BI is not for work, it's for when there is not enough opportunity for work that is productive enough to both better the worker measurably plus provide a return for the master.
Regardless of whether it's a shrinking economy everywhere or just one of the selected demographics or career fields which opportunity can be found receding from, or even "just" creeping credentialization with its growing exclusionary effect.
Plus what if there was never enough opportunity to begin with in one way or another?
What BI is really for is so that nobody ends up with absolutely nothing. On a regular basis while the rest of the world has descended into a situation where it's not enough to be fully out of debt and ahead of the game quite well at any one point. Not that many decades ago this had been enough to gain a secure enough foothold along the path to upward economic mobility. The need for cash outlays on a monthly basis has skyrocketed, just to be able to participate in the same society as those millions having only barely-productive jobs. And the threshold between productive vs barely-productive can be a faster-moving goalpost that can provide a distorting illusion to "smart" people no different than anybody else.
A country can't even afford the most minimal "welfare" payouts to a small minority of the most disenfranchised citizens if the country itself is a "poor" country in a serious way that would need to be remedied beforehand. But beyond a certain point any country that was successful as a whole to a certain extent would be able to afford to fix it at least for a minimally significant portion of citizens whom it would help the most. And the most detrimental effect it could have on the overall economy would naturally be minimally significant. And that's the cost for a place that is not a rich country at all and can barely afford anything like this. Some people are just better at math than others.
In a truly rich country you have overwhelming resources compared to that, so you can draw the line where a lot more significant percentage of citizens can be kept away from the zero mark. How rich are you capable of being anyway?
There's not much difference between now and over 50 years ago when the continuous devaluation of currency was commenced. Other than scale. Back then only a small minority of citizens was left with absolutely nothing on a regular basis whether they had a job or not and whether that job was nearly as financially beneficial to others more so than the worker. A handful of people would be using food stamps at the supermarket, now it's every single cashier multiple times per hour.
People paying the workers are so heavily in debt now it can't work the same any more, and the workers themselves are even worse off at the same jobs.
But it's the same system, only the balance of wealth has changed and the buffer that has been increasingly absorbed is the citizen's resource level needed to avoid being pushed to zero by ever-more-prevailing forces.
Now no matter how you do the math, it's not a small minority of the most opportunity-denied citizens who need something on a regular basis to keep from going to zero. It's getting to be a serious majority who are increasingly at risk and the sooner something is done about it the better since it could take quite a while to take effect and the first salvo might not have enough smart people making the decisions.
UBI is not some new concept, it's just regular BI all grown up since it seems like everybody is at risk now, no differently than only the worst-off were facing before so much of a country's wealth had been extracted from the citizens to who knows where. It took a while but it's just about squeezed dry.
A valid argument against UBI is that everybody doesn't actually need it yet, but you've got to remember that for things to continue trending in the direction having the greatest financial momentum, more people will be needing it if the true beneficiaries (rent-seekers) are to continue experiencing the growth prospects they have in mind.
Basic income on the scale of welfare programs for a small minority of the most poor aren't quite the same. A UBI is a much more broad program, even if it doesn't help every single person it does attempt to prop up a large chunk of the population. At that point we're solving the wrong problem.
That were we definitely agree. A growing number of people in the US are falling behind. We need to fix the root cause of that though, the lack of money is only an obvious symptom. If our social, political, or economic systems are the underlying problem then let's fix those. Throwing a UBI at the problem creates even more chaos in the system and we simply don't know what the side effects will be.
Worse, if a UBI isn't the right answer we will have wasted all of our attention and political capital forcing it through. We almost certainly would walk away feeling like we solved it and end up in a worse spot when we're blind to the still growing problem. Roe v Wade comes to mind, we hung our hat on the victory of one supreme court decision when what was really needed was legislation codifying the decision.
