Weird how every one of these tests shows most people use the money to better themselves instead of wasting it all like right wing media would say.
Super weird.
this post was submitted on 04 Apr 2024
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It’s projection. “I’d blow it all on coke and hookers, so obviously everyone else will too!”
The people with the most money do the least amount of work and call everyone else "lazy."
If you have time to lean, you have time to blame the masses for your own shortcomings.
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I think it's also just a side effect of their place in life. If you have disposable income already, a few thousand dollars is more disposable income. You can't picture what poverty is really like when you're a few thousand short on bills for the year every year and so you have to give up meals etc to make ends meet.
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It's almost like an individual is the person who knows what is best for themselves, instead of an agency that has never met them and only knows them through means-testing.
Common sense dictates that's exactly what would happen. The super rich and right wingnuts lack that particular attribute tho.
Yeah but that's because they're way more likely to read Ayn Rand than Thomas Paine.
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Oh look UBI experiment number 1578 says the same thing.
And people will still ignore it and pretend UBI is unproven.
Except of course none of these are UBI experiments. The U has been completely forgotten.
They're trying to water down the idea of UBI to renaming "benefits". There's only one class of people who would find this advantageous, and it ain't us.
The reality is that we won't know for sure how it works across an entire population until a small country changes its tax structure to make this possible across everyone. Would people quit shit jobs more often? Would minimum wage be abolished? How much work is considered saturation when all the crap is stripped away?
Real actual UBI would be an enormous societal change (I believe for the better), and I'm not sure that giving a handful of poor people some money and watching them spend it on things they need to survive is particularly worthwhile. We know that. It's everyone else that might throw a spanner in the works.
Ahhh the, "the experiment is impossible" argument. Except no one ever argues that the math is wrong once the self sustaining tax system is explained. Because it's really quite simple. So we don't need an experiment for that do we?
We look at people's employment status and their financial literacy. And this is study number 1542 proving that it would not cause massive drop out from employment and people are capable of budgeting the extra money responsibly.
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But people won't want to slave away for my megacorp for starvation wages if we pay them not to work!
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Remember, if these trials can cause change then EVERYONE gets a little extra. And it's cheaper than our current welfare system. AND it actually helps people instead of putting them in a place where getting help ends their desperately needed support. It's a win for everyone except the "I struggled and so should you" crowd which means its an absolute victory for everyone that matters!
What makes it worse, those people almost never actually struggled. Otherwise they may have learned to suffer some empathy.
I’ve watched someone start to empathize and then talk themselves out of it so many times I’ve lost faith in someone’s ability to learn it.
I remember when the first wave of stimulus checks went out and a bunch of car dealerships suddenly raised the price on their cars by $1000. UBI would be great, but if we don't reign in the corporate-apologist economy first, every product will suddenly be more expensive so they can bleed people of that extra money.
Oh this is an awesome comment. I love talking about this part of UBI
I studied Economics in school and dived deep into UBI. Some interesting facts/research for you:
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(Fun fact) The US already has UBI, just a super watered down version. It's called EITC (Earned Income Tax Credit). It's a Nixon brainchild and was thought they could use UBI to reduce the inefficiencies of such a big government. I.e. get one nice UBI check that covers healthcare, retirement, insurance, education, food, housing, etc. blah blah blah, and you can shut down a bunch of federal government agencies that are pretty inefficient.
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The car dealership thing happened because of a variable that we often discount: information (or knowledge). The car dealership knew exactly how much money was coming out and who got it (mostly), and they knew it was a one-off not an ongoing thing. A lot of UBI macro research guesses that we'd see some small inflationary pressure at the beginning when it's new, but then return to normal as it becomes part of every day life. And even if it does, the benefits strongly outweigh the benefits and the Fed has other tools to reign in inflation to balance the affect out.
Caveat, this knowledge is 20+ years old. I may be way off base.
Just a heads-up, you accidentally wrote "the benefits strongly outweigh the benefits" instead of (presumably) "the benefits strongly outweigh the drawbacks."
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There have been UBI trials before and they found that it didn't lead to price increases to any great degree.
Yes but not widespread UBI, I think it would be slightly different like the reference to the stimulus checks where nearly everyone obtained it and it was widely circulated information.
Exactly. If a small group of people are given UBI, then they just have more money, and stores want to profit from everyone, including the people who aren't getting more money. But if everyone gets UBI, then the stores are sure that their customers can afford higher prices, and our current government has shown that it doesn't care if prices are arbitrarily inflated. I'd love UBI, but it can't function alone without accompanying laws to prevent price hiking.
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Same thing happened to college financial aid. The more aid given the more colleges raised the prices.
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The entire concept of a scientific study to determine whether people spend this money wisely is bunk, because it’s nobody else’s business how a person’s money gets spent and whether it’s categorized as “wise”.
If we assume that there is an objective, ie scientifically valid, definition of “wise spending”, then we should just go centrally planned communism because the whole point of free markets is allowing people to enact their own value structure in their spending.
The whole idea of basic income, as opposed to all these other services, is based on the same idea: that people’s money is their own.
This study seems nice, but it frames this whole question the wrong way. The whole concept of money is that people have a right to make their own economic choices, regardless of what some centralized authority thinks is “wise”.
That's not true. There is a wise spending. Or to be more correct there is a foolish spending. Gambling your money away for example is f* stupid.
The point is that the government really shouldn't have any say in which is which. I agree with you that gambling all your money away is a poor financial choice, but that doesn't mean that I think we should ban gambling, because many people enjoy it responsibly. Teaching people financial literacy, and treating addictions is the solution, not policing how people use their UBI.
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Word.
Also it's a huge difference if you get universal income for life or just for a limited time and have to provide for yourself again after that
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The conclusion is basically of course a UBI works - you give most people extra money, they'll spend it on things they need and things that are worthwhile rather than blowing it all on vices.
It's something we see time and time again, and anyone who genuinely believes otherwise is either rich or blind.
I’ve always felt that the push back comes from people who assume others are at the same level of means as they are. A lot of people don’t understand food insecurity, or that “you have a car” doesn’t mean the oil was changed this year.
Or antisocial in the psychological sense, ie "I see it, and I'm not rich, but people suffering under me makes me feel superior, gives me the dopamine rush of schadenfreude, and I'll just go ahead and make shit up in my head about why I believe they deserve their suffering so I can just revel in how much better I'm doing guilt free."
As an American, its a tragic reality that 10s of millions of us are proud sadists. Not entirely our fault, our owners gained their fortunes by not caring about how their profiteering hurt others, ane they propagandize us to worship and deify them and their mindset of If I hurt you to benefit myself, its just business.
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"People spend money on basic needs"
Personally I have never considered that there would be a risk of the UBI recipients to spend the money unwisely.
People needing UBI have a very long standing experience of not getting what they need to minimise their losses on a daily basis, so of course they will invest in that first. They all probably have a ranked, itemised list of all that would help. And I'm willing to bet that said list, on average, would be at least 80% correct (the 20% being influenced by personal sensitivities and beliefs, like a vegan person spending more on plastic based clothing, that wears out faster).
People not needing UBI already have more money than they can find intelligent uses for, and so they already are spending money unwisely.
Nah, the part that concerns me is that as soon as we all get UBI, and I do mean the very next day, rents are gonna rise by 33% of the amount of the UBI, the cost of food will rise by 33% of the amount of the UBI, and the cost of all the rest combined will rise by 34% of the amount of the UBI. It will be back to square one, and all we will have achieved will be funnelling our taxes straight into the pockets of for profit, private megacorporations.
We need to "fix" that megacorporation problem first.
You mean rents will go up by 100% of the UBI, food will go up by 100% of the UBI, and healthcare will go up by 10,000% because it's a day ending in the letter Y.
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Here in the US, our society is in practice neutral towards human life. We (usually) don't actively kill each other, but we're completely comfortable letting our fellow citizens die under a freeway of exposure for the crime of not producing capital value for our owner class.
Instituting something like UBI would be a significant step towards finding congruence with our currently false, empty rhetoric of valuing human life.
Untl then, we as a people can and will continue to pretend that we do, but again in practice, it means the same as saying we value the candy bar wrapper we just threw in the trash.
Some people are being given thousands of dollars with no strings attached in universal basic income trials. They spend the cash.
FTFY
the amount given should be based on some cost of living index just like the minimum wage should be
The crazy thing is that this kind of thing is way closer to actual socialism than any historical society has gotten, but the tankies hate it because it doesn't have enough violent fan service.
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there is no try. do. ubi is not ubi and its benefits only really show when its everyone. One of the main points is for it to go to those who need it when they need it without a whole lot of beuracracy (those needing it being those who are in a position to not be making much money and therefor their tax burden will be less than they recieve)
Don't give away money to the poor! They'll just waste it spending $36 billion on a poorly thought out and woefully executed meta-universe! Only corporations can be trusted to make efficient decisions!
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