We know these programs work, but the American public won’t admit it has a sadist streak. We delight in the suffering of those we have decided deserve suffering. It’s part of the culture to engage in shaming and punishing one another to the point where it’s ritual. We repeat verbatim paradigmatic lines of justification. We actively reject opportunities that function better than (in)formal punishment in a wide variety of areas: parenting, teaching, criminal justice, jobs, etc. At some point, if we don’t own and improve upon that programming, I don’t see what else would change our trajectory, save for tragedy.
It’s nice that homeless people were able to enjoy a significantly higher quality of life but inflation made my latte $7 so I don’t think we should be giving away free handouts.
/s
I put that /s because you ravenous Lemmy commies can’t read sarcasm even if it was written by Marx. I’m onto you guys 😉
Yeah these kinds of studies just keep happening, get the government refuses to do anything to make the problems go away. It’s almost as if the country is run by greedy capitalists who have no interest in seeing anyone of the working class survive without daily struggle and hardship. Weird.
I know Imma get down voted for this opinion. But from what I can see the Study says that 100% (that means people in the experiment and control group) applied for a job so there is really cute 0% difference in people that got money and people that didnt.
This is consistent with what they were finding up in Ontario with their basic income pilot before their leader decided - with zero evidence or consequences - to eliminate the program illegally against contract and ethics.
People stepping out of poverty and able to give back to the community.
It really makes sense. Everyone needs x money for food and absolute basic necessities. Take y% tax from the sallary to cover those up.
If you get fired you still get a little bit of money. Or you propably more easily try to get a better work because you at least get some money if you are jobless for a while.
So how many of these “experiments” do we need to have until we make some policies based on the results? I see this all the time, but it’s always just that: an “experiment”
Imagine that! Actually having money allowing homeless people to get a home and increase their chances of going out and actually getting a job so they can keep their quality of life up from being homeless!
Who could have ever guessed that people with homes are more likely to try and get jobs to keep their homes? /s
getting a job so they can keep their quality of life up from being homeless!
And paying taxes while having that job. So even from a cold hearted financial perspective, this might be one of the cheapest ways to deal with the problem
This is what the “social security is communism!” crowd just just doesn’t get. Investing a tiny amount up front actually makes you money (or at least saves you exponentially more later). And hey, people get to not be homeless at the same time!
I read a lot about this and I have a friend who does social work with homeless people.
There are so many different situations for homeless people. The ones who can better their situation with $1k/mo are truly down on their luck. They need a boost and they can get back on their feet. These are the “invisible homeless” because they are generally ashamed of their situation.
Then you have crackheads. The money won’t help them.
Then you have the mentally ill. They need medical treatment. Cash is less important.
Finally, you have people who have given up. They don’t want to leave their tent. They’ve been homeless so long it’s their life. They prefer it. It’s familiar. I don’t know how money affects this situation.
Similarly, Colorado had a program to give out free birth control and it reduced abortions by like 30%. But Republicans shut the program down because it isn’t about saving babies, it’s about controlling women.
I’m glad they are getting that money (or were?), but the fucked up thing is knowing that’s literally more than I get in a month working 30 hours a week of the hardest job I’ve had in 15 years. 🙃
I’m betting the two people who downvoted me would happily tell me to just get a better job. 😂
The hardest jobs I’ve had have all been the lowest paying.
Higher paying jobs tend to have higher entry requirements but it also means the employer actually values you (like, literally places a high monetary value on you because at the end of the day that is what capitalism demands)
This idea that low paying jobs are easy is wrong. Being replaceable makes you vulnerable to exploitation and abuse.
Markets aren’t moral. So while this is how it works, that doesn’t make it good. It’s so important for governments to protect workers for exactly this reason.
I’m not joking when I say that I have put in at least 1-3 applications every single day for 3 months now and all the while making calls to the companies to check on the application process. I could go into elaborate detail about how much pavement pounding I’ve done, but honestly I’m just too tired and exhausted with life and just want to tell you to go fuck yourself.
I didn’t mean to sound like I was blaming you - I realize how it came across that way and I’m sorry.
Your situation sucks. And I know you’re not alone, there are tons of areas that have what basically works out to a labor surplus. It drives wages down because there’s no protection for workers and the minimum wage is a fucking joke.
Yeah, sorry, just feels like I get beat down every day and then people hit you with “just get a better job”, “just stop being depressed”, etc. It’s very exhausting to live these days.
mind you if there was reasonable social security like a payment to the jobless, exploitation like that would be harder. It feels like countries like the US fight social security to make it easier to pay people almost nothing, by keeping the danger of homelessness and lack of healthcare real.
not presuming you’re in the US, that income would honestly make more sense in a less developed part of the world. I hope that’s not an insult 😬
I am a fan of a UBI (Universal Basic Income) but these limited CBI (Conditional Basic Income) trials are not really comparable to a long-term implementation of either version.
Taking a specific number of people and giving them cash is certainly going to improve their lives. Giving cash to everyone in a city or state, including new arrival, is asking for local inflation and a population explosion. If the area is empty and has abundant natural resources that can be converted into jobs it will probably work out, at least for a while. If it is a major city with most of the resources and land already in use, and there is not much demand for workers, then the program’s budget is likely to be overrun fairly quickly.
Its usually cheaper to give everyone a small amount of money than it is to set up and pay a whole department of civil servants to figure out who qualifies and who doesn’t.
Also the poor and disabled suffer disproportionately when you start putting strict restrictions on financial aid. Just look at universal credit in the UK, in trying to save money/protect against the boogyman of welfare queens, they government has unqualified assessors trying to fail people even if they have serious disabilities.
It’s not charity if everyone gets it, it’s levelling the field and making society fairer.
For the people who need it most it could mean life or death or being able to stay in their home or not have to choose between heat or food.
For those in the middle it might be a nice excuse to treat yourself.
For the richest it would be such an absurdly tiny amount of money they might not be able to spend it.
All we should care about is making sure as many people in the first group get the support. For basic income payments the most effective way to do that is to give it to everyone. By the government giving you that money instead of doing what I talked about above, more people were helped.
Also has the added bonus of countering slightly the siphoning of wealth from the poor to the rich that’s been happening the past while.
It’s not charity if everyone gets it, it’s levelling the field and making society fairer.
I like ubi a lot.
But I think this statement is not true actually. Removing UBI from the argument for a second, if we are children and we go find easter eggs and afterwards we take eggs from everyone and redistribute it so it’s more equal that’s charity.
Big Bill didn’t get as many eggs because he struggled with childhood diabetes.
Fast Francine got a lot of eggs because per parents put her on ADHD meds and she’s laser focused.
So if we take eggs from Francine and give them to bill now we’re doing charity.
1 kid got 10000 eggs from their parents and refuses to share. Ther rest have 0-2 eggs each.
Maybe the students do chores but the pocket money they get only allows them to get 1 extra egg.
UBI is the school giving 2 eggs to every student. Now the egg distribution is more even since most students now have double the eggs or more but the richest students eggs only went up by a tiny percentage.
Is it really fair that one student has more eggs than they could possibly need and many kids have nothing just because they were born into a different family.
If you want to talk about really being fair you probably want to talk about proper wealth redistribution. If you took 5000 eggs off that one student and split it between everyone, every kid would be up 5 eggs. The kid with all the eggs would still have 5005 eggs which IMO is still more than any 1 kid should have to themselves.
I still wouldn’t call any of this charity since 99.9% of people benefit from it.
It gets even better when you ask where the parents got the money. Since its a closed loop you can’t really create money from nothing.
Let’s keep things simple, say the rich parents own all the shops and services in the town. All their money comes from the other parents of the town. The poorer parents have no choice where to buy things like food that they need, they can’t not pay their water bill or their heating. Buying their kids clothes and toys means giving more of their money to the rich parents. Now most of the parents can only afford a couple of eggs and the rich parents can afford a ridiculous number.
The ability for some to make large profits off humans basic needs is wrong and if you say any of this is fair then you should try and figure out why you think like this.
My first thought too, but at least it’s something. One day someone might be able to weave the mountain of evidence in support of UBI into their political campaign.
You say that like landlords aren’t going to do it anyway. This argument is predicated on the idea that rates would not go up otherwise, and that’s certainly not true.
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