Comment Re:let me correct that for you. (Score 1) 619
Above is a bunch of words.
To summarize: by dividing up all direct welfare costs (not including medicare/medicaid), it's possible to dole out enough money that even the unemployed have--just barely--enough money each month to obtain livable housing, food, and other basic needs above the cost of supplying these things. That makes them a target for businesses to pump them for every dollar they have, which is easiest by supplying them with the things they need.
I've worked out that it's feasible. I've largely worked out where the money comes from. I've avoided risks in calculations by deliberately tilting the error out of my favor, so any uncertainty is opportunity rather than threat. I'm now working on implementation and transition details, and playing with the numbers to generate charts and graphs and interesting points.
Eventually, this will become presentations, speeches, and campaigns. I have time: the basic welfare concept is an unconditional basic income, which is gaining mind share; I've begun the refinement of a welfare plan that exchanges our system with a UBI-based system, designing both the transition and the final state to maximize stability and success.
If it works--and it's almost certain to work, if only I can get it implemented without tinkering (lowering/raising the benefit, feeding it from a graduated tax, etc.)--it will provide a stable welfare system with no welfare traps, immunity to income inequality (it simply doesn't affect the amount of tax collected and the benefit paid out), robust against economic damage (such as the mid-2000s financial market collapse), and resistant to consequential effects of free money (if UBI is too high, you start encouraging inflation--far too high and you get hyperinflation; the system collapses before the benefit is high enough to reduce work incentive).
The obvious result is nobody needs a job. Life is not pleasant unemployed, but you're not going to starve to death sleeping in a puddle of your own piss in an alley. Scarcity won't threaten *living* day-to-day, because you can always eat and always go home out of the rain.
By the by, I've learned that *knowing* the solution and *implementing* the solution are two different things. This ranges from knowing that it's possible, knowing how it's possible, but not knowing the details; to knowing everything but not knowing how to make people do it; to knowing it all, having the opportunity, but being unmotivated to make the time or take the effort. This is most hard when trying to change the world: everyone wants to just tax the shit out of the rich, but, when you're working for the greater good, the first person you should ask something of is yourself.