>What are good alternatives? I'm not an expert but here is my thinking: Basic income could be interest-free debt extended by the government, whose repayment i

>What are good alternatives? I'm not an expert but here is my thinking: Basic income could be interest-free debt extended by the government, whose repayment is done entirely from future taxes, i.e. without increasing the taxes they would have otherwise paid. This would motivate people to stop accumulating the debt quickly, it would force people to make investments into their education (to increase earnings later), and it would act as a smaller incentive to game the system than a pure money transfer. The basic reason basic income is so important is that people are not able to make any investment of their time if they are trying to make ends meet: going to work for McDonald's is not an effective strategy for climbing out of the poverty hole. Staying home and attending classes or learning a skill, however, is. There are few people whose natural talents are so low that after investing 5-10 years, they cannot become skilled or productive enough to contribute meaningfully to society. Additionally it would finance artistic endeavors which often take over a decade of practice before producing anything worth being sold. Indeed, many artists could fail ever to make a meaningful tax contribution (to repay the basic income they were given), however, this may be a burden society as a whole could bear. In addition there should be some kind of easy grace period or tapered end of benefits so that accepting a job does not "endanger" someone's benefits that they're already receiving. We can't talk about all the different parts of society, but to talk about this incentives thing in terms of hackers: some programmers will choose to devote themselves to open source and take a basic income. This is simply a fact. For years, (5-10-20 years) they will live on basic income and contribute to open source. This is just a simple byproduct of introducing basic income. So what needs to happen is that after someone has done that for 15 years, if a commercial company wants to hire that hacker for some reason, then there needs to be a smooth way for the hacker to accept that salary. This transition is a difficult one, but ideally, over a few years of working for their corporate sponsors, they'll have generated enough taxes to repay all of their previous transfer payments. All of the future taxes they generate are now tax base value that never would have existed without the basic income. So this kind of a 'success story' can work. Basic income needs to be quite low, i.e. not much of an incentive, and it is important for people not to feel like they are endangering their basic income, by taking paid work. I believe these issues can be solved very well.