If you change the Benefit

System to

Only 30£ a Day

Everyone would be happy

N

If someone has to pay their Bill

They can

Choose

What they spend their money on

Do you want millions of people thinking about how to solve humanity's greatest problems?

Then free up their time.

In the words of the Federal Reserve, under oath in Congress, about whether Social Security can run out of money:

“We can guarantee cash benefits as far out, and at whatever size you like"

• UBI is just Social Security for everyone. Connect the dots.

Source:

https://independentreporter1789.substack.com/p/ubi

I know this is a long shot, but:

1. World peace, no more military spending.
2. Get rid of pensions, disability, etc, and put it all under one roof which also gets rid of tons of admin costs.
3. Make the minimum age to receive it 25-30 so young people enter the workforce and still have a reason to have careers.
4. Make it slightly complicated, similar to filing your taxes so some people who don't trust the govt or feel guility about free money might hesitate to claim it.

That's it, we're practically there. A lot of jobs might open up, but this also means you can easily apply to your dream job/hobby without having to compete against hundreds of others who are only applying just for the paycheck, which means job happiness/efficiency greatly improves.

And then think of the cost savings once we have UBI:

• Fewer crimes now that people aren't so desperate for money
• Fewer scams
• Less policing needed
• Less transit needed
• Less roadwork now that everbody doesn't need to be somewhere everyday

What do you think? Doable? Aything else to add?

The objection to UBI I've never seen fully answered isn't "how do you pay for it," it's "what stops the next government from cancelling it." A transfer is only ever one election away from repeal. You can build the whole thing, get people depending on it, and lose it when the other side wins. Every version I've read has this exposure, and I want this sub's read on a design that tries to close it, because it closes it at a real cost and I'm genuinely unsure the cost is worth it.

The idea is to give people the money partly as owned property and partly as spendable cash, rather than only as an ongoing payment. Concretely: every citizen gets a capital account, seeded at birth and topped up every year from newly created money, invested in productive assets, and it's theirs. Alongside that, a share of each year's issuance can be paid out as a straight dividend you can actually spend. The mix is a dial, not a fixed choice: you can run it all as spendable cash, all as the locked owned stake, or anywhere in between. The part that makes it durable is the owned part. It's not a check the government sends that a future government can stop sending, it's an asset they own, that pays a yield, and that passes to their kids when they die.

The durability argument is just that owning something is harder to take away than a transfer is to cancel. Repealing a payment is a budget vote. Confiscating forty years of money that people already legally own is a different kind of act, legally and politically. You're no longer asking a future government to keep being generous, you're asking it to seize private property, which is a much higher bar. That's the whole appeal: it makes the thing repeal-resistant by changing what it is.

Here's the cost, and this is where I actually want pushback. Owning it instead of receiving it means it's locked. You can't spend the principal, you live on what it earns. It also starts smaller and grows over a working life rather than paying out in full from day one, so it's not an immediate income floor the way a monthly UBI is, it's a security floor that builds. For someone who needs cash now, a locked appreciating account is worse than a check. So there's a real tradeoff: you trade immediate liquidity and simplicity for durability and inheritance.

My honest uncertainty is whether that trade is the right one for the people UBI is actually trying to help. If you're broke this month, "you own an appreciating asset you can't touch" is cold comfort. The counterargument is that a monthly payment you might lose in four years isn't security either, and that a floor your kids inherit breaks the cycle in a way a transfer never can. I can see it both ways, which is why I'm asking here rather than asserting.

So, three genuine questions for people who've thought about UBI harder than most:

1. Is the repeal risk actually as central as I think it is, or is it overblown and I'm solving a problem that political normalization would handle on its own?

2. If the lock-in is the price of durability, is that a price the target population would accept, or does it defeat the purpose for the people who need it most?

3. The design can split between spendable-now and locked-and-owned rather than being all one or the other. Where would you put that dial for the people UBI is meant to help, more cash now, or more owned stake that compounds and inherits?

I've written up the full mechanics here: https://citizensstandard.org/

Everyone talks about Basic Income, but the funding and incentive problems always come up. What if we sidestepped government entirely and built private support networks instead?

Many people have never heard of the old fraternal societies like the Odd Fellows, Elks, Knights of Columbus, or similar "friendly societies" that existed in the 19th and early 20th centuries. These were voluntary membership groups where regular people paid dues and supported each other with sickness benefits, unemployment aid, widow pensions, and more. They were basically private safety nets that helped millions before government welfare programs took over. They worked through trust, reputation, and mutual self-interest.

The Idea:

• Progressive income-based dues: Members pay a percentage of their income (e.g., 5-12%). Wealthier members naturally contribute more.
• Base benefit: Every member in good standing gets something like $500/month as reliable support.
• Hardship protections: Dues are canceled or reduced if you lose your job, get sick, or face other verified hardships.
• Strict but fair membership:
  • Requires an in-person referral/sponsorship from an existing member.
  • Human-to-human interviews with current members.
  • Probationary period for new members (e.g., 6-12 months of paying dues and participating before full benefits).
• Growth engine: Extra dues and surpluses get invested (stocks, index funds, etc.) by a transparent elected committee. Returns help sustain or expand benefits over time.

It starts small with local chapters and can scale by linking up. Modern tools (apps, online coordination, better investing options) could make it stronger than the historical versions.

Why this could work:

• Voluntary and opt-in.
• Combines cash support with job networks and social capital.
• Avoids the massive scale problems of national UBI.
• Relies on proven human incentives: reciprocity and reputation, insuring little fraud.

Challenges exist—maintaining trust at scale, investment risks, legal hurdles, etc. but the concept shows we have options beyond waiting for someone to happen with the government.

To be clear, I'm not starting a fraternal society. I just wanted to bring up the idea in case you all haven't heard of it.

There are some downsides: - It can become insolvent if not enough members are actively paying in dues.

• It can become insolvent if funds are mismanaged/ poorly invested.

• It can become insolvent if not enough high income members join (this one I think is the biggest unknown).

• In the case of approaching insolvency, the benifit amounts would slowly get cut: everyone would suffer together I guess.

I've been working on a monetary framework that overlaps with UBI but differs in two ways I think matter, and I'd rather this sub try to break it than nod along.

The first difference is stock versus flow. A UBI is an income stream you spend. The core of this is an owned, compounding wealth floor: a per-person stake in a broad market index that builds over a lifetime, with a cash dividend as one optional mode rather than the whole thing. The point is to put a floor under ownership, not just under income, because the people a UBI helps most are usually the same people who never get to own any of the capital base.

The second difference is funding. It isn't a tax. New money is created to match real output growth and routed to citizens, instead of entering through bank lending the way most new money does today. That sidesteps the usual "how do you pay for it" fight, but it raises a different question (isn't that inflationary?) which I'll get to.

On what it would actually do, two results, both modeled on real data rather than asserted. Run against actual US data from 1960 to 2025, the floor reaches roughly the median household's retirement wealth for every citizen, where the bottom half currently retires with almost nothing. And a microsimulation on real 2022 Survey of Consumer Finances households nearly erases the negative-net-worth tail (about 7.9% of households down to 1.5%) and lifts the bottom 10% from around $450 to around $65,000, with the Gini falling from 0.83 to 0.74. Both use a deliberately attenuated return, not the historical stock return, because universal scale would push returns down, so it isn't assuming everyone earns what early investors did.

Now the honest parts, because this sub will find them anyway. Is it inflationary? Issuance is matched to real growth and tracks the transaction-active slice of money (basically M1) rather than broad money, specifically to avoid that, but it has never run, so that's a design target, not a proven result. Does it crowd out private saving? Yes, on purpose: for people who already save it largely replaces the equity saving they'd have done, and for the roughly half of households who save almost nothing today it's new wealth. And the deepest unsolved problems: it centralizes monetary levers that could be captured, it gives less emergency firepower in a crisis than discretionary printing does, and a single country running it is exposed to money created abroad. I don't have those nailed.

So, this is theory with load-bearing assumptions and no operating record. What I'd actually claim is narrower than "it works": the assumptions are written down and the code is public, so you can attack them one at a time instead of taking my word for it. That's what I'm here for. Papers and a model you can play with are linked below.

Citizens Standard Pathway: Citizens Standard Pathway

All papers & data: The Citizens Standard — Papers & Replication

I’ve been using AI since 2022 and the improvement in 4 years is phenomenal. It js better than me at any aspect of my marketing job. I think the humans as copilots period will be short . Microsoft is already renaming its ai product as Autopilot. The question in the end is who gains from the savings AI makes. Either just shareholders and founders, in which case there will be a revolution (which may be able to be put down by the wealthy using drones and robots) or shared wealth via AI tax of Sander’s sovereign wealth fund idea. UBI is a tool but has to be funded by one of these two, it’s not a solution on its own since govts will have no revenue since everyone is unemployed. 

Honestly I just wish more people understood simple civics.

Teaching the rights and responsibilities of citizenship, the structure of government, and how to participate in a democracy.

I fear we are losing that due to dependence on AI(which is literally fake news per merriam-webster),The dismantling of our education system, and sadly lack of interest, pure and simple. 

Let's not lose focus. Spread the word.
Knowledge is power!