5 ms·
Californians on universal basic income paid off debt and got full-time jobs
- water8 6y agoAnd how long did they keep those jobs?
- salawat 6y agoIs there an answer you're expecting?
- water8 6y agoWhy work for free in the long run? There are not enough perfect jobs to go around. How do the others find motivation? Throwing money at a problem is a child's solution.
- setr 6y agoI don’t think $6k/year gets you to working for free. At least, it certainly doesn’t for me.
- water8 6y agoIt get's you 6,000 less motivations to improve your situation and by extension improve society.
- thedevelopnik 6y agoIt literally gave them the ability to improve their situation. They could afford to take days off to interview for a better job because of this. Poverty is a trap most can’t afford to escape. It boggles my mind how people can read a headline that states an observed fact and then come with an opinion that that fact that happened just won’t happen.
- setr 6y agoIf that were true, than paying any satisfactory wage at all would be highly harmful to society; in fact for optimal societal benefit, all persons should be kept under severe duress at all times, to ensure sufficient and continuous motivation.
- mbrodersen 6y agoWow you obviously didn’t even read the article.
- King-Aaron 6y ago> Throwing money at a problem is a child's solution Interesting take. So does that also apply to automotive manufacturer bailouts, bank bailouts, corn subsidies, oil subsidies, etc?
- undefined1 6y ago> ...after receiving $500 per month for two years I mean, of course? what else do you expect with $500/mo capped at 2 years? that's not UBI. the test needs to be at least $1k/mo, indefinitely.
- kolinko 6y agowhat else do you expect - many critics of UBI claimed it would be spent on alcohol, oled tvs and as an excuse to dig a deeper debt hole
- gumby 6y agoI don't understand what is "of course", why $500 is wrong and $1K would be right. Could you expand on your thinking?
- undefined1 6y agobecause one's choices are going to be different with $500/mo temporarily vs $1k/mo for life. the former is a temporary windfall, the latter is UBI. to actually test UBI, the amount needs to be substantial and with no end.
- whythre 6y agoDoesn’t sound like of a test so much as full implementation.
- phendrenad2 6y agoMaybe there's a compromise that'll test it more thoroughly (break through the "windfall" mentality) without it going on forever. 10 years?
- undefined1 6y agoit would still be a test of the system though, because it would only be a small subset of the population.
- ChrisLomont 6y agoTo roll this out on a national scale, at $500/mo for anyone under median income, at 160M US workers, would be 80 * 10^6 * 500 * 12 = 480B dollars. This is 1/7th more than current Federal Receipts. Imagine trying to raise taxes on every form of federal taxes on average 14% to reach this. For that much money, there are likely vastly better places to spend it in targeted assistance instead of such a ham-handed one size fits all program, with far better social returns.
- khaki54 6y agoWell really you have to use the full U.S. pop to pay for all of the kids and whatnot. So it's closer to $1T a year. Next, imagine just fully liquidating every U.S. billionaire and seizing their assets to pay for it for 1-2 years. Very realistic and self-sustaining.
- ChrisLomont 6y agoMost billionaires are rich via stock. Forcing stock sales will cause markets to tank. Markets tanking will destroy retirement funds, pensions, teacher and public pensions, and more. Capital flight will empty markets, similar to all the countries that got this dumb (see the swedish financial transaction tax as an example). With investment gone, payrolls will fail since lending will fail, rates will skyrocket from uncertainty, and so on. To stave off riots, the Fed will print money, and if we're lucky we'll be another poster child for hyperinflation. All so people who used to make 50k a year can have another 6k. Now we're all poor, but at least we're equal, right?
- draklor40 6y agoI like UBI, but before we implement UBI, we should stop the Central Banks and the governments from pumping money and pushing asset inflation, or otherwise, it will simply end up being a giant spiral of more inflation, more UBI , just as shitty unaffordability of things in general.
- TrackerFF 6y agoLow salaries and poor job security will trap people. Job interviews are almost certainly out of questions, unless you manage to get one outside work hours, or weekends. The time between your last salary from previous job, and first salary from new job, is very critical. Some people simply cannot afford to take a new job, if first paycheck is too far away - even if it benefits them in the long run. I'd imagine that a lot of college-educated have had to turn down opportunities (internships, etc.) because the pay didn't cover their expenses, even though that experience would have benefited them in the long run. When I was a college student, I once went 6 months without any student loans, during some administrative error. During that time, I worked various gigs through some temp agency, and to my surprise then, I met a lot of people with decent college degrees, doing minimum wage jobs. One of the common reasons, being that the temp agency paid a bi-weekly salary - some of those people simply could not go 6-8 weeks without pay. No buffer account, no savings, nothing to sell, no credit cards to float them, no nothing. It's not much, but for many, it's just enough to afford them more options.