ownership, practically speaking, is state ownership.
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