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Is giving people cash working? Six months of Denver's Basic Income Project

denverite.com

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Re: Is giving people cash working? Six months of Denver's Basic Income Project

#61

Post by tibbydudeza »

webdood90 wrote: post #29

[flagged]

In South Africa we have about a 38% jobless rate (formal economy) of economically active adults.

We do have a UBI of sorts started during the Covid pandemic for folks who don't have employment and not on any other benefit (current 18 million people) - it is called the SASSA and is about $18 per month (R350).

On the Big Mac Index we are about $2.81

The govt was supposed to cancel it but they keep extending it and are now coming up with inventive accounting tricks to keep it not that our economy can afford a rollout to more people.

It works but our taxbase is so small.

Re: Is giving people cash working? Six months of Denver's Basic Income Project

#62

Post by EGreg »

misja111 wrote: post #4

But 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.

They keep changing the U in Universal to Unconditional, or taking it out altogether, such as with https://mayorsforagi.org which is means-tested

Re: Is giving people cash working? Six months of Denver's Basic Income Project

#63

Post by jampekka »

webdood90 wrote: post #57
jampekka wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How are you contributing to society?

I participate in the economy, I pay taxes, I don't break laws.

That doesn't mean you're contributing, at least positively.

Re: Is giving people cash working? Six months of Denver's Basic Income Project

#64

Post by recursivecaveat »

grumple wrote: post #39
Hasz wrote: post #21

Wow, interesting that just $50/month did almost just as well as $1000/month.

That's basically the control group (but how do you perform a study like this without an actual control group and expect your data to be taken seriously?). 50/month being almost totally meaningless in terms of income. So really this study says that the larger payments goes a long way towards eliminating people sleeping outside and has a small/moderate effect on how many are able to rent/buy housing.

I don't think you can have a $0 control group just because you have to pay the controls to fill out your surveys and such, otherwise their stats will be very out of whack.

Re: Is giving people cash working? Six months of Denver's Basic Income Project

#66

Post by swatcoder »

webdood90 wrote: post #29

[flagged]

Because they were born into it, people forget the US has been in a 70 year “blip” that’s pretty ahistorical and clearly not sustainable.

More likely then UBI or universal living wages, we’ll just see a return to communal living with shared responsibilities and far more modest personal luxuries: more multi-generational homes, a return of boarding houses and flops, etc

It doesn’t look anything like what we grew up imagining the future to look like, but it’s actually pretty livable overall. Many people already live that way throughout the world, without particular suffering, and even in the US/West most people did until quite recently.

However disappointing to the idea of progress, it’d just be a reversion to the proven norm.

Re: Is giving people cash working? Six months of Denver's Basic Income Project

#67

Post by Aurornis »

misja111 wrote: post #4

But 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.

> As far as I know, basic income means that everybody receives a fixed income, rich or poor.

People frame it like that, but in practice it would be offset by increased taxes for most.

For example, everyone gets $20,000 per year as "universal" basic income. However, your taxes go up $20,000 per year or more because you weren't in the lowest tax bracket. We have to pay for the UBI somehow.

UBI of a substantial amount would be incredibly expensive. Expensive to the point that the taxes would have to dip all the way down into the middle class to make it work. So for the average person, that UBI would come in and then go right back out as taxes.

Re: Is giving people cash working? Six months of Denver's Basic Income Project

#68

Post by exabrial »

stouset wrote: post #60
webdood90 wrote: post #29

[flagged]

UBI is a practical solution. 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 f…

Sure but who pays for it? Who decides who gets to be rich?

Re: Is giving people cash working? Six months of Denver's Basic Income Project

#69

Post by pdonis »

aimor wrote: post #56
misja111 wrote: post #4

But 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.

This is still a study about UBI, it's looking at differences based on how the income is delivered. A part of UBI, different from other types of aid, is that the recipient can spend the money however they see fit. There are question about how well this will work. Will the recipients benefit or suffer by not being restricted in how they spend? Will they benefit or suffer by being given the money all at once at the begi…

> This is still a study about UBI

No, it isn't. You can't study UBI by giving income to people who don't currently have income. To study universal basic income, you have to give it to everybody--the same amount--including people who already have income, even people who don't need any additional income. And then you can look at all of the effects, negative (people ceasing to work, or not working as much, because they are now guaranteed a certain amount of income independent of how much they work--meaning that overall production of goods and services might go down even as demand goes up) as well as positive (people who previously didn't have income now having it and therefore having more options).

Studying having the spending of the income not be restricted might be worth doing, but that still doesn't make it a study of UBI, because having the spending be unrestricted is not the critical feature of UBI. We already have social programs that give income whose spending is unrestricted, such as SSI and SSDI. What we don't currently have is a program that gives the same income to everybody regardless of need or anything else. That is the key feature of UBI that would need to be studied if you want to claim to be "studying UBI".

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