death rates of white middle class American males

[David Horn]

(02-22-2017, 10:19 AM)SomeGuy Wrote: My complaint with the idea of Basic Income as a solution to some of the problems brought up in that Commentary article I linked to is that we have already have a functional equivalent with the explosion in disability claims, TANF, and the like.  The people in question aren't starving, they're playing videogames and drinking themselves to death/doing drugs.

You can see similar (barring minor differences in culture) outcomes with neds/chavs/boggans/what-have-you in the rest of the Anglosphere, hikikomori in Japan, or, more alarmingly, the European jihadists (overwhelming concentrated not in the first generation immigrants, but the second and third ones growing up on public assistance*).

Man does not live on bread alone.

* Which, in wacko liberal logic, means that there is no risk of bringing in an unlimited number of low-skilled refugees to a society with high youth unemployment and increasing automation, because it's mostly their children and grandchildren who will be likely to have problems.  Presumably because, in the longrun, we're all dead, amirite? 

OK, but what alternative are you suggesting?  Gaming the system, which is what you  are noting here, requires one to look broken to get money ... so they look broken.  Yes, the system gets scammed frequently.  A system that required no scamming, might solve a lot of the downside issues you see ... or not.  At some point, universal income, or something similar, will be tried out of desperation.  Then we'll know.