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As asked by @dilucadomain: Should universal income only be given to people who make less than a certain income?
For a universal basic income to be considered universal, it needs to be given to everyone, no matter the recipient’s personal financial circumstances. Without being universal, this income plan fails critically. One of the biggest concerns of the universal basic income principle is that it would incentivize people to work less or to stop working entirely. If people lost this universal income boost once they reached a certain financial threshold, they would be incentivized to never reach that threshold, and therefore always work beneath their full potential. As a result of this, I believe that there should not be a cutoff threshold for a universal income, as I believe that it would sabotage the motivation of its recipients.
For universal basic income to have a chance at success, it must be truly universal. Currently, there are welfare plans in place that provide assistance to those below a certain income threshold. However, once these people start earning money on their own, even if it is not enough to sustain themselves, they immediately lose support. As a result of this sudden loss of support, those who try to escape their impoverished state and work to be productive are crippled, and usually brought to an even lower state than they were initially, and are so disadvantaged because they have attempted to do better. Because this is common knowledge in the societies that are living under these “benefit” programs, the people living in them are incentivized to not ever work enough to escape their poverty, because to do so, they would ironically impoverish themselves further. Since this is the incentive and course of action taken, these people are often looked down upon as leaches on society, when in reality they are trapped by the very system that is supposed to help them. These systems are bloated due to people remaining trapped in them instead of recovering and rejoining society as intended. This is why for a universal basic income should have no income threshold.