I continue to ask: what happens when dad gambles away the UBI income? What happens to the children of the family?
Are you all ready to turn you back on that? Dads who gamble, moms who put family income up their noses.
Tell me the consequence in your world for those actions, what happens?
I am ready to turn my back on those cases. We turn our backs on neglectful parents already. To a great extent, I don't get to judge how someone else should model behavior and raise their children. If the neglect gets too severe, maybe there should still be a DCF intervention to put the kids in state/foster care.
The key thing (and I'm not sure if it was mentioned up-thread or on another UBI discussion) is to allow the learning to be short cycled. Maybe you get the UBI money every day via electronic draft. Maybe you get it once a week. Make a bad call and take it all to the track, you go hungry for a few days but have the chance to connect your actions to the outcome. (By the way, you can still pick up a shovel, rake, or broom and work a day laborer job someplace. There's nothing that says once you blow your UBI that you can't ever get another dime any other way until the next deposit.) Maybe you need to borrow from friends or family.
Imagining that a tiny sliver of the population will be seriously mis-allocating their UBI should not paralyze into trying to prevent harm from coming to those people. Moms who will put UBI up their nose or dads who will put it in their veins already exist and those kids are already in trouble. The fact that we can't save 100.0000000% of the population from spending their money in a way that we judge is unwise is not a reason to erect restrictions that will drive costs up and overall efficacy of the program down.
I dont thnk it is a tiny sliver, and I think a program of comfortable free flowing gubmnt money will only grow the population who wants to sit back and collect it.
But in the theoretical, sure, I agree with you that a Universal Basic Income, if it saves the federal government money, is s good thing and it is fine with me. I appreciate your answer that you are ready to "turn your back" on the troublesome parents who leave their children to starve because I thnk it is an answer that is honest.
Please understand that in our society of safety nets, those same children today, while "in trouble" as you say, DO have government protection via foodstamps,and public housing, at least theoretically. Their drug addled parents may not be able to grab and keep,those services, however.