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$500 a Month, No Strings: Chicago Experiments with a Guaranteed Income

50 points by lxm 4y ago

nwah1 4y ago
There are strings. You need to qualify for it. Which means it isn't a guaranteed income program. It is a normal needs-based welfare program. The entire concept of a basic income guarantee, originally, was to remove the perverse incentives of needs-based programs, which can unintentionally trap people into dependency and poverty by punishing them for taking steps to improve their situation.
- sjellen 4y ago
  This, except.. its not unintentional.
  - dsfyu404ed 4y ago
    Lyndon Johnson has a great quote about cornering voting blocks that way.
    - nwah1 4y ago
      Would be interested to hear it, if you can dig it up.
      - workingdog 4y ago
        https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/lbj-voting-democratic/ https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/lbj-voting-democratic/
        dsfyu404ed 4y ago
        It’s provenance is at least as good as the equally inflammatory Nixon war on drugs quote everyone here assumes to be factual. https://intellectualtakeout.org/2016/10/did-lbj-say-ill-have-those-nggers-voting-democratic-for-200-years/ https://intellectualtakeout.org/2016/10/did-lbj-say-ill-have...
- walterbell 4y ago
  See the history of indentured labor.
- k2enemy 4y ago
  Nothing can actually be a guaranteed income program though, at least in the spirit that people talk about it. Someone eventually has to pay for it. Even if "everyone qualifies" and you give every person $xxx, some people will get their taxes raised by more than $xxx. Or if you tax entities other than individuals, eventually the taxes get passed on to individuals in the form of higher prices, lower wages, etc.
  - kerpotgh 4y ago
    [dead]
  - everfree 4y ago
    > Even if "everyone qualifies" and you give every person $xxx, some people will get their taxes raised by more than $xxx. I don't see how this would make it "not income". It's still income if you have a large tax bill. > at least in the spirit that people talk about it. In what spirit do people talk about it?
    - k2enemy 4y ago
      If UBI means that I get a check for $500 but at the same time my taxes go up by $500, I would have a hard time thinking that my income went up by $500. Think of a world with two people. One rich one poor. Both get checks for $500, but the rich persons taxes go up by $1000 to pay for the program. The net effect is different for the two people. Now in a more realistic setting with a range of incomes, the tax burden of UBI increases in a persons wealth. When you take the net of UBI income minus UBI taxes you get a progressive tax scheme. This means it is not a transfer in the way economists talk about transfers. You still have an effect where people get "punished" with higher taxes as their income goes up.
      - everfree 4y ago
        > If UBI means that I get a check for $500 but at the same time my taxes go up by $500, I would have a hard time thinking that my income went up by $500. If you get a check for $500 and your taxes go up by $500, that means your total compensation (all sources of taxable income including capital gains) is exactly at the national mean, which is to say that your income is way higher than the median income. As a mean income earner, you earn more than 80% of all Americans. Are you in the top 20% of income earners? If not, then you come out ahead. > Think of a world with two people. One rich one poor. Both get checks for $500, but the rich persons taxes go up by $1000 to pay for the program. The net effect is different for the two people. That is true and it is by design. That's the way functioning progressive tax systems have always worked. > You still have an effect where people get "punished" with higher taxes as their income goes up. Yes, that's the point of a progressive tax system.
pastdiscovery 4y ago
> But, Mr. Rector said, previous experiments in cash assistance, like a “negative income tax” program for the poor in the 1970s, showed ... negative impacts on marriage that lasted long after the efforts ended. It feels like using marriage volume or divorce volume as a negative signal is a terrible idea. People not feeling forced into marriage because it's more or less necessary to get by or progress in a post-suffrage economy for the working class is probably a good thing. The couple who raised me each noted it had been at least partially rooted in economics, and if they had more time to figure things out, they probably wouldn't have gotten married. It worked out to a degree for them, they have some degree of happiness, some of the time; they love one another. It also has caused immense harm: They share nothing in common, they fight all the time due to fundamentally different styles of communication and relatively different belief systems. If an increase in the divorce rate happens due to better economic conditions, this probably signals there were a lot of couplings that were not really good for the participants, but necessary to maintain a certain quality of life. It also could signal people leaving abusers. Is keeping "zombie relationships" worth it?
- dsfyu404ed 4y ago
  I'm no fan of marriage the institution but the results are clear. Policies that incentivize couples who would be married to not marry leads to worse outcomes for both parties at scale as well as any kids. It is regrettable that some may feel trapped in marriages that aren't working but the numbers don't lie. I don't want to make this a race thing because it's not but look at what happened to the urban blacks who had this kind of policy peddled hard at them starting in the 1960s. They regressed on tons of metrics that are closely tied to and both predict and are predicted by household stability. Your advocating for something that has been tried and failed. (That said, perhaps the above would not be the case, or at least not to the same degree if women and men weren't treated differently with regard to child custody and men had the option of being single fathers)
  - TrinaryWorksToo 4y ago
    What numbers are you referring to?
willew793 4y ago
My wild prediction is that it will help.
exabrial 4y ago
I have no problem with Guaranteed Income, paid by people freely giving to those in need. If everyone spent as much time donating their time and money as they do jaw jacking that "someone else should do something", we'd solve world hunger by now. I have a problem with taking something from Peter and giving it to Paul. Stealing is stealing, no matter how you butter it up, and no matter if Peter will miss it, and no matter if Peter has enough that it doesn't matter. Repeat: Ends do not justify the means. It's sad that so many people think the only answer is to steal from whom they consider rich. If this rule were applied equally globally, everyone complaining would have _a lot_ removed from them, as the World Poverty Level is defined at an income $1.90/day or $693.5/year. The upper bound on worldwide wealth is only bound by energy and raw materials, which we have nearly unlimited supplies of both. My challenge to you is to increase your giving in 2023. You skip the extreme overhead of government's and every crooked politician grabbing a handful out of the hat and every special interest taking a cut. If you want to help, the answer is found in basic charity that everyone should be doing.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- anthonypasq 4y ago
  [flagged]
  - jeromegv 4y ago
    It's also the mentality that somehow someone receiving money from the government is "stealing", but leaves totally out of the equation people that have extorted a crazy amount of wealth on themselves by enduring dangerous and poor working conditions for their workers. When you see companies depending on government to provide welfares or NGOs food banks to their OWN worker because how low the salary is. But that is fine.
  - 0xbadc0de5 4y ago
    If not theft, would you not agree that it's certainly excessive? Did you support government giving your tax money to the banks in 2008 or the automakers in 2009? If you didn't support it, did you still pay your taxes? If so, why? fwiw, I think the "taxes are theft" argument is often used as a response of exasperation against what appears to be systemic misuse of public money. I suspect that the vast majority of people who would repeat that, would also agree that some form of the "social contract" is necessary. They probably just disagree on what specific level of government involvement makes sense. ie: rather than expanding the size of government, why not reduce the size of government. Wouldn't that free up more productive labor that could grow the pie for everyone? Maybe government doesn't need to be picking winners and losers in a free market - or at least less so than they currently do.
hnburnsy 4y ago
We already have a means tested, guaranteed income with no strings attached in the US and 30 states called EITC. So some in Illinois are eligible for Federal EITC, Illinois EITC, and Chicago Guaranteed Income.
- nine_k 4y ago
  Is there any good report summarizing the results of the program through the years?
- schemescape 4y ago
  EITC requires earned income. I’m sure it’s mentioned somewhere and I missed it, but does the Chicago program require earned income? Edit: the article contrasts it with the EITC, so I’m interpreting that to mean it does not require earned income.
swamp40 4y ago
Chicago experiments with buying the re-election of Lori Lightfoot...
- Kon-Peki 4y ago
  The lower income demographic didn’t vote for her the first time, and they aren’t going to vote for her this time either. In the general election, there were 10 candidates that got > 10,000 votes. Lightfoot got 17% of the vote, concentrated in the rich white northside along the lake. Prekwinkle (the other person in this article) got 16% of the vote, concentrated in the rich white and black south side along the lake. The poor areas of the city voted for a variety of black and Hispanic men. The most interesting of those men was Willie Wilson, who literally went to churches and handed out cash as people left Sunday services. The Trump-era FEC investigated and declared that handing out cash does not count as trying to buy votes, so obviously this Chicago program is A-OK regardless of whether any recipients vote for her!
  - jjtheblunt 4y ago
    20 years away myself, who did vote for her?
    - Kon-Peki 4y ago
      Municipal elections in Chicago are in odd years, which virtually guarantees low turnout. This is probably on purpose, but on the other hand the November ballot in even years is already 20 pages long, so adding a bunch more local stuff would make them insane. So basically, hardly anyone voted for her. About 6% of registered voters voted for her, and that made her the top vote getter. In the special election, she did better (24% of registered voters!) but basically it was just people voting for “anyone but Prekwinkle”. And, well, elections have consequences. LOL
      - jjtheblunt 4y ago
        off topic, but how did Kim Foxx (?) NOT get dethroned?
INGSOCIALITE 4y ago
But where does the money come from
- Turskarama 4y ago
  Taxes, obviously. Is this supposed to be some kind of gotcha? The ultimate purpose of a guaranteed income is to reduce inequality, rich people pay for it or it doesn't work.
  - ksniwmidjd 4y ago
    [dead]
  - xwolfi 4y ago
    But how does it reduce inequality ? Isn't it just money and nothing else is solved ? Why wasnt the recipient rich in the first place ? Aren't there factors in his initial state that 500$ a month won't fix and we risk having him mis-spend it just like he mispent everything else he earned up to now, ending in a state where everything is 500$ more expensive and he's still poor and others are still rich, shifted by 500$ ? You're a union representing factory workers, wont it be tempting to demand a 500$ raise for everyone ? And then all prices of the output of the factory would be shifted up in price to compensate ? If we look at what the american experiment did with their 1000$ cheque signed by Trump, didnt it do exactly that ? Isnt it true that the value of 500$ today depends on how hard it is to get in the first place, and if it's much easier, it becomes much less valuable ?
    - quxbar 4y ago
      Guaranteed income is a form of stability, which changes the outlook of recipients far more radically than a one-time transfer. People are more likely to make plans that increase their productivity in the future, such as fixing vehicles, going back to school, or leaving under-employed situations. The price fixing you describe already happens as much as possible, that's what drives inflation. UBI lets people walk away from bad jobs and re-distributes agency so that nobody is trapped.
    - 4y ago
ghiculescu 4y ago
> gunshots rang out one day as he was leaving work. Two bullets from a drive-by shooter pierced his head and left him permanently blind Only in Chicago could you read this and conclude that giving out monthly checks is the solution to the city’s problems. I recently left Chicago. The main reason was that with a young family the crime was just too scary. I don’t have a strong opinion on this program, I was happy to pay taxes in Chicago, and I was certainly not eligible for it. But I will observe that the tax base that is needed to fund it will continue to leave due to crime.
- brewdad 4y ago
  It's been a while since I lived in that part of the country, but I was under the impression that the crime in Chicago is largely confined to a few neighborhoods that the taxpayers you mention would never go to anyway. For most Chicagoans. crime is something you see on the 10 o'clock news.
  - ghiculescu 4y ago
    That wasn’t my experience. I lived in wicker park. Someone had their motorbike stolen at gunpoint outside my kitchen window. This was monthly (or more often) news https://abc7chicago.com/amp/chicago-carjackings-bucktown-carjacking-crimes-crime/12579190/ https://abc7chicago.com/amp/chicago-carjackings-bucktown-car...
    - tptacek 4y ago
      Chicago leads the nation in carjackings, but they've spiked in most big cities in the US --- they quadrupled in NYC and Philly (which has a comparable number to Chicago per capita). They're lower in New York, but it's harder to drive in New York than in Chicago, so that tracks. I think this is probably a city phenomenon more than it is a Chicago phenomenon. Aside from vehicular hijacking, crime in Chicago for the typical HN reader is not a huge issue; it might actually be less of an issue than it is in San Francisco, for instance (not that SF is any kind of gold standard). Obviously, for a large group of people who will never read HN, crime in Chicago is a nationally-historic disaster; if you lived in Chatham, fleeing to any other city to escape crime would make a lot of sense.
tdr2d 4y ago
It actually nearly exists in France https://www.caf.fr/allocataires/aides-et-demarches/droits-et-prestations/vie-professionnelle/le-revenu-de-solidarite-active-rsa https://www.caf.fr/allocataires/aides-et-demarches/droits-et... It is called RSA. Any person (in need) who are elligible can claim around ~500 euros of revenue, even more if you have children. I personnally see a lot of people abusing it and not willing to find themselves a situation, when I pay their salary with huge taxes. It's not so fair for active people who have the ambition to reach a greater comfort than the bear minimum. But, it really makes you feel safe to know that your country will never let someone in need down.
LinkLink 4y ago
What needs redistribution incentive is assets not income. Anyone can get income, even disability is income. However assets are increasingly out of reach.
- quxbar 4y ago
  If I knew every person had a guaranteed income, I would have a lot of business ideas that would be radically more feasible. It would be much easier to borrow against a portion of one's future income and secure capital.
- paulpauper 4y ago
  Invest your $500 in the stock market.. now you have assets. People choose to buy rapidly depreciating discretionary goods instead of investing.
  - nine_k 4y ago
    This way to acquire assets is statistically working, but it's very slow; it takes decades, unless you actively trade and maybe have some not entirely public insights into the businesses you invest in. Also, an investor risks to lose the investment when the market crashes. Not everyone thinks about that during a market rally though; during these it looks like you can keep making tons of money for a long time. I'd say that investing in a car repair shop and the appropriate skills would likely pay more, that is, would produce more assets faster.
- everfree 4y ago
  Assets and passive income are interchangeable. Assets produce passive income, and you can borrow against reliable passive income to purchase assets. If you redistribute passive income, you redistribute access to assets. If you redistribute assets, you redistribute access to passive income. They are one and the same.
paulpauper 4y ago
Even though I am of the right, I like this idea. I think it's a way of helping people have control of their money and as a way to see the benefits of earning money and the freedom it provides, in contrast to heavily restricted govt. programs
karaterobot 4y ago
> A 2019 report by European labor unions expressed worry that unconditional cash assistance to create a universal income floor in a developed economy might render targeted social services obsolete, ending government functions that ensure equitable health care, child care and educational services. See, if true, this is the reason small-government people should really support a UBI. It's not about whether the government spends money, it's how much they spend and what we get in return. If a UBI reduces the overall size of government, while capably replacing these social services, it should appeal to the wide, middle band of Americans that cuts across both parties. Framing this — as the article does — as a referendum on whether you like "big government" or not is unnecessary. Who likes big government for its own sake? I only know people who want the government to be optimally sized to do its job. After that it's just a question of how you define those terms: optimal, do, and its job. But few would argue that a government shouldn't use the most effective solution for the jobs we agree it should do.
- ghiculescu 4y ago
  > Who likes big government for its own sake? Those who are employed by it. Either directly (job) or indirectly (welfare dependent). I agree with your first paragraph btw, but it’s naive to think smaller or more efficient government is what the city of Chicago is going for.
- readthenotes1 4y ago
  I think Reagan in 1960 said something about if all the money given to the government to help poor people went to poor people they would no longer be poor...
charlie0 4y ago
I like the idea of UBI, but don't see it working. Think about it this way, whenever the government increases grants for schools, the schools just end up raising prices. I think the same will apply here. Landlords might be more compelled to raise rents, restaurants will increase prices,etc. Eventually, some other party(ies) will find a way to capture that UBI.

50 points by lxm 4y ago

There are strings. You need to qualify for it. Which means it isn't a guaranteed income program. It is a normal needs-based welfare program. The entire concept of a basic income guarantee, originally, was to remove the perverse incentives of needs-based programs, which can unintentionally trap people into dependency and poverty by punishing them for taking steps to improve their situation.

sjellen 4y ago
This, except.. its not unintentional.
- dsfyu404ed 4y ago
  Lyndon Johnson has a great quote about cornering voting blocks that way.
  - nwah1 4y ago
    Would be interested to hear it, if you can dig it up.
    - workingdog 4y ago
      https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/lbj-voting-democratic/ https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/lbj-voting-democratic/
      - dsfyu404ed 4y ago
        It’s provenance is at least as good as the equally inflammatory Nixon war on drugs quote everyone here assumes to be factual. https://intellectualtakeout.org/2016/10/did-lbj-say-ill-have-those-nggers-voting-democratic-for-200-years/ https://intellectualtakeout.org/2016/10/did-lbj-say-ill-have...
walterbell 4y ago
See the history of indentured labor.
k2enemy 4y ago
Nothing can actually be a guaranteed income program though, at least in the spirit that people talk about it. Someone eventually has to pay for it. Even if "everyone qualifies" and you give every person $xxx, some people will get their taxes raised by more than $xxx. Or if you tax entities other than individuals, eventually the taxes get passed on to individuals in the form of higher prices, lower wages, etc.
- kerpotgh 4y ago
  [dead]
- everfree 4y ago
  > Even if "everyone qualifies" and you give every person $xxx, some people will get their taxes raised by more than $xxx. I don't see how this would make it "not income". It's still income if you have a large tax bill. > at least in the spirit that people talk about it. In what spirit do people talk about it?
  - k2enemy 4y ago
    If UBI means that I get a check for $500 but at the same time my taxes go up by $500, I would have a hard time thinking that my income went up by $500. Think of a world with two people. One rich one poor. Both get checks for $500, but the rich persons taxes go up by $1000 to pay for the program. The net effect is different for the two people. Now in a more realistic setting with a range of incomes, the tax burden of UBI increases in a persons wealth. When you take the net of UBI income minus UBI taxes you get a progressive tax scheme. This means it is not a transfer in the way economists talk about transfers. You still have an effect where people get "punished" with higher taxes as their income goes up.
    - everfree 4y ago
      > If UBI means that I get a check for $500 but at the same time my taxes go up by $500, I would have a hard time thinking that my income went up by $500. If you get a check for $500 and your taxes go up by $500, that means your total compensation (all sources of taxable income including capital gains) is exactly at the national mean, which is to say that your income is way higher than the median income. As a mean income earner, you earn more than 80% of all Americans. Are you in the top 20% of income earners? If not, then you come out ahead. > Think of a world with two people. One rich one poor. Both get checks for $500, but the rich persons taxes go up by $1000 to pay for the program. The net effect is different for the two people. That is true and it is by design. That's the way functioning progressive tax systems have always worked. > You still have an effect where people get "punished" with higher taxes as their income goes up. Yes, that's the point of a progressive tax system.

pastdiscovery 4y ago

> But, Mr. Rector said, previous experiments in cash assistance, like a “negative income tax” program for the poor in the 1970s, showed ... negative impacts on marriage that lasted long after the efforts ended. It feels like using marriage volume or divorce volume as a negative signal is a terrible idea. People not feeling forced into marriage because it's more or less necessary to get by or progress in a post-suffrage economy for the working class is probably a good thing. The couple who raised me each noted it had been at least partially rooted in economics, and if they had more time to figure things out, they probably wouldn't have gotten married. It worked out to a degree for them, they have some degree of happiness, some of the time; they love one another. It also has caused immense harm: They share nothing in common, they fight all the time due to fundamentally different styles of communication and relatively different belief systems. If an increase in the divorce rate happens due to better economic conditions, this probably signals there were a lot of couplings that were not really good for the participants, but necessary to maintain a certain quality of life. It also could signal people leaving abusers. Is keeping "zombie relationships" worth it?

dsfyu404ed 4y ago
I'm no fan of marriage the institution but the results are clear. Policies that incentivize couples who would be married to not marry leads to worse outcomes for both parties at scale as well as any kids. It is regrettable that some may feel trapped in marriages that aren't working but the numbers don't lie. I don't want to make this a race thing because it's not but look at what happened to the urban blacks who had this kind of policy peddled hard at them starting in the 1960s. They regressed on tons of metrics that are closely tied to and both predict and are predicted by household stability. Your advocating for something that has been tried and failed. (That said, perhaps the above would not be the case, or at least not to the same degree if women and men weren't treated differently with regard to child custody and men had the option of being single fathers)
- TrinaryWorksToo 4y ago
  What numbers are you referring to?

willew793 4y ago

My wild prediction is that it will help.

exabrial 4y ago

I have no problem with Guaranteed Income, paid by people freely giving to those in need. If everyone spent as much time donating their time and money as they do jaw jacking that "someone else should do something", we'd solve world hunger by now. I have a problem with taking something from Peter and giving it to Paul. Stealing is stealing, no matter how you butter it up, and no matter if Peter will miss it, and no matter if Peter has enough that it doesn't matter. Repeat: Ends do not justify the means. It's sad that so many people think the only answer is to steal from whom they consider rich. If this rule were applied equally globally, everyone complaining would have _a lot_ removed from them, as the World Poverty Level is defined at an income $1.90/day or $693.5/year. The upper bound on worldwide wealth is only bound by energy and raw materials, which we have nearly unlimited supplies of both. My challenge to you is to increase your giving in 2023. You skip the extreme overhead of government's and every crooked politician grabbing a handful out of the hat and every special interest taking a cut. If you want to help, the answer is found in basic charity that everyone should be doing.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
anthonypasq 4y ago
[flagged]
- jeromegv 4y ago
  It's also the mentality that somehow someone receiving money from the government is "stealing", but leaves totally out of the equation people that have extorted a crazy amount of wealth on themselves by enduring dangerous and poor working conditions for their workers. When you see companies depending on government to provide welfares or NGOs food banks to their OWN worker because how low the salary is. But that is fine.
- 0xbadc0de5 4y ago
  If not theft, would you not agree that it's certainly excessive? Did you support government giving your tax money to the banks in 2008 or the automakers in 2009? If you didn't support it, did you still pay your taxes? If so, why? fwiw, I think the "taxes are theft" argument is often used as a response of exasperation against what appears to be systemic misuse of public money. I suspect that the vast majority of people who would repeat that, would also agree that some form of the "social contract" is necessary. They probably just disagree on what specific level of government involvement makes sense. ie: rather than expanding the size of government, why not reduce the size of government. Wouldn't that free up more productive labor that could grow the pie for everyone? Maybe government doesn't need to be picking winners and losers in a free market - or at least less so than they currently do.

hnburnsy 4y ago

We already have a means tested, guaranteed income with no strings attached in the US and 30 states called EITC. So some in Illinois are eligible for Federal EITC, Illinois EITC, and Chicago Guaranteed Income.

nine_k 4y ago
Is there any good report summarizing the results of the program through the years?
schemescape 4y ago
EITC requires earned income. I’m sure it’s mentioned somewhere and I missed it, but does the Chicago program require earned income? Edit: the article contrasts it with the EITC, so I’m interpreting that to mean it does not require earned income.

swamp40 4y ago

Chicago experiments with buying the re-election of Lori Lightfoot...

Kon-Peki 4y ago
The lower income demographic didn’t vote for her the first time, and they aren’t going to vote for her this time either. In the general election, there were 10 candidates that got > 10,000 votes. Lightfoot got 17% of the vote, concentrated in the rich white northside along the lake. Prekwinkle (the other person in this article) got 16% of the vote, concentrated in the rich white and black south side along the lake. The poor areas of the city voted for a variety of black and Hispanic men. The most interesting of those men was Willie Wilson, who literally went to churches and handed out cash as people left Sunday services. The Trump-era FEC investigated and declared that handing out cash does not count as trying to buy votes, so obviously this Chicago program is A-OK regardless of whether any recipients vote for her!
- jjtheblunt 4y ago
  20 years away myself, who did vote for her?
  - Kon-Peki 4y ago
    Municipal elections in Chicago are in odd years, which virtually guarantees low turnout. This is probably on purpose, but on the other hand the November ballot in even years is already 20 pages long, so adding a bunch more local stuff would make them insane. So basically, hardly anyone voted for her. About 6% of registered voters voted for her, and that made her the top vote getter. In the special election, she did better (24% of registered voters!) but basically it was just people voting for “anyone but Prekwinkle”. And, well, elections have consequences. LOL
    - jjtheblunt 4y ago
      off topic, but how did Kim Foxx (?) NOT get dethroned?

INGSOCIALITE 4y ago

But where does the money come from

Turskarama 4y ago
Taxes, obviously. Is this supposed to be some kind of gotcha? The ultimate purpose of a guaranteed income is to reduce inequality, rich people pay for it or it doesn't work.
- ksniwmidjd 4y ago
  [dead]
- xwolfi 4y ago
  But how does it reduce inequality ? Isn't it just money and nothing else is solved ? Why wasnt the recipient rich in the first place ? Aren't there factors in his initial state that 500$ a month won't fix and we risk having him mis-spend it just like he mispent everything else he earned up to now, ending in a state where everything is 500$ more expensive and he's still poor and others are still rich, shifted by 500$ ? You're a union representing factory workers, wont it be tempting to demand a 500$ raise for everyone ? And then all prices of the output of the factory would be shifted up in price to compensate ? If we look at what the american experiment did with their 1000$ cheque signed by Trump, didnt it do exactly that ? Isnt it true that the value of 500$ today depends on how hard it is to get in the first place, and if it's much easier, it becomes much less valuable ?
  - quxbar 4y ago
    Guaranteed income is a form of stability, which changes the outlook of recipients far more radically than a one-time transfer. People are more likely to make plans that increase their productivity in the future, such as fixing vehicles, going back to school, or leaving under-employed situations. The price fixing you describe already happens as much as possible, that's what drives inflation. UBI lets people walk away from bad jobs and re-distributes agency so that nobody is trapped.
  - 4y ago

ghiculescu 4y ago

> gunshots rang out one day as he was leaving work. Two bullets from a drive-by shooter pierced his head and left him permanently blind Only in Chicago could you read this and conclude that giving out monthly checks is the solution to the city’s problems. I recently left Chicago. The main reason was that with a young family the crime was just too scary. I don’t have a strong opinion on this program, I was happy to pay taxes in Chicago, and I was certainly not eligible for it. But I will observe that the tax base that is needed to fund it will continue to leave due to crime.

brewdad 4y ago
It's been a while since I lived in that part of the country, but I was under the impression that the crime in Chicago is largely confined to a few neighborhoods that the taxpayers you mention would never go to anyway. For most Chicagoans. crime is something you see on the 10 o'clock news.
- ghiculescu 4y ago
  That wasn’t my experience. I lived in wicker park. Someone had their motorbike stolen at gunpoint outside my kitchen window. This was monthly (or more often) news https://abc7chicago.com/amp/chicago-carjackings-bucktown-carjacking-crimes-crime/12579190/ https://abc7chicago.com/amp/chicago-carjackings-bucktown-car...
  - tptacek 4y ago
    Chicago leads the nation in carjackings, but they've spiked in most big cities in the US --- they quadrupled in NYC and Philly (which has a comparable number to Chicago per capita). They're lower in New York, but it's harder to drive in New York than in Chicago, so that tracks. I think this is probably a city phenomenon more than it is a Chicago phenomenon. Aside from vehicular hijacking, crime in Chicago for the typical HN reader is not a huge issue; it might actually be less of an issue than it is in San Francisco, for instance (not that SF is any kind of gold standard). Obviously, for a large group of people who will never read HN, crime in Chicago is a nationally-historic disaster; if you lived in Chatham, fleeing to any other city to escape crime would make a lot of sense.

tdr2d 4y ago

It actually nearly exists in France https://www.caf.fr/allocataires/aides-et-demarches/droits-et-prestations/vie-professionnelle/le-revenu-de-solidarite-active-rsa https://www.caf.fr/allocataires/aides-et-demarches/droits-et... It is called RSA. Any person (in need) who are elligible can claim around ~500 euros of revenue, even more if you have children. I personnally see a lot of people abusing it and not willing to find themselves a situation, when I pay their salary with huge taxes. It's not so fair for active people who have the ambition to reach a greater comfort than the bear minimum. But, it really makes you feel safe to know that your country will never let someone in need down.

LinkLink 4y ago

What needs redistribution incentive is assets not income. Anyone can get income, even disability is income. However assets are increasingly out of reach.

quxbar 4y ago
If I knew every person had a guaranteed income, I would have a lot of business ideas that would be radically more feasible. It would be much easier to borrow against a portion of one's future income and secure capital.
paulpauper 4y ago
Invest your $500 in the stock market.. now you have assets. People choose to buy rapidly depreciating discretionary goods instead of investing.
- nine_k 4y ago
  This way to acquire assets is statistically working, but it's very slow; it takes decades, unless you actively trade and maybe have some not entirely public insights into the businesses you invest in. Also, an investor risks to lose the investment when the market crashes. Not everyone thinks about that during a market rally though; during these it looks like you can keep making tons of money for a long time. I'd say that investing in a car repair shop and the appropriate skills would likely pay more, that is, would produce more assets faster.
everfree 4y ago
Assets and passive income are interchangeable. Assets produce passive income, and you can borrow against reliable passive income to purchase assets. If you redistribute passive income, you redistribute access to assets. If you redistribute assets, you redistribute access to passive income. They are one and the same.

paulpauper 4y ago

Even though I am of the right, I like this idea. I think it's a way of helping people have control of their money and as a way to see the benefits of earning money and the freedom it provides, in contrast to heavily restricted govt. programs

karaterobot 4y ago

> A 2019 report by European labor unions expressed worry that unconditional cash assistance to create a universal income floor in a developed economy might render targeted social services obsolete, ending government functions that ensure equitable health care, child care and educational services. See, if true, this is the reason small-government people should really support a UBI. It's not about whether the government spends money, it's how much they spend and what we get in return. If a UBI reduces the overall size of government, while capably replacing these social services, it should appeal to the wide, middle band of Americans that cuts across both parties. Framing this — as the article does — as a referendum on whether you like "big government" or not is unnecessary. Who likes big government for its own sake? I only know people who want the government to be optimally sized to do its job. After that it's just a question of how you define those terms: optimal, do, and its job. But few would argue that a government shouldn't use the most effective solution for the jobs we agree it should do.

ghiculescu 4y ago
> Who likes big government for its own sake? Those who are employed by it. Either directly (job) or indirectly (welfare dependent). I agree with your first paragraph btw, but it’s naive to think smaller or more efficient government is what the city of Chicago is going for.
readthenotes1 4y ago
I think Reagan in 1960 said something about if all the money given to the government to help poor people went to poor people they would no longer be poor...

charlie0 4y ago

I like the idea of UBI, but don't see it working. Think about it this way, whenever the government increases grants for schools, the schools just end up raising prices. I think the same will apply here. Landlords might be more compelled to raise rents, restaurants will increase prices,etc. Eventually, some other party(ies) will find a way to capture that UBI.