this is true, but kinda misleading. a very large portion of that 6 figure debt is going to be a mortgage on a home. as long as you're not upside-down and you can afford the monthly payments, it's not bad to have a mortgage. you have to go down to the tenth percentile of american households to find negative net worths. of course, net worth doesn't tell the whole story either, but it's a lot better than presenting debt loads without balancing it against assets held.
I don't think its really all that misleading. The article is talking about basic income being needed as a safety-net for events like losing your job so that you can continue to feed your family. I suspect that absent a car, mortgage and credit card payment coming due every month most people would actually be able to weather this sort of event. The reality of these monthly liabilities doesn't change all that much regardless of your equity situation.
I'm disagreeing that "the average american has a six figure debt load" is a problem to begin with. if you take the total outstanding consumer debt in the US and divide by the number of households, you get about $110k for the mean, which is pretty close to the median household net worth. unless the distributions of debt and net worth look quite different, this implies that a typical household has a debt-to-assets ratio of <0.5. this doesn't strike me as a problem.
this is independent of whether I think UBI is a good idea in general (I do, actually).
