If 100 homeless people were given $750 per month for a year, no questions asked, what would they spend it on?
That question was at the core of a controlled study conducted by a San Francisco-based nonprofit and the USC Suzanne Dworak-Peck School of Social Work.
The results were so promising that the researchers decided to publish results after only six months. The answer: food, 36.6%; housing, 19.5%; transportation, 12.7%; clothing, 11.5%; and healthcare, 6.2%, leaving only 13.6% uncategorized.
Those who got the stipend were less likely to be unsheltered after six months and able to meet more of their basic needs than a control group that got no money, and half as likely as the control group to have an episode of being unsheltered.
Of course, but it’s not a very good experiment for a mass rollout. On a mass scale I hypothsize it will diminish motivation to find a job, thereby reducing the number of taxpayers, and that leads to the big question: who are you taking this money away from? 9 times out of 10 it’s middle class folks. 1%ers and corporations can afford to spend the money to get every single tax break, so middle class without those resources will end up paying most of the bill.
I’m glad you came up with a hypothesis, fortunately scientists have already tested your hypothesis (or something very analogous) and failed to prove it, in fact they have indicated the opposite effect.
I hope that in the name of scientific knowledge and progress you take this research into account and change your view based on the available information.
Can you link some of the research you mention? Interested in giving it a read.
I’m on the toilet right now but there’s a few links already in the replies to the op, you can check out those.
Luckily every study at every scale on UBIs has not found any loss in motivation. What it actually has shown is people use the financial breathing room to train up and get better jobs, thereby societally paying back more than they put in, in the long term. The kind of society that can implement UBI can also tax the rich intelligently and fairly.
It’s been calculated multiple times that UBI would have a similar cost to existing welfare programs due to the significantly reduced overhead. Thus whoever pays for UBI are the same ones currently paying for existing welfare.
It might sound backwards but for a lot of people, myself included, not having a job will actually diminish motivation.
The frustration of applying for jobs and going for interviews with no response for months on end only adds to the stress of not having any money which adds up to a “what’s the fucking point?” train of thought, which hasn’t resulted in homelessness for me, but I could see how it would for other people.
Or we can just implement a wealth tax like any reasonable nation. You make more than 10 million a year? We’ll take 10% of that, thanks. 100 million a year? 20%. A billion a year? 40% of that.
My car doesn’t generate income either but that doesn’t stop the government from taxing it every single year.
Yeah, the problem here is the implementation: you and I and most people here would benefit a little from a higher tax on billionaires, enough to motivate us to send a letter to our Congressional representatives and send a few bucks to whichever campaigning politicians promise to do it.
Billionaires, in the meantime, stand to lose millions, or even tens of millions of dollars. Enough that it makes sense for them to start PACs, schmooze, and even bribe the Congressional representatives who’d be in charge of raising taxes. So even though there are hundreds of them and millions of us, they have greater means and motivation.
Fun fact, the economic disparity between the upper and lower classes in America is worse than when the French started cutting people’s heads off. I can’t legally say we should follow their lead, but it makes you think, you know?
But why? Why punish people just because they are more successful than other people? The government doesn’t need to steal from successful people to give to those that aren’t.
It’s called taxes, not stealing, and yes they do. It’s quite literally one of the functions of a government.
That’s literally not the function of government. Their only job is to protect me from you and you from me. That’s all. You may want the government more involved in your life. Not everyone feels that way.
How do you expect a government to function if it doesn’t collect taxes? Are they gonna run a weekly bake sale?
Believe it or not when you cut out all the superfluous duties and other bullshit, the government needs a lot less money.
You didn’t answer the question.
I’m sure there isn’t a single millionaire that made it on their own. They had other people making that money for them.
You got proof? Or you just ‘feel’ that way.
I sure hope you’re never down on your luck in your life and need help with food or rent. I hope we never have another Covid-type incident where small businesses need help, where millions of people (maybe you?) need extensions on their unemployment. Hopefully you never need social security income. I’m sure that you don’t use anything in your daily life that other people have paid taxes for but don’t use themselves.
I guess the countless people who spent their lives working and paying taxes, only to get laid off, unable to afford rent, and have to live out of their car just get nothing in return for having paid into the tax system for years. Oh, and especially all those people who work full time, sometimes at two jobs, only to have to go home to their car or tent at night. Fuck them, amirite
You have problems taxing the rich but not the poor? 👢👅
I have problems taxing anybody.
There is massive, long term UBI study happening ongoing in Kenya, and the results are extremely positive.
Early findings from the world’s largest UBI study, Dec 6, 2023 by GiveDirectly
The actual paper, Universal Basic Income: Short-Term Results from a Long-Term Experiment in Kenya, Abhijit Banerjee, Michael Faye, Alan Krueger, Paul Niehaus, Tavneet Suri, 15 September 2023
Your hypothesis is an intuitive and common fear, and so has been studied before and found insubstantial, with Canada’s “Mincome” experiment being one of the most notable: in the 70s Canada targeted members of a town with a minimum income for five years, and saw results like people opening businesses with loans they could get now that they could cite the income. Where they saw people leaving jobs, it was often for education - their high school enrollment hit 100% for the senior year for the first time ever, due to the kids not needing to help bring in money. It was ended during a fiscal crisis when the government was looking for places to tighten belts. This BBC article is a good read on it, focused on the positive health impact.
It would push people to find better jobs; advocate for better working conditions, and actually have money to spend.
Sure, you can go work at a grocery store part-time while making your $750 for some extra cash. Most of that $750 is gonna go into grocery costs anyway, might as well make some extra money.
This experiment is not on basic universal income specifically, but UBI is about giving unconditional income to anyone to keep you afloat with day to day expenses. It’s not about giving you income so you could spend it on a holiday cruise. You are still expected to work if you want to have your dream holiday.
From who whose money will fund UBI? From taxing robots. Edit: I will add that this is once robots are sufficiently more capable than humans for work to displace our labour.
This is an absolute baldfaced lie, repeatedly disproven over and over and over again in every experiment to date worldwide.
What you are saying is that YOU would be a lazy welfare shit, so you assume eveyone else will ve also. You have zero faith in rhe human need to feel worthwhile since you have no self-worth.
I pay enough taxes to support 125 $750 users like this and would gladly pay it, too. 125 people that are better off would have a significant positive impact to a community, and I’m all for it.
Also money that they spend, somewhere at some point would likely be taxed.
Your logic is flawed.
Rogan, is that you?
There it is. That’s always what any social service pushback comes down to. There are a million websites that will break down the amount of money the US and individual states spend on social services and how it compares to military spending and everything else (it’s a drop in the bucket). It’s easy to find out that the amount of fraud is miniscule, and that for a long time administrative error had been categorized as fraud which of course inflated that number.
Is anyone going to get as up in arms about military spending, foreign military spending, federal grants to states and municipalities for policing, border patrol, subsidies to private immigration detention facilities and private prisons, subsidies to public universities that go right into the pockets of administrators as they raise tution, not to mention the numbers that just came out (reposted on lemmy about twenty times since yesterday) about how the US spends more on healthcare than it would cost to just have universal healthcare, and what about all the research grants for R and D for medicines that end up with private patents so that taxpayers who need those medicines pay for them twice, or the public grants that fund research that academic publishers lock behind paywalls while their reviewers get dick, etc etc etc.
Yet somehow, all I ever seem to hear anyone bitching about is the funding that would actually help people, and it’s always the vulnerable people who get that hatred, instead of the idiots who people have actively voted for to handle their tax dollars efficiently.
I get you’re worried about YoUr tAxEs but maybe get your priorities straight first.