No, it will encourage poor people to live like illegals with 20 (unemployed) people jammed into one apartment working job that pay under the table. Hunger is a pretty damn powerful motivator.
If you want to help poor people, get rid of minimum wage and other regulatory barriers to hiring.
Well, I'd do the latter as well. The argument is that with the BIG you wouldn't need a "minimum wage" protecting you, any money you make improves your condition, and making more helps you more or less linearly until you're earning enough that you're paying more than the BIG in taxes.
And remember, illegals stuffed 20 into an apartment are generally all working. At FOUR people on my BIG, they hit the poverty line. And it's not that tough for 1 of them to go out and get a job of some sort to bring in niceties. If they aren't family, the one working for nice things is likely to want to keep most of the nice to themselves, as they worked for it. So others all get jobs, like I did as a teenager to support my car habit and more. Once they get used to the idea of having to work for niceties, they will probably want to work for more money, for even nicer things. Unlike the current situation, where they recognize that earning $1 more an hour will cost them $10k in benefits, so they sit on their asses at an almost minimum wage part time job. Because they'd need to go from $10/hour@20 hours a week to $20/hour @ 40 hours a week to be truly ahead under the current system, all in one jump. And that's tough unless your actual title is "college student" or such.
1. If they're that desperate to "not work", I'm afraid that we know what they currently do - crime. And imprisoning them is an order of magnitude more expensive than the BIG. I may not
like it, but I consider somebody living only on the BIG payment and avoiding jail because a conviction removes the payment for a time, and living on it is marginally better than without, to be superior. Cheaper at least.
2. Difficult, but encourage them to NOT have kids. This would limit it to basically a sharp decline in hardcore moochers, because they'd stop having kids for hardcore mooching. Some would still get pregnant and such, but they'd likely have ONE kid, not a dozen. Because they aren't getting more money.
If it ain't funded by my tax dollars, I don't give a damn. I am not forced to contribute.
The problem, as I see it, is that it is a tragedy of the commons problem. There isn't enough charity out there to cover the "needs", and I'm defining "needs" as "spend the money now, or spend gobs more later" fixes.
Take schools, for example. Sure, I might not like some of my taxes going towards them. I'd be better off if I didn't have to pay. However, if I don't pay, if
everybody doesn't pay, 20 years down the road we'll all find that we've screwed ourselves because the next generation aren't capable of taking over the trained positions we need filled in order to keep having the services and products we enjoy like medical care. That we'll have a bunch of criminals instead.
So I consider school taxes(and other things) a cost of living in a civilized society(more or less, it's a sliding scale). That doesn't mean that I don't want them to be so efficient with the money they take from me and others that the money
screams. That I don't recognize that that is impossible and must settle for just 'mostly efficient'.
