It is my assessment that the liberal and conservative classes are pushing universal basic income at just slightly above the poverty level for one reason and one reason only, to save the criminally inflated price of real estate and the banks and politicians that allowed this to happen. This is where the rubber really hits the road in politics, right at the central heart and underpinning of the entire economy, housing, commercial and residential.
The knuckle dragger's that put us in this position of having to provide the public with the rent subsidy called universal basic income, will only get away with poverty level universal basic income in an environment with an ever increasing price of real estate for a nanosecond.
As everyone starts crunching the numbers of poverty level universal basic income in an environment of an ever increasing price of real estate, it will occur to enough people who have been on welfare before, that it will be an entitlement like welfare that will most likely stay flat while the musical chairs of who will survive the housing market continues to leave people dead in the streets as a result of the ever increasing price of real estate.
What today's bankers don't want to recognize, is that keeping product off the market in order to maintain an extraordinarily and even criminally low vacancy rate and an ever increasing price of real estate and then paying a rent subsidy to keep the shell game going, it's crash will be the worst we've seen. Well, when it crashes and it's crashing now, though just in the beginning stages, almost everyone will need a much higher rent and mortgage subsidy than the conservatives and liberals classes are willing to agree to. I guess they just can't live without dead bodies to step over on their way into their offices.
This is where the social democratic forces combined with the savvy of small business, the employer of the greatest amount of citizens any given time, discipline the situation with working class math.
We can't do universal basic income at all if we don't balance the spreadsheet. We can't allow very small group of citizens to possess as much wealth as they have now for very much longer without it creating Society wide chaos. The only way that we're going to balance the books is with the wealth tax like he US had after World War II with a modern twist of it staying, a gradually tapering off to a permanent 5% on top of the wealth is a privilege income tax they are already paying which must be increased as well.
Wealth is a privilege bestowed on those talented organizers that our democratic society gives the nod to because of their creativity, certainly not because of how much wealth they actually accumulate. When one person accumulates the kind of wealth that Jeff Bezos has, it slows the entire economic system as one person cannot possibly distribute that much capital and by placing that much capital into the corporate sector that generally only ever employee 20% percent of the population, you are really stepping on the brakes of the human economy.