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If people waste their basic income on alcohol, well, so what? I don't know the tax situation in Switzerland, but in the US, that means a big chunk of that money
by mistercow 13y ago
If people waste their basic income on alcohol, well, so what? I don't know the tax situation in Switzerland, but in the US, that means a big chunk of that money is immediately reclaimed as taxes. The rest goes back into the economy, and the person is not really in any worse of a situation than they would have been without basic income.
It's one situation where basic income doesn't really help, but it doesn't really hurt either.
- breischl 13y agoThe money did come from someone else in the first place, where it would almost certainly have been better-spent than on getting wasted. And you may just be enabling a substance abuse problem to continue and worsen. To put it another way, you end up where you would have without the guaranteed income, except that the alcoholic has done that much more damage to him/herself, and the taxpayers are that much poorer. So I'd say that yeah, in that particular case it does hurt.