I truly appreciate the insight you gave on zoning, housing, and healthcare. But I feel we are talking past each other, and you are attacking a strawman. I never implied UBI would be a catch all solution to the problem of homelessness. You are attacking the people who treat it as such when I said explicitly it is only one of several remedies.
I simply meant 1) it seems like a good solution for replacing food stamps, and it seems like you dropped this point entirely. I also think 2) it can be helpful in a wider sense. It is certainly easier to give people basic income checks than to rearchitect the entirety of American society away from cars, employer-based healthcare, and suburbia. While I agree with you that we perhaps should be on this more effective path, such a radical reorganization would take decades and massive political will that just isn’t there yet. Not even the New Deal, Great Society, or Eisenhower highway programs reached anything near this scope. UBI is something that has already had a test shot, and the data shows it has had a huge effect in reducing poverty during the pandemic. Unless I’m missing something big, it seems like a good way to start.
I simply meant 1) it seems like a good solution for replacing food stamps, and it seems like you dropped this point entirely. I also think 2) it can be helpful in a wider sense. It is certainly easier to give people basic income checks than to rearchitect the entirety of American society away from cars, employer-based healthcare, and suburbia. While I agree with you that we perhaps should be on this more effective path, such a radical reorganization would take decades and massive political will that just isn’t there yet. Not even the New Deal, Great Society, or Eisenhower highway programs reached anything near this scope. UBI is something that has already had a test shot, and the data shows it has had a huge effect in reducing poverty during the pandemic. Unless I’m missing something big, it seems like a good way to start.