Well they are valuable to me, but no one else :-)

Thanks for the article links! The dilemma I always have is that I don’t have enough time for those things — I have to work to pay my bills.

It has always seemed to me that as a society, we have let greed control the structure of our lives. Human hunter gatherers had to forage and hunt eight hours a day to acquire enough food to live. Today, it seems like we still have to work for the same amount of time. That is not progress to me. Our quality of life is better in some ways, but worse in others.

It seems that the work world grabs as much of us as it can — until the point at which we cannot tolerate any more. Those who are not wealthy enough to stop working live a form of subsistence — just making it from one day to the next, while saving enough to send their kids to college and have enough left to retire.

It does not seem like we have actually made progress, in terms of the time that humans have to pursue what they love, instead of working to get by.

It seems to me that basic income is targeted at the part of the workforce that is at the bottom economically. To anyone who is middle class or above, and who lives in a metropolitan area, the money that a basic income would provide is inconsequential. But even today, a large part of our population is on disability — fraudulently in a large percent of cases — and that is why they have left the workforce and why the low unemployment numbers are so misleading. A basic income would merely daylight that — we would have a large part of the population intentionally not working and collecting “basic”. They would be those who are at the lower end of the economic spectrum. Everyone else would be subsidizing them.

I know that if I received a basic income that was less than $8,000/month it would not change anything about how I work or live, except that I would take more vacation days (I am a contractor) — I might even take months off at a time — would buy a new high end laptop, and would start putting aside more for my retirement, for when I stop working completely.

If it was more than $8000/month ($96,000/year) after taxes, I would consider stopping my work now, and pursuing things that I like but that are of no value to anyone else — and I might be content to live off the basic, provided by the remainder of the taxpayers who are still working. And I would wonder why those people don’t also stop working — or perhaps they would.

But I will read the articles you sent links for. Perhaps I am missing something! Thanks.