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In practice it's not going to be a UBI with a welfare state, it's going to be one or the other. There's literally zero chance of a UBI being implemented but especially not without gutting whatever welfare exists in your country at the same time.
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With that in mind, what do you do when you rely upon UBI and you suddenly find yourself in a situation with huge medical bills or the need to make your living disability-accessible?
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Unless it is comprehensively indexed against inflation and the cost of living, it will absolutely get eroded by a death of a thousand cuts via the compounding effect, just like virtually all welfare that exists today under bourgeois democracies. You can almost guarantee that there won't be comprehensive provisions for this because the government will want an escape clause.
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What do you do if you are robbed or scammed or you suffer a catastrophic event like a natural disaster or your house burns down and you rely on UBI for your income, and especially for your retirement savings? Without a welfare state, you're fucked. Part of the rationale for a UBI is that it would mitigate the current welfare trap of the welfare state but this would effectively be replacing a welfare trap with a trapdoor that leads directly to absolute destitution.
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Does your bourgeois democracy exist in the imperial core? Then it almost certainly relies upon migrant labour to supplement the workforce in a significant way. The US industrial agricultural sector would collapse in a heartbeat without migrant labour. Think of what currently exists for countries like this - there is a significant pool of labourers who either get work visas or they stay in the country illegally. It's probably already quite hard to become a citizen in these countries. Imagine what that looks like when all of a sudden there's an immense perverse financial incentive for the government to prevent having to pay for one extra person's UBI if they could avoid it in any way. Now imagine what it would look like when most people aren't interested in being spat upon in customer service jobs when they could stay at home and pursue their passions at roughly the same standard of living, if not an improved standard of living. Have you got a picture in mind yet? If not, I'll give you a clue - this is what the Gulf States look like today. There's a huge pool of migrant labourers who do all the dirty, shitty jobs that Gulf State citizens simply refuse to do. It's essentially a caste system reimagined under a liberal democratic framework. And these conditions lead to huge violations of labour rights and even human rights because the existence of these labourers is contingent upon them having work and if they step one millimetre out of line they get fired and sent back home. Forget about trying to navigate the labour laws and judicial system in a foreign country - people struggle to do that where they are citizens and likely speak the language natively and they have extensive support networks in their countries.
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A UBI would create the ultimate neoliberal deathblow to whatever welfare state exists and it would be perhaps the largest scale privatisation to occur in your country (unless it's a settler-colonial state, in which case it would be the second largest.)
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It would take the threat of a violent revolution to bring the bourgeoisie to negotiate a UBI imo. And I'm not being hyperbolic here - you would need a noose around the neck of bourgeois democracy before they'd compromise and... at that point why would you ever settle for half-measures?
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Milton Friedman, may he rot in piss, was a major proponent of a UBI under the name of a "negative income tax". If that doesn't throw up massive red flags for you then there's something seriously wrong.
Economism, not even once.
No more half measures, Walter.
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Let's say the government decides to start giving everyone $1000 per month as UBI. Congratulations! Your rent just went up by $1000 per month. Also food is now 5x the price! Why? It's not because of some nonsense "inflation" or any other nonsense liberal argument against it (or wage increases, for that matter). It's simply because capitalists are greedy and they want every cent of your money they can get. If you have more money in your pocket each month, they'll take all of it and more.
UBI cannot work unless you also implement price controls on basically everything, which governments simply won't do. Inflation isn't real. Capitalist greed is. Capital controls the governments, and they're never going to do anything that benefits you.
UBI is "ill give you 5$ to fuck off" policy. It further separates people from the means of production. UBI either privileges the consumer as the core of the person, is based on some utopian technological future that leaves many people irrelevant to the social reproduction of society (where ubi then becomes a gift from the elect/entrepeneurs/etc to the surplus population) or a stop gap solution to the globalization of businesses where workers can no longer lay a claim on equity in the business they work for and all redistribution has to be via the state.
I just ate an entire box of peanut butter girl scout cookies and now I feel like shit
Will UBI fix that? No? Then why should I care?
I will fix that, give me your money so you can't spend it on girl scout cookies
There are two different approaches to UBI.
One is conceptualized as a transition period to a fully postscarcity, post-money economy, giving workers the ultimate strike fund. This would be good, but can't happen under capitalism, under bourgeois democracy because it would remove the reserve army of labor. Capitalists need a poor and desperate underclass living in desperation that they can use as a threat against their workers.
The other concept of UBI is as a lifeline for capitalism and as a way to marketize, privatize, and replace all other social services. This type of UBI is the only one possible under bourgeois democracy and could never be enough to live on. It would function only as a subsidy to landlords and to the businesses underpaying workers.
It's a neoliberalisation of welfare.
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Take the weekly amount of money you get on the dole. Let's say it's 100, for the sake of the example.
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Say minimum wage is 200 a week.
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That means working instead of relaxing requires 100 extra to motivate the worker
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With normal welfare, the employer must pay the 200. With UBI the employer only has to pay 100, and the UBI pays the other 100
It's a transfer of trillions from the taxpayer tp subsidise scabby employers.
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UBI is a wonderful bandaid solution, probably the best bandaid solution that capitalism would ever consider offering, but it is ultimately just a bandaid. It would help with food insecurity, but would not do anything to directly address the reasons why people are denied food. It would help enable strikes by providing for striking workers, but would not directly address the abusive conditions which cause strikes. It would help cover the cost of housing, but would not prevent landlords from just raising rent to steal even more from tenants.
Its strength is giving people a foothold to demand more from. A population which can't be dropped to absolute zero is harder to subjugate than a population that can have everything stolen from them on a capitalist's whim. For this reason alone, I would vote for a democrat offering it because it represents actual and meaningful harm reduction.
Its weakness is indirect: America is the most propagandized nation on the planet. Getting people to actually use that foothold will be a challenge, and UBI alone won't stop people from cheering on the capitalists driving them into poverty. I used to argue that people would riot if they got a $1,000 per month UBI and then landlords immediately raised rent by at least $1,000 per month. The response to covid has make that seem unlikely
Capitalism requires a reserve army of labour, UBI would never exist as being unemployed has to be punishing. The working class can demand reforms but eventually these reforms will bring it into conflict with capital and it would be more likely than not before a livable ubi. The dole however is a thing in many places, but generally your still in poverty on the dole.
It's better to struggle for winnable reforms that are won by building workers power, which then train the working class to become self determinate and change the face of society forever.
Ubi is only ever advocated for by people who wanna vote for some lib to hand it down, this does nothing to build the workers movement
It depends
...is it implemented for social good or is it implemented in a libertarian way to dissolve the social safety net while giving people a pacifier in the short term to accept it? Is it being implimented from the economic left or right? After 20 years of such a system, really qui bono? Who benifiets?
Any good UBI should be tied to cost of living increases and not funded by a regressive tax such as VAT, which imposed undue stress on the lower income.
Yang's UBI was to the right of Libertarian CATO institue's UBI. It would have become irrelevant within the first generation of implementation. They wanted to destroy the welfare state. Always remember inflation. Look at what the lack of movement on the minimum wage has done.
If you wanted to do this in a way to lift people out of poverty, it needs to be a "Yes AND" policy, not a "Yes BUT" policy. There can be no exclusions, means testing, ect. The welfare state MUST remain in tact or you will leave all those behind in it's wake.
Now if UBI or Basic Income Guarentee BIG as the Libertarians coined it, is to be what it is then as this income suppliment is implemented - if it works as intended - then less people would need to rely on the other safety net programs. Those who still remain on them are further symptoms it either isn't enough or q greater systemic failing.
Yang's implementation forced people into a choice - take the $1,000 but if you do, you can kiss your other help goodbye. So after 20 years and you need that social security or food assistance in your retirement years you instead have $500 worth or less of purchasing power - good luck. No further assiatance.
Further Reading on the different schools of thought on UBI/BIG
CATO institute - The Libertarian "Pragmatic" Case for Basic Income Guarentee
UBI would be a good bandaid for alleviating the problems of the working class. But in capitalist countries it would only be a means to an end because it does not change the political economy in any meaningful. The bourgeoisie still control the means of production so UBI would just be a concession that they can take away if they want.
Many UBI opponents SLAM it for reasons like it might cause inflation. I don't know enough about the economy to know if this is true or if it is whether it can be reigned in via measures such as price control. These people to me always reek of being "rampant inequality enjoyers" that hide their viciousness under the veil of fiscal responsibility.
By definition it would be a great solution. It everyone were guaranteed an actually sufficient to sustain a dignified existence and could be trusted to continue as such in perpetuity it would be, it would function as a bottomless strike fund and defang the threat of unemployment. Anything short of that though and the whole thing collapses, and that definition does a lot of heavy lifting.
To be universal there must be no group of people excluded from receiving it (or who can be threatened with such), not immigrants, not foreigners living overseas. Dependent children would be a complication but probably a solvable one.
To be 'basic' it must actually be sufficient to cover the necessities of living in comfort and dignity. In the first place this requires either that the UBI be indexed to cost of living somehow or that price controls be imposed on housing and enough foods etc. Additional welfare would still be needed for those with assisted living needs. What qualifies as sufficient for this purpose is especially important, or you end up with masses of subsidy-farming packaged micro apartments that cost 95% of the UBI and trap people in poverty.
An actually universal UBI (and not just a test zone) would require a communist revolution, and if you can pull that off, why settle for the shitty compromise?
In theory I'm for it. But the problem is if it was actually implemented in the US - the US could be far worse of. Congresspeople and the president (whoever that is) would join together in a bipartisan manner and gleefully cut or privatize any number of social programs as they baldly lie and says "These programs aren't needed anymore!" Similar stuff would happen on the state level too.
