One of the biggest problems with Basic Income that no one talks about is that Basic Income is exactly that: basic. It covers only the most basic needs for survival. Bearing in mind that automation is progressing faster than our attempts to talk about technological unemployment, and way faster than our attempts to actually implement anything meaningful on a large scale, we may end up implementing Basic Income at a time when its positive effects will be largely reduced to social welfare support.
That can lead to a separation of the population into two groups: the super wealthy and privileged on one end and the social cases surviving on basics without any possible chance to rise above and overcome the circumstances in which they were born, as there won’t be any jobs or means of climbing the social ladder.
As a first strategy, I have proposed a Basic Tax Control system fix (Inforgraphic & BTC vs. UBI difference or you can read about it more in my book), but there is one other very simple strategy.
The secondary strategy to overcome this issue would be to use a portion of the money people are getting from Basic Income (or their own money) to crowd-fund/“buy out” all top company shares. This large-scale dispersal of shares of all energy, telecommunication, manufacturing, and many other companies could help with dispersing wealth and giving people access to more resources than what Basic Income would usually provide.
For instance, Walmart has a market value of $204.62 billion. If each American citizen (325.39 million people) would spend approximately $628, then American citizens would own 100% of the world’s largest company by revenue (List of largest companies by revenue)
So instead “bail out” we could “buy out“ strategically important companies .
In that way, people could distribute wealth by becoming owners of both the technology and the companies, gaining access to more resources than they would otherwise have with only Basic Income.
If you liked this story, you may like my book.
System Upgrade v2.016:
Solutions for a failing economy, wealth distribution, declining democracy, climate change, and robots that steal jobs
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