I'm not promoting any central planning. That certainly would be a disaster. The reason I suggest a voucher and food stamps is because they give the individuals the flexibility to apply them to their situation.

Edit: Also, it's definitely not just my parents. Look around you, there's payday loans on every corner. My parents only took a couple payday loans that I knew about. Their money-management issues are a drop in the ocean of similar problems.

Things that this does not cover:

Transportation Education Health Childcare Clothes Job-seeking expenses

If you want the flexibility to cover every avenue of "i and my family have a shot at making it," you either arrive at a combinatorial explosion of complex needs-tested programs, or basic income.

Since every program you make will induce some unique form of leakage, corruption or freeloading, the expectation of BI is that it limits that to "some people do not have the personality to manage personal finances, and will always be broke in any given situation." But that doesn't take anything "away" from people who can be responsible - they will in fact be insulated from the drag-the-family-down dynamic that prevails in the deepest instances of developed-world poverty, because they get their own BI at adulthood and can just run away from the situation without severe risk or hardship.

With vouchers and food stamps, you're effectively prescribing how the basic income is supposed to be spent. But that totally misses the point of a basic income. You get money, you spend it as you see fit. Where some people will pay their rent and buy food, others may want to spend it on booze and gambling. They'd still have free reign over the money just like people with an income have nowadays. Nobody shall be able to force you to spend your money in a way that prescribes a very specific kind of lifestyle.

_ak:

"Nobody shall be able to force you to spend your money in a way that prescribes a very specific kind of lifestyle."

But they're not spending their money, they're spending other people's money.

ak, If your version of basic income is about taking money from one group and letting another group blow it on alcohol and cigarettes, then it's obviously a bad idea.

"But they're not spending their money, they're spending other people's money."

No, that's not true. The purpose of the BI is that it's their money and their decision. It's just like when you get salary you get to decide what to do with it, it's not your employers money.

"If your version of basic income is about taking money from one group and letting another group blow it on alcohol and cigarettes, then it's obviously a bad idea."

It isn't at all obvious to me. If everybody would spend money on alcohol and cigarettes, we wouldn't face an ecological crisis, for example. A famous scientist or actor has a much larger ecological footprint than a gambling addict.

People with food stamps but no money still need to buy things that cost money (e.g. new glasses, bike tire repair). The solution is to sell their food stamps for cash, and the black market only pays ~$.80 on the dollar. It's more efficient (and less patronizing) to give people $1000 to spend as needed than to give $1000 in vouchers, requiring them to jump through hoops to extract the needed cash at a 20% loss.

I like the idea of ubi because of its simplicity and it makes more dificult to "game the system" . In Brazil I see that a lot. With food stamps there would have places with food and cigars, that would sell cigars for food stamps. If there was a rule for no drinks on the the food stamps, people would that too. Similar things would happen to rents.

It's better to keep it simple, and avoid the rules, bureocracy, and extra fiscalization.

That said, ubi also would have its flaws: some would use dead people ids to receive it, take from someone else before he receives. It happens here with social security. But that should be easier to identify.

Individuals in that situation usually are not.

While some poor people are bad with money, I'd be willing to bet the vast majority of them are capable of deciding between paying rent and buying a new TV.

Speaking from personal experience with a bunch of people that live way too close to zero or negative net worth, it's not buy a new TV or pay rent, it's buy a new TV or maintain a 6-12 month safety net in case everything goes to hell (which you might need, one day, to pay rent). But hey, that's what loans and credit cards are for, right?

This exactly. It's not like they buy TVs instead of paying rent. Of course very few are that stupid. The problem is that they charge up their cards and blow their safety buffer on the TV/car/etc.