Why Universal Basic Income Cannot Work

A polite response to Geoff Pain PhD

Apr 24, 2025

Recently I read an article by Geoff Pain PhD titled: “Reader Poll - Do you Support a Universal Minimum Income?”. Universal Minimum Income, I believe is another term for Universal Basic Income (UBI). Geoff’s a great guy, we often talk, and I think he was well meaning with the article.

However I think it reflects a lot of misconceptions people have about UBI on the Internet, and I wanted to take time to address that.

Inside the article was a poll asking a question, which had loaded responses:

Normally a poll should be neutral. A simple yes or no would suffice. I spite loaded, bias polls. I voted no, and wanted to explain why, in-depth.

It’s not because I “prefer many people live in poverty” like some cliche moustache twirling villain who hates poor people. UBI isn’t designed to help people out of poverty; even the rich get UBI, hence why it is called ‘universal’ and not ‘welfare’. It is not a sound expenditure of resources.

I don’t say this from a position of ignorance, either. I’ve previously been in an extensive, verbal debate with a Canadian who is a through-and-though member of the WEF, on the subject of why it cannot work. Technical, in-depth arguments. I say this as someone thoroughly opposed to poverty. UBI is a pop culture meme that breaks apart when you analyse it.

Why Did I Vote Against It?

Fraud.

This one weird trick that all globalists hate!

The underlying argument for UBI is that it will “save money” (whose money is it saving?) by having zero checks (hence the ‘universal’ part), so literally anyone can apply. Including rich people who don’t need it, and fraudsters. Fraudulent applications plague all welfare systems, not just UBI, but UBI, having no checks, would make the problem rampant, on an unseen scale.

When confronted with this, the Canadian WEF globalist I debated fell back on the meme of globalist digital ID. Ignoring the fact UBI now requires a mass surveillance state — too high a price for privacy, in my mind — I pointed out the poorest often don’t have ID.

The Poorest Cannot Apply

Have you noticed how bank statements, utility bills, drivers licences, insurance, etc all require a living address? Homeless people don’t have fixed living addresses. They get caught in a Catch-22; they need ID/bank card/bank account/etc to make/store money, but they can’t get those things because they have nowhere to live; they have nowhere to live because they can’t make money. Oh, crap!

To open a bank account (perhaps this varies by country; it is true in the UK), they need proof of living address, two utility bills, a passport or a driver’s licence, and two people willing to vouch for them. And if you don’t have those checks, then you invite money laundering, scams and fraud.

This isn’t speculative bullshit, either. I tried to help numerous homeless people in my time; the Catch-22 is real. Sometimes it’s even more complex than that; for example, governments will offer to rehouse them, but it is in a faraway, remote location, where they’re unable to beg, their primary source of income (government welfare can take weeks, months to process or be outright declined), and so they have to refuse to be rehomed.

Some don’t even want to be helped. As crazy as this sounds, some choose willingly to live on the streets. It might be due to mental illness, or the deepest form of depression. Some live it as a punishment to themselves, or because they have nothing to live for. Throwing money at the problem will not solve it. It requires tailored, custom solutions; it requires efforts. Throwing money at stuff to “solve it” is a rich person’s meme.

Theft And Drug Use

When I pointed out the flaw of the lack of ID, the WEF globalist said they would just hand out prepaid cards to the homeless. Which sounds like it might work. Until you realise homeless people regularly get stolen from. That $500 a week/month, they have to somehow hold onto, the entire time they are vulnerabe and exposed on the streets.

And the ones with drug addictions would just instantly spend the money on drugs. Which in-turn endangers their lives. At this point the globalist started to struggle: he proposed some sort of food-only EBT system, but I pointed out homeless people have needs beyond just food (clothes, for example).

He proposed expanding it to give them access to essentials, but then I pointed out fencing is a thing, too; many people on EBT in America sell expensive foods they buy (rather than the food stamps themselves which is illegal), for a major discount, in order to generate cash for themselves to bypass the EBT system denying them access to cash. As soon as you introduce crime, fraud and desperation, the system starts to break down.

Still Unemployed And Subsidises Wages In Employed

Numerous studies confirm it: UBI does not change the employment rate. People’s personal situation does not improve. They are not able to climb out of their hole even with the money because it presumes an entrepreneurial ability that most people just don’t have.

In cases where they already had work, they were more likely to quit because they realised income was not dependent on contributions.

In cases designed to counter this (E.G. a government stipend paid for the person being in work), employers exploited the fact they were being paid by the government and reduced the paid wages, or were passed over for promotion. The UBI recipient couldn’t quit because their stipiend was dependent on them being in work. So rich employers got a free wage subsidy.

Somehow, in every scenario, UBI made things worse.

Gives Untrustworthy Government Too Much Control

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UBI pretends there’s this cheery dystopia where everyone scans their ‘mark of the beast’ forehead and receives a government approved stipend — subject to ‘no hate speech’™ — and requiring they get into the death pod at the age of 50 akin to Logan’s Run.

You might think that’s tongue in cheek but the Midazolam Murders prove the globalist has no love of old people — deemed a burden rather than a wise knowledge source. Or bigots. Or racists. Or anyone they label a terrorist because they’re resisting the forehead stamp of the beast. Anyone who doesn’t conform to their beliefs, really.

The analogy here is the government is giving people fish, rather than giving them the tools to fish for themselves. I don’t want to be co-dependent on someone else handing me out a fish, especially not a government that endorses genocide at the behest of religious groups.

Well What If We…

As the debate got deeper and deeper into the technicalities — honed from my years of experience campaigning against government waste, proposing corrections to the system, fixing fraud, spotting security holes, and more — the WEF globalist started to flail wildly with caveats and technicalities that took them from ‘here’s UBI’ (a system with no checks or controls) to ‘here’s a welfare system with more stringent checks and slightly more accessibility to homeless people’.

So what we have already, really, but with some shiny stickers.

If you have to caveat, create exceptions, invent weird technicalities or workarounds, the idea has lost.

You Can’t Afford It

I even took the WEF globalist through the back of the envelope calculations using a best case scenario, where only the valid members of the population could apply. I took America, used a rounded population figure of 330 mil to keep things simple, assumed $500 a month per person (even though you could never afford rent in the majority of places with that little; rent is between $1k-$2k as a starter in some places)…

…it would cost you 165 billion per month, or $1,980,000,000,000 ($1.98 trillion) per year.

Now before you point out that the US government spends $1 trillion on the US military (absoluely awful waste of money), this is debt expenditure. The US government is going deeper into debt spending that money. That is not a sustainable course of action. You’re currently +$40 trillion in debt and you need to pay that off first before you start doing any handouts.

However, unlike the military, the UBI handouts pay people, for literally doing nothing. Yes, you, like myself, object to the genocides and overseas wars, but the US military does also, rarely, help out in disaster relief efforts, and sometimes even border security. They’re employees, paid workers; not merely UBI ‘stay at home, do nothing’ recipients. The US military, in their own twisted, wicked way, contribute to the US economy.

Smaller countries without the powerhouse GDP of the US (currently estimated to be $26+ trillion) which isn’t even the US’ budget (GDP is not tax earnings), literally cannot afford UBI.

The UK for example, makes ‘only’ an estimated $4 trillion in GDP, and UBI would cost them on the lower end of $396 billion (a third of a trillion; or 1/12th the national GDP, which isn’t the national budget, GDP is not tax earnings); about the same as they spend to run the entire NHS. Imagine paying the same amount of money as the NHS but getting nothing for it. Crazy!

There’s Knock-On Effects To Expenditure Too

So, lets say you cut every budget known to man. You gut NPR, the BBC, you naively think other countries won’t invade and attack you and you dismantle your entire standing military force. You dismantle every agency that has caused harm, and you leave only the IRS running (taxes finance this thing, right?). You’ve made millions unemployed but it is okay, they’ll be ‘reemployed’ under UBI.

You then magically give everyone exactly what they need, magic ‘Communist utopia’ style. So if they need $1k for rent and $500 for food, you ‘ping’ the exact amount into their account.

Do you know what happens when you do this?

Companies increase what they’re charging. And this isn’t simply ‘muh price gouging’. Now everybody has more money, there’s increased expenditure, and increased expenditure increases competition. So it isn’t just ‘poor people can afford rent now’ but everyone can afford rent, and they all want that particular house, flat, apartment, place, so the person renting it increases their prices until there’s a winner.

Think of it like an auction house, but you give everyone who intends to bid an extra $1k each. All of them will bid $1k minimum on the thing they all want, but only the person with *more* than $1k (I.E. the rich person) will get it. You didn’t increase availability, you just increased the bottom floor price.

There’s a finite supply of housing, and an unlimited supply of money; so it demands prices go up. The moment you have to say ‘but what if we introduce price controls’, you have to admit UBI has failed. Because the price isn’t the problem; it never was. It was the lack of supply.

If You Want To Make Things Cheaper, Make More Of The Things You Need

When the WEF globalist admitted defeat, and then got angry — what the hell better idea did I have? I told him.

If you want to make food prices cheaper for the poorest, make more food (the Netherlands, a tiny slither of land, feeds a large chunk of the world, it can be done; this is something globalists are opposed to under ‘muh climate change’ by the way). You can supply food banks. Why pay cash to corporations for food if you can just supply the food?

If you want housing to come down, prevent other people from hoarding houses (a person only needs one house to live in) and make more houses.

If you want electricity to be cheaper, make more electricity. Find cheaper methods of electricity generation.

If you want people to find employment, make more jobs.

If you want medicine to be affordable, make medicine manufacturing cheaper.

If you want homeless people to have a home, don’t give them money, give them somewhere to live.

If you want unemployed people to start a business, teach them how to become self-employed; don’t put tax obstacles in their way when they’re first starting out. Make becoming self-employed ridiculously easy.

People don’t need more money, what they need is their pre-existing money to go further. They need things to be cheaper, more affordable. The chief complaint about rent isn’t that they’re poor, but rent is too expensive; so find ways to lower the rent. Find out why it costs so damn much.

You don’t need to throw money at the problem, you need to properly fix the damn problem itself.

The Daily Beagle

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