I would go further, especially considering the context:
Give people a survivable wage.
Regardless of whether they can work or not. People’s survival should not be contingent on working. Give people what they need to survive as a baseline, and then if they want to work for more, they can negotiate for employment on equal terms.
Even if a universal basic income makes things more expensive, it will make things more expensive by less than the amount that average people will benefit from it. It also reduces economic inequality.
Universal basic income (like a bigger one than you are probably thinking), universal healthcare, eliminate most other welfare programs (UBI filling that role in place of things like SNAP and TANF, the remaining ones should be narrowly targeted and temporary - think WIC), institute a maximum wage (highest compensated person in a company can make no more than X% of the least compensated and Y% of the median compensated employee - makes it so that for executives to get a raise that rising tide has to lift every boat).
The only issue I have with that last suggestion is that contracts can blur the line between being employed at a company and not. For example, obviously a contract employee should be subject to the same level of minimum wage, but what about if a company hires another company? What stops some big tech company from just getting all of their janitors from a contract with a janitorial company that doesn’t have to pay their people nearly as much? I think that windfall taxes on the 0.1% and a big UBI are the way forward.
I would go further, especially considering the context:
Give people a survivable wage.
Regardless of whether they can work or not. People’s survival should not be contingent on working. Give people what they need to survive as a baseline, and then if they want to work for more, they can negotiate for employment on equal terms.
Even if a universal basic income makes things more expensive, it will make things more expensive by less than the amount that average people will benefit from it. It also reduces economic inequality.
Universal basic income (like a bigger one than you are probably thinking), universal healthcare, eliminate most other welfare programs (UBI filling that role in place of things like SNAP and TANF, the remaining ones should be narrowly targeted and temporary - think WIC), institute a maximum wage (highest compensated person in a company can make no more than X% of the least compensated and Y% of the median compensated employee - makes it so that for executives to get a raise that rising tide has to lift every boat).
The only issue I have with that last suggestion is that contracts can blur the line between being employed at a company and not. For example, obviously a contract employee should be subject to the same level of minimum wage, but what about if a company hires another company? What stops some big tech company from just getting all of their janitors from a contract with a janitorial company that doesn’t have to pay their people nearly as much? I think that windfall taxes on the 0.1% and a big UBI are the way forward.
It’s okay. We don’t have to think about this in the USA because leftists wanted to teach democrats a lesson on Gaza*
*Gaza will be destroyed in its entirety over the coming years.
And plus we can just keep increasing taxes and UBI until we achieve the desired result.
Because raising the minimum wage is easy and happens all the time, the same should be true of.a UBI. /$
$7.25 an hour
We aren’t going to get any UBI at all until we’re much better represented than we currently are.
Sounds great but do you really think the 1% will not fuck with a UBI?