 You know, universal basic income, universal basic income. So let's start with what it is. What is universal basic income? And, you know, how does it function? So I'm gonna take as probably the best idea here is a proposal made by Charles Mowey. Now, Charles Mowey is a pretty serious guy. Nothing Charles Mowey suggests should be taken lightly. He's not a lightweight, he's a heavyweight. He put out a book that basically makes this case. It's called In Our Hands, a Plan to Replace the Welfare State. And the idea is this, you know, people out there, we've got all these government programs that help people out. We've got welfare. We've got like 300 different welfare programs from food stamps to unemployment insurance, you know, insurance in quotes because it's not really insurance. To all these other different types of welfare and government help and government assistance, you know, Social Security has this massive program that if you get, you know, if you can't work or, you know, if you get injured, if you get something like that, there's huge amount of subsidies that go to you. So, you know, so you've got Social Security and you've got Social Security, so if you get old, right? If you get old, this is covered. And, you know, then there's Medicare. If you get sick and you're old, the government basically pays you healthcare bills. And then there's Medicaid, that if you're poor and you're sick, the government pays you medical bills. And then you've got, I don't know, what else do you have? You've got a million different things. You've got governments at the state level, the federal level, redistributing wealth from some people to other people on just a massive scale and constantly and in a hundred different types of programs. It's not even one program. It's, you know, there's so many government agencies from housing agencies that subsidize housing for the poor to all the different welfare agencies that exist out there. There are literally hundreds of programs. The big ones being big ones is just straight kind of welfare, but they're really big ones. And I consider these welfare, I know many of you don't. The really big ones are Social Security, Medicare, and the big one right now that's being discussed as part of the Obamacare. So-called pretend, let's pretend we're gonna repeal bill that Republicans can't actually even do that. That's a whole other topic I've already talked about. What we might talk a little bit about today is the inability of Republicans to repeal Obamacare. But so here, and then you've got Obamacare, right? Which Obamacare in and of itself is a massive subsidization of insurance rates, insurance rates to all different people, right? So young people and old people and sick people, everybody is getting a subsidy from the government, which is another form of welfare, right? So you've got, think about all the different ways, hundreds of different ways in which the government takes money from some people and give it to others, not put aside all the corporate welfare nonsense, all the subsidies there, we'll set those aside. We're not talking about those. We're just talking about, from person to person, person to person, redistribution of wealth, person to person, money taken from some and given to others all in the name of helping the poor. And really this has gotten pushed during two big pushes during three different administrations. During FDR's administration, when we got Social Security and we got much of the infrastructure of the office state, Johnson, where we got the war on poverty, the war on poverty, right? And of course, what has happened since the war on poverty was started in the 1960s, nothing. I mean, there's many people poor today as they were back then. It has done nothing to actually alleviate poverty, but as a consequence of that, we have had dozens and dozens and dozens of different welfare programs all instituted in the name of the war on poverty, right? So that was in the 1960s. And of course we got George W. Bush, a big-time welfare proponent who expanded Medicare through part D of Medicare, expanded Medicare dramatically. And again, Medicare is a massive welfare program. That's some of you say, but I pay my taxes. So only a fraction of Medicare's true costs are being paid by you, but it's not your money is paying for your expenses. Your money is going into a pool that then is given to some people. It's a massive redistribution of wealth. Your money is basically given to retired people today. So Medicare is a massive redistribution program. You cannot get away from that. It's same with Medicaid and same with Social Security. The Social Security Trust Fund has no money in there because all the money that you have given through your payroll taxes has been spent already. What does it mean it's been spent already? It's been given to people, it's been redistributed. All right, so all of this, so that's just a set of context, right? We have massive quantities of, massive numbers of welfare programs out there. And UBI at its best under the Charles-Mauri proposal, which I think is the best of all of them, would replace all of them with a fixed sum, same sum that everybody gets. All right, you're listening to your run book show. We're talking about UBI today or one of the topics we're gonna talk about. You're gonna get a very unique perspective that you won't get anywhere else. Share it, link to this, get your friends to listen, get your friends engaged. You can call in 888-900-3393. We'll be taking calls after this break. You'll be listening to your run book show. We're talking about redistribution of wealth. We're talking about the welfare state and we're talking about proposals to replace much of the welfare state with what's called universal basic income and a number of different proposals being floated out there from Silicon Valley, Mark Zuckerberg was talking about it the other day about how wonderful it is that in Alaska they have the equivalent of universal basic income, which is money, you know, there's a big fund in Alaska that everybody in Alaska gets a check from. It doesn't quite work that way, but Mark Zuckerberg was romanticizing it. And then you've got Elon Musk walking, going around the world saying, oh, jobs are gonna be lost. Nobody's gonna be working in a few years because robots are gonna do everything and then what are we gonna do? People are gonna die unless you know how to build robots unless you know, well, robots are gonna build robots, right? Human beings are gonna be going extinct, according to Elon Musk, because of robots, artificial intelligence. So we need to keep ourselves alive by redistributing wealth from the few of us we're gonna actually produce any wealth to the rest of us in the world. We're gonna have to redistribute wealth from robots to the rest of us. And actually, I think Bill Gates to go was talking about taxing robots. Taxing robots, because they produce the wealth, tax them and then redistribute the wealth to the rest of us and the rest of us will be happy, all right? If you wanna, I think we've got some problems on the phone lines, but you can try 888-900-3393. Give it a try and see, but if you've got any ideas, comments, suggestions about universal basic income, what's your view? What's your opinion about the whole thing? Let me know. Okay, so universal basic income basically is at least the Charles Marry proposal, which I think is the best I've seen so far. So I'm gonna take the best case, right? Basically says, we end all welfare programs, including, and I include under welfare programs, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and all the rest of the hundreds of other redistribution programs. So in the United States, we have 11 different medical welfare programs to aid the poor, 11 different programs on a federal level. We have cash aid. We have five different programs, right? Five different programs, including the only income tax credit, which we'll get to in a little bit, which is kind of a negative income tax. We've got 12 different food type programs, food stamps, food subsidies, food types problem, right? We've got 15 different educational programs, money given to poor kids to go to school, but 15 different ones. And then we've got 13 housing programs, 13 different programs that are all mean tested, that are all based on how poor you are, where we take money from some people and give it to others, right? 15 social services programs, eight employment and training programs, and two programs focused on energy, I guess subsidizing energy for poor people, oil and gas and electricity and whatever, right? Hundreds of these programs, hundreds. I mean, that's just the main big federal programs, the 80 plus federal welfare programs, the names of the departments, I've got a list here, it just goes on and on forever. That doesn't include any estate programs and all the rest of it, right? Why does it concern me, somebody ask? It concerns me because they're taking my money and they're spending it all these programs. They're taking my money, my tax money, and they're dishing it out to millions of people in the most inefficient, ridiculous way that's kind of the practical side of it, and then what right do they have to my money? They just take my money, they steal my money, and then they get to decide, they get to decide how to spend it, it's mine. Why not, why not me, right? Why not me taking, decide how to spend my money? It's my money, it's not theirs. How do you eat? How do you get money? You work, if you work, you earn money, you own it, you're not stealing it, you're not taking it from somebody else, then you spend it anywhere you want, and if you wanna help people by giving that money to charity by helping them out, great, good for you. If it's consistent with your values, and if you have the money to spare, and if you can't think of better uses for the money, go for it. But that's not the system we have, the system we have is you work hard, you make the money, and then the government steps in completely arbitrarily, because some people voted for some idiots in Washington, DC, and they've determined the tax rate, and they decide how much you'll move your money, they're gonna take away, and they're gonna spend it on some things you like and some things you hate, and a lot of things you hate, and you, you have no say in it, you have zero say in it, and that's, you know, that's the world in which we live, and that's this welfare state, and it's so inefficient, and it's so cumbersome, and think about the hundreds of thousands of bureaucrats working in it, who could be doing something productive, actually creating wealth instead of redistributing it, and sucking away their own salaries, and what Charles Marie suggests is very simple and very appealing to those of us who think the government is incredibly inefficient, and, you know, they are, those of us who think it's immoral what the government is doing, but incredibly, incredibly economically stupid and inefficient, one solution to that is to get rid of all these programs, get rid of all these programs, and then instead, just give people a check for a lump sum amount. In Charles Marie, in Charles Marie's case, it would be $10,000. Give everybody in the United States who's an adult, $10,000, and they can do whatever they want with their money, but they're not gonna get anything else from the government. That is it, and whether they have a job or not, they still get to $10,000. So it's not the case, like I've seen that often happens, that, you know, you have a job and you're making very little, let's say, barely surviving, right? And then you lose that job, and now you're getting welfare, because welfare is tax-free, you're getting welfare that's worth more than what you were making in the job, unemployment insurance, all these 90 programs, if you add them all up, you're actually getting more than what you got on the job. So getting a job now is negative. You have no incentive to go out and get a job. Your incentive is basically to stay on welfare. So what the alternative universal basic income does is it does away with that, because whether you have a job or don't have a job, you still get the basic income, you still get the $10,000. So your incentive now, if you wanna become wealthier, is to get a job because you get to keep the rest. All right, we're talking about universal basic income. You're listening to your own book show on the Blaze Radio Network. And so we set it up, right? We set it up. We've got all these welfare programs, and yet the idea is, Charles Murray's idea is, to replace all these welfare programs with just one, one simple payment, reduce the bureaucracy ultimately in the long term, reduce the cost of these welfare programs, take away the disincentive that people on welfare have to actually engage in work, actually to make a living, and sounds great. Now that's one thrust, one source of the argument. And that's Charles Murray, and that's what the conservatives and the white of you. But there's another thrust of the argument, and that comes out of Silicon Valley. And the other thrust of the argument is, look, guys, robots are gonna take all our jobs. So there's not gonna be work in the future to be done. There's not gonna be opportunities to actually engage in any kind of job. And suddenly, for a vast number of people on the planet who are engaged in manual labor, manual labor is gone, right? Manual labor is gonna disappear. Robots are gonna do everything. I mean, think about it. They're not gonna be assembly line jobs. They really are not gonna be assembly line jobs. And I agree completely. They're not gonna be auto jobs and auto parts jobs and manufacturing jobs. All those jobs are gonna be done by robots. And the robots are not sophisticated yet to do a lot of those jobs, but give it 10, 20 years. And the robots will do pretty much every manufacturing jobs that you can imagine. But then it's not just the manual jobs. The whole area of what's called artificial intelligence is gonna replace human beings in smart jobs as well. On figuring out the optimal way to design and construct an assembly line. I don't know that human beings do that today, never mind in the future. But here's one that I think is pretty amazing. They have a software today that if you feed it in like MRI scans, is better at detecting certain cancers than any radiologist is. And you can imagine software a hundred times more powerful in 10 years because the rate at which these things get better is exponential. A lot of technology today follows Moore's Law. Moore's Law is that, what was it that the speed of processing, computer processing, computer programming doubles every, I forget how many years Moore's Law is, but it's an exponential dramatic growth. Maybe somebody in one of the chats can remind me what Moore's Law does in terms of growth. So imagine this software, the smart software, the software that can analyze huge quantities of data, software that can actually learn, learn in a sense from the data. Moore's Law is every year doubles, right? So imagine the growth path when that happens and you can see it actually happening in computer processing power. Somebody else says two years, all right. When you guys decide whether it's a year or two years, let me know. We've got conflict on the chat board. But imagine what would happen in terms of robots, in terms of software, in terms of AI, in terms of all these things, to all these jobs, including things like radiology. So it's every two years a double, sorry, not every year, every two years, including radiology. It's massive growth, right? And so radiologists are gonna go away, but there are thousands of jobs that are gonna disappear. I mean, one of the things I tell people is one of the things you should do just as a self-help thing, as taking responsibility for your own life is really caring about your own life, is think, is think, consider. As part of your plan of your career, can a robot or computer take my job in the next five years, 10 years, 20 years? Take truck drivers, they're three and a half million truck drivers in the United States. Three and a half million truck drivers in the United States. And the real question is, what are they gonna do when you get self-driving trucks? Now, some people think that's five years away. I think it's more like 10, 20 years away, but at some point those three and a half million people will not have a job driving trucks. So what happens to them? And Elon Musk and Zuckerberg and a lot of these high-tech guys are saying, nothing, they're gonna starve unless we do something about it. And the solution, therefore, is to guarantee a basic income. Is to say everybody gets something. Now, they would probably do it higher than 10,000 because they don't think these people will ever get a job so they're gonna have to make it enough so people can really live on so they'll make it more than 10,000. Charles Murray suggests 10,000 because he actually expects these people to get a job above and beyond the 10,000. 10,000 is just a basic flaw, kind of a real social security for everybody. So this is the idea. So you've got two strands, a very kind of strand that comes from the high-tech industry, primarily held by people who have more left-leaning views. And that is the idea that people just not gonna have jobs because of robots, because of artificial intelligence. And then you have a whole strand that comes more from the right, more from conservatives, although a lot of the left supports this as well. That just as a way of being more efficient and replacing welfare, we've gotta take care of people, we've gotta give them some basic way of living. The system we have today is going bankrupt and it is going bankrupt. This country will be bankrupt because of social security and Medicaid. It's going bankrupt so we can simplify it, we can cut costs, we can cut bureaucracy and make it more efficient and take away the disincentive that people have when they're on welfare to get a job.