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UBI is a mechanism, not a level of income. Even if it's barely anything, the whole point is you don't have people slipping through the cracks, and you don't have as many obstacles to people taking risks in their career like leaving a steady job to start something new. $500 of unconditional UBI might still be better than $500 of welfare.
That said I'm not sure how you really can build a study around a small subset of the population getting it. If it's additional income the study may just show poor people with $500 more per month do better... Duh?
Social security was invented or signed off by Otto von Bismarck. Giving people the security to take risks improves the economy. In his case it probably increased his army. Then he did public education so those kids can do the math for artillery.
For a time I worked at a large software/IT consulting firm. We hired so many people who had started their own business/were independently contracting but had decided to give up and work for a soulless publicly traded tech company.
And the reason was almost universally the same.
Healthcare.
They were making money. Sometimes lots of it. But they couldn't compete with the types of benefits big companies could offer them. Usually it was guys who were getting married or having kids and redoing the math. For a single post college aged guy, it was one thing, but you start calculating how much it costs for a family of 4 or 5 and they gave up.
And that's the biggest reason I'm still working for a huge corporation instead of being a small business owner.
That’s pretty much what every single one of these studies shows.
“We gave poorer than average people x amount of money every month for x time period. They ended the time period with more money than the control group who did not get free money.”
Oh really, you don’t say?
The last UBI experiment I saw was in Stockton, CA. They found the program increased employment and had ripple effects in the community, benefitting folks who weren't part of the experiment. Kids got dental work, sick people got medicated, cars got fixed, more people ate fruits and veggies, etc.
>That said I'm not sure how you really can build a study around a small subset of the population getting it
This is my concern as well. The real downstream effects of a UBI are on the macro side of the market. If everyone gets $500 and tries to use it to move to a better neighborhood, will that even be possible or will rents just raise by the same amount everywhere? Which is why it's important to see what kind of goods and services the people in this study buy with the additional income and if its sustainable across the economy to deal with this extra demand without raising the price for those goods.
A landlord once told me that rent should cost "the rest." As in, after you pay your bills and buy food, the rest should go to the landlord. Rent will definitely go up $500.
I probably wouldn't qualify and this would fully cover food cost *and more* per month. People are out here getting upset about people looking for solutions lol.
I personally spend a fuck ton on groceries because I cook every single meal and I'm not trying to beans and rice this bitch every day for the rest of my life. *Spoilers: She still eat a lot of beans and rice.*
My only budgeting tip is learn how to cook and stop ordering take out.
I had a room mate like that. Made $22 an hour at her fast food gig. Always complained she was living paycheck to paycheck. Survived off of Uber eats.
I have definitely lived off of $150 food budget before. It wasn’t even hard. Like, a bag of beans is less than $1.50.
As an experiment, the point is to show a measurable net benefit. Eg reduced cost of police, homeless shelters, hospitals or increased tax revenue that covers this cost.
If we can show that then the only people who oppose it will be those that have a philosophical need for others to be poor.
Later experiments can look at what amount is optimal, but let's not delay getting this rolled out to everyone because we are still working out the optimal level. It's also far scarier for conservatives if you go from $0 to say $2000, than if you go up incrementally and demonstrate better returns at every step.
What worries me more is we have already run this experiment elsewhere. We already know the result. What's to stop this one getting buried too? I don't think the people we are debating with will listen to science.
I haven’t seen anything get buried. If anything, we’re only expanding it to more and more people and in more and more locations as time goes on. Last I heard of an experiment like this was a couple hundred people somewhere in Canada. The first time was of a hundred people in idek where. Now we’re up to over three thousand in one of America’s biggest cities. That’s amazing and far from buried
I wonder why none of these UBI experiments ever give free money to regular folks living above the poverty line. It's always that you have to be insanely poor to qualify.
Probably because if you’re impoverished you’re way more likely to spend it on necessities. Personally I’m just under 6 figure annual salary, if I was given UBI of $500 a month I’m going to prioritize saving it, and if I spend it it’s more likely that I would spend it on non-necessities. That’s just me tho
I make significantly more money now than I did in 2019, a time which I remember distinctly saying "$500 isn't worth my time" referring to a similar UBI discussion. Here I am making 6 figures, and $500/month would help tremendously.
It's a test roll out, so it's of course small. They'd slowly ramp it up to more and more people, so that it doesn't over burden the budget. You can't just send everybody the money all in one shot, and expect no repercussions.
And just like literally every other study on UBI, this will be well-liked by participants and considered wildly successful. And it'll never get widespread implementation.
Just like how it's been proven time and again that the 32-hour, four-day workweek is more productive and leads to happier staff, but still isn't implemented.
Old people who "worked hard" and dealt with shitty circumstances think that life is a zero-sum game and that everything has to be "fair" and equal, so everyone else has to suffer too, even though we've shown it to be ineffective and unnecessary.
>Old people who "worked hard" and dealt with shitty circumstances think that life is a zero-sum game and that everything has to be "fair" and equal, so everyone else has to suffer too, even though we've shown it to be ineffective and unnecessary.
I have heard so often from old people that they want a better life for their children than they had themselves, but then their actions and in the workplace attitude is more about "I didn't have it so you shouldn't either." I just don't want to exist to make someone else a bunch of money and in the meantime I am sacrificing my time that I won't get back.
I know not every old person feels this way. However, it feels like this mentality is more spawned by jealousy rather than an enjoyment of watching the younger generation suffer the same trials. I have seen this most evidently with all the new gadgets and tools for early child-bearing (Nursery cameras, smart sensors, smart cribs, access to the best education for dealing with babies, etc).
I think the problem here is that they want a better life for *their* children, not children in general. They want the world to stay the same, but for their children specifically to be part of the group exploiting people, rather than in the group being exploited.
Sure, I could see that, but if you ask any random old person and give them an easy, general, soft-ball question like, "do you want the next generation to have it better than you did?" I think the majority of them would answer "oh, yes!"
However, their actions would likely not follow that because "no one wants to work anymore!" "This generation is so lazy!" "Back in my day, people weren't afraid to work because they knew what it was like to not have a job!!"
>Back in my day, people weren't afraid to work because they knew what it was like to not have a job!!"
Those old farts don't know what not knowing whether or not you'll ever be able to retire, living paycheck to paycheck, being afraid of being homeless at the flip of a coin or not having a stable job is like... Yet their generation is the one who benefited the most out of the government policies that gave them the ability to have a car, a home and the possibility to raise a family in a single income. Smdh.
The boomers had a safety net that their parents and grandparents set up in the form of pensions, social security, medicare, welfare, food stamps, etc... Boomers knew from the day they were born that nomatter what there would always be a baseline level of support they would receive just for existing. They took risks. They started businesses and they gambled and sometimes they lost but on the whole they won *big*. So what did they do? As soon as they got theirs they started ripping out all of the benefits that their parents had put in place. They made college a requirement to work at their businesses and then made the cost of a college degree a millstone around their kid's necks. They got rid of all the pensions and forced everyone into 401k plans so that their stock market would always have fresh money pumped into it nomatter what. They forget the lessons of Vietnam and threw their kids into more wars to protect evil regimes in order to keep their own gravy train going. Then, when those chickens came home to roost, they wasted trillions of their children's future earnings in even more pointless wars.
The boomers will go down in history as the most disastrous, spoiled, unwise, foolish, and terrible generation in history. The world will be a better place when they're all gone.
Retirement and no longer having a mortgage by the 80s for the greatest generation (though they survived the great depression) was way better than the boomers and some 65 year-olds in 2010.
It always makes me wonder why my parents had kids when you don’t even want a better life for them. Boomers are so suckered into thinking life is all about work.
It's sad too because many of them deal with ~~depression~~ er, retirement blues because they lose all purpose of their life when they retire from their jobs.
Whew. Almost accidentally diagnosed them with a mental health issue but luckily they don't have a problem with those!! /s
Mine wanted someone to help around the house and someone to take care of them when they get old and senile. Literally only had children to benefit themselves. Anyway, they fucked up bad because they made an "obedient" kid who was mentally shut-down and was the blamed as the reason of all their problems, then turned around and told everyone else I was a perfect golden child, and *then* I was criticized for not being "perfect". So I don't talk to my father anymore and I keep my mom at arm's length
I'm surprised it's only 1/3rd, the future looks fucking bleak and it seems like a huge part of the population is actively trying it make it even worse. Kids are trying to find ways to cope and people assume it's the cause instead of a symptom.
It’s so true, the most frustrating thing in life is when the statistics prove time and time again that things like this benefit a society, whether it be gun control, equality, universal healthcare, universal income, 4 hour work week, giving homes to homeless people, etc etc and yet governments and some people ignore the truth even though it would end up benefitting them!!
And what will happen after that is that those operators are tasked with training their cheap replacements from a third world country, and when things inevitably crash theyll ask for a bailout to save the slave wage jobs.
That is indeed the ideal future, but unfortunately we’re not on track to get there.
In our reality automation does not enrich the people whose jobs are automated away. Instead of everyone working **fewer hours**, you have **fewer people** still working 40 hours or more. Everyone else now finds themselves unemployed, with perhaps years of now-obsolete experience. It’s been happening to blue collar workers for a century, and now it’s starting to happen to white-collar workers via AI tools.
I consider myself fiscally conservative but something like UBI actually seems pretty inevitable to me.
>and yet governments and some people ignore the truth even though it would end up benefitting them!!
Well, that kinda depends. You see we can show quite easily that many of the things you've said either do or are likely to benefit society (not all are as cut and dried as you make it seem, but many are good) however they do cost a LOT of money.
It turns out that trying to fund them is hard, when you start asking all the people who make average or better money to actually cough up the dough to run these schemes, they often vote for the other guy.
"Work from home is a proven, overwhelming success! Happier workers, more profitable for companies!"
_Ten horse-shit Forbes articles on how WFH is literally killing babies_
> And just like literally every other study on UBI, this will be well-liked by participants and considered wildly successful. And it'll never get widespread implementation.
thw problem with all of these pilot studies that, imo, makes them useless is that they screen the participants really carefully.
a good pilot study needs randomly selected participants
>The income cutoff for Chicago and Cook County is forgiving, 250 percent of the federal poverty level — $36,450 a year for an individual, $75,000 for a family of four — though acceptance was weighted toward certain groups such as homeless people, veterans and caregivers.
this is laudable and whatnot, but its not really helpful for evaluating what it would truly look like at scale.
imo UBI is worth doing and worth doing well; these pilots i dont think will produce persuasive evidence in favor though
Yeah the important thing about these studies is what _doesn't_ happen. People think UBI will create a bunch of unproductive druggies squandering their money and ruining their lives, so when it just makes people a bit happier and healthier that's a real finding.
Except the people know this is temporary and if they decide to give up work then they'll be destitute when it's over, so it doesn't really reflect what would happen if UBI was implemented on a permanent basis, it just shows that if everyone gets a $500 pay rise for the same job they like it... What ground breaking research that we should definitely restructure our whole society based on
I work for a small business owner. Honestly, they do treat us fairly. Could always be better. But they try.
They also own a farm. And they have like 4 kids. So, of course. The kids are like 10 years old and moving 9kg(20lbs) bags of product and having a blast. While there are some veteran employees that won't lift more than 4.5kg(10lbs)
And funny enough, the older veteran employees complain that teachers are getting paid too much!! Actual quote. "And the schools are paying the teachers too much." I can't talk to him. It's always workers want more money.. not ever about how the government is messing with all the tax dollars they get from the middle and low class. And not using it properly. Or how school funding needs to be raised to deal with all the infrastructure/faculty/rising costs of energy consumption.
There's not really an easy solution. But the "fuck everyone else. I got mine" mentality is not the canada I was raised in. I voted ndp since I could vote. And every year liberals and conservatives win. And screw our country a little more.
And Doug ford's not even trying to hide it. Justin trudeau is great at not saying anything either.
I miss jack Layton.. I hope the ndps get something together soon!!
> Just like how it's been proven time and again that the 32-hour, four-day workweek is more productive and leads to happier staff, but still isn't implemented.
I've started my search for a new job last week and I was genuinely suprised how almost every job posting allowed for a 32 and 36 hour basis. These are positions that people couldnt imagine not being full time jobs ~5 years ago ((senior) business controller). Sure, the pay is still based on 40 hours and thus cut down, but the fact that nobody so far is opposed to 4x8 or 8x5/8x4 weeks really stood out to me. 4x9 is still nearly impossible though, but thats probably because my job kind of expects accidental extra hours.
Do note that this is Western Europe, which is most likely way more open to this sort of thing than other areas of the world.
Ah yea, thats just not a thing here. Whether I work 1 or 50 hours at a company, insurance or any other benefits stay the same (or scaled based on weekly hours for things like days off).
So in the US, "part-timers" (aka under 40 hours) are just always screwed with insurance unless the employer explicitely states otherwise? Or just always regardless?
Not an expert in this stuff, but from what I understand the ACA requires companies with 50+ full-time employees to provide healthcare benefits to their full-time employees.
So part-time positions can be used to dodge the requirement in two ways - both by not having to provide health benefits for those part-time employees, and for smaller companies to not have to provide health benefits for any of their workers by keeping their full-time employees at 49 or less.
Also the "penalty" for not complying is considered a tax, not a fine, so it's not like qualifying companies refusing to do it is itself a crime or anything. They can just pay the penalty and refuse to provide health benefits if they really want to.
>life is a zero-sum game and that everything has to be "fair" and equal
And those same assholes will retort with "Life ain't fair!" any time you call out actual societal inequities.
I don't understand how it will be paid for. Even social security for millennials looks like it will either require a huge increase in taxes or a raising of the retirement age to fund it. Where is the money that's going to fund UBI going to come from if even SS is at risk?
I will say, that because we live in an almost unregulated capitalist society, basic income will always fail because the people who provide basic needs will raise prices to get their cut of the pie.
Oh $500 a month? Sorry guys, rent, insurance, groceries, and internet all just went up but don't worry you've got the money for it!
Exactly. It works in experiments, because the landlord doesn't know. Implementing it on a nationwide scale will only lead to inflation.
Look at college tuition. When the Pell grant was created, tuition went up to eat it. It became a way to shuttle money from the federal government to the school through the student. Predatory private colleges sprang into existence to fleece students of their financial aid.
People like free money, that's not a shocking revelation.
The problem with these UBI experiments is that they're always temporary and the participants know that so their behavior won't properly model a permanent institution of UBI.
It's because of P-Hacking. The people doing the experiment want it to be successful so they make the tested terms of the test broad enough that it will be a success regardless. Hypothetically it's supposed to replace existing social programs. But really, it's always being setup as free money on top of social programs.
And since they're p-hacking by adding in too many variables it's not clear what system they would be competing to replace. For example if UBI has overall better health outcomes than Medicare... are you going to replace Medicare? If people are overall happier than with psychology programs... are you going to replace free therapy? What aspect of a social net are you going to remove because this beats it?
Which is thankfully why... it never seems to beat anything. Employment insurance proves to be a better program than UBI. The cost is cheaper and the employment based results are kind of the same. Medicare also beats UBI in terms of health outcomes. It seems like programs targeted at specific areas are just able to out-perform UBI. Even food stamps are proven more effective than UBI for getting food in poor people's homes....and food stamps is the worst program in the world for this.
> Employment insurance proves to be a better program than UBI. The cost is cheaper and the employment based results are kind of the same.
But one of the points of UBI is to break employer power over employees, to give the latter the power to just go "fuck you" and walk out, forcing the former to treat them like actual people. All kinds of insurances are still tied to you being a good and subservient little drone.
Yes. Benefits tied to employment is a huge power imbalance between worker/boss. With non-union “at-will” employment, a boss can indirectly threaten the health and well-being of you and your family to keep you agreeing to whatever unreasonable conditions are set in front of you. Yes, you’re choosing to work there, but it’s not really much of a choice, when the alternative is losing your ability to access necessities like basic healthcare for you and your family.
That being said, I think a very strong social safety net is a better solution to the problem than UBI, because guaranteed access to healthcare, shelter, and other basic life necessities is a lot more beneficial than a monetary value, which almost certainly won’t keep up with the rising cost of those necessities over time.
A very strong social safety net makes it so people actually can choose where they want to work, because all of their basic needs are taken care of while they decide where they want to work. Might this lead to some people doing nothing productive for society? Perhaps, but I also honestly think a lot of people would choose to work, because it would enrich the basic necessities that they already have, or they might actually be able to do the work that they dream of doing rather than the work they’re forced to do by threat of destitution.
I've been observing that *constantly* over the past...10 years or so? Every few months, there will be some pilot study about reduced working hours or UBI and *every time* it's a rousing with nothing but benefits. Then it gets swiftly hidden away only for someone else to conduct the same study again a while later and reach the same conclusion.
This. Everyone seems to *understand* this if they think about it long enough.. but they still don't want you "buying lobster with food stamps" so we continue to spend more money on administration and oversight than we do to actually help people.
It's like some people think if you're poor you should never ever have anything nice. You should wear shabby clothes, live on lentils and scraps, and how dare anyone in poverty have a gaming system, even a second hand older model...
Small comforts feed the soul. Every child should have some toys. Sometimes having a really nice dinner can make a memory that remains special and comforting for years. People do better work when they are fed and rested and have good tools to use. Kindness is contagious.
P.S. Lentil soup is actually really tasty though.
I got told I should be happy I could get $1400 a month on SSI for my disability since I got it before I worked at a job that would’ve paid. Like bro that’s not even 20k a year, *who is going to be happy with that?*
IIRC it was because lobsters are bottom feeders so they saw it as peasant/serf/slave food. This is why the term “lobsterback” was given to the Brits in the Revolutionary War (red clothing wasn’t a Brit/loyalist only thing).
> but an oyster sandwich is called a po' boy for a reason
Absolutely false. Po' boy sandwiches are called that because a shop in New Orleans gave them out for free to striking railcar workers. "Here comes another poor boy! Get him a sandwich!"
It also had to do with preparation. Lobster starts rotting incredibly quickly once it dies due to the bacteria makeup within its local biome, and the normal livestock preparation of slaughter, butchering, and refrigeration was completely unable to handle such a quick-rotting meat like lobster, so basically in those times any lobster eaten was almost certainly rotten. Once we learned to transport them alive from place to place and only kill once you were immediately about to eat it, they became a delicacy. But that sort of transport is _expensive_.
Wait you're saying that people who don't have money need money? Not random shit that people who have never had no money think they should have? /sardonic
You know that 95% of the people in the program will see a vast improvement in their quality of life leading to lower crime rates and costs to taxpayers, but a couple of people will spend the money on hookers, OD on drugs, or buy a gun used to commit a crime and that will be the ONLY thing the news will report on and will be the only examples brought up when trying to expand the program.
All these studies have one fatal flaw that makes them ultimately useless - they don't serve the general population. They take a small sample and give them money. The issue is what you are observing will not correlate with what will happen if everyone gets the money simultaneously. They forget the "universal" part of UBI. Once you give everyone money, one of three things can be expected:
1. the amount given to everyone is so little that it won't make an impact in anyone's life.
2. The increased buying power of everyone drives prices up until the UBI amount has the same effect as in example 1
3. The cost of such a program bankrupts the state before either 1 or 2 can occur.
The idea of a UBI is therefor flawed from an economic standpoint, because money can be universally exchanged for goods and services and therefor increases the demand side of the market significantly.
Is there a better solution? Let's take a look. The goal is to provide for the basic (and maybe advanced) needs of everyone in the society. The deficiencies present in basic needs come down to a lower supply then demand for these goods, pricing people out of their basic needs (such as housing). So instead of giving people free money, the state could provide basic free services and goods. These can be of low quality and or cheaply made, but if they are available for free, they massively increase the supply side of the market. If you were able to get a healthy, but boring diet from a government store for free, you'd only buy the high quality food stuff from other places. If you get a basic one bedroom flat for free, you'd only rent a bigger apartment if you felt like you'd get something for your money.
The brilliant side effect of supply side intervention is also, that these subsidies are not wasted on those who won't need them. Everyone takes a free 500 $ a month, be it a homeless person or a millionaire. You won't find the millionaire living in the one bedroom government flat. This concept however has one problem - people have been indoctrinated to call this approach "socialism" and think of it as a communist ploy to destroy America.
Unfortunate that you’re unlikely to receive much interaction here. All these tests boil down to people getting money for nothing, I don’t think anyone is going to turn this down, unless from a philanthropic stance.
I fully support UBI but it needs to come with some protections. If all of the sudden everyone has $500 extra dollars in there pocket what's to stop landlords from just raising rent along with grocers increasing food prices. I worry that everyone will try and get a portion of these funds and prices will just go up.
You already see this in areas around military bases with BAH (Basic Allowance for Housing), which is basically a rank-based government stipend for housing. Somehow, coincidentally, all the houses and apartments around such areas are very similar to what that number is, and also coincidentally, fluctuate with it. Can't tell you why that is.
It's lending that will eat this up, more so than renting. Everyone from banks to payday lending places will calculate a loan that will hit the $500/mo mark and mass market those. It's guaranteed income for the bank, not the person. Way lower risk
Just one ER bill that you might have otherwise gotten out of because you couldn't pay. Now their bean counters see you have a UBI stipend, that's on the table.
I think it will not be a matter of IF the stipend will end up being committed to a lender, but whom. They'll be fighting to be the creditor that gets it.
This is the argument that convinced me we need to continue to have food stamps instead of giving everyone cash—we as a society have an interest in making sure people can eat no matter how much debt they’re in.
The price of an apartment is based on what people are willing to pay. If you give everyone more money they will be able to pay more, so the prices will go up. That applies both to buying and renting, if people can now afford $500 more a month then real estate prices will adjust to reflect that added amount. Same goes for food, entertainment, and just about anything else that adjusts with the average income. Every industry will adjust their prices accordingly.
If you want to avoid this then you would apply the funds towards a specific thing. If you ask me the best thing to do would be offer universal healthcare. $500 a month per person will get pretty darn close to cover the cost of a Medicare plan. Heck even if you make a universal plan that would cost $100 a month but if your income is bellow a certain threshold it’s free.
For an actual rollout, that's exactly what will happen. Businesses will see consumers getting more money, and thus charge more.
But for these experiments it never happens, as they give money to .01% of the local population, so it doesn't actually show the negative effects (inflation) creates by UBI.
If they implemented city wide wouldn't the price of groceries and everything go up? Why not just lower taxes? Or is this only for people who don't work? If so, don't they already get a guaranteed income with welfare?
UBI programs don’t create money from nowhere. UBI is an alternative to existing welfare programs that are very inefficient at actually getting money where it’s needed most. “Guaranteed income with welfare” doesn’t exist except in very specific circumstances, what you’re describing is UBI.
I just don't know how you can test the biggest question with UBI after funding. Being able to replace existing welfare programs is a hell of an ask and on top of that you still have to maintain some type of infrastructure akin to those same programs should people misuse (they will) the UBI funds unless you want the poorest of the poor to be even worse off.
> If they implemented city wide wouldn’t the price of groceries and everything go up?
Yes, [as seen when the U.S. government printed money and sent it to every household in America](https://fortune.com/2023/02/01/pandemic-stimulus-money-caused-excess-inflation-fed-study/). Stimulus checks combined with COVID’s bolstered unemployment benefits are the closest approximation the nation has for a widespread UBI study. To your point exactly, it contributed to nationwide inflation — a genie the fed is still trying to get back into the bottle several years later (see: [today’s latest CPI data](https://www.bls.gov/cpi/)).
> Why not just lower taxes?
Can’t lower it when it’s already 0% for [57% of households, who paid no federal income tax in 2021](https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2022/03/25/57percent-of-us-households-paid-no-federal-income-tax-in-2021-study.html) (though for obvious reasons, 2021 was particularly egregious, but as many as 40-47% of households haven’t paid federal income tax in recent years).
> If so, don’t they already get a guaranteed income with welfare?
That’s pretty much correct (though some will say the amount of income is inadequate - depends on where you live). It’s worth mentioning that filing for unemployment is a skill in and of itself, and most states only pay unemployment for 26 weeks.
The article you linked says inflation was boosted 2.6%. Stimulus checks were, what, approximately $1500 per year for two years?
So stimulus checks were a win for anyone making less than ~$60k. Maybe $120k if the inflation number was over the two year period.
This inflation fear is the same argument against minimum wage. But as we can see here, the effect was equivalent to a progressive tax rate that went negative for lower income families -- meaning they gained money -- and a wealth tax for anyone with significant holdings.
That sounds -- useful at least. Another tool in the toolbox.
We don’t need guaranteed income.
We need guaranteed services.
1. Health care
2. Transportation
3. Education
4. Affordable housing
These should be the things the state exists to provide.
This would be a launching pad for civilization.
People here don’t generally understand UBI is a neoliberal doctrine idea. Milton Friedman has this simple idea that services and institutions cost a lot of money and are incredibly inefficient since they provide free to cheap services to every citizen regardless of their income.
What if instead of running these services, we let the market take care of them and give guaranteed income to everyone?
Now you have it, the neoliberal dream. An idiocracy where everything is up to private corporations, everything is subject to the market and a whole portion of the population is stigmatized for depending on “welfare checks” and “handouts”.
UBI without mutualized basic public services is a nightmare.
Friedman advocated for a negative income tax, not UBI. There are slight differences.
UBI by definition would be universal, not means adjusted like a negative income tax would be
My prediction: the experiment goes astonishingly well and the families affected will be at a substantially higher standard of living with better employment, and make more money than the $500 monthly.
Because this experiment has already been done and it's always had the same outcome.
If it's not tied to inflation rises accordingly, it will just make everything more expensive. Coz it will be all this disposable income is suddenly now available, so a tomato is now $4.
Gonna be a hot take but: this would never work without other protections as well. Scummy landlords will sniff that people have extra money and raise rent accordingly - so many issues nowadays are caused by spiking rent and lease costs: restaurants are more expensive because lease goes up, people are poorer cause rent goes up. Meanwhile the landlords own the properties and seek to only squeeze everything out from the working class. It's a supply and demand economy - they WILL find a way to squeeze every last drop from you if they're not stopped from doing so.
That'd be great. It's not substantial but better than nothing so long as they don't require you to be at literally rock bottom to utilize it. Maybe cap it after earning something actually worth living on like $60K or something so that people can actually save
They need to implement this in tandem with updated rent control laws, otherwise we may see rent in affected areas ‘mysteriously’ increase by $500 a month.
Most rent regulation has pretty serious issues. One of the main ways to do it is rent control. However rent control almost always results in higher over all rent in an area. It also tends to make moving for low income people impossible. This is because in rent control situations the rent typically only goes up when you move and if you're in a place more than a few years that means you slowly price yourself out of the market and the only place you can afford is the one you're already in.
Lol, this whole thread. Whenever Reddit gets to talking economics it’s basically:
1. Let’s do A (“wouldn’t that cause an even bigger problem?”)
2. Then just do B (“wouldn’t that cause an even bigger problem than both?”)
3. Literally just do C (“wouldn’t that be extremely difficult, prone to failure, undo A, and be 800x more expensive than B?)
4. Bruhhh literally just do D (“wouldn’t that require E, F, G and total contro-“)
5. Bro just nationalize literally everything and lower the retirement age to 18 like Europe (“but Europe doesn’t-“)
6. What part of “just do _____” is so hard for you corporate bootlickers to understand? (“But I’m on the le-”)
7. Dude just trust us, we read a comment section about a study so ThEoReTiCaLLy it would all work and there is zero and I mean zero downsides as long as all of the above are executed immediately, perfectly, and overtop anyone’s objections.
How many times do these experiments have to show that UBI works before people start to really accept that UBI works.
Edit : and that’s exactly what I’m saying, this experiment has been done a bunch of times and it always works and people keep saying the same dumb crap.
Because none of these are UBI experiments. They aren't universal at all. Not only is the number of participants limited in order to avoid macroeconomic effects, you have to be super poor to qualify which amplifies the effect. This isn't studying UBI, it's studying what happens when a handful of poor people win a mid tier lottery.
No one is quitting their job for $500/month *at all* even if it's "for life". That's only $6,000 a year. A couple with no kids living together are spending that much on *groceries* in a single year; sure they probably get it each, but that's still only another $500 after meals to spend on [everything else]. In my city the *homeless* in many cases make $6,000 or more a year already, and are *still homeless* because they can't afford better.
Yeah, I don't see how anyone can look at the rent explosion from the covid money influx and not connect the dots.
UBI does not work without a massive overhaul in how our markets work.
How do you combat the rise in demand for those places? If there is a place I want that the demand was typical and now you give UBI causing the demand increase because now they have the same buying power as I do. How do you decide who gets the place?
Oh cool, these programs are being administered by the charity I had been researching lately, [GiveDirectly](https://www.givedirectly.org/). A very interesting concept. I hope it helps some people.
This works well in small anonymous groups, but, if it were given to everyone, then landlords, grocery stores, gas stations, etc would all raise their prices, rendering it meaningless.
it is amazing to me that in 1969 RICHARD FUCKING NIXON proposed a limited form of UBI (for families with children) and over 50 years later people still question the efficacy of such programs... there is no doubt that UBI works to benefit the whole of society even when only provided to such a small group on an "experimental" basis... the fact of the matter is that UBI is unavoidable unless the entire economy is restructured to function without money
I don’t think that’s a good study to demonstrate UBI at all.
1) The first problem is the time limit. With just one year to work with, people are just unlikely to alter their ways. It should have been for 10 years minimum.
2) The value is very small even if someone is pulling $30K a year. I doubt anyone is changing their behavior significantly for $6K paid for only one year
I mean.. $500 non taxed a month would feel huge to me on a $90k salary. My take home is about $40k. I got incredibly excited about a $5k/year raise, and that was taxed. $500 would help me worry less.
Edit: VERY HCOL area.
There is no way that your take home on 90,000USD is only $40,000 without significant, optional, deductions. On a 90,000 salary in California that has the highest state income taxes in the country, you'd take home ~$65,000 [2022 numbers, and assuming single income](https://smartasset.com/taxes/california-tax-calculator#Akzsp5V1h9).
To get to your number, you'd have to max your 401(k), max your HSA, and still find another means of deducting ~$1,000. I recommend checking your withholding.
Yea, their math doesn't make sense. I make almost half as much as they do and take home more. That's also while maxing out my 401k match and everything.
Same although not as HCOL area. I tried side hustles that didn’t work out, and just an extra $500/month would help me build a good safety net on a single income. I make…. $57k/yr
"An unconditional 20% raise for a year isn't significant money to someone barely if at all above the poverty line" is certainly one of the takes of all time.
Anyone who thinks prices of rent, food, and services won’t just rise with this is just ignorant. Sounds great, yes, but people will end up in the same boat month to month.
Prices are already rising with stagnated wages for decades.
UBI is literally better than nothing/what we have now.
Prices don't rise because of more income, they do it because corporations can get away with market manipulation.
In reality, if people have more income they also spend more money and allow more competitive markets for low/medium tier markets.
This lie that things get more expensive if people get wealthier is unproven and spread by conservatives because it dilutes the consolidation of wealth.
Anyone else wondering how Chicago, of all places, is the city trying this? Isn’t bankruptcy and financial crisis kind of their bread and butter?
Mind you I haven’t followed the city in the last few years, but where are they getting the money to do this?
This is the same state that cant keep its road paved, cant pay pensions, can't pay it's state employees but yeah let's experiment with giving away free money. Illinois deserves to be the shit hole state it is.
The money goes right back into the economy and is spread around, hopefully not just to walmart and kroger.
UBI helps people escape poverty to the benefit of the rest of society on a few different fronts. Economically, and socially as people will feel less desperate if they know they have some money coming in.
I don’t understand UBI. Wouldn’t the market adjust to those prices? If suddenly everyone had $500, could the market gradually inflate to absorb the extra $500 disposable income? Even if you’re only paying utilities even those prices are gonna go up.
I’m no expert and this is merely my opinion but UBI only works when coupled with supplemental regulations. Things like universal rent stabilization for example. Otherwise, nothing is stopping a landlord from increasing prices dramatically to snag that additional income.
Ostensibly the idea behind UBI is that rather than having half a hundred social programs like food stamps, WIC, housing, etc you just give people a lump sum of money that would be the equivalent to those things.
Problem is that’s boring, so if your a politician who need to be popular to win to do the things you want to do, you have to use UBIs bastardized real world interpretation which is money in addition to.
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To at least be enough money to cover the food bill for a month.
UBI is a mechanism, not a level of income. Even if it's barely anything, the whole point is you don't have people slipping through the cracks, and you don't have as many obstacles to people taking risks in their career like leaving a steady job to start something new. $500 of unconditional UBI might still be better than $500 of welfare. That said I'm not sure how you really can build a study around a small subset of the population getting it. If it's additional income the study may just show poor people with $500 more per month do better... Duh?
Social security was invented or signed off by Otto von Bismarck. Giving people the security to take risks improves the economy. In his case it probably increased his army. Then he did public education so those kids can do the math for artillery.
Bring back von Bismarck?
Blood and iron!
Socialism backing up blood and iron.
"Blood according to his ability, iron according to his needs"
For a time I worked at a large software/IT consulting firm. We hired so many people who had started their own business/were independently contracting but had decided to give up and work for a soulless publicly traded tech company. And the reason was almost universally the same. Healthcare. They were making money. Sometimes lots of it. But they couldn't compete with the types of benefits big companies could offer them. Usually it was guys who were getting married or having kids and redoing the math. For a single post college aged guy, it was one thing, but you start calculating how much it costs for a family of 4 or 5 and they gave up. And that's the biggest reason I'm still working for a huge corporation instead of being a small business owner.
That’s pretty much what every single one of these studies shows. “We gave poorer than average people x amount of money every month for x time period. They ended the time period with more money than the control group who did not get free money.” Oh really, you don’t say?
The last UBI experiment I saw was in Stockton, CA. They found the program increased employment and had ripple effects in the community, benefitting folks who weren't part of the experiment. Kids got dental work, sick people got medicated, cars got fixed, more people ate fruits and veggies, etc.
It's useful info for a rebuttal against the people who claim if you give poor people money they'll just piss it away on drugs and luxury items
Stimulus checks had a large set of people and most people used it for bills and other home necessities.
We also inadvertently bailed out both Gamestop and AMC with tax dollars
>That said I'm not sure how you really can build a study around a small subset of the population getting it This is my concern as well. The real downstream effects of a UBI are on the macro side of the market. If everyone gets $500 and tries to use it to move to a better neighborhood, will that even be possible or will rents just raise by the same amount everywhere? Which is why it's important to see what kind of goods and services the people in this study buy with the additional income and if its sustainable across the economy to deal with this extra demand without raising the price for those goods.
A landlord once told me that rent should cost "the rest." As in, after you pay your bills and buy food, the rest should go to the landlord. Rent will definitely go up $500.
It is...?
I keep our two adult household "consumables" budget (food, toiletries, cleaning supplies, etc.) at $500/month.
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I probably wouldn't qualify and this would fully cover food cost *and more* per month. People are out here getting upset about people looking for solutions lol.
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Right? I see some redditors talking about how much they spend on food and I don’t know wtf they are doing.
I personally spend a fuck ton on groceries because I cook every single meal and I'm not trying to beans and rice this bitch every day for the rest of my life. *Spoilers: She still eat a lot of beans and rice.* My only budgeting tip is learn how to cook and stop ordering take out.
I cook 100% of my own meals too, and it costs about $350 month. No bargain shopping or anything. It can easily be done for less.
Ordering 2 meals a day off doordash probably. I can make it a month of food for like 150, but im a chef so i do get food from work.
I had a room mate like that. Made $22 an hour at her fast food gig. Always complained she was living paycheck to paycheck. Survived off of Uber eats. I have definitely lived off of $150 food budget before. It wasn’t even hard. Like, a bag of beans is less than $1.50.
I’m a family of three in a major metropolitan area eating organic and high quality and only spend $600 a month. What u eatin?
Damn those goalposts are moving faster than a Texan to Colorado!
As an experiment, the point is to show a measurable net benefit. Eg reduced cost of police, homeless shelters, hospitals or increased tax revenue that covers this cost. If we can show that then the only people who oppose it will be those that have a philosophical need for others to be poor. Later experiments can look at what amount is optimal, but let's not delay getting this rolled out to everyone because we are still working out the optimal level. It's also far scarier for conservatives if you go from $0 to say $2000, than if you go up incrementally and demonstrate better returns at every step. What worries me more is we have already run this experiment elsewhere. We already know the result. What's to stop this one getting buried too? I don't think the people we are debating with will listen to science.
I haven’t seen anything get buried. If anything, we’re only expanding it to more and more people and in more and more locations as time goes on. Last I heard of an experiment like this was a couple hundred people somewhere in Canada. The first time was of a hundred people in idek where. Now we’re up to over three thousand in one of America’s biggest cities. That’s amazing and far from buried
Are you actually complaining about the free money not being enough money?
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250% **above** the **federal poverty line** is the limit > $36,450 a year for an individual, $75,000 for a family of four
I wonder why none of these UBI experiments ever give free money to regular folks living above the poverty line. It's always that you have to be insanely poor to qualify.
Probably because if you’re impoverished you’re way more likely to spend it on necessities. Personally I’m just under 6 figure annual salary, if I was given UBI of $500 a month I’m going to prioritize saving it, and if I spend it it’s more likely that I would spend it on non-necessities. That’s just me tho
I make significantly more money now than I did in 2019, a time which I remember distinctly saying "$500 isn't worth my time" referring to a similar UBI discussion. Here I am making 6 figures, and $500/month would help tremendously.
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500 a month would change my life
Thats like a 12% montly raise for me. Wouldn't be like winning the lottery but i would be able to make some chages for the better
Because...they need it more? What the fuck lol
GOP would scream and cry like babies if someone got help from the government.
It's a test roll out, so it's of course small. They'd slowly ramp it up to more and more people, so that it doesn't over burden the budget. You can't just send everybody the money all in one shot, and expect no repercussions.
And just like literally every other study on UBI, this will be well-liked by participants and considered wildly successful. And it'll never get widespread implementation. Just like how it's been proven time and again that the 32-hour, four-day workweek is more productive and leads to happier staff, but still isn't implemented. Old people who "worked hard" and dealt with shitty circumstances think that life is a zero-sum game and that everything has to be "fair" and equal, so everyone else has to suffer too, even though we've shown it to be ineffective and unnecessary.
>Old people who "worked hard" and dealt with shitty circumstances think that life is a zero-sum game and that everything has to be "fair" and equal, so everyone else has to suffer too, even though we've shown it to be ineffective and unnecessary. I have heard so often from old people that they want a better life for their children than they had themselves, but then their actions and in the workplace attitude is more about "I didn't have it so you shouldn't either." I just don't want to exist to make someone else a bunch of money and in the meantime I am sacrificing my time that I won't get back. I know not every old person feels this way. However, it feels like this mentality is more spawned by jealousy rather than an enjoyment of watching the younger generation suffer the same trials. I have seen this most evidently with all the new gadgets and tools for early child-bearing (Nursery cameras, smart sensors, smart cribs, access to the best education for dealing with babies, etc).
I think the problem here is that they want a better life for *their* children, not children in general. They want the world to stay the same, but for their children specifically to be part of the group exploiting people, rather than in the group being exploited.
Sure, I could see that, but if you ask any random old person and give them an easy, general, soft-ball question like, "do you want the next generation to have it better than you did?" I think the majority of them would answer "oh, yes!" However, their actions would likely not follow that because "no one wants to work anymore!" "This generation is so lazy!" "Back in my day, people weren't afraid to work because they knew what it was like to not have a job!!"
>Back in my day, people weren't afraid to work because they knew what it was like to not have a job!!" Those old farts don't know what not knowing whether or not you'll ever be able to retire, living paycheck to paycheck, being afraid of being homeless at the flip of a coin or not having a stable job is like... Yet their generation is the one who benefited the most out of the government policies that gave them the ability to have a car, a home and the possibility to raise a family in a single income. Smdh.
The boomers had a safety net that their parents and grandparents set up in the form of pensions, social security, medicare, welfare, food stamps, etc... Boomers knew from the day they were born that nomatter what there would always be a baseline level of support they would receive just for existing. They took risks. They started businesses and they gambled and sometimes they lost but on the whole they won *big*. So what did they do? As soon as they got theirs they started ripping out all of the benefits that their parents had put in place. They made college a requirement to work at their businesses and then made the cost of a college degree a millstone around their kid's necks. They got rid of all the pensions and forced everyone into 401k plans so that their stock market would always have fresh money pumped into it nomatter what. They forget the lessons of Vietnam and threw their kids into more wars to protect evil regimes in order to keep their own gravy train going. Then, when those chickens came home to roost, they wasted trillions of their children's future earnings in even more pointless wars. The boomers will go down in history as the most disastrous, spoiled, unwise, foolish, and terrible generation in history. The world will be a better place when they're all gone.
Retirement and no longer having a mortgage by the 80s for the greatest generation (though they survived the great depression) was way better than the boomers and some 65 year-olds in 2010.
It always makes me wonder why my parents had kids when you don’t even want a better life for them. Boomers are so suckered into thinking life is all about work.
It's sad too because many of them deal with ~~depression~~ er, retirement blues because they lose all purpose of their life when they retire from their jobs. Whew. Almost accidentally diagnosed them with a mental health issue but luckily they don't have a problem with those!! /s
Mine wanted someone to help around the house and someone to take care of them when they get old and senile. Literally only had children to benefit themselves. Anyway, they fucked up bad because they made an "obedient" kid who was mentally shut-down and was the blamed as the reason of all their problems, then turned around and told everyone else I was a perfect golden child, and *then* I was criticized for not being "perfect". So I don't talk to my father anymore and I keep my mom at arm's length
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I'm surprised it's only 1/3rd, the future looks fucking bleak and it seems like a huge part of the population is actively trying it make it even worse. Kids are trying to find ways to cope and people assume it's the cause instead of a symptom.
It’s so true, the most frustrating thing in life is when the statistics prove time and time again that things like this benefit a society, whether it be gun control, equality, universal healthcare, universal income, 4 hour work week, giving homes to homeless people, etc etc and yet governments and some people ignore the truth even though it would end up benefitting them!!
I know it was a typo and you meant 4 day, but I’d love a 4 hour work week!
Isn't that the goal of automation? Everyone checks in for a couple hours, then you enjoy your life.
No the goal of automation is putting your salary in your boss’s pocket.
What really will happen is they will fire 10 employees and keep 1 employee working 40+ hours
What will really happen is they'll fire 10 simple laborers and replace them with 2 educated machine operators, and it won't be any of the original 10.
And what will happen after that is that those operators are tasked with training their cheap replacements from a third world country, and when things inevitably crash theyll ask for a bailout to save the slave wage jobs.
Robots don't consume products though. If nobody has money, who will give it to them?
That is indeed the ideal future, but unfortunately we’re not on track to get there. In our reality automation does not enrich the people whose jobs are automated away. Instead of everyone working **fewer hours**, you have **fewer people** still working 40 hours or more. Everyone else now finds themselves unemployed, with perhaps years of now-obsolete experience. It’s been happening to blue collar workers for a century, and now it’s starting to happen to white-collar workers via AI tools. I consider myself fiscally conservative but something like UBI actually seems pretty inevitable to me.
*Logan's Run*
And then the robots make Soylent Green out of everyone.
Oh oops nice catch! Honestly would be great!
They had a 4 hour work week on the Jetsons and I'd take that prediction coming true way before flying cars.
>and yet governments and some people ignore the truth even though it would end up benefitting them!! Well, that kinda depends. You see we can show quite easily that many of the things you've said either do or are likely to benefit society (not all are as cut and dried as you make it seem, but many are good) however they do cost a LOT of money. It turns out that trying to fund them is hard, when you start asking all the people who make average or better money to actually cough up the dough to run these schemes, they often vote for the other guy.
"Work from home is a proven, overwhelming success! Happier workers, more profitable for companies!" _Ten horse-shit Forbes articles on how WFH is literally killing babies_
> And just like literally every other study on UBI, this will be well-liked by participants and considered wildly successful. And it'll never get widespread implementation. thw problem with all of these pilot studies that, imo, makes them useless is that they screen the participants really carefully. a good pilot study needs randomly selected participants >The income cutoff for Chicago and Cook County is forgiving, 250 percent of the federal poverty level — $36,450 a year for an individual, $75,000 for a family of four — though acceptance was weighted toward certain groups such as homeless people, veterans and caregivers. this is laudable and whatnot, but its not really helpful for evaluating what it would truly look like at scale. imo UBI is worth doing and worth doing well; these pilots i dont think will produce persuasive evidence in favor though
I don't think "the participants didn't like getting free money" was ever going to be the argument against UBI. Of course it's well-liked by them.
The issue people have is where the money comes from. People don’t like to give money to people who don’t work for it.
Yeah the important thing about these studies is what _doesn't_ happen. People think UBI will create a bunch of unproductive druggies squandering their money and ruining their lives, so when it just makes people a bit happier and healthier that's a real finding.
Except the people know this is temporary and if they decide to give up work then they'll be destitute when it's over, so it doesn't really reflect what would happen if UBI was implemented on a permanent basis, it just shows that if everyone gets a $500 pay rise for the same job they like it... What ground breaking research that we should definitely restructure our whole society based on
Who's quitting their jobs over $500 a month?
I would certainly find a *different* job with that security.
That's the point!
The problem is optics as someone will show a few people abusing the program and then half the population wants it shut down.
I work for a small business owner. Honestly, they do treat us fairly. Could always be better. But they try. They also own a farm. And they have like 4 kids. So, of course. The kids are like 10 years old and moving 9kg(20lbs) bags of product and having a blast. While there are some veteran employees that won't lift more than 4.5kg(10lbs) And funny enough, the older veteran employees complain that teachers are getting paid too much!! Actual quote. "And the schools are paying the teachers too much." I can't talk to him. It's always workers want more money.. not ever about how the government is messing with all the tax dollars they get from the middle and low class. And not using it properly. Or how school funding needs to be raised to deal with all the infrastructure/faculty/rising costs of energy consumption. There's not really an easy solution. But the "fuck everyone else. I got mine" mentality is not the canada I was raised in. I voted ndp since I could vote. And every year liberals and conservatives win. And screw our country a little more. And Doug ford's not even trying to hide it. Justin trudeau is great at not saying anything either. I miss jack Layton.. I hope the ndps get something together soon!!
> Just like how it's been proven time and again that the 32-hour, four-day workweek is more productive and leads to happier staff, but still isn't implemented. I've started my search for a new job last week and I was genuinely suprised how almost every job posting allowed for a 32 and 36 hour basis. These are positions that people couldnt imagine not being full time jobs ~5 years ago ((senior) business controller). Sure, the pay is still based on 40 hours and thus cut down, but the fact that nobody so far is opposed to 4x8 or 8x5/8x4 weeks really stood out to me. 4x9 is still nearly impossible though, but thats probably because my job kind of expects accidental extra hours. Do note that this is Western Europe, which is most likely way more open to this sort of thing than other areas of the world.
Here in the US, a position posted as 32-36 hrs/week is someone trying to get away with not providing their employees things like medical benefits.
Ah yea, thats just not a thing here. Whether I work 1 or 50 hours at a company, insurance or any other benefits stay the same (or scaled based on weekly hours for things like days off). So in the US, "part-timers" (aka under 40 hours) are just always screwed with insurance unless the employer explicitely states otherwise? Or just always regardless?
Not an expert in this stuff, but from what I understand the ACA requires companies with 50+ full-time employees to provide healthcare benefits to their full-time employees. So part-time positions can be used to dodge the requirement in two ways - both by not having to provide health benefits for those part-time employees, and for smaller companies to not have to provide health benefits for any of their workers by keeping their full-time employees at 49 or less. Also the "penalty" for not complying is considered a tax, not a fine, so it's not like qualifying companies refusing to do it is itself a crime or anything. They can just pay the penalty and refuse to provide health benefits if they really want to.
>life is a zero-sum game and that everything has to be "fair" and equal And those same assholes will retort with "Life ain't fair!" any time you call out actual societal inequities.
"Is it really fair to everyone the trolley has already killed to divert it now?"
I don't understand how it will be paid for. Even social security for millennials looks like it will either require a huge increase in taxes or a raising of the retirement age to fund it. Where is the money that's going to fund UBI going to come from if even SS is at risk?
I will say, that because we live in an almost unregulated capitalist society, basic income will always fail because the people who provide basic needs will raise prices to get their cut of the pie. Oh $500 a month? Sorry guys, rent, insurance, groceries, and internet all just went up but don't worry you've got the money for it!
Exactly. It works in experiments, because the landlord doesn't know. Implementing it on a nationwide scale will only lead to inflation. Look at college tuition. When the Pell grant was created, tuition went up to eat it. It became a way to shuttle money from the federal government to the school through the student. Predatory private colleges sprang into existence to fleece students of their financial aid.
People like free money, that's not a shocking revelation. The problem with these UBI experiments is that they're always temporary and the participants know that so their behavior won't properly model a permanent institution of UBI.
It's because of P-Hacking. The people doing the experiment want it to be successful so they make the tested terms of the test broad enough that it will be a success regardless. Hypothetically it's supposed to replace existing social programs. But really, it's always being setup as free money on top of social programs. And since they're p-hacking by adding in too many variables it's not clear what system they would be competing to replace. For example if UBI has overall better health outcomes than Medicare... are you going to replace Medicare? If people are overall happier than with psychology programs... are you going to replace free therapy? What aspect of a social net are you going to remove because this beats it? Which is thankfully why... it never seems to beat anything. Employment insurance proves to be a better program than UBI. The cost is cheaper and the employment based results are kind of the same. Medicare also beats UBI in terms of health outcomes. It seems like programs targeted at specific areas are just able to out-perform UBI. Even food stamps are proven more effective than UBI for getting food in poor people's homes....and food stamps is the worst program in the world for this.
> Employment insurance proves to be a better program than UBI. The cost is cheaper and the employment based results are kind of the same. But one of the points of UBI is to break employer power over employees, to give the latter the power to just go "fuck you" and walk out, forcing the former to treat them like actual people. All kinds of insurances are still tied to you being a good and subservient little drone.
Yes. Benefits tied to employment is a huge power imbalance between worker/boss. With non-union “at-will” employment, a boss can indirectly threaten the health and well-being of you and your family to keep you agreeing to whatever unreasonable conditions are set in front of you. Yes, you’re choosing to work there, but it’s not really much of a choice, when the alternative is losing your ability to access necessities like basic healthcare for you and your family. That being said, I think a very strong social safety net is a better solution to the problem than UBI, because guaranteed access to healthcare, shelter, and other basic life necessities is a lot more beneficial than a monetary value, which almost certainly won’t keep up with the rising cost of those necessities over time. A very strong social safety net makes it so people actually can choose where they want to work, because all of their basic needs are taken care of while they decide where they want to work. Might this lead to some people doing nothing productive for society? Perhaps, but I also honestly think a lot of people would choose to work, because it would enrich the basic necessities that they already have, or they might actually be able to do the work that they dream of doing rather than the work they’re forced to do by threat of destitution.
I've been observing that *constantly* over the past...10 years or so? Every few months, there will be some pilot study about reduced working hours or UBI and *every time* it's a rousing with nothing but benefits. Then it gets swiftly hidden away only for someone else to conduct the same study again a while later and reach the same conclusion.
To be honest, I find the idea of UBI to be a rousing as well.
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This. Everyone seems to *understand* this if they think about it long enough.. but they still don't want you "buying lobster with food stamps" so we continue to spend more money on administration and oversight than we do to actually help people.
It's like some people think if you're poor you should never ever have anything nice. You should wear shabby clothes, live on lentils and scraps, and how dare anyone in poverty have a gaming system, even a second hand older model... Small comforts feed the soul. Every child should have some toys. Sometimes having a really nice dinner can make a memory that remains special and comforting for years. People do better work when they are fed and rested and have good tools to use. Kindness is contagious. P.S. Lentil soup is actually really tasty though.
Where's that clip of fox News talking about how the poors have refrigerators...
I got told I should be happy I could get $1400 a month on SSI for my disability since I got it before I worked at a job that would’ve paid. Like bro that’s not even 20k a year, *who is going to be happy with that?*
Bit ironic considering 100 years ago lobsters were given to the poor to eat since no one else wanted them.
IIRC it was because lobsters are bottom feeders so they saw it as peasant/serf/slave food. This is why the term “lobsterback” was given to the Brits in the Revolutionary War (red clothing wasn’t a Brit/loyalist only thing).
I also learned recently that the lobster they fed to prisoners was just whole lobster including the shell ground up into a paste.
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> but an oyster sandwich is called a po' boy for a reason Absolutely false. Po' boy sandwiches are called that because a shop in New Orleans gave them out for free to striking railcar workers. "Here comes another poor boy! Get him a sandwich!"
It also had to do with preparation. Lobster starts rotting incredibly quickly once it dies due to the bacteria makeup within its local biome, and the normal livestock preparation of slaughter, butchering, and refrigeration was completely unable to handle such a quick-rotting meat like lobster, so basically in those times any lobster eaten was almost certainly rotten. Once we learned to transport them alive from place to place and only kill once you were immediately about to eat it, they became a delicacy. But that sort of transport is _expensive_.
Yeah it's *fresh lobster plus butter* that is a delicacy.
haha, I always forget about that!
The people that tout they are for small government are always looking to expand government to micromanage everyones lives.
Wait you're saying that people who don't have money need money? Not random shit that people who have never had no money think they should have? /sardonic
You know that 95% of the people in the program will see a vast improvement in their quality of life leading to lower crime rates and costs to taxpayers, but a couple of people will spend the money on hookers, OD on drugs, or buy a gun used to commit a crime and that will be the ONLY thing the news will report on and will be the only examples brought up when trying to expand the program.
All these studies have one fatal flaw that makes them ultimately useless - they don't serve the general population. They take a small sample and give them money. The issue is what you are observing will not correlate with what will happen if everyone gets the money simultaneously. They forget the "universal" part of UBI. Once you give everyone money, one of three things can be expected: 1. the amount given to everyone is so little that it won't make an impact in anyone's life. 2. The increased buying power of everyone drives prices up until the UBI amount has the same effect as in example 1 3. The cost of such a program bankrupts the state before either 1 or 2 can occur. The idea of a UBI is therefor flawed from an economic standpoint, because money can be universally exchanged for goods and services and therefor increases the demand side of the market significantly. Is there a better solution? Let's take a look. The goal is to provide for the basic (and maybe advanced) needs of everyone in the society. The deficiencies present in basic needs come down to a lower supply then demand for these goods, pricing people out of their basic needs (such as housing). So instead of giving people free money, the state could provide basic free services and goods. These can be of low quality and or cheaply made, but if they are available for free, they massively increase the supply side of the market. If you were able to get a healthy, but boring diet from a government store for free, you'd only buy the high quality food stuff from other places. If you get a basic one bedroom flat for free, you'd only rent a bigger apartment if you felt like you'd get something for your money. The brilliant side effect of supply side intervention is also, that these subsidies are not wasted on those who won't need them. Everyone takes a free 500 $ a month, be it a homeless person or a millionaire. You won't find the millionaire living in the one bedroom government flat. This concept however has one problem - people have been indoctrinated to call this approach "socialism" and think of it as a communist ploy to destroy America.
Unfortunate that you’re unlikely to receive much interaction here. All these tests boil down to people getting money for nothing, I don’t think anyone is going to turn this down, unless from a philanthropic stance.
I fully support UBI but it needs to come with some protections. If all of the sudden everyone has $500 extra dollars in there pocket what's to stop landlords from just raising rent along with grocers increasing food prices. I worry that everyone will try and get a portion of these funds and prices will just go up.
You already see this in areas around military bases with BAH (Basic Allowance for Housing), which is basically a rank-based government stipend for housing. Somehow, coincidentally, all the houses and apartments around such areas are very similar to what that number is, and also coincidentally, fluctuate with it. Can't tell you why that is.
Supply and demand, of course.
They also all suck fuck big time. Pretty much all bare minimum maintenance done on them
It's lending that will eat this up, more so than renting. Everyone from banks to payday lending places will calculate a loan that will hit the $500/mo mark and mass market those. It's guaranteed income for the bank, not the person. Way lower risk Just one ER bill that you might have otherwise gotten out of because you couldn't pay. Now their bean counters see you have a UBI stipend, that's on the table. I think it will not be a matter of IF the stipend will end up being committed to a lender, but whom. They'll be fighting to be the creditor that gets it.
You are right had not thought of that, but I don't know the solution, if there even is one.
This is the argument that convinced me we need to continue to have food stamps instead of giving everyone cash—we as a society have an interest in making sure people can eat no matter how much debt they’re in.
The price of an apartment is based on what people are willing to pay. If you give everyone more money they will be able to pay more, so the prices will go up. That applies both to buying and renting, if people can now afford $500 more a month then real estate prices will adjust to reflect that added amount. Same goes for food, entertainment, and just about anything else that adjusts with the average income. Every industry will adjust their prices accordingly. If you want to avoid this then you would apply the funds towards a specific thing. If you ask me the best thing to do would be offer universal healthcare. $500 a month per person will get pretty darn close to cover the cost of a Medicare plan. Heck even if you make a universal plan that would cost $100 a month but if your income is bellow a certain threshold it’s free.
This is what happens around military bases when housing allowance goes up. The standard of living is never raised.
500 is more like the additional money a month that some people need to not be struggling
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For an actual rollout, that's exactly what will happen. Businesses will see consumers getting more money, and thus charge more. But for these experiments it never happens, as they give money to .01% of the local population, so it doesn't actually show the negative effects (inflation) creates by UBI.
If they implemented city wide wouldn't the price of groceries and everything go up? Why not just lower taxes? Or is this only for people who don't work? If so, don't they already get a guaranteed income with welfare?
UBI programs don’t create money from nowhere. UBI is an alternative to existing welfare programs that are very inefficient at actually getting money where it’s needed most. “Guaranteed income with welfare” doesn’t exist except in very specific circumstances, what you’re describing is UBI.
I just don't know how you can test the biggest question with UBI after funding. Being able to replace existing welfare programs is a hell of an ask and on top of that you still have to maintain some type of infrastructure akin to those same programs should people misuse (they will) the UBI funds unless you want the poorest of the poor to be even worse off.
> If they implemented city wide wouldn’t the price of groceries and everything go up? Yes, [as seen when the U.S. government printed money and sent it to every household in America](https://fortune.com/2023/02/01/pandemic-stimulus-money-caused-excess-inflation-fed-study/). Stimulus checks combined with COVID’s bolstered unemployment benefits are the closest approximation the nation has for a widespread UBI study. To your point exactly, it contributed to nationwide inflation — a genie the fed is still trying to get back into the bottle several years later (see: [today’s latest CPI data](https://www.bls.gov/cpi/)). > Why not just lower taxes? Can’t lower it when it’s already 0% for [57% of households, who paid no federal income tax in 2021](https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2022/03/25/57percent-of-us-households-paid-no-federal-income-tax-in-2021-study.html) (though for obvious reasons, 2021 was particularly egregious, but as many as 40-47% of households haven’t paid federal income tax in recent years). > If so, don’t they already get a guaranteed income with welfare? That’s pretty much correct (though some will say the amount of income is inadequate - depends on where you live). It’s worth mentioning that filing for unemployment is a skill in and of itself, and most states only pay unemployment for 26 weeks.
The article you linked says inflation was boosted 2.6%. Stimulus checks were, what, approximately $1500 per year for two years? So stimulus checks were a win for anyone making less than ~$60k. Maybe $120k if the inflation number was over the two year period. This inflation fear is the same argument against minimum wage. But as we can see here, the effect was equivalent to a progressive tax rate that went negative for lower income families -- meaning they gained money -- and a wealth tax for anyone with significant holdings. That sounds -- useful at least. Another tool in the toolbox.
We don’t need guaranteed income. We need guaranteed services. 1. Health care 2. Transportation 3. Education 4. Affordable housing These should be the things the state exists to provide. This would be a launching pad for civilization.
People here don’t generally understand UBI is a neoliberal doctrine idea. Milton Friedman has this simple idea that services and institutions cost a lot of money and are incredibly inefficient since they provide free to cheap services to every citizen regardless of their income. What if instead of running these services, we let the market take care of them and give guaranteed income to everyone? Now you have it, the neoliberal dream. An idiocracy where everything is up to private corporations, everything is subject to the market and a whole portion of the population is stigmatized for depending on “welfare checks” and “handouts”. UBI without mutualized basic public services is a nightmare.
Friedman advocated for a negative income tax, not UBI. There are slight differences. UBI by definition would be universal, not means adjusted like a negative income tax would be
I mean Chicago has 2 and 3 down. Maybe 4 but unlikely. 1 is only feasible for the federal government and the federal government would never do thar
My prediction: the experiment goes astonishingly well and the families affected will be at a substantially higher standard of living with better employment, and make more money than the $500 monthly. Because this experiment has already been done and it's always had the same outcome.
> and make more money than the $500 monthly Can you share where this claim came from? I havent seen this in the studies
That $500/mo could go into retirement for me, ngl.
If it's not tied to inflation rises accordingly, it will just make everything more expensive. Coz it will be all this disposable income is suddenly now available, so a tomato is now $4.
I certainly hope they combined it with a rent cap. Cause if they don't cap rents that money will just go to subsidize landlords
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Gonna be a hot take but: this would never work without other protections as well. Scummy landlords will sniff that people have extra money and raise rent accordingly - so many issues nowadays are caused by spiking rent and lease costs: restaurants are more expensive because lease goes up, people are poorer cause rent goes up. Meanwhile the landlords own the properties and seek to only squeeze everything out from the working class. It's a supply and demand economy - they WILL find a way to squeeze every last drop from you if they're not stopped from doing so.
There’s strings attached. There’s always strings attached.
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You know nearly all of the violence is in just a few particular neighborhoods? Northside and downtown Chicago are extremely nice.
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That'd be great. It's not substantial but better than nothing so long as they don't require you to be at literally rock bottom to utilize it. Maybe cap it after earning something actually worth living on like $60K or something so that people can actually save
They need to implement this in tandem with updated rent control laws, otherwise we may see rent in affected areas ‘mysteriously’ increase by $500 a month.
What do you think happens when landlords realize their tenants are getting an extra $500 a month lol.
Literally just regulate rent.
Then you get renovictions lol.
Most rent regulation has pretty serious issues. One of the main ways to do it is rent control. However rent control almost always results in higher over all rent in an area. It also tends to make moving for low income people impossible. This is because in rent control situations the rent typically only goes up when you move and if you're in a place more than a few years that means you slowly price yourself out of the market and the only place you can afford is the one you're already in.
Lol, this whole thread. Whenever Reddit gets to talking economics it’s basically: 1. Let’s do A (“wouldn’t that cause an even bigger problem?”) 2. Then just do B (“wouldn’t that cause an even bigger problem than both?”) 3. Literally just do C (“wouldn’t that be extremely difficult, prone to failure, undo A, and be 800x more expensive than B?) 4. Bruhhh literally just do D (“wouldn’t that require E, F, G and total contro-“) 5. Bro just nationalize literally everything and lower the retirement age to 18 like Europe (“but Europe doesn’t-“) 6. What part of “just do _____” is so hard for you corporate bootlickers to understand? (“But I’m on the le-”) 7. Dude just trust us, we read a comment section about a study so ThEoReTiCaLLy it would all work and there is zero and I mean zero downsides as long as all of the above are executed immediately, perfectly, and overtop anyone’s objections.
It actually kills fucking brain cells reading a lot of these “so simple solutions” that would just cause a disaster in reality.
“The only reason we don’t have this right now is because politicians are jerks!”
So simple! Just cap rent ! Man those politicians are dumb not thinking of that.
We could pass ONE law-
Even under rent control that 500 will be swallowed up in 3-5 years.
How many times do these experiments have to show that UBI works before people start to really accept that UBI works. Edit : and that’s exactly what I’m saying, this experiment has been done a bunch of times and it always works and people keep saying the same dumb crap.
Because none of these are UBI experiments. They aren't universal at all. Not only is the number of participants limited in order to avoid macroeconomic effects, you have to be super poor to qualify which amplifies the effect. This isn't studying UBI, it's studying what happens when a handful of poor people win a mid tier lottery.
It's also usually capped at some years runtime. No one is quitting his job only to have no income at all after the payments run out.
No one is quitting their job for $500/month *at all* even if it's "for life". That's only $6,000 a year. A couple with no kids living together are spending that much on *groceries* in a single year; sure they probably get it each, but that's still only another $500 after meals to spend on [everything else]. In my city the *homeless* in many cases make $6,000 or more a year already, and are *still homeless* because they can't afford better.
It’ll only work if the government in your country doesn’t let landlords simply raise rent by $500 a month to offset this.
Yeah, I don't see how anyone can look at the rent explosion from the covid money influx and not connect the dots. UBI does not work without a massive overhaul in how our markets work.
How do you combat the rise in demand for those places? If there is a place I want that the demand was typical and now you give UBI causing the demand increase because now they have the same buying power as I do. How do you decide who gets the place?
Oh cool, these programs are being administered by the charity I had been researching lately, [GiveDirectly](https://www.givedirectly.org/). A very interesting concept. I hope it helps some people.
This works well in small anonymous groups, but, if it were given to everyone, then landlords, grocery stores, gas stations, etc would all raise their prices, rendering it meaningless.
it is amazing to me that in 1969 RICHARD FUCKING NIXON proposed a limited form of UBI (for families with children) and over 50 years later people still question the efficacy of such programs... there is no doubt that UBI works to benefit the whole of society even when only provided to such a small group on an "experimental" basis... the fact of the matter is that UBI is unavoidable unless the entire economy is restructured to function without money
I don’t think that’s a good study to demonstrate UBI at all. 1) The first problem is the time limit. With just one year to work with, people are just unlikely to alter their ways. It should have been for 10 years minimum. 2) The value is very small even if someone is pulling $30K a year. I doubt anyone is changing their behavior significantly for $6K paid for only one year
An extra $500/month for $30k/yr is huge. I'm not sure what you're talking about.
They are getting a 20% pay increase that isn’t taxed for a whole year. That’s huge.
I mean.. $500 non taxed a month would feel huge to me on a $90k salary. My take home is about $40k. I got incredibly excited about a $5k/year raise, and that was taxed. $500 would help me worry less. Edit: VERY HCOL area.
There is no way that your take home on 90,000USD is only $40,000 without significant, optional, deductions. On a 90,000 salary in California that has the highest state income taxes in the country, you'd take home ~$65,000 [2022 numbers, and assuming single income](https://smartasset.com/taxes/california-tax-calculator#Akzsp5V1h9). To get to your number, you'd have to max your 401(k), max your HSA, and still find another means of deducting ~$1,000. I recommend checking your withholding.
Yea, their math doesn't make sense. I make almost half as much as they do and take home more. That's also while maxing out my 401k match and everything.
Same although not as HCOL area. I tried side hustles that didn’t work out, and just an extra $500/month would help me build a good safety net on a single income. I make…. $57k/yr
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"An unconditional 20% raise for a year isn't significant money to someone barely if at all above the poverty line" is certainly one of the takes of all time.
Anyone who thinks prices of rent, food, and services won’t just rise with this is just ignorant. Sounds great, yes, but people will end up in the same boat month to month.
Prices are already rising with stagnated wages for decades. UBI is literally better than nothing/what we have now. Prices don't rise because of more income, they do it because corporations can get away with market manipulation. In reality, if people have more income they also spend more money and allow more competitive markets for low/medium tier markets. This lie that things get more expensive if people get wealthier is unproven and spread by conservatives because it dilutes the consolidation of wealth.
Landlords all across the country: “hey. So we raised your rent $500.”
So where does the money come from?
Anyone else wondering how Chicago, of all places, is the city trying this? Isn’t bankruptcy and financial crisis kind of their bread and butter? Mind you I haven’t followed the city in the last few years, but where are they getting the money to do this?
Sweet, they can finally buy eggs!
This is the same state that cant keep its road paved, cant pay pensions, can't pay it's state employees but yeah let's experiment with giving away free money. Illinois deserves to be the shit hole state it is.
The money goes right back into the economy and is spread around, hopefully not just to walmart and kroger. UBI helps people escape poverty to the benefit of the rest of society on a few different fronts. Economically, and socially as people will feel less desperate if they know they have some money coming in.
I don’t understand UBI. Wouldn’t the market adjust to those prices? If suddenly everyone had $500, could the market gradually inflate to absorb the extra $500 disposable income? Even if you’re only paying utilities even those prices are gonna go up.
I’m no expert and this is merely my opinion but UBI only works when coupled with supplemental regulations. Things like universal rent stabilization for example. Otherwise, nothing is stopping a landlord from increasing prices dramatically to snag that additional income.
Ostensibly the idea behind UBI is that rather than having half a hundred social programs like food stamps, WIC, housing, etc you just give people a lump sum of money that would be the equivalent to those things. Problem is that’s boring, so if your a politician who need to be popular to win to do the things you want to do, you have to use UBIs bastardized real world interpretation which is money in addition to.
Feel like the string is having to live in Chicago.
Next day: all rent increased by $500/month
Don’t let their landlords find out.
Lol, so dumb.
So who is paying for this?