Eliminating poverty should be one of our primary goals as a society. The solution is to lift everyone out of poverty with #BasicIncome as an unconditonal right to resources needed to exist. If you believe only the employed deserve to live free of poverty, your vision is lacking.
Ending poverty REQUIRES unconditional basic income. There's no ending poverty through a conditional approach. The right to live free of poverty should be seen as a right of citizenship, not something someone only deserves for doing activities deemed worthy by those dominating us.
Do you believe that unpaid workers deserve to live in poverty or that providing them with conditional welfare benefits prevent their poverty? Do you think providing paid workers with cash while providing unpaid workers with benefits-in-kind, or even nothing, is fair & dignifying?
Expanding our definition of work isn't good enough because it requires a conditional line which will always exclude some people. Disability itself is a mess because we have to decide who is sufficiently disabled and who isn't. In doing so 4 out of 5 with a disability must work.
Medicare for All is really important too, but its focus is on treating instead of prevention. Providing everyone with UBI would dramatically lower what we spend on Medicare for All because of the big health benefits, not only of ending poverty, but decreasing inequality & stress.
We need to step back & look at a wide view of poverty and who deserves it. Nobody deserves it. NOBODY. Why? Because poverty is something society created, and it's wielded as a stick to get one group of people to do what a much smaller group of people wants. Poverty is domination.
That poverty is ever deserved is a lie. By teaching us to view poverty as a moral failure of the individual, society prevents us from realizing poverty is a moral failure of society itself. Poverty has no justification for existing, and no one needs to prove their right to exist.
Unconditional basic income is independence created mutually by a society declaring the right for all citizens to live above the poverty line. It is a right. It is YOUR GODDAMN RIGHT to not be impoverished in a world whose resources once available to all have been claimed by some.
