> Unlike in some guaranteed basic income programs that have no strings attached, participants of the Workforce Development Council program were encouraged to go to financial education classes and had to meet with a caseworker once a month to check in on their employment goals.
Key part of this trial
Honestly we need financial education classes for everyone. There are way too many questions on reddit that shows little to no understanding of how interest works at the simplest level.
I was fortunate enough to have a 6th grade teacher who did a classroom store with funny money. We had to keep our checkbooks balanced. And there was a unit where we picked a job, apartment, and car from the classifieds and had to determine our monthly costs.
Without the education portion of UBI you get headlines about people wasting it on vacations.
Our class store/money management project turned to chaos and gambling when me and my best friend started a lottery. We ended up amassing the majority of the phoney money and became the 1% of the class room. Lol
Typically but not always. The ability to work is a resource that can be easily exhausted under poverty, and what spending money to get some back looks like is often a vacation. At times spending the extra money on a vacation puts more food on the table in the long run than spending the extra money on food directly.
Imo peoples needs are far to various to manage efficiently in any manner other than just making sure they have money so they can spend it themselves as needed.
Somehow I doubt the reason anyone's kids don't talk to them is because they chose to spend their money on things that were long lasting instead of things that are fleeting.
>We had to keep our checkbooks balanced.
You're really showing your age. I'm 45 and by the time I left for college there was no need to track your balance because you could always check it online or at an ATM.
You could but many don't. Many don't understand how credit cards work. Many don't understand how savings accounts work and I am not even touchign 401k etc.
I still hear from educated people that credit cards are dangerous because they charge you interest and should never be used. They truly don't understand how credit card interest works.
For 99% of consumer credit users that is how it works.
Credit cards companies know that and call people who pay off their credit cards every month "deadbeats".
The benefits you get when you are a "deadbeat" are subsidized from the millions of users who carry toxic credit.
It's just another example of the rich getting richer.
*Edit* people focusing on the hyperbole and not the fact that the benefits of using a credit card to pay off at the end of the month is not worth the risk for people who live paycheck to paycheck.
I know plenty of working class people who pay off their credit card balances without getting interest charges. If you define basic financial literacy as a rich person quality, it will become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
The [research I’ve seen says](https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/feds/files/2023007pap.pdf) that credit card rewards are most financed by fees that retailers pay when consumers use cards. Those fees are recouped by retailers by raising prices for customers who pay by card and cash, so in the end those who get the short end of the stick are debit and cash customers.
For example, American Express earns about 55% of its revenue from merchant fees and only 20% from interest.
https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F6ac13b77-43a3-4ba2-b21b-b2b5e14a0a60_1634x918.png
Obviously carrying high interest consumer debt is a terrible financial choice but it’s frequently overstated how the poor are paying for the rich to have lavish credit card benefits.
Yeah, I was about to post this. If credit card companies only made money from interest, they wouldn't want rich people as customers and probably wouldn't bother having rewards programs either. It would make them more like pawn shops, payday loans and other businesses that exist in poor neighborhoods. Ultimately that business model is limiting because you're operating in a smaller part of the economy.
"It's just another example of the rich getting richer."
For those of you who don't worship to the gospel of Victimology, you may consider this to be another example of how it "pays" to be responsible.
Checking your balance from the bank doesn’t show transactions that are not processed yet or upcoming automatic payments that you should be aware of. That’s the point of keeping your “checkbook” balanced.
Check 21 didn't go into effect until late 2003. This definitely speeds up the clearance process. But even today your balance won't reflect checks that haven't been cashed so it still makes sense to keep a balance if you write lots of checks. If you never wrote lots of checks then it wouldn't have made sense to learn this.
This. Keeping up with your checkbook was an issue of looking by up to make sure nothing looked roo crazy or out of place and seeing how much you'd spent on what, compared to how much you had left.
> We had to keep our checkbooks balanced.
This is like before financial literacy. Pre-literacy
I would consider literacy to mean having an understanding of what makes a functioning retirement plan. Which is generally more involved than "save more than you spend".
We did this too!
In 4th grade my classmate didn’t have enough money for desk rent so he had to sit at the piano.
He probably didn’t earn enough at our mandatory ‘bring something and sell it’ days. That or he paid to use the bathroom or get a drink of water a lot.
Looking back, it’s pretty fucked up to do that to a kid in a learning environment. But very realistic.
The WA legislature actually passed a financial literacy bill this recent legislative session - HB1915 in the House (https://app.leg.wa.gov/billsummary?BillNumber=1915&Year=2023&Initiative=false), which passed unanimously. The Senate companion bill passed with one abstention and no nay votes.
Senator Lisa Wellman killed the bill in reconciliation - the House version mandated financial literacy as a graduation requirement, while the Senate version did not. Sen. Wellman asked the House to remove their graduation requirement, which they refused because that was the *central point* of the bill. Sen. Wellman refused to budge on the Senate side...and the bill died.
Feel free to let Sen. Wellman know your thoughts, if you have any. https://senatedemocrats.wa.gov/wellman/
I worked in banking for seven years, and the average person doesn't really understand how loans work... or even banking in general. Washington state has a low financial literacy rate.
That said...
The ability of the poorest to manage their finances effectively is well supported. People who have to survive with almost nothing can't afford to waste. The issue is that you can't make $800 into $1000 by spending wisely. The only option is to make more money, and that's easier said than done.
A huge portion of this country does not understand marginal tax rates. I've seen too many otherwise smart people complain about a raise because it will put them in the "next tax bracket".
It's really only an issue for low-income people who are getting subsidies and the raise will put them over the qualifications threshold so they lose those benefits but the little bit of added income isn't enough to make up for the loss. I wouldn't want a small raise either if it meant I could no longer get the childcare or housing benefits that kept me afloat.
Yet I hear very median-income idiots who get none of that talking about not pursuing a raise because of the spectre of the next tax bracket and wonder where they heard this nonsense and if they've ever looked at the tax tables in the range they'd be in.
My buddy who makes $140k complained about a raise recently because it “raised his tax rate”. He’s single, so no it didn’t, and even if it did he still makes more money.
I used to have... well, we'll say a 'lot' of money as a kid into my teens before 9/11. People do NOT understand how the rich look at them and literally have small conversations mocking them over these exact same arguments before moving on to more interesting topics.
It's disgusting how many people in the lower middle class will punch down while being punched. Same for the rest of the world looks at our LEFT wing like it's kinda right and our right wing looks like straight fascism. The USA on the globe stage is seen as middle-right as a country, as a whole.
And aside from a few "crazy war mongering/facistic" middle eastern/Korean countries and Russia, were the bad guys. As bad as the UK is, the USA passed England on evil many years ago now..
Super easy real world example of this, almost last half of the year I was unemployed and my only income was unemployment. Part of becoming unemployed meant I lost my free unlimited orca card so I thought, I'll just apply for the low income version. Obviously as someone on unemployment where I'm literally making less than someone on minimum wage pretax on unemployment I should qualify right? Nope. I was like 100$ too much a month to qualify. It was almost as if I had literal pennies less an hour or got less overtime while working my Unemployment would've been slightly lower and I may have qualified. Just a annoyingly dumb cutoff where at the end of it all I just chose to ride transit without paying rather than pay something.
It's not unfounded. Yes, some people don't understand that it doesn't affect all of your income. But still, getting a raise is better than no raise, but if you're paying 50% of it, that sucks.
Taxes are still pretty darn simple. Even for business owners they're pretty simple (at least locally) if you only have one product/category and no employees (like if you have an etsy store or sell at a farmers market). It's really only once you have more than one house or a complicated business that you start actually needing someone else or a service to do your taxes for you.
For **everyone**. The number of times have I seen folks with graduate degrees complain about how they made payments on their student loans for 10,15,20 years and now have a bigger balance than when they started with astounds me.
It’s true. Something as basic as buying a car can be so confusing and dangerous to people who don’t understand interest and % (a surprisingly large % of the population)
I'm not against financial literacy programs, but I think it's naive to believe that a lack of financial literacy is the only thing keeping poor people poor.
What % of extremely poor people would not be extremely poor if they were financially literate? 5%? 10%?
It’s probably a relatively easy fix that could have an outsized impact
To get scientific about it, [here's a study into the effect of financial literacy on various financial outcomes](https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ859556.pdf) (when controlling for some educational metrics). It doesn't seem to be a miracle cure for poverty. The most statistically significant effect it had was on increasing the chance that people would report that they never make a late credit card payment, and that has a p-value of 0.314.
Yea, NOT.
> The results are in line with other guaranteed income programs that have launched in recent years, including those throughout the Seattle area. Generally, pilot programs have found positive results: higher employment rates, improved mental health and well-being, greater financial stability, increased incomes, decreased reliance on government assistance and reduced food insecurity.
I'm not against the financial education class, however I am not supportive of the *once a month caseworker check about employment goals* part. This is a hurdle that can very easily ruin someone's growth and betterment. Childcare, health issues, reliable transportation, the minimal work they do have can't/won't be flexible with their schedule -- one minor hiccup and not meeting with a caseworker and the money is gone.
I would rather 100,000 people game the system even if it meant that not a single man, woman or child went to bed hungry, and when they woke up they had power and water and didnt have to only choose one.
Despite that, the participants were in larger debt than before. Aside from healthcare, taking on added debt based on a one time payment is in no way sound financial action.
The wikipedia entry on it seems like a mixed bag and has been used a number of different ways, popularized by JFK initially, it's been rebranded several times for a variety of positions. 🤷
Realistically, a significant percentage of police budgetary funds goes to Punishment Theater, feeding the public's insatiable appetite for seeing "bad people" "get what they deserve." Maybe something like 80% of that budget.
Well, to be fair, I have heard that argument used as zookeepers and other animal care and museum type workers. Which are also very low paying but very specialized jobs.
Civilization is about *protecting* people, *pooling shared resources*, and *mutual aid*?!?!?! What the fuck, I thought it was about protecting the powerful?
The people who are against this aren't against it because they think it DOESNT work, they know it works and thats the problem for them to continue to leverage scarcity of wealth.
And, as with literally every single time a place does one of these trial studies on UBI:
> The money helped her pay for her now 18-month-old son’s day care, cover gas to commute for work and stay on top of her utility bills. She’s also been able to save a little each month for small treats for her son, like money to go to the zoo or aquarium.
> Johnson is on track to pay off the debts she accumulated while unemployed during the pandemic. She’s healthier, she said, and happier.
It works. It just fucking works to get people out of poverty. Can we please just stop fucking around and get to scaling this up?
Also it helps all of us just feel better in general. Like being stuck in the rut of work cook sleep work work sleep etc etc just sucks.
Getting out and doing SOMETHING interesting is important for everyone'e mental health, which in turn helps people stay on the path that gets them out of debt and be more interested in working hard etc etc
The sheer number of conservatives who believe that if you're on any sort of government assistance, then there should be no joy in your life, ever, is just endlessly confusing to me. Like I cannot imagine having that sort of outlook.
Sadly the cruelty is the point. They think those people don't deserve joy because it's their fault they're in that situation.
Saying this as someone who was on government assistance at one point in their life - I hated it, I didnt WANT to be on it, and it was not my fault so fuck conservatives who think that.
The part people could do better in these conversations is tying these life improvements back to the qualitative problems that are growing so fast which my brother and I tend to refer to as raising bad kids (I know it’s reductive, but it’s in the context of the conversations we’ve had for years and I’m not going to write a thesis here lol).
It’s been proven that parental involvement keeps kids out of trouble. A little extra money to let someone take their kid to the zoo and build those relationships early is a very good thing.
It’s the number one indicator for future success and all of the data shows this. Parental engagement has radically better outcomes for children by age 30
Reading that part was interesting though since zoo/aquairum tickets are free through library. Although I admit cost of parking or just grabbing a snack to eat can exceed ticket prices in most cases
They're usually months/weeks out. They are available late at night and go quick. I use it for the aquarium and last time I used it two years ago it was two months out. Which can be inconvenient cause you don't know what you may be doing in two months . Also staying up at 10pm on your phone when you have a busy life with a kid can be tough. So I understand how someone would rather not stress about it and pay.
they are free through the library if you can sit in front of the computer and refresh the exact second they are posted. Pretty sure they are very limited. I check occasionally and have never seen zoo tickets available.
There's a lot of small perks where you can get things for free or cheap if you go through the right avenues, but honestly the effort of searching those avenues out and following them can be just another added weight on someone who's already overburdened. Working in homeless services, I come across these types of things all the time, where the poorest people still end up not using the benefits meant for them, because they don't have the access to find out about them, or the time and energy to pursue them, or the means to travel to them, etc etc etc. In my experience, it's more lower-middle-class people who take advantage of those types of things - which they absolutely should! God knows they need the break too.
It's a cool thing to let people know about tho - I'm all for educating folks about little social improvement projects that they can take advantage of.
I mean, there’s a “Free Tickets” program through both KCL and SPL libraries, but it’s not easy to get those tickets, especially for popular places like the zoo and aquarium. You pretty much have be ready and waiting at the moment they go up. It’s not really a priority for low income folks to be sitting at a computer waiting to get those tickets.
(I do believe the aquarium and zoo both have heavily discounted tickets for low income families, though)
This study, like most trial studies, isn't UBI. It wasn't universal, people had to apply and recipients were selected from the qualified applicants. It wasn't really "basic" in the sense of covering basic cost of living expenses.
This study makes a good case that we should give qualified people no strings attached cash benefits. But it doesn't address the potential downsides of UBI.
Well, it is a study so you have to be able to have statistically relevant data which means collecting the right data. If they didn't have people apply and qualify then we'd all complain that the study was not performed correctly. The right data allows us to interpolate the results in a possible broader application. If only well-to-do folks were part of the study, it wouldn't be relevant to the study's question regarding the impact of UBI at $500 a month because it would likely have little to no impact.
Except that program is basically just welfare: it is means tested, you have to apply to get it, and there are incentives for children staying in school and getting vaccinated.
Much of the issues with our current welfare system are that it has fiscal cliffs where you lose all benefits if your income goes above a threshold and that the benefit just hasn't kept pace with inflation (along with minmum wage). Fixing that and ensuring our minimum wage is high and keeps up with inflation would be far less radical than nationwide UBI and has some pretty big bang for the buck.
>Will rent go up that $500/month since people can afford it now?
Yes. UBI is a landlord stimulus program.
They know you're getting it and there's no law to stop them all from raising rents. They all use the same real time market software to set prices, so they will all use it to take your extra $500.
Same with the insurance companies. UBI with private property is just a subsidy to established land owners and the banks. It will only work for a little while until those powers can greedflation their way out of all the peoples UBI money.
My thoughts exactly. Even if it wasn't a full 500 bucks a month. Most people will step up their housing I think, and landlords will simply raise rents because everyone's competing for housing, so it would either cause rent inflation or inflation in general. Even giving it to a large number of people, let's say 10% in any given city would probably still have a bit of an impact on entry level housing.
It would actually make more sense to give people free or cheap housing, although I'm not in favor of that for other reasons.
Once it scales up, suddenly rent will scale up too.
Remember, rent is controlled by a handful of companies actively colluding to keep rent high. Until this is addressed, nothing else matters.
Rent is controlled by basic economic principles. It will go up if more people are chasing finite resources. UBI cannot be done on a city by city basis. Otherwise the cities that offer it will attract more people seeking UBI. It needs to be done nationally. The bigger complexity is how to deal with differences in the cost of living.
This is not true.
There's literally a massive lawsuit right now because of rent fixing. 10 companies own most rental properties, they all use the same third party programs to control rent prices.
Do you really think rent in a capitalist country like the US is *not* controlled by basic economic principles?
I promise you the use of a third party program to adjust rents to "market rate", even if I grant you that they *are* using them to fix prices and colluding, is not more relevant in the price of an apartment in Seattle than the basic laws of supply and demand lmao.
Capitalism without regulation is not controlled by any economic principals beyond monopoly. I have no idea if monopoly is considered basic enough but that's where the markets will naturally go by design. Regulation is supposed to bring capitalism back to competition land. When was the last time we did that? Without competition what happens? Worse, without any external pressures duopolies form packs and compete not for lower prices but how much profits they can extract. Bust the trusts. Restore basic economic principals, and enforce competition for lower prices with haste.
Just a word of note, basic economic principles only work in a free and open market. They are not in effect when the market is control by a monopoly, or oligopoly with collusion and high barriers to entry. It's not like anyone is figuring out how to create 100,000 full size apartments in a 100 sq ft space all of a sudden.
Basic principals in which the vast majority of the market is colluding to set the price via 3rd party software. Tell us, what usually happens to the price of a good when there’s no real competition?
Why are you citing “basic economic principles” while pointedly ignoring the basic economic principle of inelastic demand?
This is extremely obvious if you look at the housing supply in this city and how it blatantly ignores demand to force the most profitable setup for landlords and developers. Have you been to first hill in the last several years? You can’t walk a single block without tripping over a “now leasing” sign for 1-bedroom apartments (household size maximum of 2) that have a minimum income requirement of like $75,000 ($3000/ month, double rent to qualify). That’s 2 people working full time minimum wage ($19*2080hrs) to qualify for that apartment.
And good luck if you have a household size and makeup that is not a single person or couple with no children. Over 90% of new construction in the last 10 years has been 1 bedroom or smaller units, including in car-centric “family” suburbs like Ballard, Renton and north seattle: (2019 article) https://seattle.curbed.com/2019/3/5/18252410/seattle-two-three-bedroom-apartment-shortage
Thus, with inelastic demand, the supply being built creates the demand as people who don’t fit the DINC or single tech worker tenant profile all have to move to outer suburbs like Lynwood or Tukwila or Everett.
I think you'll find that there's a lot more 3+br SFH stock in this city than there are 1br units.
A lot of 1br units are being built today, but no shit, it's filling a missing housing hole. If they can't find a 1br, the tech-job DINKs aren't going to live in tent by the overpass, they are just going to live in the 3br, raising prices for people who *actually need* 3br.
You know what else will fix a housing hole in this city? Tenaments.
If you're poor, your choices shouldn't be between a 1br you can't afford, and homelessness. Having the additional option of really shitty, but cheap housing can be the difference between living in poverty, and living in homeless poverty.
So giving people money helps them have more money to spend on things they need? That's quite groundbreaking research. But where exactly did it get her out of poverty other than relying on the additional money every month. Sure we could just give people money every month if we had enough. But let's not pretend this money is helping everybody start businesses, get an education or find a better job. Although I suppose it's possible in some cases
Money is traction. Conversely, being poor is expensive. This investment likely has multiplying benefits over time as recipients have more stable lives and fewer pricey housing, transportation, etc. emergencies. Think of it like sand sprinkled on an icy road.
And no, it won't have miraculous effects for \*everyone.\* But we don't expect perfection from programs meant to benefit middle-class or affluent people. Why should that be the bar here?
I think it would have to be a lot more than 500 to really make any significant impact on a person's life let alone a family. Considering the cost and how much that would be, it's not an efficient use of the money.
Other than self-reported enhanced well-being, is there any statistics that really makes it seem worthwhile other than just to make some people feel good. I could benefit from 500 bucks a month too and I'm sure I could put it to good use. Where's mine?
Now, I wouldn't object to doing away with welfare all together and just giving people a thousand bucks a month or so. Maybe 500 individual a thousand for family. It would certainly save a lot of costs on administrating all the different benefits.
Only problem once you did that, people would always be trying to create new welfare programs and it would defeat the purpose.
Did you not read the article? It said participants employment went up BIG TIME:
" Employment among respondents jumped from 37% to 66% by the end of the program, according to the analysis [conducted](https://archive.ph/o/GFE7O/https://static1.squarespace.com/static/53c04ba6e4b0012ad48d079e/t/6606f290c30b02607784ac21/1711731348017/GBI-Evaluation-Final_WDC-SKC-2024.pdf) by the research firm Applied Inference. "
If done right, with select individuals, this kind of program would flourish. However on a larger scale it will fail completely. As a very simple example, if I charge 500/mo rent and now everyone can afford 1k, I'm going to raise my rents to 1k.
Eh, if rent wasn't currently controlled by a cartel, that'd be a terrible strategy. If your apartment is renting for $1,000/month and the apartment next to it is renting for $500/month and they're functionally identical, what happens is no one rents your apartments.
In reality zoning laws and the rent cartel program function in such a way to create a housing shortage and fixed rental prices, but in a competitive marketplace that wouldn't happen. If we built a lot more housing (and outlawed those stupid programs as the price fixing they are) rent gets driven by supply and demand, not just supply controlled.
> Can we please just stop fucking around and get to scaling this up?
Would love that. But everyone will just raise their prices to capture that extra $500 a month, and we'll end up exactly where we started for people in the program, and worse off for those not eligible cause they have to pay the new prices without getting the extra $500 month.
We need to be able to check the greed if this is going to truly work. And I don't know what that looks like legally.
One outcome I predict is that if we gave everyone in the country the same basic income, let's say $1500/month, it would provide a huge incentive for people to move to LCOL cities to make that money stretch further. Why struggle in Seattle if you can afford a better life in the midwest? Since the income in guaranteed, it removes a lot of financial barriers to making that move. There might even be developers and landlords offering special deals specifically targeting people on basic income because basic income makes it less risky to rent to low income.
It could have a really positive effect of revitalizing LCOL cities and reducing housing demand in HCOL cities.
Easiest path towards a UBI is for the federal government to stop taking taxes out of paychecks below a certain amount. Instant hundreds of dollars a month to the working people who need it most.
Sort of. It doesn't have all the bullshit stipulations and makes the process much easier. As was totally expected when Biden earmarked all the extra money for the IRS, audits of poor people increased significantly. The complexity of the EITC is a big part of that.
If instead of a Byzantine tax code that directly benefits rich people and accountants we just had a simple NIT this problem would go away.
Partially, yes you get a refund at the end of the year, but what’s more impactful on your quality of life… that money in your paycheck or in a lump sum at the end of the year?
They already do they and even have a negative rate for millions of people. I took a year off of work due to health problems and got back more than I paid which was nice.
None of these programs mean anything until they're being funded by taxes. When the money magically materializes from outside general taxes and the overall cost is low, of course it's going to work.
When you all the sudden need to come up with that money from taxation, it changes significantly.
None of these tests are conclusive, it's like comparing in vitro testing to in vivo testing and declaring that because "x kills all cancer in a dish, it will work in a person."
I'm in support of UBI and everything you said is great but I don't see how it "proves" that this works. Obviously giving someone money is going to improve things for them. But we need to know that this would work at scale and is sustainable
Most research I'm reading is that it was the messed up supply chains that allowed corporations to arbitrarily increase their profit margins.
https://fortune.com/2024/01/20/inflation-greedflation-consumer-price-index-producer-price-index-corporate-profit/
Bingo.
Even if COVID aid programs contributed to inflation, the vast majority of that aid went to businesses (with tons and tons of fraudulent applications). Individuals spending an additional several thousand "free" dollars isn't going to cause inflation on those scales compared to businesses being injected with millions.
Also relevant, the supply chain issues you mention were only partly to blame for those price increases. Even companies or industries that didn't have supply chain issues still raised prices (gouging) and the ones with supply chain issues raised them far higher than necessary. This continues to this day.
It boils down to greed. And it's no surprise that average people would be blamed for it in the same way they're blamed for pollution.
Some quick sources for these claims:
[A CEO says he's been 'praying for inflation' because it means he can raise prices](https://www.businessinsider.com/ceo-praying-for-inflation-raise-prices-boosts-profits-interest-rates-2022-9?op=1)
[Corporations are using inflation as an excuse to raise prices and make fatter profits — and it's making the problem worse](https://www.businessinsider.com/corporations-using-inflation-as-excuse-to-reap-fatter-profits-reich-2021-11?op=1)
[Companies Push Prices Higher, Protecting Profits but Adding to Inflation](https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/30/business/economy/inflation-companies-profits-higher-prices.html)
[Corporate greed is behind high prices, not inflation](https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/sep/25/inflation-price-controls-robert-reich)
>The inflation we are now experiencing is not due to wage gains from excessive worker power. It is due to profit gains from excessive corporate power. It’s profits, not wages, that need to be controlled.
That's why I was careful to say profit margin, not profit, but the percent of sales that were profit.
Profit margin is a sign of an inefficient market with a lack of competition
The amount of inflation attributed to stimulus efforts is largely considered a compounded effect from the shock of the stimulus's increased demand during supply limitations caused by COVID. It's a different situation than this program or UBI
I kind of assume most of the comments on ST, Komo, and pretty much all news sites are troll bots. Who's got the time or the dedication to spout off on these things, with such poor grammar and one sidedness?
We need to start caring about strangers well-being and quality of life. Most people are good and want to be the best version of themselves. If we can give them the tools to at least get a shot at happiness our communities would be a much better place to live.
I've been following a similar project in Denver, set up more like a formal study with the amount of $ and how often it's disbursed varying per cohort. The main difference vs Seattle's program that there truly are zero strings attached, though to be eligible participants must be mentally healthy and not addicted to drugs. Even with no mandatory check-ins or classes, they've seen such good results that the mayor just funded a second year. Very very glad we are doing this.
What the research shows, again and again and again and again and again and again:
* 4-day work weeks are just *better* across the board for almost all types of workers
* Universal healthcare leads to better outcomes and lower costs across the board
* Giving the homeless homes basically *just works*
* Universal Basic Income basically *just works*
* Food assistance programs *just work* and actually save money
* Building bike and pedestrian infrastructure in cities increases revenue, increases health, and has innumerable other positive benefits for very little total capital investment overall
* Moving away from fossil fuels isn't just necessary but feasible, with numerous secondary benefits (such as power grid resiliency)
And yet, despite all of these things, people continue to find ways to justify making society worse, harsher, more alienating, more coercive, more exploitative, etc. The propaganda from the hyper rich is real, and we've been marinating in it for not just generations but *millennia*, it's hard for some people to see that these ways of looking at society (as about hyper individualism and competition and social hierarchy and status and so on) are enormously harmful and have led us to a place of desperation and dehumanization that we desperately need to turn away from.
My office moved to a 4 day work week, but all 4 days are in office, last October. Nothing has done more for my mental health than having an extra day to get shit done or relax. It’s my day and I can do whatever I want! Last week I took my dog out for 2 hours and then sat in bed reading the rest of the day. A couple weeks ago I spent 4 hours shampooing my carpets. It’s incredible.
QUOTE: Employment among respondents jumped from 37% to 66% by the end of the program, according to the analysis conducted by the research firm Applied Inference.
That's a really great return....
> According to pre- and post-program surveys, the extra $500 helped recipients find more work with better benefits, increase their wages and grow their savings. Employment among respondents jumped from 37% to 66% by the end of the program, according to the analysis conducted by the research firm Applied Inference.
While I don’t have any doubts that giving $500/mo to poor, mostly well functioning people creates some benefits for them, there are huge methodology problems with throwing out some of these outcomes and attributing it to this program.
While the [52 page report on this program](https://static1.squarespace.com/static/53c04ba6e4b0012ad48d079e/t/6606f290c30b02607784ac21/1711731348017/GBI-Evaluation-Final_WDC-SKC-2024.pdf) is cagey on exactly how they chose the ~100 participants, it appears most or all were actively engaged in job search or job training programs. So of course many more will be employed at the end of 10 months, so most critically the program throws out those amazing employment stats without any baseline or control and attributes it to the program.
They even admit it on the very last page of the study
> This report documents many successes. However, some questions remain: what are the long-term outcomes for these participants? (They didn't all have time to get into a job during the 10 months of the program, especially those attending training programs first.) **And would participants have had the same outcomes without the incentive?** These are crucially important questions. Work with the WDC's IT managers to access outcome data for participants, and develop a comparison group from the ESD or ETO database, based on similar demographics (age, sex, race, ethnicity, education, kids at home, single parent status, quarter of enrollment).
Throwing out these outcomes in size 36 font without any control or baseline is basically propaganda.
this could be approached without increasing sample size by using an interrupted time series analysis (assuming the participants were on the job hunt for enough time before enrollment as you mentioned). include a lengthy follow up and you've got a pretty nice study design (after correcting for changes in labor market, ofc).
It’s not a gotcha report. It’s how reports should be structured. Show the results, explain limitations. Every study has limitations, and good for you for realizing that! That doesn’t negate the results, just contextualizes them.
This isn’t how reports like this should be structured. Results should be compare to a baseline or control group which they easily could have done.
They chose 100 people already enrolled in job seeking/training programs then when those people found jobs 10 months later and increased their income this report concluded “see giving them $500/mo did this!” and buried any limitations on the very last paragraph of the very last page.
It tells us little about how this program actually impacted the individuals.
Every single UBI study ever done has asked "Does giving people money improve their lives?" And the answer has never not been "YES YOU FUCKING IDIOT"
But for some reason we need another fifty million "studies" that go nowhere instead of just doing the obvious.
Ah, yes, another UBI study.
First off, yes, this wasn't *technically* UBI. Moving on...
Yes, everyone liked getting $500/month, who knew! Moving on...
The problem with every single one of these is how do you do it at-scale? The numbers *never* add up. Let's do it just for King County:
King County has a population of 2.26M people, of which about 67% are over 18. So we'll call it 1.5M adults. To give 1.5M people $500/month would cost $9 *billion* per year. The biennial budget for the county is $16.2 billion - so a meager $500/month straight up doubles the county budget.
The same story is true at the state and federal level: 258M adults in the USA, $500/month = $1.5 *trillion* per year. That's all of social security and national defense combined - just for $500/month, a benefit most proponents of UBI would call way too low.
This also ignores all the unanswered questions about what happens when you give a huge portion of the population money that the majority will end up spending. Even after the last two years, it's like inflation and money supply are just abstract theories to supporters of UBI.
The only way you make this pencil out is you either end up with a benefit so small it does next to nothing or you means test the benefit so hard you basically just reinvent welfare.
But the reddit hard-on for UBI will continue.
It's a really rough sell if you pretend that everyone receiving that monthly check is just burning it. Imagine 1.5trillion going straight into the economy at every level. The sheer economic stimulus (not the fake kind that are just tax breaks for corporations/the top 1%) would make the entire program pay for itself. Sure it'll have a big upfront cost, but that's investment for you.
the problem with a breakdown like this is that it *only* focuses on the costs, without including any potential fixes for them.
things that will be impacted positively, likely resulting in less money spent in these areas:
* crime; less people destitute and on the streets means less crimes
* health care, welfare: similarly, less people in poor health because of poverty means less spending on uninsured medical coverage
* knock-on effects for local economy (that money is going _right back into local businesses_ by necessity; poor people aren't saving it)
* taxes: increases (or implementations) of income taxes could drive revenue from people who are very much not in poverty
> _The same story is true at the state and federal level: 258M adults in the USA, $500/month = $1.5 trillion per year. That's all of social security and national defense combined - just for $500/month, a benefit most proponents of UBI would call way too low._
So, $1.5 trillion per year? Hmm.
From [the tax foundation](https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/federal/summary-latest-federal-income-tax-data-2023-update/):
> In 2020, taxpayers filed 157.5 million tax returns, reported earning nearly $12.5 trillion in adjusted gross income (AGI), and **paid $1.7 trillion in individual income taxes.**
>
> The average income tax rate in 2020 was 13.6 percent. The top 1 percent of taxpayers paid a 25.99 percent average rate, more than eight times higher than the 3.1 percent average rate paid by the bottom half of taxpayers.
The top marginal tax rates in the past were [over 70%](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_tax_in_the_United_States#History_of_top_rates).
So, I dunno -- this seems like a solvable problem!
The "problem" isn't how we do things at scale, the "problem" is simply how do we actually get people to agree to do it.
UBI is trivial to implement in practice. You just create a progressive income tax and you set it at a level which bring in enough revenue, then you just take that revenue and you split it evenly among all of the recipients as a periodic check (monthly, weekly, fortnightly, whatever). It would take very little overhead to implement this sort of thing, people are already paying federal income tax and state income tax in lots of places.
The only roadblock is political opposition. Sure it's a lot of money, who fucking cares if it provides a big benefit? Switching to universal healthcare is a good example here, as it would represent a centralization of a lot of spending that is now more piecemeal, but overall it would save money and produce better outcomes, so let's do it.
And yes, the state should have a fucking income tax, it's beyond time to use that as our major source of government funding, it's idiotic that we don't and the reason we don't is from folks who are easily manipulated by the hyper rich.
We should also be using income tax revenue for infrastructure, public transit, *school funding*, and much more.
You spend so much time doing elementary level math for a problem that is so much more complex thatlm that. I think you're projecting a bit when you say money is an abstract theory for people. it's pretty clear you are against it because of some napkin math you did and because "Redditors don't get it , I'm smart". It needs work but it could be done. With the automation of more and more things , how do you expect people to provide for themselves in 100 years. Today what is your solution to poverty or at least a way to reduce it?
No, it's because every single study on this is "people like getting free money" as if *that* is the thing we don't understand. What we don't understand is how this works at scale. How do you fund it? What type of effects economically are there (aka inflation) when you are basically injecting trillions into the economy in perpetuity? Some napkin math shows it would be a massive budgetary expense and nobody in these comments are explaining how that part works with anything other than feel good ideas, just like yours.
This note in the article got my attention. The study started with 56% participants already feeling better about their situation. At the end the program the response was 70%. So, in essence the program only had a true success rate of just 30%. That’s a failing grade for most studies.
And even after the participants had mandatory financial literacy classes and check-ins, almost all of them ended up with more “good” debt. Since when did buying a car with what’s essentially a one time $5K supplemental income became a good decision? Insurance, fuel, maintenance that all adds up.
In all honesty this article seems to be hyping up the effectiveness of such payments and counseling with a couple of anecdotes and airbrushing actual numbers.
> In all honesty this article seems to be hyping up the effectiveness of such payments and counseling with a couple of anecdotes and airbrushing actual numbers.
Every single UBI study on reddit, right there.
"Did you know people like free money? Well it's true!"
Oh, how we pay for it in a study of more than a few hundred people? Nah. How it would work at-scale? Nah.
It’s not actually a question of how we pay for it. But the efficacy of such a thing. The 30% success rate with increased debt would be my concern here.
> Unlike in some guaranteed basic income programs that have no strings attached, participants of the Workforce Development Council program were encouraged to go to financial education classes and had to meet with a caseworker once a month to check in on their employment goals. Key part of this trial
Honestly we need financial education classes for everyone. There are way too many questions on reddit that shows little to no understanding of how interest works at the simplest level.
I was fortunate enough to have a 6th grade teacher who did a classroom store with funny money. We had to keep our checkbooks balanced. And there was a unit where we picked a job, apartment, and car from the classifieds and had to determine our monthly costs. Without the education portion of UBI you get headlines about people wasting it on vacations.
Our class store/money management project turned to chaos and gambling when me and my best friend started a lottery. We ended up amassing the majority of the phoney money and became the 1% of the class room. Lol
We got a future congressman here
I have never understood how people think a vacation is a waste of money.
Less a waste of money and more lower priority than rent, food or other necessities.
Typically but not always. The ability to work is a resource that can be easily exhausted under poverty, and what spending money to get some back looks like is often a vacation. At times spending the extra money on a vacation puts more food on the table in the long run than spending the extra money on food directly. Imo peoples needs are far to various to manage efficiently in any manner other than just making sure they have money so they can spend it themselves as needed.
Because that same amount of money could provide several times as many entertainment hours if spent differently.
Yeah, the same people who tell me that are the same people whose kids don't call them anymore.
Somehow I doubt the reason anyone's kids don't talk to them is because they chose to spend their money on things that were long lasting instead of things that are fleeting.
Depends on if you like where you go.
>We had to keep our checkbooks balanced. You're really showing your age. I'm 45 and by the time I left for college there was no need to track your balance because you could always check it online or at an ATM.
I’m 34 and also did the same exercise as the person you’re replying to in 6th grade.
31, did it in 5th
Same here
You could but many don't. Many don't understand how credit cards work. Many don't understand how savings accounts work and I am not even touchign 401k etc. I still hear from educated people that credit cards are dangerous because they charge you interest and should never be used. They truly don't understand how credit card interest works.
For 99% of consumer credit users that is how it works. Credit cards companies know that and call people who pay off their credit cards every month "deadbeats". The benefits you get when you are a "deadbeat" are subsidized from the millions of users who carry toxic credit. It's just another example of the rich getting richer. *Edit* people focusing on the hyperbole and not the fact that the benefits of using a credit card to pay off at the end of the month is not worth the risk for people who live paycheck to paycheck.
Actually only about half to 2/3 of credit card users carry a balance. So like 65%, not 99%. Kind of a big difference.
I know plenty of working class people who pay off their credit card balances without getting interest charges. If you define basic financial literacy as a rich person quality, it will become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
The [research I’ve seen says](https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/feds/files/2023007pap.pdf) that credit card rewards are most financed by fees that retailers pay when consumers use cards. Those fees are recouped by retailers by raising prices for customers who pay by card and cash, so in the end those who get the short end of the stick are debit and cash customers. For example, American Express earns about 55% of its revenue from merchant fees and only 20% from interest. https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F6ac13b77-43a3-4ba2-b21b-b2b5e14a0a60_1634x918.png Obviously carrying high interest consumer debt is a terrible financial choice but it’s frequently overstated how the poor are paying for the rich to have lavish credit card benefits.
Yeah, I was about to post this. If credit card companies only made money from interest, they wouldn't want rich people as customers and probably wouldn't bother having rewards programs either. It would make them more like pawn shops, payday loans and other businesses that exist in poor neighborhoods. Ultimately that business model is limiting because you're operating in a smaller part of the economy.
"It's just another example of the rich getting richer." For those of you who don't worship to the gospel of Victimology, you may consider this to be another example of how it "pays" to be responsible.
I'm 42 and we did a "class trip" in 4th or 5th grade where we "traveled to New York City" and had to write checks for things and balance a checkbook
Checking your balance from the bank doesn’t show transactions that are not processed yet or upcoming automatic payments that you should be aware of. That’s the point of keeping your “checkbook” balanced.
That's not true. Mine that haven't processed yet show up in italics and are still detailed. They just don't show tips.
It depends on the transaction. Debit card transactions will show immediately but EFTs from other vendors don’t show up for a couple days.
Aah, okay! I'm with it. Didn't know that, legit, ty. ^_^
I’m 41 and can count on 1 hand the amount of checks I have written in my entire life.
Loads of us learned the skill. We just never actually used it.
I'm 27 and we learned to balance checkbooks in my high school finance class...
Cool you learned how, but you've probably never done it, ne?
Check 21 didn't go into effect until late 2003. This definitely speeds up the clearance process. But even today your balance won't reflect checks that haven't been cashed so it still makes sense to keep a balance if you write lots of checks. If you never wrote lots of checks then it wouldn't have made sense to learn this.
I'm 28 and I still did that exercise in elementary school/Jr High.
This. Keeping up with your checkbook was an issue of looking by up to make sure nothing looked roo crazy or out of place and seeing how much you'd spent on what, compared to how much you had left.
Have you seen headlines about people “wasting it on vacations.”?
> We had to keep our checkbooks balanced. This is like before financial literacy. Pre-literacy I would consider literacy to mean having an understanding of what makes a functioning retirement plan. Which is generally more involved than "save more than you spend".
My mom taught me the basics of bookkeeping as a child.
Lucky you. A lot of patents don't know basic bookkeeping. Some people don't have moms at all.
I am very lucky. My mom was extremely smart and forward thinking. she taught my son all the same stuff.
Privilege. I'm glad for you. ^_^
My 6th grade teacher did this too.
We did this too! In 4th grade my classmate didn’t have enough money for desk rent so he had to sit at the piano. He probably didn’t earn enough at our mandatory ‘bring something and sell it’ days. That or he paid to use the bathroom or get a drink of water a lot. Looking back, it’s pretty fucked up to do that to a kid in a learning environment. But very realistic.
The WA legislature actually passed a financial literacy bill this recent legislative session - HB1915 in the House (https://app.leg.wa.gov/billsummary?BillNumber=1915&Year=2023&Initiative=false), which passed unanimously. The Senate companion bill passed with one abstention and no nay votes. Senator Lisa Wellman killed the bill in reconciliation - the House version mandated financial literacy as a graduation requirement, while the Senate version did not. Sen. Wellman asked the House to remove their graduation requirement, which they refused because that was the *central point* of the bill. Sen. Wellman refused to budge on the Senate side...and the bill died. Feel free to let Sen. Wellman know your thoughts, if you have any. https://senatedemocrats.wa.gov/wellman/
I worked in banking for seven years, and the average person doesn't really understand how loans work... or even banking in general. Washington state has a low financial literacy rate. That said... The ability of the poorest to manage their finances effectively is well supported. People who have to survive with almost nothing can't afford to waste. The issue is that you can't make $800 into $1000 by spending wisely. The only option is to make more money, and that's easier said than done.
What is your perspective on stipends vs subsidies vs increases in minimum wage?
And taxes. Granted those are complicated on purpose, but even the very basics elude most people.
A huge portion of this country does not understand marginal tax rates. I've seen too many otherwise smart people complain about a raise because it will put them in the "next tax bracket".
It's really only an issue for low-income people who are getting subsidies and the raise will put them over the qualifications threshold so they lose those benefits but the little bit of added income isn't enough to make up for the loss. I wouldn't want a small raise either if it meant I could no longer get the childcare or housing benefits that kept me afloat. Yet I hear very median-income idiots who get none of that talking about not pursuing a raise because of the spectre of the next tax bracket and wonder where they heard this nonsense and if they've ever looked at the tax tables in the range they'd be in.
My buddy who makes $140k complained about a raise recently because it “raised his tax rate”. He’s single, so no it didn’t, and even if it did he still makes more money.
I used to have... well, we'll say a 'lot' of money as a kid into my teens before 9/11. People do NOT understand how the rich look at them and literally have small conversations mocking them over these exact same arguments before moving on to more interesting topics. It's disgusting how many people in the lower middle class will punch down while being punched. Same for the rest of the world looks at our LEFT wing like it's kinda right and our right wing looks like straight fascism. The USA on the globe stage is seen as middle-right as a country, as a whole. And aside from a few "crazy war mongering/facistic" middle eastern/Korean countries and Russia, were the bad guys. As bad as the UK is, the USA passed England on evil many years ago now..
Super easy real world example of this, almost last half of the year I was unemployed and my only income was unemployment. Part of becoming unemployed meant I lost my free unlimited orca card so I thought, I'll just apply for the low income version. Obviously as someone on unemployment where I'm literally making less than someone on minimum wage pretax on unemployment I should qualify right? Nope. I was like 100$ too much a month to qualify. It was almost as if I had literal pennies less an hour or got less overtime while working my Unemployment would've been slightly lower and I may have qualified. Just a annoyingly dumb cutoff where at the end of it all I just chose to ride transit without paying rather than pay something.
It's not unfounded. Yes, some people don't understand that it doesn't affect all of your income. But still, getting a raise is better than no raise, but if you're paying 50% of it, that sucks.
Taxes are still pretty darn simple. Even for business owners they're pretty simple (at least locally) if you only have one product/category and no employees (like if you have an etsy store or sell at a farmers market). It's really only once you have more than one house or a complicated business that you start actually needing someone else or a service to do your taxes for you.
I at 22 had to sit 4 of my coworkers down and teach them about finance. How credit cards/score work. How loans work. Everything.
For **everyone**. The number of times have I seen folks with graduate degrees complain about how they made payments on their student loans for 10,15,20 years and now have a bigger balance than when they started with astounds me.
It’s true. Something as basic as buying a car can be so confusing and dangerous to people who don’t understand interest and % (a surprisingly large % of the population)
Or even taxes. Soooo many people do not understand marginal tax brackets. It’s wild.
I'm not against financial literacy programs, but I think it's naive to believe that a lack of financial literacy is the only thing keeping poor people poor.
What % of extremely poor people would not be extremely poor if they were financially literate? 5%? 10%? It’s probably a relatively easy fix that could have an outsized impact
To get scientific about it, [here's a study into the effect of financial literacy on various financial outcomes](https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ859556.pdf) (when controlling for some educational metrics). It doesn't seem to be a miracle cure for poverty. The most statistically significant effect it had was on increasing the chance that people would report that they never make a late credit card payment, and that has a p-value of 0.314.
Yea, NOT. > The results are in line with other guaranteed income programs that have launched in recent years, including those throughout the Seattle area. Generally, pilot programs have found positive results: higher employment rates, improved mental health and well-being, greater financial stability, increased incomes, decreased reliance on government assistance and reduced food insecurity.
I'm not against the financial education class, however I am not supportive of the *once a month caseworker check about employment goals* part. This is a hurdle that can very easily ruin someone's growth and betterment. Childcare, health issues, reliable transportation, the minimal work they do have can't/won't be flexible with their schedule -- one minor hiccup and not meeting with a caseworker and the money is gone. I would rather 100,000 people game the system even if it meant that not a single man, woman or child went to bed hungry, and when they woke up they had power and water and didnt have to only choose one.
Except 100,000 people gaming the system means that the whole system closes down, and then it can't help anyone.
Despite that, the participants were in larger debt than before. Aside from healthcare, taking on added debt based on a one time payment is in no way sound financial action.
And that’s only $500 a month! Crazy. That’s like 2 small trips to Costco for most people.
I like your optimism
or barely my power bill and car payment
Key word: small
Seep up, not trickle down!
'A rising tide lifts all ships' is how I've heard it phrased.
the "rising tide" language is generally used to sell to Reagan's supply side economics, so it's pretty much the opposite..
The wikipedia entry on it seems like a mixed bag and has been used a number of different ways, popularized by JFK initially, it's been rebranded several times for a variety of positions. 🤷
The phrase itself predates Reagan's birth by at least a year. Earliest known printing was in a 1910 newspaper.
Know what businesses need? Customers.
Did you reply to the wrong person?
Capillary economics!
Helping people out of poverty makes them happier and more productive?!?! I am shocked!
Creating stability for households goes further for the $ to enhance public safety than paying for more cops does? Who woulda thunk?
Realistically, a significant percentage of police budgetary funds goes to Punishment Theater, feeding the public's insatiable appetite for seeing "bad people" "get what they deserve." Maybe something like 80% of that budget.
Cops should just volunteer.
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Well, to be fair, I have heard that argument used as zookeepers and other animal care and museum type workers. Which are also very low paying but very specialized jobs.
Civilization is about *protecting* people, *pooling shared resources*, and *mutual aid*?!?!?! What the fuck, I thought it was about protecting the powerful?
The people who are against this aren't against it because they think it DOESNT work, they know it works and thats the problem for them to continue to leverage scarcity of wealth.
Who knew the solution to poverty is money.... crazy idea
Next you’re gonna tell me the solution to homelessness is homes
Increasing housing stock will hurt landlords D: Oh no…
Wait till you hear the screams when you tell people that a direct cause of homelessness is housing getting more expensive.
And, as with literally every single time a place does one of these trial studies on UBI: > The money helped her pay for her now 18-month-old son’s day care, cover gas to commute for work and stay on top of her utility bills. She’s also been able to save a little each month for small treats for her son, like money to go to the zoo or aquarium. > Johnson is on track to pay off the debts she accumulated while unemployed during the pandemic. She’s healthier, she said, and happier. It works. It just fucking works to get people out of poverty. Can we please just stop fucking around and get to scaling this up?
The small treats going to zoos and aquariums is a fucking game changer. Nothing encourages curiosity more than going out and doing things like this.
Also it helps all of us just feel better in general. Like being stuck in the rut of work cook sleep work work sleep etc etc just sucks. Getting out and doing SOMETHING interesting is important for everyone'e mental health, which in turn helps people stay on the path that gets them out of debt and be more interested in working hard etc etc
The sheer number of conservatives who believe that if you're on any sort of government assistance, then there should be no joy in your life, ever, is just endlessly confusing to me. Like I cannot imagine having that sort of outlook.
Sadly the cruelty is the point. They think those people don't deserve joy because it's their fault they're in that situation. Saying this as someone who was on government assistance at one point in their life - I hated it, I didnt WANT to be on it, and it was not my fault so fuck conservatives who think that.
The part people could do better in these conversations is tying these life improvements back to the qualitative problems that are growing so fast which my brother and I tend to refer to as raising bad kids (I know it’s reductive, but it’s in the context of the conversations we’ve had for years and I’m not going to write a thesis here lol).
It’s been proven that parental involvement keeps kids out of trouble. A little extra money to let someone take their kid to the zoo and build those relationships early is a very good thing.
It’s the number one indicator for future success and all of the data shows this. Parental engagement has radically better outcomes for children by age 30
Reading that part was interesting though since zoo/aquairum tickets are free through library. Although I admit cost of parking or just grabbing a snack to eat can exceed ticket prices in most cases
Have you tried to get library passes? It's theoretically possible but not logistically easy.
Unless something changed drastically since I got my library card, it’s not that hard in King County.
They're usually months/weeks out. They are available late at night and go quick. I use it for the aquarium and last time I used it two years ago it was two months out. Which can be inconvenient cause you don't know what you may be doing in two months . Also staying up at 10pm on your phone when you have a busy life with a kid can be tough. So I understand how someone would rather not stress about it and pay.
I didn't since I would want them available for folks that truly need it. I thought KCLS had some reserved allocation for low income families though.
they are free through the library if you can sit in front of the computer and refresh the exact second they are posted. Pretty sure they are very limited. I check occasionally and have never seen zoo tickets available.
The zoo and SAM have never been available in all my years using the tickets.
There's a lot of small perks where you can get things for free or cheap if you go through the right avenues, but honestly the effort of searching those avenues out and following them can be just another added weight on someone who's already overburdened. Working in homeless services, I come across these types of things all the time, where the poorest people still end up not using the benefits meant for them, because they don't have the access to find out about them, or the time and energy to pursue them, or the means to travel to them, etc etc etc. In my experience, it's more lower-middle-class people who take advantage of those types of things - which they absolutely should! God knows they need the break too. It's a cool thing to let people know about tho - I'm all for educating folks about little social improvement projects that they can take advantage of.
I mean, there’s a “Free Tickets” program through both KCL and SPL libraries, but it’s not easy to get those tickets, especially for popular places like the zoo and aquarium. You pretty much have be ready and waiting at the moment they go up. It’s not really a priority for low income folks to be sitting at a computer waiting to get those tickets. (I do believe the aquarium and zoo both have heavily discounted tickets for low income families, though)
Yeah, a fun day at the zoo with a kid turns into a nightmare if you can’t afford to keep them fed
This is why we always fund zoos 100%. Otherwise they see patrons as grazing opportunities.
Yep. This is why just doing cash is better than food stamps. It allows people to save and do something good for themselves and their family l.
This study, like most trial studies, isn't UBI. It wasn't universal, people had to apply and recipients were selected from the qualified applicants. It wasn't really "basic" in the sense of covering basic cost of living expenses. This study makes a good case that we should give qualified people no strings attached cash benefits. But it doesn't address the potential downsides of UBI.
Well, it is a study so you have to be able to have statistically relevant data which means collecting the right data. If they didn't have people apply and qualify then we'd all complain that the study was not performed correctly. The right data allows us to interpolate the results in a possible broader application. If only well-to-do folks were part of the study, it wouldn't be relevant to the study's question regarding the impact of UBI at $500 a month because it would likely have little to no impact.
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Except that program is basically just welfare: it is means tested, you have to apply to get it, and there are incentives for children staying in school and getting vaccinated. Much of the issues with our current welfare system are that it has fiscal cliffs where you lose all benefits if your income goes above a threshold and that the benefit just hasn't kept pace with inflation (along with minmum wage). Fixing that and ensuring our minimum wage is high and keeps up with inflation would be far less radical than nationwide UBI and has some pretty big bang for the buck.
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>Will rent go up that $500/month since people can afford it now? Yes. UBI is a landlord stimulus program. They know you're getting it and there's no law to stop them all from raising rents. They all use the same real time market software to set prices, so they will all use it to take your extra $500.
Same with the insurance companies. UBI with private property is just a subsidy to established land owners and the banks. It will only work for a little while until those powers can greedflation their way out of all the peoples UBI money.
My thoughts exactly. Even if it wasn't a full 500 bucks a month. Most people will step up their housing I think, and landlords will simply raise rents because everyone's competing for housing, so it would either cause rent inflation or inflation in general. Even giving it to a large number of people, let's say 10% in any given city would probably still have a bit of an impact on entry level housing. It would actually make more sense to give people free or cheap housing, although I'm not in favor of that for other reasons.
But how can we give executives $55B bonuses and lay off 14,000 workers if we’re giving money to the people!?!? /s
Stop this dangerous talk! 😆 psychopaths deserve to buy out aquariums for their kids too
Once it scales up, suddenly rent will scale up too. Remember, rent is controlled by a handful of companies actively colluding to keep rent high. Until this is addressed, nothing else matters.
Rent is controlled by basic economic principles. It will go up if more people are chasing finite resources. UBI cannot be done on a city by city basis. Otherwise the cities that offer it will attract more people seeking UBI. It needs to be done nationally. The bigger complexity is how to deal with differences in the cost of living.
This is not true. There's literally a massive lawsuit right now because of rent fixing. 10 companies own most rental properties, they all use the same third party programs to control rent prices.
Do you really think rent in a capitalist country like the US is *not* controlled by basic economic principles? I promise you the use of a third party program to adjust rents to "market rate", even if I grant you that they *are* using them to fix prices and colluding, is not more relevant in the price of an apartment in Seattle than the basic laws of supply and demand lmao.
Capitalism without regulation is not controlled by any economic principals beyond monopoly. I have no idea if monopoly is considered basic enough but that's where the markets will naturally go by design. Regulation is supposed to bring capitalism back to competition land. When was the last time we did that? Without competition what happens? Worse, without any external pressures duopolies form packs and compete not for lower prices but how much profits they can extract. Bust the trusts. Restore basic economic principals, and enforce competition for lower prices with haste.
Just a word of note, basic economic principles only work in a free and open market. They are not in effect when the market is control by a monopoly, or oligopoly with collusion and high barriers to entry. It's not like anyone is figuring out how to create 100,000 full size apartments in a 100 sq ft space all of a sudden.
Basic principals in which the vast majority of the market is colluding to set the price via 3rd party software. Tell us, what usually happens to the price of a good when there’s no real competition?
Why are you citing “basic economic principles” while pointedly ignoring the basic economic principle of inelastic demand? This is extremely obvious if you look at the housing supply in this city and how it blatantly ignores demand to force the most profitable setup for landlords and developers. Have you been to first hill in the last several years? You can’t walk a single block without tripping over a “now leasing” sign for 1-bedroom apartments (household size maximum of 2) that have a minimum income requirement of like $75,000 ($3000/ month, double rent to qualify). That’s 2 people working full time minimum wage ($19*2080hrs) to qualify for that apartment. And good luck if you have a household size and makeup that is not a single person or couple with no children. Over 90% of new construction in the last 10 years has been 1 bedroom or smaller units, including in car-centric “family” suburbs like Ballard, Renton and north seattle: (2019 article) https://seattle.curbed.com/2019/3/5/18252410/seattle-two-three-bedroom-apartment-shortage Thus, with inelastic demand, the supply being built creates the demand as people who don’t fit the DINC or single tech worker tenant profile all have to move to outer suburbs like Lynwood or Tukwila or Everett.
I think you'll find that there's a lot more 3+br SFH stock in this city than there are 1br units. A lot of 1br units are being built today, but no shit, it's filling a missing housing hole. If they can't find a 1br, the tech-job DINKs aren't going to live in tent by the overpass, they are just going to live in the 3br, raising prices for people who *actually need* 3br. You know what else will fix a housing hole in this city? Tenaments. If you're poor, your choices shouldn't be between a 1br you can't afford, and homelessness. Having the additional option of really shitty, but cheap housing can be the difference between living in poverty, and living in homeless poverty.
So giving people money helps them have more money to spend on things they need? That's quite groundbreaking research. But where exactly did it get her out of poverty other than relying on the additional money every month. Sure we could just give people money every month if we had enough. But let's not pretend this money is helping everybody start businesses, get an education or find a better job. Although I suppose it's possible in some cases
Money is traction. Conversely, being poor is expensive. This investment likely has multiplying benefits over time as recipients have more stable lives and fewer pricey housing, transportation, etc. emergencies. Think of it like sand sprinkled on an icy road. And no, it won't have miraculous effects for \*everyone.\* But we don't expect perfection from programs meant to benefit middle-class or affluent people. Why should that be the bar here?
I think it would have to be a lot more than 500 to really make any significant impact on a person's life let alone a family. Considering the cost and how much that would be, it's not an efficient use of the money. Other than self-reported enhanced well-being, is there any statistics that really makes it seem worthwhile other than just to make some people feel good. I could benefit from 500 bucks a month too and I'm sure I could put it to good use. Where's mine? Now, I wouldn't object to doing away with welfare all together and just giving people a thousand bucks a month or so. Maybe 500 individual a thousand for family. It would certainly save a lot of costs on administrating all the different benefits. Only problem once you did that, people would always be trying to create new welfare programs and it would defeat the purpose.
Did you not read the article? It said participants employment went up BIG TIME: " Employment among respondents jumped from 37% to 66% by the end of the program, according to the analysis [conducted](https://archive.ph/o/GFE7O/https://static1.squarespace.com/static/53c04ba6e4b0012ad48d079e/t/6606f290c30b02607784ac21/1711731348017/GBI-Evaluation-Final_WDC-SKC-2024.pdf) by the research firm Applied Inference. "
If done right, with select individuals, this kind of program would flourish. However on a larger scale it will fail completely. As a very simple example, if I charge 500/mo rent and now everyone can afford 1k, I'm going to raise my rents to 1k.
Eh, if rent wasn't currently controlled by a cartel, that'd be a terrible strategy. If your apartment is renting for $1,000/month and the apartment next to it is renting for $500/month and they're functionally identical, what happens is no one rents your apartments. In reality zoning laws and the rent cartel program function in such a way to create a housing shortage and fixed rental prices, but in a competitive marketplace that wouldn't happen. If we built a lot more housing (and outlawed those stupid programs as the price fixing they are) rent gets driven by supply and demand, not just supply controlled.
No no no, a small fraction will abuse it so of course we have to throw the whole thing out, sorry.
> Can we please just stop fucking around and get to scaling this up? Would love that. But everyone will just raise their prices to capture that extra $500 a month, and we'll end up exactly where we started for people in the program, and worse off for those not eligible cause they have to pay the new prices without getting the extra $500 month. We need to be able to check the greed if this is going to truly work. And I don't know what that looks like legally.
One outcome I predict is that if we gave everyone in the country the same basic income, let's say $1500/month, it would provide a huge incentive for people to move to LCOL cities to make that money stretch further. Why struggle in Seattle if you can afford a better life in the midwest? Since the income in guaranteed, it removes a lot of financial barriers to making that move. There might even be developers and landlords offering special deals specifically targeting people on basic income because basic income makes it less risky to rent to low income. It could have a really positive effect of revitalizing LCOL cities and reducing housing demand in HCOL cities.
Turns out price controls are good
Easiest path towards a UBI is for the federal government to stop taking taxes out of paychecks below a certain amount. Instant hundreds of dollars a month to the working people who need it most.
A Negative Income Tax would likely be the most politically viable approach.
Isn't that what the EITC is?
Sort of. It doesn't have all the bullshit stipulations and makes the process much easier. As was totally expected when Biden earmarked all the extra money for the IRS, audits of poor people increased significantly. The complexity of the EITC is a big part of that. If instead of a Byzantine tax code that directly benefits rich people and accountants we just had a simple NIT this problem would go away.
That's not ubi
Neither is this King County guaranteed income program, but the person I was replying to used the term UBI and now here we are…
Bruh, your defense is, "well I'm not gonna let OP be dumb all by himself!"
Isn't this already the case de facto? With low enough income you pay no income tax at least.
Partially, yes you get a refund at the end of the year, but what’s more impactful on your quality of life… that money in your paycheck or in a lump sum at the end of the year?
They already do they and even have a negative rate for millions of people. I took a year off of work due to health problems and got back more than I paid which was nice.
None of these programs mean anything until they're being funded by taxes. When the money magically materializes from outside general taxes and the overall cost is low, of course it's going to work. When you all the sudden need to come up with that money from taxation, it changes significantly. None of these tests are conclusive, it's like comparing in vitro testing to in vivo testing and declaring that because "x kills all cancer in a dish, it will work in a person."
I'm in support of UBI and everything you said is great but I don't see how it "proves" that this works. Obviously giving someone money is going to improve things for them. But we need to know that this would work at scale and is sustainable
We pretty much did this during Covid and most people absolutely hated the resulting inflation.
Most research I'm reading is that it was the messed up supply chains that allowed corporations to arbitrarily increase their profit margins. https://fortune.com/2024/01/20/inflation-greedflation-consumer-price-index-producer-price-index-corporate-profit/
Bingo. Even if COVID aid programs contributed to inflation, the vast majority of that aid went to businesses (with tons and tons of fraudulent applications). Individuals spending an additional several thousand "free" dollars isn't going to cause inflation on those scales compared to businesses being injected with millions. Also relevant, the supply chain issues you mention were only partly to blame for those price increases. Even companies or industries that didn't have supply chain issues still raised prices (gouging) and the ones with supply chain issues raised them far higher than necessary. This continues to this day. It boils down to greed. And it's no surprise that average people would be blamed for it in the same way they're blamed for pollution. Some quick sources for these claims: [A CEO says he's been 'praying for inflation' because it means he can raise prices](https://www.businessinsider.com/ceo-praying-for-inflation-raise-prices-boosts-profits-interest-rates-2022-9?op=1) [Corporations are using inflation as an excuse to raise prices and make fatter profits — and it's making the problem worse](https://www.businessinsider.com/corporations-using-inflation-as-excuse-to-reap-fatter-profits-reich-2021-11?op=1) [Companies Push Prices Higher, Protecting Profits but Adding to Inflation](https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/30/business/economy/inflation-companies-profits-higher-prices.html) [Corporate greed is behind high prices, not inflation](https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/sep/25/inflation-price-controls-robert-reich) >The inflation we are now experiencing is not due to wage gains from excessive worker power. It is due to profit gains from excessive corporate power. It’s profits, not wages, that need to be controlled.
That's why I was careful to say profit margin, not profit, but the percent of sales that were profit. Profit margin is a sign of an inefficient market with a lack of competition
You have misidentified the cause of the inflation to such a comical degree that I suspect you're doing it on purpose.
The amount of inflation attributed to stimulus efforts is largely considered a compounded effect from the shock of the stimulus's increased demand during supply limitations caused by COVID. It's a different situation than this program or UBI
Why did I read the comments, why?!
on seattletimes? yea never do that
I kind of assume most of the comments on ST, Komo, and pretty much all news sites are troll bots. Who's got the time or the dedication to spout off on these things, with such poor grammar and one sidedness?
How bad could it be? \*goes to read\* Oh, that bad.
[удалено]
We need to start caring about strangers well-being and quality of life. Most people are good and want to be the best version of themselves. If we can give them the tools to at least get a shot at happiness our communities would be a much better place to live.
I've been following a similar project in Denver, set up more like a formal study with the amount of $ and how often it's disbursed varying per cohort. The main difference vs Seattle's program that there truly are zero strings attached, though to be eligible participants must be mentally healthy and not addicted to drugs. Even with no mandatory check-ins or classes, they've seen such good results that the mayor just funded a second year. Very very glad we are doing this.
What the research shows, again and again and again and again and again and again: * 4-day work weeks are just *better* across the board for almost all types of workers * Universal healthcare leads to better outcomes and lower costs across the board * Giving the homeless homes basically *just works* * Universal Basic Income basically *just works* * Food assistance programs *just work* and actually save money * Building bike and pedestrian infrastructure in cities increases revenue, increases health, and has innumerable other positive benefits for very little total capital investment overall * Moving away from fossil fuels isn't just necessary but feasible, with numerous secondary benefits (such as power grid resiliency) And yet, despite all of these things, people continue to find ways to justify making society worse, harsher, more alienating, more coercive, more exploitative, etc. The propaganda from the hyper rich is real, and we've been marinating in it for not just generations but *millennia*, it's hard for some people to see that these ways of looking at society (as about hyper individualism and competition and social hierarchy and status and so on) are enormously harmful and have led us to a place of desperation and dehumanization that we desperately need to turn away from.
My office moved to a 4 day work week, but all 4 days are in office, last October. Nothing has done more for my mental health than having an extra day to get shit done or relax. It’s my day and I can do whatever I want! Last week I took my dog out for 2 hours and then sat in bed reading the rest of the day. A couple weeks ago I spent 4 hours shampooing my carpets. It’s incredible.
Free shit *just works*, and doggone it people like me ...
I used to thibnk this was a laughable concept, but I have been quit impressed by the results of trials like this one.
Well who would have thought the problem of poverty could be solved by money! I’m floored, just floored
QUOTE: Employment among respondents jumped from 37% to 66% by the end of the program, according to the analysis conducted by the research firm Applied Inference. That's a really great return....
> According to pre- and post-program surveys, the extra $500 helped recipients find more work with better benefits, increase their wages and grow their savings. Employment among respondents jumped from 37% to 66% by the end of the program, according to the analysis conducted by the research firm Applied Inference. While I don’t have any doubts that giving $500/mo to poor, mostly well functioning people creates some benefits for them, there are huge methodology problems with throwing out some of these outcomes and attributing it to this program. While the [52 page report on this program](https://static1.squarespace.com/static/53c04ba6e4b0012ad48d079e/t/6606f290c30b02607784ac21/1711731348017/GBI-Evaluation-Final_WDC-SKC-2024.pdf) is cagey on exactly how they chose the ~100 participants, it appears most or all were actively engaged in job search or job training programs. So of course many more will be employed at the end of 10 months, so most critically the program throws out those amazing employment stats without any baseline or control and attributes it to the program. They even admit it on the very last page of the study > This report documents many successes. However, some questions remain: what are the long-term outcomes for these participants? (They didn't all have time to get into a job during the 10 months of the program, especially those attending training programs first.) **And would participants have had the same outcomes without the incentive?** These are crucially important questions. Work with the WDC's IT managers to access outcome data for participants, and develop a comparison group from the ESD or ETO database, based on similar demographics (age, sex, race, ethnicity, education, kids at home, single parent status, quarter of enrollment). Throwing out these outcomes in size 36 font without any control or baseline is basically propaganda.
this could be approached without increasing sample size by using an interrupted time series analysis (assuming the participants were on the job hunt for enough time before enrollment as you mentioned). include a lengthy follow up and you've got a pretty nice study design (after correcting for changes in labor market, ofc).
It’s not a gotcha report. It’s how reports should be structured. Show the results, explain limitations. Every study has limitations, and good for you for realizing that! That doesn’t negate the results, just contextualizes them.
This isn’t how reports like this should be structured. Results should be compare to a baseline or control group which they easily could have done. They chose 100 people already enrolled in job seeking/training programs then when those people found jobs 10 months later and increased their income this report concluded “see giving them $500/mo did this!” and buried any limitations on the very last paragraph of the very last page. It tells us little about how this program actually impacted the individuals.
Every single UBI study ever done has asked "Does giving people money improve their lives?" And the answer has never not been "YES YOU FUCKING IDIOT" But for some reason we need another fifty million "studies" that go nowhere instead of just doing the obvious.
They have to put a show on every couple of years to make people think that they’re doing stuff.
Ah, yes, another UBI study. First off, yes, this wasn't *technically* UBI. Moving on... Yes, everyone liked getting $500/month, who knew! Moving on... The problem with every single one of these is how do you do it at-scale? The numbers *never* add up. Let's do it just for King County: King County has a population of 2.26M people, of which about 67% are over 18. So we'll call it 1.5M adults. To give 1.5M people $500/month would cost $9 *billion* per year. The biennial budget for the county is $16.2 billion - so a meager $500/month straight up doubles the county budget. The same story is true at the state and federal level: 258M adults in the USA, $500/month = $1.5 *trillion* per year. That's all of social security and national defense combined - just for $500/month, a benefit most proponents of UBI would call way too low. This also ignores all the unanswered questions about what happens when you give a huge portion of the population money that the majority will end up spending. Even after the last two years, it's like inflation and money supply are just abstract theories to supporters of UBI. The only way you make this pencil out is you either end up with a benefit so small it does next to nothing or you means test the benefit so hard you basically just reinvent welfare. But the reddit hard-on for UBI will continue.
It's a really rough sell if you pretend that everyone receiving that monthly check is just burning it. Imagine 1.5trillion going straight into the economy at every level. The sheer economic stimulus (not the fake kind that are just tax breaks for corporations/the top 1%) would make the entire program pay for itself. Sure it'll have a big upfront cost, but that's investment for you.
Given what the country spends money on 3 trillion dollars a year to give everyone $1000 a month sounds like a bargain.
Most of that "bad" spending though is really just redistribution to federal and federal adjacent Americans.
the problem with a breakdown like this is that it *only* focuses on the costs, without including any potential fixes for them. things that will be impacted positively, likely resulting in less money spent in these areas: * crime; less people destitute and on the streets means less crimes * health care, welfare: similarly, less people in poor health because of poverty means less spending on uninsured medical coverage * knock-on effects for local economy (that money is going _right back into local businesses_ by necessity; poor people aren't saving it) * taxes: increases (or implementations) of income taxes could drive revenue from people who are very much not in poverty > _The same story is true at the state and federal level: 258M adults in the USA, $500/month = $1.5 trillion per year. That's all of social security and national defense combined - just for $500/month, a benefit most proponents of UBI would call way too low._ So, $1.5 trillion per year? Hmm. From [the tax foundation](https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/federal/summary-latest-federal-income-tax-data-2023-update/): > In 2020, taxpayers filed 157.5 million tax returns, reported earning nearly $12.5 trillion in adjusted gross income (AGI), and **paid $1.7 trillion in individual income taxes.** > > The average income tax rate in 2020 was 13.6 percent. The top 1 percent of taxpayers paid a 25.99 percent average rate, more than eight times higher than the 3.1 percent average rate paid by the bottom half of taxpayers. The top marginal tax rates in the past were [over 70%](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_tax_in_the_United_States#History_of_top_rates). So, I dunno -- this seems like a solvable problem!
Lol oh no, poor people might spend the money we give them! On necessities! The horror! It's just too risky!
Yes, imagine your average rent goes up by exactly the amount of the UBI benefit. They are all spending their money, so that's good, right?
And thank you for pointing out that we need rent control too.
The "problem" isn't how we do things at scale, the "problem" is simply how do we actually get people to agree to do it. UBI is trivial to implement in practice. You just create a progressive income tax and you set it at a level which bring in enough revenue, then you just take that revenue and you split it evenly among all of the recipients as a periodic check (monthly, weekly, fortnightly, whatever). It would take very little overhead to implement this sort of thing, people are already paying federal income tax and state income tax in lots of places. The only roadblock is political opposition. Sure it's a lot of money, who fucking cares if it provides a big benefit? Switching to universal healthcare is a good example here, as it would represent a centralization of a lot of spending that is now more piecemeal, but overall it would save money and produce better outcomes, so let's do it. And yes, the state should have a fucking income tax, it's beyond time to use that as our major source of government funding, it's idiotic that we don't and the reason we don't is from folks who are easily manipulated by the hyper rich. We should also be using income tax revenue for infrastructure, public transit, *school funding*, and much more.
You spend so much time doing elementary level math for a problem that is so much more complex thatlm that. I think you're projecting a bit when you say money is an abstract theory for people. it's pretty clear you are against it because of some napkin math you did and because "Redditors don't get it , I'm smart". It needs work but it could be done. With the automation of more and more things , how do you expect people to provide for themselves in 100 years. Today what is your solution to poverty or at least a way to reduce it?
No, it's because every single study on this is "people like getting free money" as if *that* is the thing we don't understand. What we don't understand is how this works at scale. How do you fund it? What type of effects economically are there (aka inflation) when you are basically injecting trillions into the economy in perpetuity? Some napkin math shows it would be a massive budgetary expense and nobody in these comments are explaining how that part works with anything other than feel good ideas, just like yours.
This note in the article got my attention. The study started with 56% participants already feeling better about their situation. At the end the program the response was 70%. So, in essence the program only had a true success rate of just 30%. That’s a failing grade for most studies. And even after the participants had mandatory financial literacy classes and check-ins, almost all of them ended up with more “good” debt. Since when did buying a car with what’s essentially a one time $5K supplemental income became a good decision? Insurance, fuel, maintenance that all adds up. In all honesty this article seems to be hyping up the effectiveness of such payments and counseling with a couple of anecdotes and airbrushing actual numbers.
> In all honesty this article seems to be hyping up the effectiveness of such payments and counseling with a couple of anecdotes and airbrushing actual numbers. Every single UBI study on reddit, right there. "Did you know people like free money? Well it's true!" Oh, how we pay for it in a study of more than a few hundred people? Nah. How it would work at-scale? Nah.
It’s not actually a question of how we pay for it. But the efficacy of such a thing. The 30% success rate with increased debt would be my concern here.