#Universal Basic Income

[liberalsarecool]

UBI works. 88% success rate.

[animentality]

[theconcealedweapon]

It's considered normal to fantasize about winning the lottery and not having to work anymore.

It's considered normal to fantasize about owning a business and having others work for you.

It's considered normal to fantasize about owning rental properties and living off of the passive income they generate.

But if you fantasize about a world in which no one has to work, that's considered farfetched. People respond with "you just want to be lazy and leech off of the working class", even though the other three scenarios in which that's actually true are considered acceptable.

[mindblowingscience]

Giving a regular cash payment to the entire world population has the potential to increase global gross domestic product (GDP) by 130%, according to a new analysis published June 7 in the journal Cell Reports Sustainability. Researchers suggest that charging carbon emitters with an emission tax could help fund such basic income programs while reducing environmental degradation. "We are proposing that if we can couple basic income with environmental protection, we can save two birds with one stone," says first author U. Rashid Sumaila of the University of British Columbia in Vancouver.

Continue Reading.

[ralfmaximus]

A Seattle-area guaranteed basic income pilot gave low-income residents $500 a month to help reduce poverty. Employment in the group nearly doubled, and numerous unhoused residents secured housing. The Workforce Development Council of Seattle-King County launched a 10-month guaranteed basic income pilot program with 102 participants in fall 2022. New findings by research firm Applied Inference reveal that the $5,000 total payments improved participants' quality of life, housing, and employment outcomes.

Oh gosh look: another successful UBI pilot program.

Not only was employment doubled in the test group, their savings increased, and health & life insurance coverage tripled. Many participants got health insurance for the first time.

It's time to roll this out nationwide and with more money. The return on investment is undeniable and would be huge if it applied to everyone.

[whereserpentswalk]

There are UBI advocates who say that UBI won't make people work less. And I think if it doesn't make people work less than it isn't enough.

[victusinveritas]

[miniar]

The people who are trying to sell you on the idea that no one would want to do any work if it wasn't for the money are fully aware of the existence of things like charity, or wikipedia, or massive complex computer game build projects, or any number of examples of countless hours of work done for no reason other than the joy of the project.

What they're actually saying is "The poor won't break their own backs for my benefit if their survival wouldn't depend on it." just in a way that is more marketable.

Arguing against the lie, the more marketable facade, won't sway them as it's not actually their stance at all.

[bcrispin]

Proud of my brother for this interview

[probablyasocialecologist]

The core defining feature of capitalism is that it is fundamentally undemocratic. Yes, many of us live in electoral political systems, where we select political leaders from time to time. But when it comes to the system of production, where we spend most of our waking lives, there is little or no democracy. Under capitalism, production is controlled primarily by capital: large corporations, major financial firms, and the 1 percent of wealthy individuals who own the majority of investable assets. They decide what we produce, and how our massive productive capacities—our labor and our planet’s resources—should be used. And for capital, the primary purpose of production is not to meet human needs or to achieve obvious social and ecological goals, but to maximize and accumulate profits. That is the overriding objective.

Jason Hickel, The Limits of Basic Income

[enbycrip]

Big thing I’ve got from my study of disability in the early modern period in Britain, including dissertation research?

Poor relief that gives money out to the poorest people is probably the most benefit per amount of money, but it’s *massively*, *massively* resented by wealthier people. Not only because it’s redistribution of wealth, given it was usually raised by local taxation, but because it takes both control and opportunities to benefit from them.

The big thing money gives is options, choice, and freedom. Wealthier people value having that and massively resent poorer people having it. They much prefer giving charity to paying their taxes because a) giving charity lets them keep control of the money, even at a remove, and b) they usually find a way to benefit more directly from it.

This is basically why we have the current social security systems we have, where so much more is spent on control and policing of the behaviour of poor and disabled people than actually helping. Universal benefits were popular when the systems were set up for a variety of reasons, including reducing resentment by wealthier people, but largely because means-testing is *more expensive* and *less efficient*than universal benefits.

Wealthier people screaming for more means-testing are doing so because they prefer to have more money spent on tormenting people who are struggling with the conditions that those wealthier people create and maintain because it benefits them than that money actually reaching them.

That’s not how they parse it in their heads, I’m sure, but it *is* the reality of the situation.

[soul-our-punk]

It's a crime to be poor

In a capitalist society

It's a crime to be sick

In a capitalist society

It's a crime to be free

In a capitalist society

Maybe it should be

A crime to be capitalist

In a humane society

[sideaccount512]

Is there a Realistic way to Remove Big Money from Politics?

[allthegeopolitics]

A new study of a guaranteed-income program in Compton, California, finds that regular cash payments from the government to low-income households during the COVID pandemic improved recipients’ perception of housing security while reducing household spending. The research suggests that households may have used the money from the program to pay down debt. The two-year study, published Dec. 10 by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), began in December 2020 with the Compton Pledge, an effort by then-mayor Aja Brown and the nonprofit Fund for Guaranteed Income to alleviate economic hardships caused by the COVID pandemic. The program provided $500 per month on average to 698 randomly chosen low-income households over a two-year period – a roughly 20% increase in monthly household income. A control group of 1,402 households received no transfers.

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[alwaysbewoke]