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UBI Cash Payments Reduced Homelessness, Increased Employment in Denver
(www.businessinsider.com)
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this post was submitted on 06 Oct 2023
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Every single study on UBI finds that it is a good idea that benefits both the recipients and society as a whole, but because it contradicts the dominant ideology it can't be allowed to happen.
If people aren't forced to work to live then how can I get cheap labor for my shitty business that my dad gave me?
If people have UBI, you can get away with paying less though. That's how walmart does it; just encourage your workers to get welfare so they stay alive enough to work more
And that's honestly my proposal for it. Basically, create something like UBI (my preference is NIT) that ensures everyone is over the poverty level, eliminate minimum wage, and have benefits phase out for some reasonable definition of "living wage" (say, 2x the poverty level, maybe 3x).
Working would never make you worse off, and people wouldn't feel obligated to take crappy jobs if the pay isn't there.
We could also eliminate many other forms of welfare at the same time and just increase benefits accordingly.
The only benefits that I think would have to stay, are those with "unlimited" downside, like healthcare.
UBI can potentially replace specific benefits for housing or general living expenses, but it can't really replace healthcare.
Agreed, I certainly wouldn't touch Medicare or Medicaid. I'd also probably leave unemployment insurance as is, and this would kick in afterward.
But I think it could replace Social Security, food assistance, housing assistance, etc. And I think we could fund it by lifting the income cap on Social Security, but I'd need to run the numbers to be sure.
I'd say some disability benefits as well. Simply getting by can be more expensive when you can't do basic tasks yourself, even if you have the best universal health care possible.
Which we all know would happen IMMEDIATELY in lockstep with any widespread rollout of UBI, and any complaint would be met with half the country screeching "FREE MARKET REEEEEE"
Guess we better institute rent controls first then
Shut up baby I know it
Too bad 80% of the country would call us commies for suggesting it.
Rent Control can only have one outcome. Decreased amount of available new or renovated rentals which coupled with an ever increasing demand for housing, creates some of the housing shortages we see in larger cities today.
UBI can be an effective way to fight poverty, and would be an even more effective way to combat poverty if we implemented a Negative Income tax whereby all welfare programs are rolled into the funding.
More ๐ Empty ๐ Houses ๐ Than ๐ Homeless ๐ People ๐
The maoist uprising against the landlords was the largest revolution in history and led to an almost entirely equitable distribution of land ownership
And how did that work out for the estimated 15-55 million people that died of starvation as a result of the "equitable distribution of land ownership"?
Source
Wikipedia lol
Would you like more sources?
The Guardian
NPR
Britannica
Al Jazeera
Oh wow, all bourgeois press or capitalist state affiliated media. I'm sure they have no bias that influences their portrayal of communist china.
What a childish response. So the famine didn't occur because it's documented on Wikipedia?
The reasons for the famine are well understood and documented. I don't think defending Mao is the way to go in regards to our modern housing crisis.
The housing market issue is also well understood and documented. We know companies and investors have been buying more and more houses, driving up prices. We know wages have not kept pace with rising housing costs. We know the gap between rich and poor has been widening year after year. Why the fuck are we derailing the conversation?
First off, I'm not denying the famine happened, aim just denying Wikipedia's framing. The death counts are exaggerated and many were connected to devastation caused by the Civil War.
Second off, I am not advocating we do mid 20th century agriculture practices and kill the sparrows after doing land reform.
Only if you assume that private landlords are the only way to supply housing.
There is no reason to assume that.
How can a society built on capital work towards the betterment of society rather than the accretion of capital?
Exactly. If organisations (private, public and other) had to maximise for social betterment, they would release annual reports measuring it. There might even be entire industries dedicated to auditing measurements of social betterment.
But no, we're stuck using a system of 'value' based on the prestige of owning shiny rocks and control of the areas where those shiny rocks are found. And finding new uses for things and people that aren't the desired shiny rocks so that you may demand and acquire more shiny rocks as others in the same time duration.
If a majority of countries can successfully ditch the gold standard and allow fiat currency - as they did a century ago, that means the world is also able to redefine what fiat currencies measure. There's nothing actually stopping us from requiring social and environmental impact to be included in the calculation of financial valuations, except the people who have a vested interest in keeping the current equations.
Stop measuring people's networth. Start measuring their societal value.
I agree with not measuring net worth but how are you planning on measuring individual societal value? That just sounds ripe for discrimination and elitism.
There was a UBI experiment in canada that was a huge success and of course the tories axed it as soon as they had the chance. Conservatives need to [extremely long bleep] ... [yeah still bleeping] ... ... [still going] ... [leeeeep] -yeah i'm going to have to redact this in post.
I've yet to see a study at a scale large enough to impact the local economy. Will the results hold when everyone gets monthly cash payments, or will rent go through the roof and that's about it?
Kind of a weird argument, isn't it? If we did the opposite instead, it's not as if you'd expect rents to fall -- on the contrary, rent would go up in response to the added financial burden on landlords. Setting that hypothetical aside, wouldn't a generalized inflation of rents be an acceptable tradeoff for reducing homelessness and untethering the 50+% of young adults who still live with their parents to move and work in more economically efficient environments?
While I actually consider multi-generational housing a good thing, let's ignore that since the reason people aren't moving out is financial and not social.
The question is whether UBI is the best way to solve that problem (and others) and I have yet to see data that can be reasonably said to actually be universal for a region. The closest thing I know of is Alaska, and their oil payments are too small and their economy too remote to say much about larger payments in a larger economy.
To me, because money has a social and psychological value to it, what works on an individual level has no guarantee to transfer to a societal level. I would be very interested to see UBI practiced on an entire economic zone, but good luck getting anyone to volunteer.
That's about it. Why would anyone work for $20k/yr when they could get $12k for free? They wouldn't. So those jobs would bump to $30k+, and a domino affect would occur. Nothing would be achieved other than the devaluing of the American dollar, which would lead to a loss of jobs, increased poverty, and guess what else - increased homelessness.