That's nice JB, but you're going to have to dig a little deeper. Who gets how much, and how are you going to pay for it? It's easy to say we should do this and that, but I never see anybody talking about the details.
Well, All that exists right now are the broad strokes of what we might do, and that is because we can only get more specific as the oncoming problems arrive. You cant fix it until it gets broken.
Having said that, I dont think we need a UBI right now, but we will in coming years. This I think would be part of the response to the Strong AI Robotics Revolution.
Now many jobs that used to be done by people are being done by robots already, but these are staticly placed machines that work along assembly lines and that sort of thing. Strong AI androids that will be highly mobile, capable of learning and know how to respond to people these are going to take the majority of jobs in our economy as mass production makes them cheaper than a desktop today.
When that day comes corporations will have sky rocketing profits as they get rid of their primary cost of human labor, while jobs will virtually vanish in the span of ten to fifteen years or so and we have around 80% unemployment. Individuals unable to find a job or pursue careers that they have trained for are going to become very unstable. We could be looking at an existential civilization crisis by 2040.
There will be two routes to avoid this, the first one will be simplistic and in the long run disastrous; just give all the problems to the government to fix.
The second is to have a managed and gradual transition that assures people that if they want to work they can work whether it is through the market, job programs or charitable work.
But also consider that the upside to all this is that people wont have to work in order for society to have enough to feed, clothe, house and shelter the population as robotic labor will do that for next to nothing in terms of costs.
The government will need to have revenues, and the corporations will need to have consumers to buy their crap and so people will have to have incomes. But how to do that when there are no jobs? With a UBI that is not needs based, but an annual grant that goes mostly straight to the landlord, grocer, doctors, etc in the form of vouchers. This is to make it more likely that the money is well spent though somediscretionary income is necessary.
How do we pay for all this? Several ways;
1) a Robotics tax that would replace the lost income tax fromt he workers that are displaced. The corporations will still be making windfall profits with even that much.
2) a flat 10% sales tax on all monetary transactions - no individual income tax.
3) Corporate profit taxes around 15%.
To encourage corporations to continue employing people as long as possible give them an added take break on their corporate taxes by reducing the taxable profits by a percentage of their cost for human labor, somewhere from 50% to 100%.
Another humanitarian factor would be a government program to assist people in using new technologies to produce as much of what they need as possible, from 3D printing, to agroponics to microproduction using nanites.
But we are going to see more radical change in our society over the next twenty years than we saw in the last 200 and we need to be ready at the rudder to avoid the shoals.
