This weeks topic has probably been the most engaging and interesting to me. The idea of universal basic income is one that intrigues me with all of the possibilities and the different avenues of thinking. Given the plan is orchestrated and implemented clearly and effectively, I genuinely think that this is a very realistic and helpful goal/strategy. One of the most important ways to make this work, in my opinion, is making it a part of the Constitution like Dr. Trost explained. It will largely prevent the influence of party control over this idea and would hopefully take political biases out of the equation. As someone who tries to stay in the middle when it comes to politics, I believe that this idea absolutely has the capability to please those of both democratic and republican ideals. With that, I also believe that because it has those capabilities, it also should be able to withstand the test of time. As presidents change and different parties are in control, ideally, it would have minimal impact on the implementation of this policy.
One of my main topics of interest is the way that a universal basic income would realistically be implemented. In Dr. Trost's plan, one of the larger points of universal basic income would be to replace other governmental help surrounding income or lack there of. This is where the funding for this idea would come from, so it's not possible to have both and would require the removal of some programs in order for this to be realistic. I would love to dive deeper into what specifically would be replaced. Would government covered healthcare (like medicaid) be something that is removed, or would medical care be classified differently? Would Veteran's benefits also be affected by this? Disability benefits? There are a lot of different avenues revolving around governmental assistance, so I would be interested to see if it would be an all or nothing situation or if some would stay and some would go. I have a hard time believing that some assistance (like disability) would be removed, but I also don't have as deep of an understanding as to how this would all unfold.
Even more importantly though, how would the universal basic income be set into action? Would it be the case that it is announced that this program/idea is being implemented and other governmental assistance would end the day universal basic income was implemented? If so, my presumption would be that the universal basic income would be implemented at the beginning of the year to therefore provide for the citizens for the year to come. If that's the case, could it be considered to divide the income into two separate occurrences, January and July? My thoughts on this would be to possibly help with the misuse of the money being given and hopefully better encourage the people receiving it that really need it to use it sparingly and intelligently.
Overall, I believe that this plan is very well thought out and absolutely something that could be extremely beneficial to citizens of the United States. I do have a lot of questions about the lesser "important" impacts of the plan that I would love more knowledge on, but as a whole I believe this plan has the potential to be really helpful in getting us out of the cycle of more and more different governmental programs and would align them a little bit.