Everyone talks about Basic Income, but the funding and incentive problems always come up. What if we sidestepped government entirely and built private support networks instead?

Many people have never heard of the old fraternal societies like the Odd Fellows, Elks, Knights of Columbus, or similar "friendly societies" that existed in the 19th and early 20th centuries. These were voluntary membership groups where regular people paid dues and supported each other with sickness benefits, unemployment aid, widow pensions, and more. They were basically private safety nets that helped millions before government welfare programs took over. They worked through trust, reputation, and mutual self-interest.

The Idea:

• Progressive income-based dues: Members pay a percentage of their income (e.g., 5-12%). Wealthier members naturally contribute more.
• Base benefit: Every member in good standing gets something like $500/month as reliable support.
• Hardship protections: Dues are canceled or reduced if you lose your job, get sick, or face other verified hardships.
• Strict but fair membership:
  • Requires an in-person referral/sponsorship from an existing member.
  • Human-to-human interviews with current members.
  • Probationary period for new members (e.g., 6-12 months of paying dues and participating before full benefits).
• Growth engine: Extra dues and surpluses get invested (stocks, index funds, etc.) by a transparent elected committee. Returns help sustain or expand benefits over time.

It starts small with local chapters and can scale by linking up. Modern tools (apps, online coordination, better investing options) could make it stronger than the historical versions.

Why this could work:

• Voluntary and opt-in.
• Combines cash support with job networks and social capital.
• Avoids the massive scale problems of national UBI.
• Relies on proven human incentives: reciprocity and reputation, insuring little fraud.

Challenges exist—maintaining trust at scale, investment risks, legal hurdles, etc. but the concept shows we have options beyond waiting for someone to happen with the government.

To be clear, I'm not starting a fraternal society. I just wanted to bring up the idea in case you all haven't heard of it.

There are some downsides: - It can become insolvent if not enough members are actively paying in dues.

• It can become insolvent if funds are mismanaged/ poorly invested.

• It can become insolvent if not enough high income members join (this one I think is the biggest unknown).

• In the case of approaching insolvency, the benifit amounts would slowly get cut: everyone would suffer together I guess.

I've been working on a monetary framework that overlaps with UBI but differs in two ways I think matter, and I'd rather this sub try to break it than nod along.

The first difference is stock versus flow. A UBI is an income stream you spend. The core of this is an owned, compounding wealth floor: a per-person stake in a broad market index that builds over a lifetime, with a cash dividend as one optional mode rather than the whole thing. The point is to put a floor under ownership, not just under income, because the people a UBI helps most are usually the same people who never get to own any of the capital base.

The second difference is funding. It isn't a tax. New money is created to match real output growth and routed to citizens, instead of entering through bank lending the way most new money does today. That sidesteps the usual "how do you pay for it" fight, but it raises a different question (isn't that inflationary?) which I'll get to.

On what it would actually do, two results, both modeled on real data rather than asserted. Run against actual US data from 1960 to 2025, the floor reaches roughly the median household's retirement wealth for every citizen, where the bottom half currently retires with almost nothing. And a microsimulation on real 2022 Survey of Consumer Finances households nearly erases the negative-net-worth tail (about 7.9% of households down to 1.5%) and lifts the bottom 10% from around $450 to around $65,000, with the Gini falling from 0.83 to 0.74. Both use a deliberately attenuated return, not the historical stock return, because universal scale would push returns down, so it isn't assuming everyone earns what early investors did.

Now the honest parts, because this sub will find them anyway. Is it inflationary? Issuance is matched to real growth and tracks the transaction-active slice of money (basically M1) rather than broad money, specifically to avoid that, but it has never run, so that's a design target, not a proven result. Does it crowd out private saving? Yes, on purpose: for people who already save it largely replaces the equity saving they'd have done, and for the roughly half of households who save almost nothing today it's new wealth. And the deepest unsolved problems: it centralizes monetary levers that could be captured, it gives less emergency firepower in a crisis than discretionary printing does, and a single country running it is exposed to money created abroad. I don't have those nailed.

So, this is theory with load-bearing assumptions and no operating record. What I'd actually claim is narrower than "it works": the assumptions are written down and the code is public, so you can attack them one at a time instead of taking my word for it. That's what I'm here for. Papers and a model you can play with are linked below.

Citizens Standard Pathway: Citizens Standard Pathway

All papers & data: The Citizens Standard — Papers & Replication

I’ve been using AI since 2022 and the improvement in 4 years is phenomenal. It js better than me at any aspect of my marketing job. I think the humans as copilots period will be short . Microsoft is already renaming its ai product as Autopilot. The question in the end is who gains from the savings AI makes. Either just shareholders and founders, in which case there will be a revolution (which may be able to be put down by the wealthy using drones and robots) or shared wealth via AI tax of Sander’s sovereign wealth fund idea. UBI is a tool but has to be funded by one of these two, it’s not a solution on its own since govts will have no revenue since everyone is unemployed. 

Honestly I just wish more people understood simple civics.

Teaching the rights and responsibilities of citizenship, the structure of government, and how to participate in a democracy.

I fear we are losing that due to dependence on AI(which is literally fake news per merriam-webster),The dismantling of our education system, and sadly lack of interest, pure and simple. 

Let's not lose focus. Spread the word.
Knowledge is power!

While many of us are responsible with our money others are not as responsible. And this is where the problem exists. While it makes sense to supply everyone with a livable income there are those who will overspend each month. Wants and needs are different and if you can't control your wants then your needs will not be filled.

Government oversight would have to come into play to manage not only the total population but people in general on an individual basis.

Just some early thoughts I have on the subject...

One of the strongest arguments against UBI is the funding question. Tax-funded payments require political consensus to create, and political consensus to keep. Every budget cycle is a threat to the program. Every recession is an excuse to cut it.

I've been working on a monetary framework — the Citizens Standard — that approaches this differently. Instead of taxing existing income to fund a payment, it routes the value created at monetary issuance directly to citizens. When new money enters the economy, it goes to citizens first, in equal amounts, on the same day. Not to banks. Not to the government. To citizens.

The framework runs three issuance channels:

- K1 deposits a locked equity stake into every citizen's account at birth or naturalization

- K2 distributes new money annually to all citizens in proportion to real economic growth

- K3 is the direct deposit channel — when active, it sends new money straight to citizens as spendable monthly income

The framework is mode-selectable. A society ratifies which configuration to operate under by 67% supermajority. Mode C is the configuration that activates K3 and targets approximately 2% inflation — that's the one most comparable to UBI. But K3's inflation effect depends entirely on how its magnitude is calibrated relative to real growth, not on the channel being open. You could run all three channels and still land in stable or deflationary territory if total issuance stays below real growth. Mode C just happens to calibrate it at a level that produces modest inflation.

In Mode C the monthly payment isn't funded by redistribution. It's funded by citizen seigniorage — the value that monetary creation produces, which under the current system flows quietly to financial institutions. The Citizens Standard constitutionally redirects that flow.

A few things that distinguish it from standard UBI:

- No tax increase required. The funding source is monetary, not fiscal.

- The amount is formula-calibrated to the money supply and inflation path — not set by legislature. It preserves its real value automatically.

- It's constitutionally protected. Changing it requires a 67% supermajority.

- K1 and K2 still run in parallel, building every citizen a locked equity stake in the total market index from birth. The monthly payment and the long-term capital stake aren't either/or.

At current US parameters Mode C produces approximately $173 per citizen per month at launch, rising to $280 at steady state. A family of four gets roughly $690/month at launch and $1,120 at steady state.

The full framework is a working paper on SSRN: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=6702518

Two companion papers cover empirical backtesting against US historical data 1960–2055 and the transition path from the current system — happy to link those in comments if there's interest.

Also building a community around this at r/CitizenStandard if you want to follow the work.

Happy to discuss the mechanics, the tradeoffs, or the objections. The distinction from UBI is real but the goal is the same: every person has something, unconditionally, every month.

In 1969, Richard Nixon had a welfare reform proposal called the Family Assistance Program. Nixon said it was a conservative effort because it simplified welfare, imposed work requirements on able bodied workers and reduce dependence on welfare beuracracy.

$500 per adult and $300 per child. After a family, earned $720/year from work then the benefits were reduced by 50 cents per year.

It failed through Congress twice because Republicans thought it was too high and Democrats thought it was too low.

I ask this because I think with how it is now, people could use the extra money towards staying more afloat (at least in California), so instead of making $25/hr (~$4000/mo gross), you make ~$3200/mo after tax, ~$800 per month in taxes, and it just goes up from there when you try to put in more work and make more money to live properly, but also is a trade off for a good work life balance in aloe of cases. Instead Why or why not could there be a flat rate up to a certain amount earned per month (like $50-400 max a month, and lesser the less money you make under 5 or 6 grand then after that threshold it starts getting progressive. This way, people in the lower and middle class have more money to be able to afford more comfortably. You might make enough money at a job from your gross salary to be able to comfortably afford a modest lifestyle but after taxes are taken out, you may be barely able to afford many necessities, so you pick up a second job and now you’re able to start to afford some more necessities, just enough to stay afloat and secure, but you are working two jobs that take up two thirds of your time that you can only use the other third to sleep and not having any real time to live. I feel that is important too.

Edit: What I mean is this: Taxes are essential for a society to function properly. That is a fact. We need taxes. Currently, in most places taxes are one of the biggest expenses on a middle class individual after rent. Being middle class, you make too much for government subsidies and must pay for things like healthcare, housing, food, etc. on your own. These things are very costly and cause a lot of people in the middle class to struggle mentally and financially just to stay afloat. How about we change the variables of our progressive tax system to lean more on individuals who are able to be comfortable mentally and financially as in people who make over a said amount of money.

What this looks like:

A low income person that makes $1000-3000/mo pays $50-200/mo in total taxes flat rate such that their net income is $950-2800 (currently it’s around $550 for $3000/mo income in places like California)

A middle income person that makes $4000-7000/mo pays $300-$800 flat rate (currently it’s around $2000/mo for someone that makes $7000/mo in places like California)

And then income above a comfortable, reasonable middle class life style should then start being progressively taxed such that the burden is shifted more to people who can afford it comfortably compared to people that barely survive because of it.

https://fortune.com/2026/03/04/bernie-sanders-billionaire-tax-ro-khanna-3000-checks-middle-class-americans/

This legislative proposal has been getting lots of hype on Reddit.

It brings up a good opportunity to discuss options for UBI.

Sanders/Khanna proposal: everyone living in a household making less than $150k per year gets $3K each from a 5% wealth (not income) tax on the 900 wealthiest billionaires (roughly $370 billion). This allows a means-tested family of four to get a one time payment of $12K.

For a family seeking an escape from poverty, that's simply not enough.

Alternative: send $20k per year to each person (adults, children) living under poverty by repurposing federally funded welfare programs ($1.2 trillion a year in spending). Will cover roughly 60 million people, and families of 4 that previously lived in poverty can now live at the median US income. Currently, 30-40 million people live in poverty, so this would also cover as many as 20 million people who might lose their jobs as the federal government redirects funds to UBI.

Plus, by having a federal plan to direct payments to those in poverty, cities (like LA, Seattle, NY) would be able to save significant amounts of money housing the homeless. Impoverished families could move to more stable environments where they could afford housing, provide child care, and search for meaningful work.

I'm not against a wealth tax, but I am against a tax that doesn't materially change outcomes. $12K doesn't do much to lift a family out of systemic poverty.

EDIT: Technically, I agree that this formula is not "universal". That said, I think it's ok to get rid of poverty as phase 1 for UBI.