Conflict of envy over basic income

The amount of debate around basic income has grown a significant amount during past couple of years. With the decrease in jobs due to automation it has been one of the proposed solutions. Basic income would grant everyone a certain amount of money each month without any conditions. Specially in the US where social benefits are low some politicians say it could help with poverty and inequality. As multiple other political issues, basic income is divided by left and right wings, such as the left support it and the right are against it. In this text I have no interest taking about what’s right and what’s wrong morally, but I will view the situation from the side of the government and then the psychological view of the situation from the voters who choose the government.

It is unrealistic to think that the goals of a government could be defined in couple of sentences so let’s assume we have a government that want’s it’s people to be as rich as possible so they could from an economic stand point, live as good of a life as possible. This means they would want to maximize their GDP. If implemented, basic income would grant everyone a certain amount of money per month. Probably, more impoverished the person getting the money would spend most of it to get by and the wealthier could afford to save some or all of it. Everything that is spent grows GDP and everything put into savings is stale money that doesn’t benefit the GDP.

Now the government must decide how they can afford the basic income so that the money they gain to pay it is less away from the GDP than the basic income grows it. One example of money not contributing in any way for GDP is the billions in the savings of the richest 1%. If the government would implement a wealth tax that for example would tax a certain percentage of money owned after 50 million it could possibly gain enough money to pay everyone the basic income. Viewing the GDP, the wealth tax wouldn’t have a negative impact to it like a consumption tax because consumption tax would make buying goods more expensive and limit the possibility of buying, while wealth tax would help put money more to the system. And if wealth tax would mean that the 1% would start spending more to pay less taxes it would mean more spending which means bigger GDP which means that for the government wealth tax would act as a win-win situation.

In the media when basic income is spoken about, most of the biggest objections it gets are related to jealousy. People are against the idea that some people are just lazy and benefiting from the system by not doing anything and getting money. It is strange to be jealous about something you can achieve also. Because the basic income is payed to everyone, anyone who feels jealous about someone being lazy and collecting monthly payments can do it himself. No one is stopping anyone from quitting their job and living more modestly and currently there are multiple people who are unwillingly unemployed who would without a heartbeat take the released jobs.

It is weird that when proposing a law that would benefit the economy and the less fortunate with the possibility of also benefiting the middle class at the expense of only the richest percent, the loudest objections come from the middle class who present themselves as right wingers.