Universal Basic Income Quotes

The more the state gives to its citizens, the less they have to earn. That is the basic concept of the welfare state - you receive almost everything you need without having to earn any of it. About half of Americans now pay no federal income tax - but they receive all government benefits just as if they had paid for, i.e., earned them.

Abolish Poverty

"What would you do with the lazy ones, who would not work?" "No one is lazy. They grow hopeless from the misery of their present existence, and give up. Under our order of things, every man would do the work he liked, and would have as much as his neighbor, so could not be unhappy and discouraged."

Doesn't anything socialistic make you want to throw up? Like great public schools, or health insurance for all?

Share the Wealth

We must do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian-Darwinian theory, he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living.

There is the freedom from want, despair and psychological insecurity that would come from having income sufficient to provide the necessities of life. But there is also the freedom to choose not to work for a time in order to take care of family members, pursue a passion, acquire education or contribute to a worthwhile community project. There is the freedom to start a new business with an uncertain future, the freedom to say yes to a job that pays little but yields joy and satisfaction — and the freedom to say no to a job that pays too little or is demeaning and unpleasant. Why, they ask, should such freedoms be reserved only for the wealthy?

I think it's fair to set limits, so that people cannot receive more than the equivalent of the national average wage while living on benefits.

I think the socialist movement, by removing many, many people from grinding stagnation and poverty and overwork, does enable people not just to lead better lives but to be better people.

How will we deal with a world where leisure is abundant and there aren't enough good-paying jobs to go around? To meet this political and economic meta-challenge, the hot new idea is the universal basic income — using some of the wealth generated by all this new technology to guarantee everyone a baseline income, whether they are working or not.

The welfare state creates its own victim/client constituency. By making individuals free and independent, we reduce the need for 'charity' to those truly needy citizens what we can certainly afford to help through real charity.

The free lunch is the essence of modern liberalism.

Universal basic income is not a solution in search of a problem - it is the obvious solution that has been in front of us for years. It only requires us to have the vision, empathy and courage to adopt it for the American people before it is too late.

Democrats are fighting for people to be able to quit work while the rest of us pay for their health care while they go out and be artists and photographers and tend to bipolar kids with asthma or what have you, and we're going to pay for this.

A universal basic income would be the best way to give everyone the opportunity to do more unpaid but incredibly important work, such as caring for children and the elderly.

A safety net for the poor indeed requires some level of income redistribution.

We're living in an economy where productivity is no longer the goal, employment is. That's because, on a very fundamental level, we have pretty much everything we need. America is productive enough that it could probably shelter, feed, educate, and even provide health care for its entire population with just a fraction of us actually working ... Our problem is not that we don't have enough stuff-it's that we don't have enough ways for people to work and prove that they deserve this stuff.

With a Socialist government, there will not be a national surplus whilst there continues to be inequality.

What we want to do is reform the welfare system in the way that Tony Blair talked about 13 years ago but never achieved - a system that was created for the days after the Second World War. That prize is now I think achievable.

From Scotland to India, and from Silicon Valley to Kenya, policymakers all over the world have become interested in basic income as an answer to poverty, unemployment and the bureaucratic behemoth of the modern welfare state.

The welfare state may be well-intentioned, but it is a Ponzi scheme

For me, democratic socialism is about - really, the value for me is that I believe that in a modern, moral, and wealthy society, no person in America should be too poor to live.

When America installs a minimum income, it's going to be doing it in a very different historical context than Switzerland or Sweden or Germany, or any other country might do it. And we're doing it in a context where it has the potential, I think, for much better consequences than in those other countries.

One way to reduce income inequality is to get rid of the rich. If Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, Rupert Murdoch and their billionaire friends could be persuaded to emigrate from the United States, income inequality would decrease overnight.

Higher minimum wages, full-employment programs, early-childhood education: Those kinds of programs are, by design, universal, but by definition, because they are helping folks who are in the worst economic situations, are most likely to disproportionately impact and benefit African Americans. They also have the benefit of being sellable to a majority of the body politic.