11 ms·

Young adults in L.A. to get $1k a month under new guaranteed income program

115 points by lxm 4y ago

DwnVoteHoneyPot 4y ago
Thought we already tried this with all the covid assistance. People took the money a did a combination of 3 things: 1) repaid debt, 2) left the job market, 3) spent the money on toys.
- slabity 4y ago
  Do you have a source on that breakdown?
  - DwnVoteHoneyPot 4y ago
    Sure. 1) Consumer debt: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CCLACBW027SBOG https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CCLACBW027SBOG 2) Labor participation: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CIVPART https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CIVPART 3) Inflation rate (look at 5 year): https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/inflation-cpi https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/inflation-cpi
    - lovich 4y ago
      Do you have any charts that are specific to a population receiving welfare vs non welfare recipients rather than the general population? Also one that accounts for the fairly significant confounding variable that was the covid pandemic?
      - random314 4y ago
        Of course, he doesn't. Its bogus right wing propaganda. As if inflation can be blamed on an extra couple of thousands of dollars.
        lovich 4y ago
        Trying to stay within hn guidelines here
        Test0129 4y ago
        I do appreciate how you're lambasting someone for providing sources by commenting on how a guy won't provide...more sources. Incredible. Yeah... "just an extra couple thousands dollars". The government pumped in excess of 4 trillion dollars into the market going directly to people [0]. Only 20% of these people spent their second and third check on necessary expenses [1]. So by grade school mathematics 80% of the money was spent on non-necessities. You don't honestly believe this didn't contribute to inflation? YOLOing money via robinhood, buying electronics, car payments (0% APR loans were everywhere and flying off the shelves), trips, etc. This all contributes to inflation by pumping more money into the system. These people didn't save their money. They spent it like it was going out of style. The result of an overheated economy is...inflation. Then you pair this with supply constraints induced by government incompetence, large amounts of money printed to buy back treasuries and bail out banks, etc. In total, there is so much extra money in the system we are probably going to see inflation for a while. I live in a low COL area and my grocery bill has gone up almost 100%. My friends in California have seen that much or more. Gas prices have just tripled in my area. "bogus right wing propaganda" is the ultimate cop-out to such an important issue. Burying your head in the sand and blaming your favorite boogeyman isn't going to make your grocery bill cheaper. Sources added because LMGTFY: [0] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/24/magazine/pandemic-aid.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/24/magazine/pandemic-aid.htm... [1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/zackfriedman/2021/06/01/heres-how-americans-spent-their-stimulus-checks/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/zackfriedman/2021/06/01/heres-h...
    - duxup 4y ago
      Did everyone counted there get some sort of UBI?
- rlt 4y ago
  Correction: 3) spent the money on toys, crypto, stocks, and other assets that have now cratered. I do wonder if asset bubbles will be a significant unintended consequence of basic income. Would it stabilize over time?
  - TheSpiceIsLife 4y ago
    I'm still getting strong buy indicators for toys.
  - alchemist1e9 4y ago
    4) drugs and vacations
  - bhawks 4y ago
    Asset bubbles are a predictable consequence of monetary inflation. Speculative assets differ from most forms of gambling in very important ways: 1: they lack expiration dates (last year's lottery ticket is not gonna become a winner tomorrow night) 2: even if their value diminishes they still maintain a miniscule probability of 'going to the moon.' Mix in real stories of folks becoming overnight millionaires along with a guaranteed future check that you can use to cover needs while you are flexing your diamond hodl hands and you've got an addictive recipe to destroy any functioning marketplace. Trying to stop it thru regulations is going to net you another metric ton of complexity and unintended consequences. We live in a world of limited resources. Those resources have dynamic & personalized value depending on an arbitrary context at a moment in time. Money is the best worst abstraction we have to quantify and reason about those values. Printing more money doesn't make assigning values to things any easier, it actually complicates it by destroying the unit of account.
- keithtom 4y ago
  Not quite the same. A lot of “give money away” programs look the same. But the incentive design is important. This program is over 3 years and is monthly. This means a few things: 1) if you make a mistake a blow 1k on stupid things, you have a chance to learn next month 2) it is over a 3 year period, which allows the recipient to make decisions like try go to school to improve their overall productivity in society in the long run When you do cash relief in lump sums and without any long term reliability, the above effects are diminished.
  - googlryas 4y ago
    The money is also being given to people who are enrolled in the "General Relief Opportunities for Work, or GROW, program, which provides employment and training services for young adults who face employment and educational barriers and often come from vulnerable backgrounds, including being unhoused or unsheltered." So, it might be the case that these are exactly the people who are motivated and can realize huge benefits from a little extra cash as they're trying to start their career. The obvious negative alternative is that they're coming from vulnerable backgrounds, and having easy cash in their pocket might lead them back to the same troubles that they are trying to escape from. Well, I guess that's the reason for the pilot program!
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
- causality0 4y ago
  Studies of UBI never fail to indicate the lives of people given UBI are better than before. What they don't seem to ever do is try to compare the improvement caused by UBI to alternative ways of spending the same money. Personally I find it unlikely that non-targeted financial assistance is or can ever be as efficient a way to spend funds as targeted assistance.
  - biophysboy 4y ago
    Is that likelihood accounting for the money it takes to target (aka means test)? Not attacking, seems like you’ve thought about this more than me
  - least 4y ago
    By this do you mean you think money is better spent by giving people food stamps, subsidized housing, and the like as opposed to simply giving someone cash? UBI is not only more humane but also creates less overhead than the alternative of the government having to figure out not only how to allocate the funds, but how to actually distribute it to people that need it. Welfare is a complex system and there's a lot of available funding to different "targeted programs" but the burden of knowledge is placed on the people who need the assistance to seek those out. I find that burden unreasonable.
    - mjn 4y ago
      This is the reason UBI was historically popular among (some) libertarians, even though most current proponents in the U.S. probably come from some variety of left-liberalism or market socialism. Milton Friedman supported a version of UBI as a replacement for the welfare state, for example. His view was that if you think it's the role of the state to provide some minimum floor for standard of living, fine. But instead of trying to administer a dozen different programs with complex eligibility requirements and a whole bureaucracy behind them (food stamps, public housing, housing vouchers, Medicaid, etc.), it would be more efficient, less economically distorting, and less invasive into the lives of the recipients, to just pick whatever level of spending you're willing to put towards this goal, and give it out as unrestricted cash.
- weakfish 4y ago
  Source, or pure speculation?
- scottiebarnes 4y ago
  Wow, people made enough from covid assistance to retire forever?
- Morgawr 4y ago
  Surely there is a huge difference in getting a one-time amount of "extra" money (which most people would see as a "present") and knowing you'll keep receiving the same amount of money regularly every month for a few years. Furthermore, I clearly remember when we got the covid assistance money a lot of it was to incentivise local spending to support local businesses (at least it was here in Japan, I admit I'm not American so the message maybe was different over there).
  - nyjah 4y ago
    In some states in America it was a lot more than a 1 time payment. People got overpaid on unemployment and unemployment extended even to people that didn’t ever have a job to begin with. People were overpaid ten of thousands of dollars too. And on top of that businesses got PPP loans and that was even more money, hundreds of thousands if not millions. Everyone around me raised their truck or bought a camper. It definitely created a lot of government entitlement. I want to be clear I’m not judging this as good or bad but the one time “extra” money was nothing compared to the other payouts people were able to figure out Just 1 link of many stories if you google it.. https://www.clickondetroit.com/consumer/help-me-hank/2022/07/25/michigan-issues-7300-waivers-24m-in-refunds-for-unemployment-overpayment/?outputType=amp https://www.clickondetroit.com/consumer/help-me-hank/2022/07...
- tayo42 4y ago
  covid assistance refers to those checks? that was like 6 thousand total in the end? people left the job market over that?
  - dahfizz 4y ago
    Covid assistance also increased unemployment benefits and increased how long you could claim unemployment.
    - coding123 4y ago
      and made it so rent and mortgages were free
- ytdytvhxgydvhh 4y ago
  I thought everyone YOLOed it into Bitcoin or Gamestop stock?
- throw__away7391 4y ago
  I used to be a big proponent of UBI, I really believed it had the potential to solve a broad range of problems, but after the pandemic I have to say I think I was completely wrong, perhaps I projected my own "nature" on to other people. I think now that I am an outlier, and probably a lot of people who supported it are outliers as well, while a lot of people who opposed it are just regular people who understand just how lazy regular people are. I am still in shock at how many of my friends intentionally lost their (cushy, white collar, work 4 hours a day from home) jobs and went on unemployment, spent the summer watching sports, smoking weed, and playing games, how many people I knew did really shady stuff to get PPP money to fund luxury purchases, etc. (And all the while complaining about "the billionaires" and how unfair the system was.) I'll say at least that from where we are now we just had by far the greatest natural experiment we could ever hope for and UBI stands invalidated. Those who still want to push it have a much greater burden of proof, and I'm a bit nervous about UBI programs getting rolled out without proper validation and where that will take us.
  - baskethead 4y ago
    I was exactly the same as you. Strong proponent of UBI and now I think there must be better solutions out there.
  - woodruffw 4y ago
    A cash infusion and a couple of months of unemployment at a time when most people were afraid to leave their houses does not amount to a strong datapoint against (or for) UBI. Testing UBI's null hypothesis requires normal economic activity.
    - that_happened_1 4y ago
    - xyzzyz 4y ago
      There is always a new reason why the most recent incarnation of socialism just didn’t happen to work out as expected this time around.
- dontknowwhyihn 4y ago
  You forgot 4) Bought bitcoin.
- Spivak 4y ago
  You make (3) sound like a bad thing but it's probably the most rational of the options, $1200 is enough to buy yourself some temporary escapism, not make rent. Anything less than "UBI is a guaranteed for life amount that will cover rent, medical care, food, water, electricity, heat/ac, and internet" is going to skew the incentives to the point of uselessness. Once you reach a point where you can simply exist for the rest of your life worry free is when you reap the benefits.
- HWR_14 4y ago
  Kind of. The vast majority of covid assistance was given to rich people (via the PPP). As for the stimulus checks, well those were designed to be spent to keep the economy chugging and were pretty small in total.
- RickJWagner 4y ago
  My first thoughts: - Substance abuse is an area of concern - Why do we have 'free money' campaigns in times of raging inflation?
- whoooooo123 4y ago
  4) used their free time to burn cities down
Proven 4y ago
uptownfunk 4y ago
Is this a pilot of the universal basic income? I’m conflicted, on one hand the lack of any income provides an urgency to work, giving the money could maybe hinder this and encouraging kicking the can down the road. Alternatively, many times even to just pull your self up by the bootstraps, something is needed for day to day necessity. Even if you get into college, does the pell grant for instance cover enough? Maybe for ramen and some clothes, basic supplies, really cheap rent if you can find it, but beyond that, hard to fathom getting far and every penny helps.
- Kim_Bruning 4y ago
  You need to earn above a certain threshold before you actually can manage to hold on to more money, plan for the future, and build your reserves. [1] Having an income below the threshold may make people feel like they need work more urgently than ever, but unfortunately they won't have sufficient means to turn that will into action. If -on the other hand- you pay people UBI up to that point (or a little over, to be safe) , you basically ensure equality of opportunity for everyone, and make sure they actually CAN go to work every day and build their fortune. (Paying for UBI needn't be hard. In one model you can effectively tax back most of the UBI from people who didn't need it. This can be achieved by adjusting tax brackets. ) [1] To hold on to most jobs, you need at least: a roof, a bed, clothes, shower, some amount of study material, transportation, and tools of your trade.
givemeethekeys 4y ago
It's a trial run: "The Los Angeles County Department of Public Social Services introduced the pilot program, which will provide a three-year guaranteed income for about 300 people ages 18 to 24, the agency said."
- climb_stealth 4y ago
  This is what I don't quite get. Surely to trial this properly people should get the guaranteed income for life. I don't quite see how one can draw many conclusions from such a short timeframe when people know it is going to end.
  - wbobeirne 4y ago
    Can you consider any government provided income guaranteed for life? Next election season you might have your benefits programs slashed.
    - charcircuit 4y ago
      What if the government paid in treasury bonds?
      - woodruffw 4y ago
        The problem is not the medium, but the payment mechanism -- if disbursing those bonds can be stopped by an Act of Congress, then there remains a chance (maybe a small one) that any UBI program will not be a true UBI program. And that affects how the recipients of UBI treat their money.
        charcircuit 4y ago
        If your UBI is guaranteed to last 30 years then people would treat it very similar to if it were to go on for their whole life at least for the majority of that 30 years.
    - 4y ago
luxuryballs 4y ago
this should surely help reduce inflation
- temende 4y ago
  I don't think the CPI will change much with 300 people receiving $1k monthly.
- InitialLastName 4y ago
  Yes just imagine what the $11million bond LA will have to take out to cover this program will do to the monetary supply.
  - Supermancho 4y ago
    That's basically the cost of a Porsche Yacht - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I_ezBTxvtlA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I_ezBTxvtlA What a gap.
  - guywithahat 4y ago
    Ideally the plan would be to expand this out to the whole city, not just the 11 million dollar trial. And frankly, dumping $11 million into the purchasing side of low income housing in LA very well could cause inflation in their local housing supply
wombat-man 4y ago
Hope it works out and help gets some people off the streets and into a better life. Some people just need a little stability.
- eschulz 4y ago
  I'm afraid a majority of people on the streets have substance abuse problems. They need help, but not in the form of cash with no questions asked.
  - wombat-man 4y ago
    yeah, I understand. This program is targeting younger people around college age. So maybe they can get back on track.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
  - cumshitpiss 4y ago
lettergram 4y ago
Surely will fix the budget deficits…
- QuarterRoy 4y ago
  I’m not against a UBI but with interest rates rising the interest alone on our national debt is expected to be more than GDP and military spending combined. This is the elephant in the room that no politician seems to want to deal with because “votes.” The bill for years of unbalanced budgets and qualitative easing will come due soon. It it will likely be in the form of cutting spending, rising taxes, or both.
missedthecue 4y ago
What insight are these trial programs intended to discover and reveal?
Kim_Bruning 4y ago
You'd think that basic income was a no-brainer on both sides of the aisle. * On the left hand, you don't just get some level of control over maximum income, but also can just directly set an income-floor. What more do you want? * On the right hand, for one you're basically giving every entrepreneur a "free" ramen budget for their startup to build on top of. At the same time you can also abolish quite a number of subsidies, reducing the costs of bureaucratic administration.
- josephcsible 4y ago
  It sounds good on paper, and I used to be in favor of it pre-COVID, but now that a bunch of places basically did it, it's become clear that it leads to way too many people choosing not to work.
  - edmcnulty101 4y ago
    This is not accurate. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_basic_income_pilots https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_basic_income_pilots
  - Kim_Bruning 4y ago
    I think a number of places gave some one-off subsidies , or even two off (possibly on condition of repay-if-you-can). I'm not sure many places actually initiated a program of unconditional monthly payments under conditions where people were permitted and encouraged to work. (With covid, a lot of the payments were as compensation because people couldn't go to work, so you wouldn't see the effect of encouraging work :-/ )
    - prepend 4y ago
      I had friends who got $2-3k per month in unemployment for over a year. This replaced their pre-COVID income $1-2k/month. It wasn’t perpetual. But they got a raise to not work. And they not only maxed out the benefit but some of them moved back home with family to minimize their costs and banked their unemployment and still aren’t working. They spent their time smoking and playing games. This was unprecedented. I would like to see a study into how frequently this actually happened as I don’t know how common my anecdote is.
gordon_freeman 4y ago
Can someone edit the title to say it is a trial run for 3 yr duration and 300 people. The title sounds like every Young Adult in LA can enroll into this program which is way more ambitious than what is happening here.
- spa3thyb 4y ago
  HN hews to using the source title, which I think the submitter did here (based on the URL, 'l-a-basic-income-program-to-give-young-adults-1-000-a-month'). See https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html for more.
  - prostoalex 4y ago
    Yeah, the current markup still is <title>L.A. basic income program to give young adults $1,000 a month - Los Angeles Times</title>
- MattGaiser 4y ago
  Hacker News guidelines are to generally use the original title. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - AnimalMuppet 4y ago
    Unless the original title is misleading. Arguably, this one is.
- HWR_14 4y ago
  To those who have issue with editorializing in violation of HN rules, the original source[1] used the title "Three-Year Guaranteed Income Pilot Program for 300 Youth Launches" [1] https://hildalsolis.org/three-year-guaranteed-income-pilot-program-for-300-youth-launches/ https://hildalsolis.org/three-year-guaranteed-income-pilot-p...
- tenpies 4y ago
  I'm not sure why we even need a trial. It will be a resounding success and the guaranteed income and MMT crowds will point to this study as "proof" that guaranteed income does not cause economy-destroying inflation, always ignoring that it only gave money to 300 people in a city of nearly 4 million. There, I just saved the city of LA $10,800,000 plus several more millions in bureaucrats.
elisbce 4y ago
sodez117 4y ago
And then they wonder where inflation comes from lmao
- it_citizen 4y ago
  You mean from a war, an energy crisis, a food crisis, ammonia shortage, neon shortage and post-covid global tension on supply chains around the globe right? Good! Because the dates match perfectly and the inflation is global, not US centric.
  - gruez 4y ago
    >war inflation was way overshooting the historic trend line before the war >an energy crisis, a food crisis, ammonia shortage, neon shortage Aren't all these just downstream from the war? >post-covid global tension on supply chains If that was caused by covid, why was inflation muted during the initial outbreak? Why did inflation only spike starting around mid 2021? It seems more plausible that supply chain tensions were caused by too much money chasing too few goods, not that inflation was caused by "global tension on supply chains".
ZooCow 4y ago
Have there been any UBI plans designed to avoid warping politics? It seems politically impossible to lower (see Alaska’s challenges [1]) and too attractive for politicians to increase in order to easily win votes. [1] https://www.vox.com/platform/amp/future-perfect/2019/9/5/20849020/alaska-permanent-fund-universal-basic-income https://www.vox.com/platform/amp/future-perfect/2019/9/5/208...
- bushbaba 4y ago
  Also easy for landlords to take advantage of. With over time cost of living increasing to take advantage of the higher price-floor.
  - larsiusprime 4y ago
    Land Value Tax would fix this problem: http://gameofrent.com/content/is-land-a-big-deal http://gameofrent.com/content/is-land-a-big-deal UBI without LVT is probably inflationary, but LVT would provide a pretty natural mechanism for funding such a thing, and is the natural policy for preventing it from causing inflation, particularly in the housing sector.
felipelalli 4y ago
Congratulations! This will attract beggars not only from the US but from all over the world!
pugets 4y ago
Typical UBI trial run. Not universal. Not basic income, unless you consider $12k/yr in LA a livable income. Ends in three years, so no one can retire early or buy a bigger home. The program will conclude that people are quite happy to receive a $1000 check in the mail each month without measuring the economic impact such a program would make if it were applied to every American long-term.
- TedDoesntTalk 4y ago
  > economic impact such a program would make if it were applied to every American long-term This sounds like a disaster. Assuming just 100,000,000 eligible adults, you’re talking about $1.2 trillion per year.
  - HWR_14 4y ago
    > Assuming just 100,000,000 eligible adults, you’re talking about $1.2 trillion per year. Which is less than Social Security and the federal portion of unemployment insurance. By hundreds of billions.
    - TedDoesntTalk 4y ago
      But you’d keep social security and unemployment insurance and Medicare… so you’re adding trillions more in spending each year?
      - lotsofpulp 4y ago
        Why would we keep them? One of the benefits of UBI is to drastically simplify everything.
        prepend 4y ago
        If you don’t keep them then social security beneficiaries would see a drop in benefits. And you’d lose the tax revenue from ss tax.
guywithahat 4y ago
Seems like a good time to remind everyone CA is one of the richest states, generally has the most progressive homeless policies, and has the highest rate of poverty in the US (sometimes second to Hawaii). People have also been trying universal basic income program trials for decades and there's a reason they're never implemented, or if they are they're quickly repealed
fargle 4y ago
why in heck is this for "young adults", not disabled, vets, or disadvantaged seniors? if you are an able-bodied young adult, you should be last in line for UBI, not first. and yes, it said homeless, but there's a lot of disabled, vets, and/or seniors that are homeless too. why not them?
- hbrn 4y ago
  Because it's supposed to be an experiment that "unlocks their full potential". Not a charity program.
  - fargle 4y ago
    could we do an experiment to "unlock the full potential" of disabled vets, maybe if they are only 20-30? Or does that attract downvotes too because disabled, needy, or old means you don't have potential?
    - hbrn 4y ago
      We could and you are free to run such experiment. While I think the experiment is likely dumb, criticizing authors for not mixing science with charity is not productive. For experiment like that it's already virtually impossible to produce valuable results. If you throw charity in the mix you're going to get less science. If one goal is already too hard, why would you make two goals? Unless you already believe there's no science here.
      - fargle 4y ago
        Yes. I think it's pretty obvious: a) it's not any kind of science in the first place b) it is in fact charity and c) it's poorly and unfairly directed charity I'm not critiquing the authors. I'm critiquing the dumb social program. The article said it was a "pilot" program and talks about unlocking their full potential. I'd certainly hope that was the point to just about any charitable program - so why pick this demographic over that one?
krageon 4y ago
Given the immense vitriol in the comments that from what I can see comes mostly from US folks, what kind of person does want this in the US? Where is the push for this coming from, given that it has to be rich people or otherwise politics wouldn't move an inch? The group that wants this must exist, or it wouldn't happen at all.
prepend 4y ago
I’m not sure how these lottery programs help to test anything. I think people understand that giving people $1k has benefits to them. The question is about whether the cost is sustainable across a large population (LA has $4M people so finding $4B/month will be tricky) and the effects on labor and inflation. These projects don’t seem to have a clear hypothesis and basically amount to “do people like cake? Let’s see”

115 points by lxm 4y ago

Thought we already tried this with all the covid assistance. People took the money a did a combination of 3 things: 1) repaid debt, 2) left the job market, 3) spent the money on toys.

slabity 4y ago
Do you have a source on that breakdown?
- DwnVoteHoneyPot 4y ago
  Sure. 1) Consumer debt: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CCLACBW027SBOG https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CCLACBW027SBOG 2) Labor participation: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CIVPART https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CIVPART 3) Inflation rate (look at 5 year): https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/inflation-cpi https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/inflation-cpi
  - lovich 4y ago
    Do you have any charts that are specific to a population receiving welfare vs non welfare recipients rather than the general population? Also one that accounts for the fairly significant confounding variable that was the covid pandemic?
    - random314 4y ago
      Of course, he doesn't. Its bogus right wing propaganda. As if inflation can be blamed on an extra couple of thousands of dollars.
      - lovich 4y ago
        Trying to stay within hn guidelines here
      - Test0129 4y ago
        I do appreciate how you're lambasting someone for providing sources by commenting on how a guy won't provide...more sources. Incredible. Yeah... "just an extra couple thousands dollars". The government pumped in excess of 4 trillion dollars into the market going directly to people [0]. Only 20% of these people spent their second and third check on necessary expenses [1]. So by grade school mathematics 80% of the money was spent on non-necessities. You don't honestly believe this didn't contribute to inflation? YOLOing money via robinhood, buying electronics, car payments (0% APR loans were everywhere and flying off the shelves), trips, etc. This all contributes to inflation by pumping more money into the system. These people didn't save their money. They spent it like it was going out of style. The result of an overheated economy is...inflation. Then you pair this with supply constraints induced by government incompetence, large amounts of money printed to buy back treasuries and bail out banks, etc. In total, there is so much extra money in the system we are probably going to see inflation for a while. I live in a low COL area and my grocery bill has gone up almost 100%. My friends in California have seen that much or more. Gas prices have just tripled in my area. "bogus right wing propaganda" is the ultimate cop-out to such an important issue. Burying your head in the sand and blaming your favorite boogeyman isn't going to make your grocery bill cheaper. Sources added because LMGTFY: [0] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/24/magazine/pandemic-aid.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/24/magazine/pandemic-aid.htm... [1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/zackfriedman/2021/06/01/heres-how-americans-spent-their-stimulus-checks/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/zackfriedman/2021/06/01/heres-h...
  - duxup 4y ago
    Did everyone counted there get some sort of UBI?
rlt 4y ago
Correction: 3) spent the money on toys, crypto, stocks, and other assets that have now cratered. I do wonder if asset bubbles will be a significant unintended consequence of basic income. Would it stabilize over time?
- TheSpiceIsLife 4y ago
  I'm still getting strong buy indicators for toys.
- alchemist1e9 4y ago
  4) drugs and vacations
- bhawks 4y ago
  Asset bubbles are a predictable consequence of monetary inflation. Speculative assets differ from most forms of gambling in very important ways: 1: they lack expiration dates (last year's lottery ticket is not gonna become a winner tomorrow night) 2: even if their value diminishes they still maintain a miniscule probability of 'going to the moon.' Mix in real stories of folks becoming overnight millionaires along with a guaranteed future check that you can use to cover needs while you are flexing your diamond hodl hands and you've got an addictive recipe to destroy any functioning marketplace. Trying to stop it thru regulations is going to net you another metric ton of complexity and unintended consequences. We live in a world of limited resources. Those resources have dynamic & personalized value depending on an arbitrary context at a moment in time. Money is the best worst abstraction we have to quantify and reason about those values. Printing more money doesn't make assigning values to things any easier, it actually complicates it by destroying the unit of account.
keithtom 4y ago
Not quite the same. A lot of “give money away” programs look the same. But the incentive design is important. This program is over 3 years and is monthly. This means a few things: 1) if you make a mistake a blow 1k on stupid things, you have a chance to learn next month 2) it is over a 3 year period, which allows the recipient to make decisions like try go to school to improve their overall productivity in society in the long run When you do cash relief in lump sums and without any long term reliability, the above effects are diminished.
- googlryas 4y ago
  The money is also being given to people who are enrolled in the "General Relief Opportunities for Work, or GROW, program, which provides employment and training services for young adults who face employment and educational barriers and often come from vulnerable backgrounds, including being unhoused or unsheltered." So, it might be the case that these are exactly the people who are motivated and can realize huge benefits from a little extra cash as they're trying to start their career. The obvious negative alternative is that they're coming from vulnerable backgrounds, and having easy cash in their pocket might lead them back to the same troubles that they are trying to escape from. Well, I guess that's the reason for the pilot program!
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
causality0 4y ago
Studies of UBI never fail to indicate the lives of people given UBI are better than before. What they don't seem to ever do is try to compare the improvement caused by UBI to alternative ways of spending the same money. Personally I find it unlikely that non-targeted financial assistance is or can ever be as efficient a way to spend funds as targeted assistance.
- biophysboy 4y ago
  Is that likelihood accounting for the money it takes to target (aka means test)? Not attacking, seems like you’ve thought about this more than me
- least 4y ago
  By this do you mean you think money is better spent by giving people food stamps, subsidized housing, and the like as opposed to simply giving someone cash? UBI is not only more humane but also creates less overhead than the alternative of the government having to figure out not only how to allocate the funds, but how to actually distribute it to people that need it. Welfare is a complex system and there's a lot of available funding to different "targeted programs" but the burden of knowledge is placed on the people who need the assistance to seek those out. I find that burden unreasonable.
  - mjn 4y ago
    This is the reason UBI was historically popular among (some) libertarians, even though most current proponents in the U.S. probably come from some variety of left-liberalism or market socialism. Milton Friedman supported a version of UBI as a replacement for the welfare state, for example. His view was that if you think it's the role of the state to provide some minimum floor for standard of living, fine. But instead of trying to administer a dozen different programs with complex eligibility requirements and a whole bureaucracy behind them (food stamps, public housing, housing vouchers, Medicaid, etc.), it would be more efficient, less economically distorting, and less invasive into the lives of the recipients, to just pick whatever level of spending you're willing to put towards this goal, and give it out as unrestricted cash.
weakfish 4y ago
Source, or pure speculation?
scottiebarnes 4y ago
Wow, people made enough from covid assistance to retire forever?
Morgawr 4y ago
Surely there is a huge difference in getting a one-time amount of "extra" money (which most people would see as a "present") and knowing you'll keep receiving the same amount of money regularly every month for a few years. Furthermore, I clearly remember when we got the covid assistance money a lot of it was to incentivise local spending to support local businesses (at least it was here in Japan, I admit I'm not American so the message maybe was different over there).
- nyjah 4y ago
  In some states in America it was a lot more than a 1 time payment. People got overpaid on unemployment and unemployment extended even to people that didn’t ever have a job to begin with. People were overpaid ten of thousands of dollars too. And on top of that businesses got PPP loans and that was even more money, hundreds of thousands if not millions. Everyone around me raised their truck or bought a camper. It definitely created a lot of government entitlement. I want to be clear I’m not judging this as good or bad but the one time “extra” money was nothing compared to the other payouts people were able to figure out Just 1 link of many stories if you google it.. https://www.clickondetroit.com/consumer/help-me-hank/2022/07/25/michigan-issues-7300-waivers-24m-in-refunds-for-unemployment-overpayment/?outputType=amp https://www.clickondetroit.com/consumer/help-me-hank/2022/07...
tayo42 4y ago
covid assistance refers to those checks? that was like 6 thousand total in the end? people left the job market over that?
- dahfizz 4y ago
  Covid assistance also increased unemployment benefits and increased how long you could claim unemployment.
  - coding123 4y ago
    and made it so rent and mortgages were free
ytdytvhxgydvhh 4y ago
I thought everyone YOLOed it into Bitcoin or Gamestop stock?
throw__away7391 4y ago
I used to be a big proponent of UBI, I really believed it had the potential to solve a broad range of problems, but after the pandemic I have to say I think I was completely wrong, perhaps I projected my own "nature" on to other people. I think now that I am an outlier, and probably a lot of people who supported it are outliers as well, while a lot of people who opposed it are just regular people who understand just how lazy regular people are. I am still in shock at how many of my friends intentionally lost their (cushy, white collar, work 4 hours a day from home) jobs and went on unemployment, spent the summer watching sports, smoking weed, and playing games, how many people I knew did really shady stuff to get PPP money to fund luxury purchases, etc. (And all the while complaining about "the billionaires" and how unfair the system was.) I'll say at least that from where we are now we just had by far the greatest natural experiment we could ever hope for and UBI stands invalidated. Those who still want to push it have a much greater burden of proof, and I'm a bit nervous about UBI programs getting rolled out without proper validation and where that will take us.
- baskethead 4y ago
  I was exactly the same as you. Strong proponent of UBI and now I think there must be better solutions out there.
- woodruffw 4y ago
  A cash infusion and a couple of months of unemployment at a time when most people were afraid to leave their houses does not amount to a strong datapoint against (or for) UBI. Testing UBI's null hypothesis requires normal economic activity.
  - that_happened_1 4y ago
  - xyzzyz 4y ago
    There is always a new reason why the most recent incarnation of socialism just didn’t happen to work out as expected this time around.
dontknowwhyihn 4y ago
You forgot 4) Bought bitcoin.
Spivak 4y ago
You make (3) sound like a bad thing but it's probably the most rational of the options, $1200 is enough to buy yourself some temporary escapism, not make rent. Anything less than "UBI is a guaranteed for life amount that will cover rent, medical care, food, water, electricity, heat/ac, and internet" is going to skew the incentives to the point of uselessness. Once you reach a point where you can simply exist for the rest of your life worry free is when you reap the benefits.
HWR_14 4y ago
Kind of. The vast majority of covid assistance was given to rich people (via the PPP). As for the stimulus checks, well those were designed to be spent to keep the economy chugging and were pretty small in total.
RickJWagner 4y ago
My first thoughts: - Substance abuse is an area of concern - Why do we have 'free money' campaigns in times of raging inflation?
whoooooo123 4y ago
4) used their free time to burn cities down

Proven 4y ago

uptownfunk 4y ago

Is this a pilot of the universal basic income? I’m conflicted, on one hand the lack of any income provides an urgency to work, giving the money could maybe hinder this and encouraging kicking the can down the road. Alternatively, many times even to just pull your self up by the bootstraps, something is needed for day to day necessity. Even if you get into college, does the pell grant for instance cover enough? Maybe for ramen and some clothes, basic supplies, really cheap rent if you can find it, but beyond that, hard to fathom getting far and every penny helps.

Kim_Bruning 4y ago
You need to earn above a certain threshold before you actually can manage to hold on to more money, plan for the future, and build your reserves. [1] Having an income below the threshold may make people feel like they need work more urgently than ever, but unfortunately they won't have sufficient means to turn that will into action. If -on the other hand- you pay people UBI up to that point (or a little over, to be safe) , you basically ensure equality of opportunity for everyone, and make sure they actually CAN go to work every day and build their fortune. (Paying for UBI needn't be hard. In one model you can effectively tax back most of the UBI from people who didn't need it. This can be achieved by adjusting tax brackets. ) [1] To hold on to most jobs, you need at least: a roof, a bed, clothes, shower, some amount of study material, transportation, and tools of your trade.

givemeethekeys 4y ago

It's a trial run: "The Los Angeles County Department of Public Social Services introduced the pilot program, which will provide a three-year guaranteed income for about 300 people ages 18 to 24, the agency said."

climb_stealth 4y ago
This is what I don't quite get. Surely to trial this properly people should get the guaranteed income for life. I don't quite see how one can draw many conclusions from such a short timeframe when people know it is going to end.
- wbobeirne 4y ago
  Can you consider any government provided income guaranteed for life? Next election season you might have your benefits programs slashed.
  - charcircuit 4y ago
    What if the government paid in treasury bonds?
    - woodruffw 4y ago
      The problem is not the medium, but the payment mechanism -- if disbursing those bonds can be stopped by an Act of Congress, then there remains a chance (maybe a small one) that any UBI program will not be a true UBI program. And that affects how the recipients of UBI treat their money.
      - charcircuit 4y ago
        If your UBI is guaranteed to last 30 years then people would treat it very similar to if it were to go on for their whole life at least for the majority of that 30 years.
  - 4y ago

luxuryballs 4y ago

this should surely help reduce inflation

temende 4y ago
I don't think the CPI will change much with 300 people receiving $1k monthly.
InitialLastName 4y ago
Yes just imagine what the $11million bond LA will have to take out to cover this program will do to the monetary supply.
- Supermancho 4y ago
  That's basically the cost of a Porsche Yacht - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I_ezBTxvtlA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I_ezBTxvtlA What a gap.
- guywithahat 4y ago
  Ideally the plan would be to expand this out to the whole city, not just the 11 million dollar trial. And frankly, dumping $11 million into the purchasing side of low income housing in LA very well could cause inflation in their local housing supply

wombat-man 4y ago

Hope it works out and help gets some people off the streets and into a better life. Some people just need a little stability.

eschulz 4y ago
I'm afraid a majority of people on the streets have substance abuse problems. They need help, but not in the form of cash with no questions asked.
- wombat-man 4y ago
  yeah, I understand. This program is targeting younger people around college age. So maybe they can get back on track.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- cumshitpiss 4y ago

lettergram 4y ago

Surely will fix the budget deficits…

QuarterRoy 4y ago
I’m not against a UBI but with interest rates rising the interest alone on our national debt is expected to be more than GDP and military spending combined. This is the elephant in the room that no politician seems to want to deal with because “votes.” The bill for years of unbalanced budgets and qualitative easing will come due soon. It it will likely be in the form of cutting spending, rising taxes, or both.

missedthecue 4y ago

What insight are these trial programs intended to discover and reveal?

Kim_Bruning 4y ago

You'd think that basic income was a no-brainer on both sides of the aisle. * On the left hand, you don't just get some level of control over maximum income, but also can just directly set an income-floor. What more do you want? * On the right hand, for one you're basically giving every entrepreneur a "free" ramen budget for their startup to build on top of. At the same time you can also abolish quite a number of subsidies, reducing the costs of bureaucratic administration.

josephcsible 4y ago
It sounds good on paper, and I used to be in favor of it pre-COVID, but now that a bunch of places basically did it, it's become clear that it leads to way too many people choosing not to work.
- edmcnulty101 4y ago
  This is not accurate. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_basic_income_pilots https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_basic_income_pilots
- Kim_Bruning 4y ago
  I think a number of places gave some one-off subsidies , or even two off (possibly on condition of repay-if-you-can). I'm not sure many places actually initiated a program of unconditional monthly payments under conditions where people were permitted and encouraged to work. (With covid, a lot of the payments were as compensation because people couldn't go to work, so you wouldn't see the effect of encouraging work :-/ )
  - prepend 4y ago
    I had friends who got $2-3k per month in unemployment for over a year. This replaced their pre-COVID income $1-2k/month. It wasn’t perpetual. But they got a raise to not work. And they not only maxed out the benefit but some of them moved back home with family to minimize their costs and banked their unemployment and still aren’t working. They spent their time smoking and playing games. This was unprecedented. I would like to see a study into how frequently this actually happened as I don’t know how common my anecdote is.

gordon_freeman 4y ago

Can someone edit the title to say it is a trial run for 3 yr duration and 300 people. The title sounds like every Young Adult in LA can enroll into this program which is way more ambitious than what is happening here.

spa3thyb 4y ago
HN hews to using the source title, which I think the submitter did here (based on the URL, 'l-a-basic-income-program-to-give-young-adults-1-000-a-month'). See https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html for more.
- prostoalex 4y ago
  Yeah, the current markup still is <title>L.A. basic income program to give young adults $1,000 a month - Los Angeles Times</title>
MattGaiser 4y ago
Hacker News guidelines are to generally use the original title. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- AnimalMuppet 4y ago
  Unless the original title is misleading. Arguably, this one is.
HWR_14 4y ago
To those who have issue with editorializing in violation of HN rules, the original source[1] used the title "Three-Year Guaranteed Income Pilot Program for 300 Youth Launches" [1] https://hildalsolis.org/three-year-guaranteed-income-pilot-program-for-300-youth-launches/ https://hildalsolis.org/three-year-guaranteed-income-pilot-p...
tenpies 4y ago
I'm not sure why we even need a trial. It will be a resounding success and the guaranteed income and MMT crowds will point to this study as "proof" that guaranteed income does not cause economy-destroying inflation, always ignoring that it only gave money to 300 people in a city of nearly 4 million. There, I just saved the city of LA $10,800,000 plus several more millions in bureaucrats.

elisbce 4y ago

sodez117 4y ago

And then they wonder where inflation comes from lmao

it_citizen 4y ago
You mean from a war, an energy crisis, a food crisis, ammonia shortage, neon shortage and post-covid global tension on supply chains around the globe right? Good! Because the dates match perfectly and the inflation is global, not US centric.
- gruez 4y ago
  >war inflation was way overshooting the historic trend line before the war >an energy crisis, a food crisis, ammonia shortage, neon shortage Aren't all these just downstream from the war? >post-covid global tension on supply chains If that was caused by covid, why was inflation muted during the initial outbreak? Why did inflation only spike starting around mid 2021? It seems more plausible that supply chain tensions were caused by too much money chasing too few goods, not that inflation was caused by "global tension on supply chains".

ZooCow 4y ago

Have there been any UBI plans designed to avoid warping politics? It seems politically impossible to lower (see Alaska’s challenges [1]) and too attractive for politicians to increase in order to easily win votes. [1] https://www.vox.com/platform/amp/future-perfect/2019/9/5/20849020/alaska-permanent-fund-universal-basic-income https://www.vox.com/platform/amp/future-perfect/2019/9/5/208...

bushbaba 4y ago
Also easy for landlords to take advantage of. With over time cost of living increasing to take advantage of the higher price-floor.
- larsiusprime 4y ago
  Land Value Tax would fix this problem: http://gameofrent.com/content/is-land-a-big-deal http://gameofrent.com/content/is-land-a-big-deal UBI without LVT is probably inflationary, but LVT would provide a pretty natural mechanism for funding such a thing, and is the natural policy for preventing it from causing inflation, particularly in the housing sector.

felipelalli 4y ago

Congratulations! This will attract beggars not only from the US but from all over the world!

pugets 4y ago

Typical UBI trial run. Not universal. Not basic income, unless you consider $12k/yr in LA a livable income. Ends in three years, so no one can retire early or buy a bigger home. The program will conclude that people are quite happy to receive a $1000 check in the mail each month without measuring the economic impact such a program would make if it were applied to every American long-term.

TedDoesntTalk 4y ago
> economic impact such a program would make if it were applied to every American long-term This sounds like a disaster. Assuming just 100,000,000 eligible adults, you’re talking about $1.2 trillion per year.
- HWR_14 4y ago
  > Assuming just 100,000,000 eligible adults, you’re talking about $1.2 trillion per year. Which is less than Social Security and the federal portion of unemployment insurance. By hundreds of billions.
  - TedDoesntTalk 4y ago
    But you’d keep social security and unemployment insurance and Medicare… so you’re adding trillions more in spending each year?
    - lotsofpulp 4y ago
      Why would we keep them? One of the benefits of UBI is to drastically simplify everything.
      - prepend 4y ago
        If you don’t keep them then social security beneficiaries would see a drop in benefits. And you’d lose the tax revenue from ss tax.

guywithahat 4y ago

Seems like a good time to remind everyone CA is one of the richest states, generally has the most progressive homeless policies, and has the highest rate of poverty in the US (sometimes second to Hawaii). People have also been trying universal basic income program trials for decades and there's a reason they're never implemented, or if they are they're quickly repealed

fargle 4y ago

why in heck is this for "young adults", not disabled, vets, or disadvantaged seniors? if you are an able-bodied young adult, you should be last in line for UBI, not first. and yes, it said homeless, but there's a lot of disabled, vets, and/or seniors that are homeless too. why not them?

hbrn 4y ago
Because it's supposed to be an experiment that "unlocks their full potential". Not a charity program.
- fargle 4y ago
  could we do an experiment to "unlock the full potential" of disabled vets, maybe if they are only 20-30? Or does that attract downvotes too because disabled, needy, or old means you don't have potential?
  - hbrn 4y ago
    We could and you are free to run such experiment. While I think the experiment is likely dumb, criticizing authors for not mixing science with charity is not productive. For experiment like that it's already virtually impossible to produce valuable results. If you throw charity in the mix you're going to get less science. If one goal is already too hard, why would you make two goals? Unless you already believe there's no science here.
    - fargle 4y ago
      Yes. I think it's pretty obvious: a) it's not any kind of science in the first place b) it is in fact charity and c) it's poorly and unfairly directed charity I'm not critiquing the authors. I'm critiquing the dumb social program. The article said it was a "pilot" program and talks about unlocking their full potential. I'd certainly hope that was the point to just about any charitable program - so why pick this demographic over that one?

krageon 4y ago

Given the immense vitriol in the comments that from what I can see comes mostly from US folks, what kind of person does want this in the US? Where is the push for this coming from, given that it has to be rich people or otherwise politics wouldn't move an inch? The group that wants this must exist, or it wouldn't happen at all.

prepend 4y ago

I’m not sure how these lottery programs help to test anything. I think people understand that giving people $1k has benefits to them. The question is about whether the cost is sustainable across a large population (LA has $4M people so finding $4B/month will be tricky) and the effects on labor and inflation. These projects don’t seem to have a clear hypothesis and basically amount to “do people like cake? Let’s see”