Kind of on topic, in the book Dying of Money they presented a “national dividend” concept. I tend to agree with the concept, a strong nation giving it’s poor a modest quality of life. This type of system would replace other handout mechanisms and would surely be easier to manage. Crime should in theory go down, incentive to achieve and EARN a higher quality of life should in theory go up. Right now America offers strong incentive to NOT WORK, the handouts are care packages intended to keep people IN THE DITCH. Whether we think this is by design or not matters not, it does seem to be our reality.
My gf has been out of work for 2 months with a disability. Paperwork is in, but took weeks of phone calls, and trips to doctors to get paperwork over and over that we were never told about on the first trip.
Over two months with ZERO income.
Way to go, douchebags.
this is topical for your situation… and softens my ‘american’ adjective at 8:10 
Save money for emergencies?
They will back date all the disability checks anyways and most places NYS short term disability is much much quicker I had to go through all this with my wife this year.
I’m pretty comfortable with the idea for a minimum quality of life. I don’t think people won’t work as hard as before, but people certainly won’t maintain a position only because they can’t afford a basic quality of life if they don’t. If someone one desires to be a doctor then they will obviously work their ass off to become one, and continue to do so in their profession. If someone desires to do as little as possible then the intrinsic rewards will follow their effort.
Don’t see how this falls on the government and all the rest of the tax payers.
Years ago you worked made a live and that was what happened…If you failed horribly family picked up the slack.
Fast forward till now people live in public housing, get welfare, and bang out as many kids as possible to get more money.
that’s a worst case scenerio but yeah it’s too common to ignore.
how do they manage this stuff in sweden, norway, finland etc?
surely they dont have the kind of $$$ necessary to be giving it away like the swiss or Qatar or Dubai who both already do some form of what is being discussed for switzerland for their native population.
on that Mincome example from Manitoba, Canada… MPI, the provincially run insurance company, if they turn a big profit every year they cut cheques back to their population for the overages. LINK
the president of MPI spot at a conference I spoke at a couple years back and had a pretty compelling argument in support of state-run insurance… they were able to reduce thefts and average costs of repair quite significantly. On the flip side, in Saskatchewan, the provincially run insurer just agreed to a huge labour rate increase for body shops… from mid $70’s up to $96 per hour in 2015 i think… that would make it the highest in Canada and probably higher than anywhere in the US too… seems there are some properly functioning state-run orgs… the counterpoint however is that the shops are typically not as competitive as the best in competitive provinces… but they are equal to the average ones.
I’ll get you a PDF of the book I mentioned. First it covers both an inflationary and deflationary depression. Then it covers things like your points/questions when it comes to the concept of a “national dividend”. In civilization the burden will always fall on tax payers & productive citizens one way or another man, we gotta pick our poison. I think it’s time we returned to a system that provides slackers just enough to survive. Remember when the government gave out go-ment cheese, barf worthy cans of goop and what are now considered hipster glasses to the poor? The stigma of looking poor and living a low quality of life offered all the incentive needed to keep most of society on track. Food stamps, bring them fuckers back. Why should people on handouts get to cloak the fact they are in our wallets? The stigma has been removed, it needs to make a comeback IMO.