I'm kinda iffy on this. In a lot of ways it definitely makes sense. Automation and efficiency are slowly killing jobs, while population is always rising so I certainly agree that there won't be enough jobs in the near future (maybe even now). But I have a few concerns. For one, I think we would absolutely need to get our debt under control and there would need to be good revenue coming in to the government. If we go with Charles Murray and have a $10,000 grant to every American we are looking at grants for 300,000,000 people, meaning an annual 3 trillion dollars would be spent on the program annually. So we are looking at a fifth of our current national debt being spent every year.
My second concern ties in with the first one. Say we pass this into legislation and every American gets this grant and this program stays in effect for one or two generations. But eventually, the program is no longer able to be sustained. Maybe we weren't able to control debt with the program in place, or we don't have enough revenue coming in, or even possibly our population grows much larger increasing the annual expenses. Then the problem becomes that the American people have become reliant on this money. So if the government is not able to continue giving out the grants, it is going to hit the people hard. Money that they were previously able to budget into their daily living expenses is gone and $10,000 is a lot of money to no longer have.
I'm definitely open to the idea of something like it, but I'm just not sure if it would ultimately good in the long run.
My second concern ties in with the first one. Say we pass this into legislation and every American gets this grant and this program stays in effect for one or two generations. But eventually, the program is no longer able to be sustained. Maybe we weren't able to control debt with the program in place, or we don't have enough revenue coming in, or even possibly our population grows much larger increasing the annual expenses. Then the problem becomes that the American people have become reliant on this money. So if the government is not able to continue giving out the grants, it is going to hit the people hard. Money that they were previously able to budget into their daily living expenses is gone and $10,000 is a lot of money to no longer have.
I'm definitely open to the idea of something like it, but I'm just not sure if it would ultimately good in the long run.
