I suggest we use basic income to even pay wall street ceos - and here is why.
Give everyone a salary that allows them to afford food and rent. Including rich wall street bankers. This will help unsigmatize the "welfare queen" factor.
Second - since we have this habit of treating humans as lab rats and need to dangle "incentives" to drive them to be productive. Create a sliding scale on top that goes from 0 to S_max.
Everyone from the Walton family members to Jeff bozz gets paid S_max + food + rent and every homeless person gets paid 0 + food + rent.
If the overall GDP of the country improves S_max goes up. If there is food shortages or housing shortages then S_max does down.
There's a different matter though; Wall Street bankers implies they live in NY, where the cost of living is enormous; the basic income as described in this and similar articles wouldn't be nearly enough to cover even half of the cheapest cost of living.
And you need to live in expensive places because why exactly? Because the jobs are there. And why do you need to be where the jobs are? Because you need a job. And why do you need a job? Because you need to pay for your livelihood. And why do you still worry about that when you have BI?
Sure, some people still might want to do the kind of jobs you can only find in places with astronomical costs of living, but even BI can't prevent you from making unsound decisions like taking a job in an expensive place for a wage that barely pays your cost of living.
What BI can do, however, is eliminate the necessity of taking on that job or moving to that expensive place. And maybe if you can't find a job in the places you can afford to live, you just start your own company and create jobs for other people who can't afford to move to those places.
BI changes dynamics. I'm not saying people will stop moving to NY to work low income jobs but at least they have less incentives to do silly things like that.
>"the basic income as described in this and similar articles wouldn't be nearly enough to cover even half of the cheapest cost of living."
Actually, the system commonly discussed in Finland would work so that the basic money for living comes on top of housing costs. And this is what kills the system. We already have a system where the income of each person is topped up to a certain level of "livable level", on top of housing costs; this means that quite a number of people have not much incentive to optimize their housing cost as it is anyway paid by the government, and that in turn means that housing is quite expensive (comparison to NY is not entirely wrong). Property investors are happy, of course, because taxpayers foot the bill.
Overall, the problem is that what is called "atypical job" is nowadays typical, and the system cannot adapt. The only way seems to do it via an insolvency of the government.
Evening taking the location out of it though if you want to live in a large house basic income won't cover it. I think as long as it provides a basic level of living for everyone (small house - enough room for you and your family, basic healthy food costs, utilities) it's good enough. Then if you want a higher standard of living (eating out, mansion, car, vacations) you have to get a job. That way we keep people who want to work working but those who want to pursue pursuits without large financial upsides can.
Give everyone a salary that allows them to afford food and rent. Including rich wall street bankers. This will help unsigmatize the "welfare queen" factor.
Second - since we have this habit of treating humans as lab rats and need to dangle "incentives" to drive them to be productive. Create a sliding scale on top that goes from 0 to S_max.
Everyone from the Walton family members to Jeff bozz gets paid S_max + food + rent and every homeless person gets paid 0 + food + rent.
If the overall GDP of the country improves S_max goes up. If there is food shortages or housing shortages then S_max does down.