But by providing them a minimum income, you basically make them into fuel for the economic machine - a consumer with no viable skills. And the vital years for gaining these skills are full of distractions, made all the easier to acquire by a basic income.
Look at the Mincome example I posted above. Teens are more likely to graduate high school. Why? Because they aren't pressured to help support their families.
This "distraction" theory is a far stretch. Teens have always had distractions. And most of them have the means to acquire those distractions. So they might buy a video game they couldn't afford before. They also don't have to try to go to school and work a full time job to support their family. Having to go to school and work is a much larger distraction.
> But by providing them a minimum income, you basically make them into fuel for the economic machine - a consumer with no viable skills.
No, by providing them with a minimum income, you make them into a someone who has the freedom to expend resources to acquire new skills as their existing skills become less relevant, rather than someone chained to their current situation.
They may choose to be satisfied with their current situation, but we'd need a lot more productivity from a small slice of the population before the completely unskilled would likely to choose to do so. Under a basic income system, the marginal benefit of additional effort (and, thus, purely financial motivation) is greater than in the status quo system for people who would otherwise be beneficiaries of means-tested social support programs.
