by James Hall, The Sleuth Journal:

What is next from the egalitarian socialists? A guaranteed income is becoming the new catch concept that is a desired destination for the limousine liberals. If you ask the tax payer, It’s time for America to embrace guaranteed income, their first response will be how do you pay for such a benefit? Intuitively they know they will most likely not be included in the scheme and when the obligation burden befalls on those dreaded 1%, you just know that class warfare is doing well on the two-hundredth birthday of Karl Marx. Based upon a recent SF gate poll, Majority of Millennials now favor universal basic income. Amazing the level of economic insanity that comes out of the asylums of higher learning.

From the Foundation of Economic Education, Peter St. Onge explains Why Universal Basic Income Is a Pipe Dream.

“Now, how expensive would this be? To get an idea of scale, in the US today we have about 260 million adults and 65 million under-18’s, so this would cost something like $3.6 trillion per year. That would take roughly doubling the current federal budget, and note that we already borrow $500 billion today (closer to a trillion dollars) of what the feds spend. So to cover a UBI you’d have to double the federal take and still borrow a trillion dollars to cover it.

$3.6 trillion is a lot of money, and people don’t end up very rich — right at the poverty line. So why do it? There are three common arguments: first, that UBI would make people more entrepreneurial. Second that UBI can replace our current welfare system. And third is more of a fear, that robots will take all the jobs.”

Considering this scale of public expenditures must come from the extent of the electroshock therapy that harms the brain functions of cell phone radio-frequency radiation. Well, some intellectuals have not gone completely mad and admit that who defines the rules and administers the distribution will shape the outcome.

For a viewpoint from an editor at Jacobin magazine, Alyssa Battistoni writes The False Promise of Universal Basic Income.

“Basic income is therefore often posited as a post-ideological solution suited to a new era of politics: the odd confluence of interest from the left and right tends to be read as a sign that political positions should be eschewed in favor of rational compromise. But UBI’s cross-ideological appeal is the bug, not the feature. Because basic income is politically ambiguous, it also has the potential to act as a Trojan horse for the left or right: left critics fret that it will serve as a vehicle for dissolving the remains of the welfare state, while proponents herald it as the “capitalist road to communism.” The version of basic income we get will depend, more than policies with a clearer ideological valence, on the political forces that shape it.”

Another account more cynical and melodramatic comes from the popular reformist Chris Hedges who presents his argument in Common Dreams, The Oligarchs’ ‘Guaranteed Basic Income’ Scam.

“The oligarchs do not propose structural change. They do not want businesses and the marketplace regulated. They do not support labor unions. They will not pay a living wage to their bonded labor in the developing world or the American workers in their warehouses and shipping centers or driving their delivery vehicles. They have no intention of establishing free college education, universal government health or adequate pensions. They seek, rather, a mechanism to continue to exploit desperate workers earning subsistence wages and whom they can hire and fire at will. The hellish factories and sweatshops in China and the developing world where workers earn less than a dollar an hour will continue to churn out the oligarchs’ products and swell their obscene wealth. America will continue to be transformed into a deindustrialized wasteland. The architects of our neofeudalism call on the government to pay a guaranteed basic income so they can continue to feed upon us like swarms of longnose lancetfish, which devour others in their own species.”

Read More @ TheSleuthJournal.com