The End

The end of the term is upon us and sadly that also means the end of this.

In the past several posts we have covered the advances that are being made and the side effects that are happening and up coming. In fact I have a partially complete post about life advancement that is happening that I will cover briefly here.

In the next five years it should be trivial to repair your DNA/RNA and add several decades to your life as it very literally stops the body's aging process. There is also a process being tested on mice to repair issues aging causes to ones brain. So in addition to all of the other things happening people are going to be living even longer.

So what can we do to solve this?

Some advocate more or less having governments pay corporations to employ people. Germany currently does this during economic down turns and Bill Gates is also an advocate of it in another form.

Personally I feel the simplest solution is called Basic Income.

How basic income works is that everyone in the nation would receive a basic yearly "salary" from the government. This would cover the basic costs of existing and supporting you. Also required for this concept to work we would need a single payer health coverage like lets say Canada or the UK.

But if you wanted to have access to money beyond this you could still of course work. So what would happen is say you are a programmer who is making 80,000 USD a year. Well lets say Basic Income was set to 30,000 USD a year. When you went to pay taxes the first 30,000 of the 80,000 would be strait up eaten by the government to repay your basic income. After that you would see about 1/3rd the rest go to taxes. So you end up with something like (80,000-30,000)*.66 would be what you get to keep so about 33,000 USD.

Now that doesn't sound like much, you just went from making 80,000 USD to 33,000 USD after taxes. However you need to add that 30,000 you were initially given back into it and hey 63,000 looks not to bad. In fact current tax rates for 80,000 would be around 25% after taking an assortment of things into account. Guess what 25% of 80,000 is? Hey its 60,000 USD, so even after the "heavy" taxation under basic income you would be making 3,000 more a year.

Now one problem with this is just like what it is attempting to solve. With Basic Income you no longer need EBT (food stamps) , Section 8 housing, TNAF, Medicaid, VA, Ect. All current social support programs would be redundant and pointless so they would be completely cut. Which also saves tons and tons of money not having to support the infrastructure associated with these programs. But what about all the people that infrastructure employs? We have now just made them jobless. Which isn't as bad as it could be but is still not so great.

No one really has come up with a solid solution to the coming problems and maybe no one will. But I feel that of the options we currently are tossing around Basic Income would end up being the easiest and best to use in our transition from a resources scarce society to a unlimited one.


Thank you for your time and good luck during these amazing but frightening times.