Ask Lemmy

Wouldn't this approach require a massive bureaucracy for enforcement?

As a simple example, let's say I earn $100 at my job and take in another $100 from UBI. I now have $200 in my bank account. Once it's in my account, $1 is $1. If I turn around and spend $10 on the devil's lettuce and porn (quite the bargain if you ask me) how is the government going to prove it's UBI dollars I'm spending? I can think of 3 possible solutions and they all have serious potential problems:

• I keep and provide all of my receipts for the month to prove that $100 or less total was spent only on things that weren't marijuanas and porn (not really feasible for most people, and also easy to defraud)
• I have a separate UBI account and a special debit card that won't let me buy certain things or only works at certain places (similar to how EBT or FSA work already, but government could interfere with this account for arbitrary reasons)
• We create a new currency, a "digital dollar", either alongside or as a replacement for USD (the really worrisome one, everything here is fully tracked and controlled at the whim of whoever is in government)

In my opinion, UBI should be given without strings attached. Even ignoring the moral questions around controlling how people spend their funds, trying to do any of the above would result in massive overhead from having to create and administer these new controls, possibly exceeding the loss coming from a small minority who would possibly misuse the funds, or it just gives the government way too much control. This could actually serve to entrench inequality and disenfranchisement rather than providing a way to ease them.