I understand how difficult your personal experience was. I married at age 20 and my son was born when I was 21, we lived in small furnished apartment that you rented by the week.
Most people do not buy adequate life insurance and disability insurance, they argue they cannot afford it. But if government provides those things, it must tax you to pay for them, so either way you pay for them. So, the real issue becomes, should society compel people to buy things or give them the individual freedom to do so. We make those decisions as a society all the time.
ObamaCare tried to do just that. Taxing people who did not buy mandatory health insurance and providing subsidies for those that needed them. It did not work, young people opted to pay the penalty and not buy it, all it did was make young people poorer and subsidize health insurance for other people... in other words it functioned as a form of income redistribution.
In general, government entitlements cost more than buying them yourself. Social security being a great example. If people bought disability insurance and invested the balance that they pay in social security taxes in a tax advantaged retirement account, they would retire far wealthier than they do, but would they, do it? Government entitlements are an expensive way to compel people to purchase a service, it is not free.
I was the Chief Financial Officer of the largest Medicare administrator in the country. About 30% of our payments represented an abuse of the health care system, that you help pay for. Private health insurance also gets abused, but not nearly as much (I was also an executive for Blue Cross).
I dragged my family across the country moving more than a dozen times to find a job that fit my skills. I have a daughter, who I know is underpaid by 10%, all she has to do is switch jobs to another employer on the other side of town paying more, but she is not a risk taker, so she stays put. These are decisions we all make.
But I am not suggesting that even if everyone made the perfect decision at every point in their career, that everyone would end up in the same place.
There is a lottery element to life. Some are blessed with special skills, some experience luck, and some figure out sooner what will work for them. Others have less skills, bad luck, or choose professions, that don't work for them for one reason or another. My friend saw his job eliminated recently due to a downsizing. He did nothing wrong, but that is how life works. I had my job eliminated early in my career and was fortunate to find another job just in time.
But at the end of the day, you are simply advocating for a form of socialism commonly referred to as universal basic income. Such experiments generally have not worked well at the societal level even if they make sense at the individual level. Anything not sustainable at the societal level ultimately fails.
It remains to be seen how long the US can run up $1 trillion in debt every 100 days. Neither are most workers willing to pay more taxes to fund the existing entitlements and yet you want to add more.
UBI sounds good, but for it to work, you need geniuses determining the work you should be doing... not you. You need to work hard at your assigned job and be willing to let the government take what you earn and distribute it as they see fit, trusting them to do the right thing.
For all the altruistic appeal, it won't work.
On the bright side, someday when AI and machines can replace most labor, society will likely adopt a UBI system. The negative aspect will be the system will likely be highly manipulative to get you to do what society wants you to do... but at least you will be secure.
Security always involves trading away freedom to gain security. Once machines operated by AI are producing most of the goods and services our economy consumers, it will be possible to operate a society that provides UBI. Unclear, is whether the risk takers will be forced into the system or allowed to risk it all to gain more.
People are wired differently. I think growing in up in sports, I am wired to compete. But I can see in one of my children, someone who is wired to "thrive". If you offered her a UBI of $60K to stay home and raise her child (she is a single mom), she would grab it. That is less than she earns today, but worth it to get her time back to do the things she loves.
But who is going to give here that $60K. Until that $60K comes from a machine operated by AI, I do not think she will have that option.
