 Universal basic income. The good, the bad, and the ugly. So what is universal basic income? What in the shell, it's a government wants to give you free money. And hopefully in this video, I'm going to be covering the good, the bad, and the ugly of universal basic income because there are a lot of beneficial things associated with universal basic income. At the flip side, there's a lot of very negative things associated with universal basic income. So basically the idea is there is going to be a necessity that every single person will need a guaranteed check from the government because where we're going right now is loss of jobs due to automation, loss of jobs due to bad economic policies, I wonder whose fault that is, right? Loss of jobs through globalization, et cetera, et cetera. Bottom line is jobs are shrinking, buying power of the dollar shrinking, opportunity is shrinking, and the average salary people are making are shrinking. That's what they're telling you. So they're like, where do we go? We don't want to eliminate the middle class. We don't want people to starve. We need to figure out a new system vis-a-vis UBI. But UBI is nothing new. UBI goes back 40, 50 years. There's many different versions of UBI. Later on in this video, I'll be talking to you about how I believe if there is ever going to be UBI, how I believe the best process for UBI to happen. So let's talk about some pros with UBI, universal basic income. Number one, my biggest pro is it would eliminate the current social programs that the government offers. So let's look at the welfare program. The welfare program is a joke. It's actually designed to limit and negate your ability to climb up the social structure ladder of success, because the incentives are skewed. It pretty much dictates, and these are just arbitrage numbers. And it's different, obviously, every country, every province, right? It dictates, let's say, okay, the welfare program will supply you and your family, let's say an individual plus two kids will supply you, let's say, 35, 40K, based on your needs. Now, if that person goes out and works, and if that person makes, I don't know, $1 more, $2 more, even $500 more, they lose their welfare. Well, why would that person only make $500 more when they're getting this money for free? And so the whole system skew, it doesn't help you, doesn't help you with new education properly, well, proper education, doesn't help you with continuing to find higher employment, so you get paid more money at the exact same time, still getting support. So the whole welfare system, there's some nefarious thoughts when it comes to the welfare system about why they created and who they created that for, but it's been an epic fucking failure. It's a black hole of sucking money in. So number one, if UBI was to happen, true UBI, the current welfare system would disappear. So that's a benefit, right? We would eliminate all that, and then we would replace that with UBI. Number two, all other current social programs attach to welfare, let's say food stamps in the United States, that would be eliminated as well, because the whole idea is, these are just random numbers they pulled out, too. It's going to be arbitrage, depending on nation, country, state, province, et cetera. Let's say $2,000. Arbitrarily, they'll give you $2,000 from the government. So the reason is why do you need UBI? Well, we can look at the Maslow Higher Crib Needs. At the bottom, what matters the most is you have roof over your head and food on your table. That's all that matters, really. Once you have housing covered and you have food on the table, you're pretty much covering the basic necessities of a human being, and everything else from there is uphill. And so that $2,000 is going to cover your rent and it's going to cover your food. And now you don't have to worry about that. And if you look at today's, let's say, expenses, majority people, what do they spend on? Mortgage, food, and basic living. So that's the idea. So the pro for that aspect is, I think from elimination of the welfare program, eliminating as many bureaucrats as possible, eliminating the food stamp program, and eliminating all these very bad and negative government programs, and then supplementing that with the brand new UBI, I think that is a net utility. That is a positive. I think that's a real big positive. Number two positive is yet to be seen, but there are studies happening from a psychological aspect as, will this safety net, I put in the quotation because long term it's not a safety net, will this safety net psychologically give people moral support so they can go now do more risky behavior, meaning they might take more risks in doing new ventures or businesses or different ideations out there. That's yet to be seen. That's yet to be seen. And UBI is trying to paint the picture that everybody's the same or not. If everyone is the same, like everyone will have the same motivations and ambitions. That's not how human nature works. Everybody's really very different. But in my eyes, that's the biggest benefit is replacing the current model, eliminating as many bureaucracians as we can, and supplementing with a new model. Okay. Now let's go to some cons. And there's a lot of cons. My biggest con for UBI is actually subtracting from UBI. It's a monetary policy itself because at the end of the day, regardless of if you now take welfare away, we deviate the taxes that we're already going to welfare and put it towards UBI. At the end of the day, what UBI doesn't solve for, it doesn't solve for inflation, it doesn't solve for commoditization of salaries, and it doesn't solve for inflationary prices for rent and food. If you look at statistics, one thing trending from the last 100 years is pretty much rent and real estate goes up. Same with produce. Produce is going up. And so if you're looking at the inflationary rate of 2% per year, you're looking at the rate of rent going up, and you're looking at the rate of produce going up, pretty much UBI is losing, or let's subtract that, your dollar that you're receiving is losing on average 3.5 to 5% per year, losing power, right? And so you have a dollar today, next year, that dollar is only worth 90 cents, so forth and so forth. And so let's fast forward 10 years, right? So let's fast forward year by year. And so if you're looking at this monetary policy, every year that $2,000 you're receiving per month will need to drastically increase to fight off inflation and to fight off the cost of rising rent. Where the fuck does this money come from? It doesn't come from anywhere, because our monetary policy is broken. If you look at the average life length of the fiat currency, it's 27 years. The average life length of the fiat currency is 27 years. And pretty much they destroyed the dollar, right? I think 2008 was truly the end of free market capitalism, at least in the United States with the bailout of everybody. Quantitative easing has fucked everything up, pretty much printing $2 trillion flooding the market. So what happens if you have a skewed supply and demand? Well, if you have huge supply, prices drop. That's what's happening with the dollar, right? Why would any rich nation or sovereign wealth fund or any person of extreme affluence put their money in currency if they don't even know the supply and demand of that currency? They wouldn't. This is one of the reasons why Bitcoin is remarkable. We know exactly the issuance of Bitcoin. We know exactly how many Bitcoins there will be in one, two, three, four, five, six years from now. There's no guesstimating. It's mathematics. Well, in the world of the Fed, the Federal Reserve, there is no mathematics. It's funny money. It's print-on-demand money as much as we want and create different derivatives of that. So the actual backbone of the monetary policy makes UBI a short-term fix only, completely short-term fix. It doesn't solve anything because due to inflation and due to the cost of prices going up, where the fuck is this money coming from? It's not going to come from anywhere. There's the same. You can rob from Paul to pay Peter until Paul is fucking broke and that's what's going to happen because the money has to come from somewhere and the money will eventually disappear because we have the worst horrible monetary policies because of, thank you, the Fed. Thank you for destroying our currency, especially here in Canada. You guys have it better in the States. Canadian dollars sucks. Oh my God, anywhere we travel, it's horrible. So that's like the biggest issue I have for UBI. Now, I do agree that there are people out there that need help. Fuck yeah, 100%. And so that being said, eliminating the current welfare system and any social programs are attached to that and trying to reduce as many bureaucracons as possible, that's a win in my books. Now, their version of UBI is just giving money away. It's horrible. I think the whole incentive model is a broken. Charlie Munger has a good saying, show me the incentives and show you the outcomes. So my take on this, and this is not my original thoughts, people were thinking about this for a very long time, is instead of UBI, we have universal basic dividend. And so this is my thinking when it comes to universal basic dividend. So imagine having a national wealth fund called the Citizens Fund, where we take our pre-existing taxes that is going into the current welfare system and we deviate that to the Citizen Fund, the universal basic dividend fund. And now, this dividend fund is not run by the Fed. It's not run by the government. It's run by third party. We're gonna make this a real fund. And like any good fund, we're gonna have a fiduciary manager responsible for this fund. And so this fiduciary manager's responsibility is to reinvest in local businesses and local economies. And so now it starts investing in local businesses, local economies. Like any fund will have different categories. We're gonna have short-term investment, long-term investment, maybe some arbitrage, hedge fund investments, etc. And so we're gonna take this sovereign, let's call it since I'm from Canada, we're gonna take this sovereign Canadian fund. We're gonna have a GP and LP. Every province can be LP and the GP will be by the third party fund, complete, devoid of the government. And each province then can deploy on local territories. And so the whole idea is like, we wanna reinvest into local businesses, reinvest into entrepreneurs, and reinvest into infrastructure within our own nations. And we as citizens, we're getting a dividend, which is great too, because it's cheaper on taxes. We get taxes as a dividend. And so imagine this. Like any good fund, you need something called an IRR, internal rate of return. Ideally, as if you've been following this video, we want to beat inflation and we wanna make a profit. And so let's say we wanna beat 3.5%, right? 2% plus, let's say, rise of cost for stuff, like rent and the basic stuff. So we wanna be 3.5%. So the fiduciary's responsibility and like we can look at like REIT returns of like maybe 5% to 8% range. So REIT is a real estate investment trust vehicle. And so we can have, we can say, okay, this fiduciary's responsibility, 7% return. That's amazing. So we are not only beating inflation, but yielding a return on our dividend plus it's cheaper on our taxes. Actually, this should be tax-free, scratch that. The universal dividend income should be tax-free, zero tax. So now this is a sustainable model where instead of just giving handouts, we're creating a proper ecosystem to drive new businesses, to help local people, to help infrastructure, to help entrepreneurs, and to increase opportunities in our nation. And so that's my take on UBI. You know, I didn't wanna go too deep in on it. I think the short-term solution for UBI is broken, completely broken. I think the monetary policy needs to be fixed first, bottom line. We can't continue, keep on printing with QE quantitative easing. We can't keep on stealing from other people, expecting that money to last forever. And this proposal that they have for UBI right now is just a short-term fix. And I haven't even gone into the political issues with UBI when it comes like, okay, imagine a party comes in the future and decides to take it away. That party would never be voted in. It's kind of like, it's there forever. That's my firm believer in the universal basic dividend because any good fund manager, if that fund manager does not return the proper rate of return expected to return, he's fired. This isn't run by the government. This isn't run by Bureau shitheads. This is pretty much controlled by third party, funded by the citizens of that nation. Through not more taxation, it's through existing taxes that we pay that's deviated towards this. In this case would be the welfare program. We take the welfare money and put in the universal dividend fund. And guess what? If that universal dividend fund is doing amazing, I'm gonna fucking put more money. I'm gonna take my income, put it in there, and then I'll get, I can take my tax-free savings, just kind of put it into a dividend fund. The whole reason why the universal dividend fund is so superior to regular universal basic income, it creates proper incentive models and structures. It creates this more sustainable model to beat inflation, to support your local businesses, local infrastructures, as opposed to like, here's a free handle for money. We don't know, don't worry where the money comes from. It's gonna be here forever. It's an absolute joke. And there's models right now. Alaska has this. People get oil revenue. They have Alaska fund for oil. They get a revenue. Kuwait has an interesting model for this, but no one has really done this full blown, where we take pre-existing money, so money being spent on bad, horrible programs, like the welfare program, and just deviating for that. And so that's my take on universal basic income. There are some benefits, but more or less, it's completely broken in my eyes. And until the monetary policies of quantitative easing, printing on demand, and the most horrible banking practices are fixed, no fucking UBI will fix anything. And hopefully, if UBI will be implemented, it's gonna be more or less in a dividend model, where we actually stimulate the economy, we stimulate entrepreneurs, and we create something that's sustainable to beat inflation. If you guys have any questions for me, leave a comment below this video and I'll talk to you guys soon. Peace!