2) Give reasons why you disagree with each of the reasons given against your position.

Universal Basic Income (UBI) takes money from the poor and gives it to everyone, increasing poverty and depriving the poor of much needed targeted support.

Universal Basic Income (UBI) takes money from the poor and gives it to everyone, increasing poverty and depriving the poor of much needed targeted support.

People experiencing poverty face a variety of hardships that are addressed with existing anti-poverty measures such as food stamps, medical aid, and child assistance programs. UBI programs often use funds from these targeted programs for distribution to everyone in society. [15]

According to Robert Greenstein, President of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, "[i]f you take the dollars targeted on people in the bottom fifth or two-fifths of the population and convert them to universal payments to people all the way up the income scale, you're redistributing income upward. That would increase poverty and inequality rather than reduce them." [15]

Luke Martinelli, PhD, Research Associate at the University of Bath, created three models of UBI implementation and concluded that all three would lead to a significant number of individuals and households who are worse off. He noted that "these losses are not concentrated among richer groups; on the contrary, they are proportionally larger for the bottom three income quintiles." [37]

Research by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) in Finland, France, Italy, and the UK concluded that "rather than reducing the overall headcount of those in poverty, a BI [basic income] would change the composition of the income-poor population" and thus "would not prove to be an effective tool for reducing poverty." [39]

UBIs are also less cost-effective than targeted welfare programs because many people lack more than just cash. UBI does not cure addiction, poor health, lack of skills, or other factors that contribute to and exacerbate poverty. [19] [24]

Anna Coote, Principal Fellow at the New Economics Foundation, and Edanur Yazici, PhD student, explain that there is " the danger of UBI entrenching low pay and precarious work. It could effectively subsidise employers who pay low wages and - by creating a small cushion for workers on short-term and zero-hours contracts - help to normalise precarity." UBI could become like another American tipping system in which employers pay low wages and count on customers to fill in the gap with tips. [52]