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.
You can do a rough summation of it yourself. We spend about 1.2 trillion dollars a year on various forms of welfare. There’s about 260 million adults in the US. That comes out to somewhere around 400 dollars a month. Now the neat part starts.
Say we set a goal to recoup half of the total using higher taxes on higher income brackets. Nothing horrible, no more than the extra 500 they got and certainly didn’t need. That means we got 600 billion back. If we continue the program we can do so with 1.8 trillion instead of 1.2 trillion. Because we still allocate the yearly 1.2 trillion dollars. So the benefit in year 2 is 600 dollars.
In this way we could easily expand the program up to about 750 dollars a month over 5 years. After that the annual half back begins to approach the annual funding amount. Which means the program stabilizes around 2.4 trillion in rotation. 1.2 from the government and 1.2 in taxing back the top half.
Incidentally this is also why it’s not an inflationary measure in the traditional sense, it’s not creating money. It’s just moving it in a novel way.
Unfortunately, if you want something more substantial you’re going to have to wade into academic papers.