Notices by Scott Santens (scottsantens@hachyderm.io)

Universal basic income does its magic via 3 primary pathways: poverty, insecurity, and inequality. It does directly reduce poverty, which is a really big deal, but only about 10% of the US lives in poverty. Chronic insecurity impacts about 5x more people. UBI helps all of them.

#BasicIncome

Of all the reasons to do Universal Basic Income, here's one that isn't considered much, but I think about it a lot. Basically, I'd just like fewer people to be constant dicks to each other. A brain burdened by scarcity is one that operates with a shorter fuse.

UBI will turn the dick dial down.

"Nothing in life is free," says the person as they sign the document accepting their inherited land that has been passed down generation after generation from an ancestor that was an immigrant who claimed the land for free that someone else was using at the time but never 'owned'.

Universal Basic Income is about more than just economics; it's about justice. It's about recognizing that in a country of plentiful resources and productive capacity, no one should be left out in the cold. Let's envision a society where survival isn't a luxury but a human right.

New study of Alaska's UBI shows it increases preventive healthcare: "Our results suggest that basic income policy ought to be thought about as a form of health policy, as it has the potential to advance a wide range of health objectives related to primary and preventive care."

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0749379724002915

386 students in New Orleans got $200 a month in basic income. As a result, they missed fewer days of school, their reading test scores grew by nearly double those of the control group, and they enjoyed more financial stability than the control group.

https://www.nola.com/news/education/guaranteed-income-study-expands-to-more-high-schoolers/article_b1636f56-5692-11ef-97bd-57631bf1517c.html

The results of another BIG pilot are here. This one was in L.A. and provided $1,000/mo for a year to 3,200 people and compared them to a control group of 5,000. Every household started in poverty and with kids or expecting.

Results:

"Across the board, the study reported no negative effects of cash payments on participants, who were 'significantly more likely to secure full-time employment than to remain unemployed not looking for work' than those in the control group."

https://www.businessinsider.com/los-angeles-guaranteed-basic-income-pilot-ubi-partner-violence-employment-2024-7

Don't hit your kids. Oh, and in related news, unconditional basic income has consistently shown the effect of reducing domestic violence against kids and partners.

https://www.psypost.org/spanking-predicts-lower-cognitive-skills-in-children-study-finds/

The idea of a meritocracy is a nice idea, but if you think it exists, that's a fantasy. Hard work can pay off, but not always, and some people succeed without hard work thanks to random chance. Universal basic income would result in more meritocratic outcomes. Bootstraps for all!

Thomas Paine, a founding father, proposed a universal cash payment for everyone turning 21 back in the 18th century. Around that same time, Thomas Spence was the first to propose what we now know as universal basic income.

UBI isn't new; it's just overdue.

It is already true and will only be increasingly true that the future of work will involve increasing frequency of transitioning between jobs and education and learning new skills. Climate change and AI only increase the frequency of transitions. Universal Basic Income will help support everyone in all transitions.

When folks argue that a Universal Basic Income would deter working, think about those million-dollar CEOs. If a modest $15k is enough to make one quit working, wouldn’t multi-million dollar packages make CEOs practically comatose? Yet, here they are, still CEOing. Weird isn't it?

Universal basic income means that everyone gets money. Those who get more in UBI than they pay in higher taxes will spend it in businesses like grocery stores and restaurants, which then in turn becomes the wages for the workers at those businesses who would get their paychecks in addition to their UBI.

Want to restore Main Street USA? UBI is how to do that. Nothing would do more for small towns across America than UBI.

It's wild how many people accept the idea of 8 hours of work, 8 hours of leisure, and 8 hours of sleep each day as somehow ideal as if handed down on stone tablets. That wasn't always the norm, and we can do better. It's time for four 8-hour days or five 6-hour days plus universal basic income.

We can't have parachutes, pilots will just fly recklessly.

We can't have seat belts; they'll just cause more car accidents.

We can't water the plants, they'll just grow dependent on water.

We can't have unconditional basic income, people will just stop working.

ALL OF THESE CLAIMS ARE STUPID

Individuals who received the $1,000/mo or $500/mo payments were more likely to find a stable, full-time job than before they received the basic income. Results also showed 45% of participants secured housing, while $589,214 was saved in public service costs.

"It's freedom. It's freedom from poverty..."

https://www.businessinsider.com/denver-basic-income-reduces-homelessness-food-insecurity-housing-ubi-gbi-2024-6

"The savings manifested in program participants staying in homeless shelters less frequently, requiring fewer ambulance rides, emergency room visits and hospital stays, and spending fewer nights in jail or drug and alcohol treatment centers, a report released Tuesday morning shows."

Providing basic income to 807 homeless people saved $600,000 that would otherwise been spent on shelters, ambulances, and prisons.

https://www.denverpost.com/2024/06/18/denver-basic-income-project-taxpayer-savings/

Alaska has had a small annual universal basic income since 1982. You might think it has only increased prices but every year when the checks go out, businesses compete for customers by lowering their prices. It has decreased poverty there. It's also increased overall employment.

Economies should grow from the bottom up. Sustainably. The physics of an economy is for money to flow upwards where it concentrates, endangering the system itself. Mechanisms need to exist to "evaporate" money at the top (taxes), and for new money to flow up from the bottom through everyone as Universal Basic Income.

If a universal basic income of $15,000 a year would cause everyone to stop working, why is anyone currently earning over $15,000 a year? If you're reading this and have a higher income than $15k, why are you doing that? Reduce your hours and enjoy the sweet $15k lifestyle.