As a right wing person myself, I dislike the assumed dichotomy that the right uniformly considers welfare a bad thing.
The way I look at it, a safety net is useful to maintaining a constant economic growth. If you cushion the failures at the point that it causes significant harm (starvation, lack of shelter), you effectively ensure that accidents of fate do not cripple otherwise productive members of society. So providing a safety net is a social good, and a legitimate (if not strictly necessary) function of government.
Then you dive into the ways to provide that safety net. I feel fairly confident that no one is satisfied with the current methods of doing so. For myself, it fails in that it creates a poverty loop -- it rewards gaming the system to remain within it indefinitely while it punishes attempts to escape it. I believe this was mentioned a few times upthread. So what the current systems generate is the occasional success story where someone falls into the net due to an accident of fate, recovers their footing, and escapes (a success!) and also where someone is born into the net or falls there, and either cannot or will not escape the net (a failure). Given that there have been nonproductive members of society throughout time -- there's always someone unwilling to work -- it is not sensible to build a system that does not at least consider what to do with those people. Functionally, a system that removes them and allows them to fail on their own is a working system, but this falls clearly afoul of modern moral sensibilities. While I do not subscribe to the idea that everyone is owed a basic living (I subscribe to negative rights, not positive ones -- you are not owed work by anyone else as a right), I do, however, subscribe to the idea that if those people exist, then it is better to plan to deal with them rather than allow them to die in the streets.
And all of that falls under the problem of how to run and fund such a program. They are clearly costly and incapable of managing fraud and abuse, yet they would seem to be unavoidable (you cannot end them). So that's a serious issue.
That brings us to the premise of a basic stipend for everyone. This has the benefit of addressing the need for a safety net and for dealing with the malcontents that will not work (or cannot), while also being far easier to implement and fund than existing, bloated, fraud-filled systems. So my inner 'leaner more efficient government' demon is satisfied alongside my 'safety nets are a social good' demon. I'd love to see this program in action.
However, there remain a number of serious questions with such a program that remain to be seen before I would endorse such a plan. Primarily is that by providing a fungible basic salary, you cannot be certain that people will spend it in ways that actually meet their needs. One of the few benefits of the current welfare programs is that they are targeted at specific needs and are not easily made fungible. Housing assistance is paid to landlords to provide housing. Food stamps can only be used to purchase food items. And so on. I am very concerned that if you eliminate the targeted and nonfungible programs in favor of just a direct cash payment that there will be many people buying circus tickets instead of bread, and the number of people in dire straights will increase. Yes, for those that are frugal and make good decisions, the universal stipend is a godsend -- it solves many of the issues that plague the current welfare programs in that it is fungible, so the disciplined persons can apply it as best fits their needs, and it doesn't create the poverty trap -- you can earn as much as you can and still receive benefits. But for the generational poor, I'm not sure that it would be a workable system.
A second concern is that the government, also in the guise of welfare, imposes itself upon the labor market in very distorting ways. Minimum wage comes to mind as such an imposition on similar reasons to welfare. If you implement a universal stipend, but maintain an aggressive minimum wage, you will still lose a great deal of the transitory space that could exist. Therefore, to achieve the social climbing necessary, I believe that you must relax the minimum wages while you implement an universal stipend to achieve the maximum transitional space from full assistance to no assistance. Otherwise, jobs will still be difficult to get with limited skills and you will have more people relying solely on the universal stipend for their income.
So, as a right winger, I'm keenly interested in watching the outcome of Finland's experiment. If they can enact a system and it manages to avoid the pitfalls I've mentioned, I will be very pleased to strongly recommend that the US adopt such a program. However, I am, at best, cautiously optimistic that they will do so. Nothing in the program addresses the root causes of poverty, but maybe those will lessen under the program or additional assistance to address those causes will be implemented to success. In the meantime, I'm waiting to see.
