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.
All these UBI experiments ever seem to demonstrate is the “BI” part.
But the part that needs to be demonstrated, IMHO, is the “U”.
Well we can’t do that until we do that. And shitting on the experiments means we’ll never do the Universal part.
It’s not the critics of the experiments that are the problem.
The “experiments” are just watering down the idea of UBI into “just rename existing benefits programs”.
You’d need to restructure an entire country’s tax systems to really do a proper experiment. No country could just afford to give everyone free money. You’d have to structure it so the average person pays back exactly what extra they got, and build affordable housing for the people that actually choose to live on just UBI.
We can’t meaningfully advocate or plan for its implementation unless we have some idea how it would work. And that it can work.
The sorts of experiments in the OP get us no closer to that. They prove nothing that wasn’t already pretty uncontroversial and obvious, and offer no insights about how these programs might be implemented universally.
Pointing this out does not hold back UBI. Ignoring it, however, does.
We know it can work. We know how it will work. The math works, the psychology works, there’s nothing else left to do but do it. This is just the latest in a long line of studies on this going back decades. Doubting it at this point is just putting your head in the ground.
This is the part where the citations you link are extremely important.
How will it work, then?
Everyone gets x amount. As you go up in tax brackets y amount is subtracted at tax time until you get high enough that the entirety of x is reclaimed. For this there are several programs we can completely shut down and the same funding would provide anywhere from 500-1500 dollars a month. (Depending on whose math you believe).
everything you’re saying here and in the replies makes perfect sense and is very clear. unfortunately, it looks like you’re arguing with someone who isn’t willing to listen to reason
That sounds like means-tested welfare programs, which we already have. UBI by definition is unconditional.
In other words, you’re talking about “BI” but I’m asking about “U”.
There is no means testing. The IRS has all the information it needs already. Getting rid of the means testing is where the bulk of the available money comes from.
And as far as the Universal part goes, we can’t do that until we actually do it. Asking to test that is a bad faith argument used by the GOP because it’s literally impossible to do without actually implementing the program.
We did actually do it though, COVID payments. Remember how corporations immediately went on a money grab and inflation immediately kicked in and now we have permanently higher prices? The fed stated 1/3 of the inflation was directly from the universal stimulus money. Printing money for everyone has good and bad factors.
This is literally means testing
You’re describing a means tested welfare program.
“Means testing” is to check the recipients income (their “means”) against a schedule of benefits. Higher income=lower benefit. This is how most existing and historic welfare systems have operated. In what sense is your suggestion an improvement?
I am no Republican. The comparison is downright insulting.
We’re honestly not at a point where UBI is sustainable. However, this clearly demonstrates that replacing existing welfare with straight up cash, and changing how that cash scales down as people approach a “normal minimum” income, is vastly superior to our current system