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This isn't a basic income experiment. It's a grant-based income subsidy. What a real basic income experiment would look like: - Take a nominally populated cou

This isn't a basic income experiment. It's a grant-based income subsidy. What a real basic income experiment would look like: - Take a nominally populated county. - Calculate a baseline income requirement necessary to live in the county. - Completely gut all of the economic service programs (carefully without breaking federal law). - Pool all that extra money together and divide it by the population. - Add some sort of VAT to county sales to cover the difference between what UBI should be and how much money is in the kitty. - Do a test run of at least 18-24 months. Things to pay attention to: - County sales tax receipts. - School attendance. - Employment, especially seasonal employment. - Crime. - Costs of groceries, restaurants, contractor services, etc. - Mean age of retirement. - Employment of those 18-25. - Rent prices Things to consider: - Are state pensions on the chopping block? - Are you going to implement basic income as UBI + earned income or the greater of the two? - Is there any opportunity to debit federally mandated economic support from the UBI totals? Hurdles: - Without buy in at the state level, how are you going to prevent people from buying their groceries across county lines, or doing most of their retail online? - Unless you pick the county properly (a proper mix of employment + age demographics), you'll have large problems on your hand. - Serious local, national, and possibly international pressure to derail the program.

JoeAltmaier 6y ago
That's certainly one way to do it. Maybe the best way. But there's all sorts of things to study, and it may be valuable to try and study them in isolation.
- debacle 6y ago
  The psychological and resultant behavioral impact on tax base whales and the liquidity of labor are the most important things to study. I can't reasonably think of a means to study those outside of an academic scenario.
amanaplanacanal 6y ago
I know that where I live, state pensions can’t be touched, as the state Supreme Court has determined they are owned by the employees, not by the state.
vinceguidry 6y ago
There's just no One True Basic Income Experiment, it seems. But realistically speaking, when it happens, it won't be a big national program, it will more likely look like a patchwork of different city-wide and regional programs brought under a federal banner, decades from now.
marcusverus 6y ago
The incentives associated with a temporary stipend are totally different from the incentives associated with a permanent guaranteed stipend. I would argue that the only way to truly test the impact of UBI is to make actual, lifetime guarantees of UBI payments. The way a worker uses a temporary stipend will be greatly influenced by the knowledge that the payments will end, at which point the worker will be required to support themselves again. With that knowledge, it makes perfect sense to spend the UBI stipend on furthering your education, paying off debt, etc. This strikes me as the logical use of a temporary UBI stipend. This is what I would do. But is the same true about a permanent UBI stipend? Maybe, maybe not. These experiments are not testing the impacts of a real UBI.

JoeAltmaier 6y ago

That's certainly one way to do it. Maybe the best way. But there's all sorts of things to study, and it may be valuable to try and study them in isolation.

debacle 6y ago
The psychological and resultant behavioral impact on tax base whales and the liquidity of labor are the most important things to study. I can't reasonably think of a means to study those outside of an academic scenario.

amanaplanacanal 6y ago

I know that where I live, state pensions can’t be touched, as the state Supreme Court has determined they are owned by the employees, not by the state.

vinceguidry 6y ago

There's just no One True Basic Income Experiment, it seems. But realistically speaking, when it happens, it won't be a big national program, it will more likely look like a patchwork of different city-wide and regional programs brought under a federal banner, decades from now.

marcusverus 6y ago

The incentives associated with a temporary stipend are totally different from the incentives associated with a permanent guaranteed stipend. I would argue that the only way to truly test the impact of UBI is to make actual, lifetime guarantees of UBI payments. The way a worker uses a temporary stipend will be greatly influenced by the knowledge that the payments will end, at which point the worker will be required to support themselves again. With that knowledge, it makes perfect sense to spend the UBI stipend on furthering your education, paying off debt, etc. This strikes me as the logical use of a temporary UBI stipend. This is what I would do. But is the same true about a permanent UBI stipend? Maybe, maybe not. These experiments are not testing the impacts of a real UBI.