Argument for Universal Basic Income
The Middle Years pt. 3
OK, I left off after getting fired for being a parent.
I remember we were living in a shelter with our 4 boys. Oh yeah I had just got fired for being a parent. The guys at the welfare ‘workfirst’ office were real dicks after that. It’s bad enough you have to suffer begging for shelter, and working at a shitty job where you get treated like shit. But you have to suck up all that shit and put up with assholes who hate their job just as much you hate yours.
The only difference is you can’t really tell the welfare workers to go f*** themselves because after all, they are helping you by telling you that you should have left your sick kid at home alone so you don’t get fired.
Now it comes backe to me. We had just got our tax return check, so we manages to find a decent house in a decent neighborhood and we got the hell out of the shelter. I even managed to get hired on with one of the crews building houses in the same neighborhood. My wife got lucky and got a call about a job too. Things were looking up.
Except for the childcare. When both parents ‘have to’ work, you have to put your kids at a daycare and hope and pray some fucking pedophile doesnt get ahold of them. Or worse yet, you end up sending your kids to a home run daycare with some fat old hag that calls your children little brats. And let’s not forget the cost.
Even with our low income subsidy the monthly payment came out to like $400. That was one paycheck gone. Just gone — poof — $400 to pay some bitch to call my kids little brats. Needless to say, I stopped working because my wife’s job was actually pretty decent with some benefits. But the cut in income really hurt.
We had some room-mates too. We ended up helping out some friends that were down on their luck. They ended up not paying us to live in a nice house and skipped out on all the bills and left us high and dry. So our broke asses had to try to come with a shitload of money to keep from being homeless again.
That was the first time my back went out. Construction will take it’s toll on a person. Especially when your always broke and always working. You never get a vacation or break. It’s never ending work and stress and bills. Something is always broke and needs fixing, or some miscellaneous thing happens that is totally out of your control.
I found a jobs as a cable installer, and it payed kind of good. But I was at work 10 hours a day and we were so far behind in bills from room mates screwing us and all the other crap that we just couldn’t catch up to the bills. It’s like the hole of ‘debt’ just kept getting deeper and deeper — no matter how much we seemed to work.
So we put in notice at our jobs — we told them we were moving — not because we too poor to keep up with our bills or because I was going a back surgery. I mean to tell your employers that your poor or injured — that just doesn’t reflect well for good little slaves.
And once again we have 4 boys loaded in the van pulling a u-haul trailer. Well, Florida sucked — Washington sucked — let’s go see what the mid-west is like.
Working on my Basic Income (and maybe starting a business)