Is it Time for a Universal Basic Income?

12 comments

1. 

2. Why not? Living through a slow collapse of Western Civilization has been tedious and painful. Let’s speed it up! Better to dive rapidly into the abyss of total societal implosion than to meekly stumble into it.

3. No lol.

4. Coincidentally, the results of a big UBI study were just released today. They gave $1000/month to 1000 low-income people in Illinois and Texas for 3 years. Twitter thread from one of the paper’s authors is [here](https://x.com/evavivalt/status/1815380140865569266), website for the study [here](https://www.openresearchlab.org/findings), and full text [here](https://www.nber.org/papers/w32719?utm_campaign=ntwh&utm_medium=email&utm_source=ntwg3).

   The result is pretty much what you’d expect:

   >The program resulted in a 2.0 percentage point decrease in labor market participation for participants and a 1.3-1.4 hour per week reduction in labor hours, with participants’ partners reducing their hours worked by a comparable amount.

   >Overall, our results suggest a moderate labor supply effect that does not appear offset by other productive activities.

   Edit: Not sure why I’m being downvoted for posting relevant information… It’s really hard to study the effects of UBI because of the extremely high cost involved, so studies like this are very rare.

5. It’s the keystone policy for keeping the US as a leading competitor on the global stage. We are the global leader of broad knowledge labor, and are in a major transformation of how we acquire and utilize knowledge. Enabling the participation and free market innovation of knowledge labor markets, as well as grass roots entrepreneurship, is really the only way we stay in the game as a nation. Or we go the state’s rights rout, of growing already extreme inequality, and basically let corps take over everything, and nations become irrelevant.

6. It will never be time for UBI while we remain capitalist. UBI lifts too many people out of poverty. You need poverty labor for capitalism to work.

7. This would be a better way to spend instead of congress spending it for us. I see no way to fund it tho. If we gave everyone 100k per year to say 350 million Americans it would cost 350 Trillion a year. We have a really hard time paying the 35 trillion we already owe.

8. I say yes. Tax the billionaires and redistribute some of it to the most vulnerable members of society. It’s the right thing to do.

9. It’s not going to work and it’ll never happen, but if it DID, it needs to ACTUALLY be universal. I will be there in line with my hand out wanting the same UBI with a 500k income, same as everyone else.

10. Isn’t this another version of LBJs great society? How successful has this been?

11. I have yet to see a single convincing paper, economic proof, or welfare analysis that shows how UBI would be a net benefit. I’ve seen numerous papers, proofs, and analysis’ which show its unfeasibility.

    I just wanna see one legitimate argument for why it would work. Not “it’s good to give people money and they’ll use it well” – an argument which shows how we could pay for it, how replacing all welfare is a net positive for those on welfare, and that it wouldn’t lead to the collapse of America from dramatic unemployment and inflation.

12. Nah. Who would get it? The poor single mom with 6+ kids or the college grad with an anthropology (useless) degree that can’t find a job?

    #FAKS