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Is giving people cash working? Six months of Denver's Basic Income Project
51–60 of 188 posts
Re: Is giving people cash working? Six months of Denver's Basic Income Project
#52[flagged]
In a convoluted, bureaucratic way, we have many of the pieces of UBI (welfare, unemployment, social security, minimum wage). We just lack the "universal" part. I agree that UBI is contentious, but I wouldn't be surprised if UBI dressed up in some definitely-not-socialism clothing eventually reaches critical mass of support.
> fixing the hard things like education
Sure. Hard, but not controversial.
> ...or reducing reproduction amongst the population that cannot raise children to a standard that is contributing to society.
Excuse me, what? Who gets to decide who has kids and who doesn't? Unless you have some clever voluntary economic way to affect this, then it sounds a lot like eugenics.
Re: Is giving people cash working? Six months of Denver's Basic Income Project
#53[flagged]
I'm getting major eugenics vibes from that comment. I'm not saying you're for forcible population control, but it's just a tiny hop and a skip from the "poor people are so burdened by having children that they just shouldn't" to "poor people are too dumb to realize that they should not have children so we should 'help' them not reproduce".
Re: Is giving people cash working? Six months of Denver's Basic Income Project
#54[flagged]
By reactive, do you mean addressing symptoms rather than causes?
Re: Is giving people cash working? Six months of Denver's Basic Income Project
#55[flagged]
Re: Is giving people cash working? Six months of Denver's Basic Income Project
#56But this is not what basic income is about, is it? As far as I know, basic income means that everybody receives a fixed income, rich or poor. What happens in Denver is just a social project, the only thing mildly special about it is that recipients didn't have to do anything in return. But there have been many of such projects in countries all over the world.
If you want to understand more about their study, their methods are available. It answers a lot of the comments below. They do make a distinction and call this "Guaranteed Basic Income" since it targets a subset population: https://static1.squarespace.com/static/64f507a995b636019ef88...
Re: Is giving people cash working? Six months of Denver's Basic Income Project
#57Re: Is giving people cash working? Six months of Denver's Basic Income Project
#58Re: Is giving people cash working? Six months of Denver's Basic Income Project
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
You obviously have never lived with unstable people who often live just above the poverty line. There’s a reason why share houses and shelters don’t work.
We live just barely above that line, and recently got $600/mo of food stamps revoked, which did an order of magnitude more harm than the pitiful raise that got us there.
Re: Is giving people cash working? Six months of Denver's Basic Income Project
#60[flagged]
Education and reproductive changes don’t alter the reality that you can spend years working on developing skills in an industry that rapidly disappears due to technological upheaval. It also doesn’t change the fact that you can’t remedy a plummeting number of jobs for low-educated people by educating everyone.
Will pilots be necessary in ten years? Twenty? Fifty? What do we do about the fact that we need them now, but we won’t in an unpredictable amount of time?
Will truck drivers be necessary in ten years? Twenty? Fifty? Do you think they will all be amenable to retraining as full-stack developers and financial analysts? Do you think we could even absorb that number of people in other industries, even if we could retrain everyone? And what happens when the jobs they retrained for disappear in five or ten years?