(Found this strange gem…

written 3 years back before I had done any real research and was just looking at it as a supplement for everyone with no other concepts or arguments. It was also before I came up against much in the way of counter arguments. Later I wrote this blog when I became a little more knowledgeable on the subject…

https://tompogson.com/2020/08/20/a-creative-professionals-take-on-universal-basic-income

I now run the Basic Income Victoria BC multiple accounts at basicbc.wordpress.com)

Here’s the older original…

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I know I’m not alone. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if many readers have great reasons of their own.

I can’t physically work more than I do. Presently I have arthritis and certainly cannot take time off for the surgery and weeks of recovery it would cost. And I’m Canadian. I know this flies in the face of our “health care is magic” but I can promise you it’s not roses in every case here.

Here in Victoria we have a lack of doctors run off their feet. They no longer, for instance, do full physical check ups as they are considered “a waste of time”. In order to avoid any problems the only thing you feel you can do is improve your diet and exercise.

Now add that to the aforementioned low income, and inability to work more due to arthritis. If you exercise you push against the arthritis that makes what work you do even more painful and if you work more the same so you have to take what little money you have to actually pay for better food which costs more.

This is why there is the modern phenomenon of poor people being obese. It used to be rich=fat. Now it’s poor=fat. Rich people can do a paleo or southbeach diet. We can’t.

When you are poor you are eating to feel full. This is starches and low quality food. Food costs are up across the board as well as gas. Again with the interconnection.

This is the part that actually makes me crazy. That I actually studied Sociology in university that in the first term explains how “income dictates health”.

How can poor people pull themselves up by the bootstraps (a sarcastic physical impossibility, meant to be simply condescension) if their situation is built to fail. It’s 2019. We can do better and we do know how.

It’s the basic income model. I just got paid Friday, paid bills and now on Wednesday I have 2$. A supplement to this would not stop me working. It would have me work more efficiently, more effectively and for longer. I’m typing this into a crap phone on a city bus but I have seen and read cases on how when this program has been tested in not only didn’t make “everything worse” but it actually cleared up problems across the board. Medical centers, for instance, notice a significant drop in visits because people’s lives became healthier.

Reason I say my story is because, even though it is specific to me I know I’m not alone. I’ve heard through the cracks in media’s paint.

Most of us are not doing better than we were ten years ago.

If someone told me they were going to make things “great again” I will admit, my hope would be raised too. This isn’t going “that way” now but it’s connected. It all is. When things are impossibly hard in a way that cancels happiness and threatens your existence you grab for any rung. You can blame me or anyone else that “didn’t make it” but that also is logically flawed. We can’t all be the head of the company. The architects just didn’t make the executive washrooms that big.

Also many of us have a “side hustle”. We worry we’ll miss out. Only stands to reason you would be on your phone so much. It doesn’t stem from anger. It stems from trying to make it “great again” yourself. It’s true no matter how you politically alighn yourself. All of us fish see the same nets being used. And it’s freaking the gills out of us.

Please have a look at the different basic income accounts out there on social media and check out what they’ve been saying.

It may be early days for this still grassroots idea, but we got to start somewhere.

There is other gains as well that can occur from Basic Standard Income as well.

Firstly we can kick off we a general feeling of brother love and togetherness in a way that actually matters, and not as an abstract concept.

Secondly the boom in the arts and humanities cannot be overstated. It is at our peril that we discount these parts of our culture as some would do. They are our culture. They are were we step into our higher selves and think beyond the immediate. Examples range from Beethoven to Beckett, from the Charter of Rights to the inscription on the Statute of Liberty.

Supporting these is our “Why?” much as supporting infrastructure is our “How?”. If you can’t stop to think you can’t do it better than before.

This is about not just raising up some of us, this is about all of us. This creates hope and from this joy. Your need to stop violence across the world to within communities and families could reduce too.

This is about humanity’s purest potential.

To quote Jeff Goldblum in the movie Powder “Maybe one day our humanity will overtake our technology”

Cheers,

Tom

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