There’s a lot of propaganda around basic income that would have you believe they don’t work. Except every experiment we’ve seen with it has shown it does work.
I’ll never understand how a significant amount of the population are convinced trickle down economics works, and that the people with more money than they can spend somehow will spend more…
But the people who run out of money between every pay day won’t spend their 1k a month back into the economy
Many to most people have an irrational need to falsely believe that the world and society is fair. That they earned what they have, and that those who aren’t getting their basic needs met did something to deserve their suffering. You can see this indignity up close in asking someone who came from economic stability if they paid for their own college. They’ll dance around and talk about the part time job they did for supplemental income to hilariously attempt equate their plight with those that had to take on indentured servitude student loans or simply couldn’t manage the expense and became understandably disillusioned.
Think of all the derogatory, punitive sentiments people say about our massive homeless and prison populations. As long as those people all deserve their suffering, the world makes sense to the weak minded. These are the same people who think billionaires are billionaires because of extraordinary work ethic, rather than social status, access to willing capital investment, and the willingness to exploit others for the value they generate.
Many to most people aren’t willing to admit that we only have control over ourselves, and that usually isn’t nearly enough to overcome the circumstances that the external world imposes on us. It allows us very occasional opportunities to influence/navigate branches within those circumstances, but the lotteries of birth, socioeconomic status, race, gender, location, etc very much limit practical trajectories. Using power over yourself might allow you to go up a class with concerted effort, from poverty to lower, lower to lower middle, etc, but our society and civilization in general is deeply unfair, and by the design of its architects. You don’t tend to start as a shelter orphan and end as someone society would consider a winner. In the same vein, children of said winners almost can’t fail being born into the little self-protecting owner club.
While it can’t be eliminated, addressing income inequity would mitigate these problems to some degree. We just refuse to because that would be unfaiiiir, right?
To privilege, equality feels like oppression. and sadly, as in most recorded history, privilege makes the rules.
They’re told that neoliberalism works by every major political party, every for-profit media company, every lobby group and every sleazy think tank.
It’s incredibly persuasive. Most people can’t even name it, let alone oppose it. The moment someone has even the slightest chance of challenging it, every single one of those organisations unites with a solidarity the rest of us can only dream of.
Because for them, “left vs right” is a pantomime. They don’t actually disagree on anything of consequence, they’re just jostling for position at the trough.
And they’re not just apathetic about those people struggling to hold on until pay day, they celebrate it. Those people have had every possible penny of wealth squeezed from them, starting it on its march back to a billionaires pocket, because that’s the way money actually flows.
Meanwhile, neoliberalism never works but we’re determined to stick with it until it’s finished wiping out life on earth.
The overlords don’t want you to be able to easily quit your job. Same thing with health insurance.
So far, so good. But implementation at scale is a whole 'nother animal. At these small scales you don’t have politicians, interest groups, idiots of all stripes, weighing in.
Only path forward I’ve thought of is 1,000 such small experiments, gradually scaling up and providing overwhelming evidence that it’s a smart idea. Course then we’d have the morons and lazy moving into those areas and destroying the whole scheme.
There’s also a lack of other factors because the population receiving the supplemental income is small relative to the “market.”
You give a thousand people extra money, you bump up their income from subsistence to usable.
You give everyone supplemental income without price controls on goods and housing, then rent or other costs just skyrocket to eat up the extra.
This is not true, though it depends what you mean by “work.” For example, this study found no statistically significant increase in employment. UBI puts unconditional money in the hands of more people. That can be seen as a good thing in and off itself, but it has hardly proven to improve quality of life metrics across the board. Much more research is required for this.
I support UBI, but I think we are many decades away from public support. The reason is that any moves to implement it today will require a) huge tax increases, and b) blocking politicians buying welfare votes. The first is incredibly unpopular today. By the latter I mean that the current welfare system is a maze of tax credits, incentives, and election bribes. More money for special interest groups, or the disabled, or the elderly. One of the reasons UBI can work is stripping the HUGE administrative overhead from the system and giving every adult the exact same money. I just don’t think these special interest groups will accept this. They’ll demand their group be given more money. They’ll demand that parents be given more money, or the disabled, or the elderly. And politicians will acquiesce. Then we’re back to the same broken, corrupt welfare system but now it costs 5x as much.
Why and how should quality of life be contingent upon employment?
According to most fucked up people in this country:
“Why shouldnt you struggle when I am struggling? Nobody gets hands out.”
It’s not. Please re-read my comment.
OK, I did. It still says what it did before. You state that UBI didn’t significantly increase employment, and then equated that with quality of life.
and then equated that with quality of life.
No I didn’t. It would help if you would just accept what I am telling you is my argument instead of weak-ass gotchas.
How is this supposed to be some “gotcha?” You claimed that UBI did not increase quality of life with your only source stating that it had no effect on employment. What does employment inherently have to do with quality of life?
I didn’t claim work is a requirement for QOL. Instead of addressing my comment, you’re hyper-focusing on a grammatical disagreement which is completely immaterial. Since you lack any substantive disagreement, I take this to mean you agree with my premise.
Whatever will we do?! We can’t possibly require billionaires and corporations to pay their fair share!
Reasonable opinion that’s not completely, unflinchingly left-wing? Here? Go to the penalty box and think about what you’ve done.
Seriously, I had not considered what interest groups would do.
The right: “How come them lazy blacks get the same I get?!”
The left: “How come privileged whites get the same as black people?”
The right: “How come them lazy blacks get the same I get?!”
The left: “How come privileged whites get the same as black people?”
Great examples! Both of these would be popular narratives, and whoever wins would end up putting their thumb on the “UBI” scales.
It’s it just the thing to call anything you disagree with propaganda now?
There are problems with this at scale that just don’t exist in small experiments.
Does it really take research to say “more money=more better for people with no money?”
That’s not the issue, and won’t be the issue with full scale implementation. The problem arises when everyone knows that literally everyone has X extra dollars to spend every month, and they think those dollars rightfully belong to them. You can’t simply hand out extra money to every person and expect that to solve any societal problems. If you’re trying to address systematic problems then you need to actually address those problems. UBI is a crutch that quickly loses it’s effectiveness, but can’t be dropped once it’s no longer effective.
Why don’t you link to peer reviewed research on the subject then if you’re so confident.
Given their claim is about large-scale (well beyond the scale that had been experimented with*) implementation, obviously there’s no research on it. I think there is a bit of an issue of inflation reducing the effectiveness of the money, particularly in the short-term. New houses aren’t just going to pop up overnight just because every homeless person has more money and many vacant homes aren’t in the locations or price ranges they can afford. If you make macro 101 level assumptions, long-term with more demand for basic goods, its possible that their prices will be higher than people going without those basic necessities if costs increase with increased production. But they could also be cheaper long-term depending on the economies of scale. I think real-world assumptions would tend towards higher prices because real pricing is more about what people will pay than how much it costs to produce, but if you’re using those assumptions, you’re still going to have an equilibrium where more people are getting more basic goods, not an equilibrium where the money just doesn’t do anything anymore.
*some people will always just claim it hasn’t been done on a large enough scale for the effects they worry about to materialize until its don’t federally in the US, the entire EU, or some similar scale.
Elimination of the stock market would address a lot.
Ignoring the fact that ubi addresses a systemic problem. Yes, other problems need to be addressed, but when you’re hungry and homeless, income can quickly address immediate needs.
I really, REALLY wish my governor would do this. I’m 100% convinced it would make a HUGE difference in the homelessness issues that have been getting worse and worse for years in my city.
I’m a fan of basic income for those 55 and older. This encourages retirement and opens up the job market. It will also help with homelessness.
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Automatically at 55, special circumstances prior to.
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Why not?
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Ah, you don’t want to work. Makes sense.
Yeah that ubi of social security that starts at 65 really got those old bastards out of the job market??? The proof is that even with a form of ubi for older people didn’t suddenly get them out of the job market, they stayed and kept on blocking jobs.
Damn, $500 a month would definitely turn my life around.
That’s so in incredibly saddening. That’s below min wage, like $3 an hour. And that much? Can do a lot?
I hope your life gets better.
Thank you so much. What makes it worse is that I have a full time job and still struggle to make it to the next paycheck. Things will get better for sure. I’m working hard and hoping for a promotion to make a little more. Could be worse. There are people who have it way worse than me. I was just saying that $500 a month would go a long ways for me and my kids.
Shit I make a pretty decent wage for my part of the country, and that would still be like 10% more money every month. Maybe not life changing for me, but it would damn sure help. And there are MANY people making less than me that would be impacted heavily by something like this.
Shit got really expensive lately. You literally need to make at least $75k a year or more to live somewhat comfortable. Went to costco the other and bought a couple of things, it was a solid $100. Even walmart and aldi have become pricey.
It would be a huge boon to many more of us than bootstrppers will ever admit.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
These payments allowed them to find a studio apartment, purchase a vehicle, improve their mental health, and give them the momentum to strive for a healthy, stable future, they said.
“Many participants reported that they have used the money to pay off debt, repair their car, secure housing, and enroll in a course,” Mark Donovan, the project’s founder and executive director, previously told Insider.
While those receiving larger payments had the largest gains, all groups benefited — after six months, one-third of participants said they lived in their own housing, compared with less than 10% before the experiment, according to the six-month report.
Similar basic-income experiments with comparable findings have been conducted in San Francisco, upstate New York, and Santa Fe, New Mexico, as well as in Vancouver, British Columbia.
They relocated to a shelter in the Denver area in the year before receiving their first basic-income payments, though Searls said it was difficult finding employment without having a permanent place to stay.
A lot of these tasks, such as finding an apartment and securing a car, they handled on their own through word of mouth or Craigslist, though they said Donovan, the project’s founder, reached out to them a few times to ask whether he could provide them with resources.
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