Andrew Yang's Nonprofit Helps Fund Five-Year, $500-a-Month Basic Income Experiment (businessinsider.com) 67
Working with the city of Hudson, New York and a local career center, Andrew Yang's nonprofit, Humanity Forward will be giving 20 people a basic income of $500 a month for five years, in a collaboration called HudsonUP. Business Insider reports:
A spokesperson for HudsonUP said the 20 residents will be selected later in 2020, likely in the fall, and will begin receiving payments shortly thereafter. Humanity Forward will cover half the bill, which according to Chris Sommerfeldt of the Daily News will be $600,000. Spark of Hudson will cover the other half, and will, together with community organizers, select the 20 participants, the Daily News reports.
While the project is starting in Hudson, Yang said he hopes more Americans get access to UBI policies soon... "I think that millions of Americans got the $1,200 stimulus and liked it," he said, "and felt that this is something that we should continue to do in a time when there are record levels of unemployment, and tens of millions of jobs lost, many of which will not return..."
Susan Danziger and Albert Wenger, founders of The Spark of Hudson, are longtime UBI advocates. They're hopeful the five-year program will have long-term impact. "UBI gives freedom — freedom to be entrepreneurs, to run for office, to stay home with the kids, to take care of sick parents, to leave abusive relationships, and to help our community in times of crisis," Danziger said in a press release.
The article also notes that Spain "is moving to establish a permanent basic income in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic for low-income citizens."
While the project is starting in Hudson, Yang said he hopes more Americans get access to UBI policies soon... "I think that millions of Americans got the $1,200 stimulus and liked it," he said, "and felt that this is something that we should continue to do in a time when there are record levels of unemployment, and tens of millions of jobs lost, many of which will not return..."
Susan Danziger and Albert Wenger, founders of The Spark of Hudson, are longtime UBI advocates. They're hopeful the five-year program will have long-term impact. "UBI gives freedom — freedom to be entrepreneurs, to run for office, to stay home with the kids, to take care of sick parents, to leave abusive relationships, and to help our community in times of crisis," Danziger said in a press release.
The article also notes that Spain "is moving to establish a permanent basic income in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic for low-income citizens."
Rent (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:1, Troll)
I hope you get disabled and suffer the fate you wished upon others.
Re: (Score:1, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
You forgot about "inheritance".
Re: (Score:2)
My great grandfather on my mother's side was a hair dresser and entrepreneur, and a very successful one at that. He owned a chain of hair salons all across Southern Ontario and Michigan, in additional to a hair dressing school.
I, on the other hand, grew up in geared for income housing while my mother collected welfare checks to feed me and my brother. A couple of years ago, the last of his properties were gone forever when his son, my maternal grandfather, passed away. My other grandparents couldn't afford
Re: (Score:3)
You act like there are 2 options, work to keep the money or squander it. There are a whole lot of people in the middle ground who do not work hard to keep their money but don't squander it. If you inherit 10 million dollars (just to take a number) and you invest it and make a modest 6% return, you will have $600,000 a year to live off of assuming no other income at all. It's not very hard to make inherited wealth last with doing nothing at all.
Re: (Score:3)
If you inherit 10 million dollars (just to take a number)
Then the first thing that happens is that you pay an inheritance tax usually between 10% and 20%, depending on the State you live in, leaving you with $8..$9 million.
On the other hand, if you inherit $10 million in rental property...
Then the first thing that happens is that you have to sell some of it in order to pay inheritance and estate taxes on it, because you dont have millions of dollars lying around.
If you inherit a small family farm, well the county its in estimates its value as $25 million d
Re: Rent (Score:1)
You know what interest is? It's their money being loaned out to other people who are putting it to work creating businesses and hiring people.
The alternative you pro-one is what? Tax inheritance so high there is none so the money goes to the government who wastes it instead of being recirculated back into the economy who have a stake in it being used wisely?
Re: Rent (Score:1)
Re: Rent (Score:2)
It is -their- wealth.
Oh right, we all made it! We all worked our entire lives for it! We all are owed something from someone who worked when we didn't work as hard.
If their children are morons they will lose it all. If they are smart and hard working they will grow the business -hire- other people who now have jobs.
Or we could just confiscate it and burn it on nothing as the government li
Re: I do think most of them were given it. (Score:3)
Let's also assume all landlord are, as you say, scum of the earth. Also nonsense but again, whatever.
Ok. So what? And? Now what?
Re: (Score:2)
Landlords have the power (Score:1)
You will never find a bigger lot of criminals than landlords.
Fuck you. They take on the risk of deadbeat tenants to provide you with shelter that you can't afford to buy.
-jcr
You're wrong. I own my home buddy...happy happy day to never deal with another landlord. Landlords have a lot of tools to extract money from tenants...much more than any tenant has to make them maintain their building. You're late a week on rent, you can contact a collection agency and get most of your money back or cause harm to the person's credit rating.
Here's a simplification. A landlord gets paid the same to maintain their property or not to. In fact, it means reduced expense to break the law.
Re: (Score:2)
I am pretty excited to be done renting (hopefully) forever. I had asked my last landlord to fix my rickety, unsafe balcony and the broken door to it for 4 months. When I moved out they withheld a bunch of my security deposit because the door was broken. (They didn't care that the balcony was structurally unsound and liable to fall on the one below.)
Except that since I had started renting they had cranked up the security deposit, and apparently had never updated my records with the new value, or had asked me
Re: Rent (Score:4, Informative)
look at that, rsilvergun aka BAReF0Ot is attempting to stir some fake outrage.
https://news.slashdot.org/comm... [slashdot.org]
https://slashdot.org/comments.... [slashdot.org]
this entire 'gets money without having to work for it' is this marxist's favoirite complaint. His ideas are that working people must be forced to subsidise the ones that are not working, he feeds on this type of a 'discussion', as the troll that he is.
Re: Rent (Score:1)
Yeah, and there's conspiracy theorists and forum trolls hiding under the floorboards, lurking in the shadows ... --.--
Get some meds for your psychosis, mate.
Re: (Score:2)
"I hope anyone who ever takes any money, whitout having *worked* for it precisely as much as everyone else"
There's a lot to unpack there.
What do you mean by "worked for it?" Do you subscribe to Karl Marx's labour theory of value? I don't want to refute a strawman so that's why I'm asking.
I suspect that you do, because you pounced on the notion of a landlord, and implicit in your reply is that someone who rents out property is not 'working'. Landlords seem to be the most hated group by marxists for some reas
Re: Landlords are hated by everyone, not just marx (Score:3)
My gf rented out her house when she moved into mine. She charges a little below market to a family that appears to be illegally subletting out a part of the house but she lets it slide because they're otherwise pretty good tenants. The first year she rented it out she was taking a small loss on it every month, in effect providing subsidized housing right out of her pocket. Evil!! Burn the witch!!
You know what happens when they report an
the fact she's a saint proves the point (Score:2)
If you got paid more for doing a shit job, you probably wouldn't be a good employee. I wouldn't. Give me a 25% bonus for not showing up for work and make me nearly impossible to fire, you'll never see me. It's corruption per
Re: (Score:3)
So she may be a saint, but that is the problem.
WTF?
You have to be a saint in order to follow the law.
No, you have to be afraid your tenant will turn you in if you don't, it's called fear of prosecution.
You have more power to extract money from tenants than they have to make you maintain the apt.
You've never been on the landlord's side of an eviction process, have you? Tenant rights trump those of the landlord every time. How long can a tenant refuse to pay rent before the landlord can kick them out - how many months? In California it can take 2-3 months, and once evicted, the landlord is out 1-2 months rent minimum, assuming the landlord keeps a one month deposit, and there is no work needed to
Re: the fact she's a saint proves the point (Score:3)
Yes there are definitely shitty landlords. There are just as high a percentage of shitty tenants. And the owners have a lot more to lose and much higher risk in the situation than the tenant. Max risk for tenant is deposit. Max risk for landlord i
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Rent collected covers operating expenses (property taxes?) and carrying costs, the payday is when you sell the property at an elevated price in the future.
You buy a property valued at $100K with 10% down. Your annual rent covers carrying costs, plus a small profit, and then, in 15 or 2 years, you sell your property for $400K. You've "profited" $300K from your $10K investment plus your work managing the property.
Re: (Score:1)
That is what I said. And it means that rents are usually set at the costs to simply own/reside in the property. Meaning - the renter would pay that amount if they lived there, and owned it themselves. It's not profiteering, the margins are quite low for someone else to actually own and be legally responsible for the property.
PS: a return like you stated is really, REALLY rare - only in a few places has that happened. Most of the time you see 3-5% increases annually [zillow.com], which would be 15-24 years to double
Re: (Score:2)
But what is "worked" and "as much"?
Re: Rent (Score:1)
I thought about that for a while.
The best measure is probably, to go by the results. As in: Have a government database of work steps and quality levels, and assign a fixed price for each step and quality level.
(It is of course more complicated than that in practice, as the quality level depends on a lot of properties that require goos official measuring standards.)
The different work steps should be put in relation to each other via the time and effort they take, including the education and training required
Re: (Score:2)
It might be tricky. I'm a technical manager and reasonably expert in my field, but I still find it difficult to evaluate the work my employees do. How do I compare developing an high linearity digital radio system with a femtosecond noise laser timing system. Or just laying out a high frequency digital electronics board with dozens of 12GHz lanes, or a single channel 100GHz receiver?
Then there is comparing the value generated by those engineers, with that of the technicians who are extremely skilled at
Re: (Score:3)
Nothing sadder than an old troll struggling for replies.
Re: Rent (Score:1)
Says the gun nut with the child abuse history.
Yeah, I know.
Me: "Don't steal from people, guys!". USA: BOO! (Score:1)
Only in America.would this ever get a (-1, Troll).
Seriously, ... the most degenerated society of selfish psychopaths on the planet.
Am *I* happy you're currently in full meltdown, 'Murica. Keep electing Trump. Then GoodCop. Then SuperTrump.
We'll reclaim the wasteland, after the radiation and cancer have worn off.
Censored in all but five seconds. (Score:1)
Funny, this took all of five seconds to get censored.
Who's the neocon libertarian piece of shit with the mod points?
Re: (Score:2)
Just like Jesus said, "Fuck thy neighbor, as long as thou get thine."
Well, He did say "The poor will always be with you." (Mark 14:7).
So eliminating poverty is going against His word, and thus anti-Christian.
Yes, there are people who believe this.
"I think it is very beautiful for the poor to accept their lot, to share it with the passion of Christ. I think the world is being much helped by the suffering of the poor people." -- Mother Teresa
Re: (Score:2)
> So eliminating poverty is going against His word, and thus anti-Christian.
That's because Jesus asks that you give everything you have to the poor (Luke 12:33). Therefore, the poor will always be with "us" (meaning Christians) because you're supposed to the one who's poor.
Fortunately I'm an atheist, so if you're looking for someone to burden all of your wealth and possessions upon, that you might get closer to God, I'm willing to make that sacrifice for you. :)
=Smidge=
Re: (Score:2)
Also, M
That sweet spot between nothing and barely enough. (Score:2)
Guaranteed to give useless results, as it is both too little to give freedom and too much to force action. Likely to result in a worst case result for either "side".
Way to boldly half where no one assed before.
UBI = inflation. Yay! (Score:1)
Bring on the huge cradle to grave full UBI! Woot! I'll make bank, big time!
But I will feel badly for the rest of you carting around millions of dollars to buy a loaf of bread (on my island).
Re: (Score:2)
If the source of the money is taxes, then its what others have complained about here, that its not enough money to live on.
And thats the real fatal flaw in UBI. Its supporters want it to be more than it can be. It wont be enough to live on, and since its going to replace welfare, then now the people previously on welfare wont get enough to live on when it used to be that they did. The UBI supporters will then demand that those
Re: UBI = inflation. Yay! (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
If the source of the money is taxes, then its what others have complained about here, that its not enough money to live on.
$500/month for 320 Million Americans is $1.92 Trillion/year. We currently collect $1.8 Trillion in federal income tax receipts. You can't simply Tax The Rich and have a program that survives a second year - The Rich aren't THAT rich.
Yang is the best (Score:1)
Totally supported him in the primary, great direction for Democrats. Think about Facebook, it is the product of the programmers somewhat, but largely of the users who provide all the content. Their only pay is free access to the product, and yet billions contribute for free, making all the value of Facebook from our leisure activity. The moral of that story is people will create value by doing what they love and it can be harnessed if things are set up right. That is what a smart UBI program is about: a bla
Re: (Score:2)
You understand Facebook's value is in advertising - it doesn't pull money out of the air, it offers something of value that advertisers are willing to pay for access to. Your basic idea is that we all should, everyone of us, become Social Media Influencers.
Re: Yang is the best (Score:2)
And where does the thing of value they sell to advertisers come from? Us, our attention and content to draw attention of peers, all through leisure activity. I am using this as an example of a more general phenomenon, people doing what they like can create value. More broadly, activities can create value in smarter ways: In the end it is about all of us training the machines that replace our day jobs, not being social media influencers. When such tech available, its about the best Subway sandwich artist be
Why are all the UBI studies broken? (Score:2)
By making UBI small amounts or short duration you are never going to get realistic results.
It is not that hard to create a decent UBI
study. Set up a lottery for $2000/month for life and sell tickets. The simplest way to do this would be to contract with a state lottery that already has everything set up.
Sell a few million tickets and award your winners. Why is no one doing it the correct way and instead doing these lame half experiments.
Re: (Score:2)
I think small scale studies are worthwhile and necessary, but I'm worried that UBI just won't scale up.
The one possible complication that I see when applied en masse is price inflation. If people have more money to spend then it stands to reason they will spend more, which will increase demand for goods and services. This might in turn put upwards pressure on prices and offset the entire supposed benefit of having UBI in the first place.
I don't know how you can attempt to falsify his hypothesis in small sca
Re: (Score:2)
UBI should scale fine. We could do it right now.
Give everyone $2k/month. Everyone who's over the poverty line, subtract $2k/month from their paycheck as a payroll tax. People making over $5k/month, subtract more than $2k. So for the vast majority of people, the impact is zero. If you make a lot of money you take a bit of a ding.
To help make this work we wipe out most of the rest of the social benefit taxes in paychecks and company tax bills. Gone are social security, disability and unemployment taxes, and t
Re: (Score:2)
Set up a lottery for $2000/month for life and sell tickets. The simplest way to do this would be to contract with a state lottery that already has everything set up. Sell a few million tickets and award your winners. Why is no one doing it the correct way and instead doing these lame half experiments.
State lotteries already have this. There are scratch-offs offering the possibility of $500/week for life, which is close enough to $2000/month.
google search: 500 a week for life [google.com]
Re: Why are all the UBI studies broken? (Score:2)
That seems ideal to study the effects of UBI and how it alters behavior. It is also decently randomized. Lotteries might skew slightly to the poor but the demographics of the people who play lottery are probably exactly who the UBI is predicted to help.
Re: Why are all the UBI studies broken? (Score:2)
Re: Why are all the UBI studies broken? (Score:2)
In my experience and if you look at it the stats, the people who tend to buy lottery tickets are exactly those who can not afford them. Lottery tickets tend to be a tax on poor desperate people and people who can not do math.
Re: (Score:2)
Set up a lottery for $2000/month for life and sell tickets. The simplest way to do this would be to contract with a state lottery that already has everything set up.
Any idea how many tickets you'd need to sell to fully-fund a single winner?
$2,000/month x 12 months/year x 50 years (estimated lifetime of "award") is about $1,200,000 - if you sold $1 tickets, and the lottery ran this for free (no overhead), you'd have to sell 1.2 million tickets per winner. If all 320 Million Americans each bought one ticket per week, at the end of the year you'd have 267.5 winners/week, or about 13,000 winners/year, and 319,987,000 Americans who just spent $52/each to benefit 13K random
Re: (Score:2)
Any idea how many tickets you'd need to sell to fully-fund a single winner?
$2,000/month x 12 months/year x 50 years (estimated lifetime of "award") is about $1,200,000 - if you sold $1 tickets, and the lottery ran this for free (no overhead), you'd have to sell 1.2 million tickets per winner. If all 320 Million Americans each bought one ticket per week, at the end of the year you'd have 267.5 winners/week, or about 13,000 winners/year, and 319,987,000 Americans who just spent $52/each to benefit 13K random Americans.
I'm gonna guess you didn't think about running the numbers.
I'm going to guess that you have no idea how big state lotteries already are. Enough people buy lottery tickets to easy fund this.
I also found out from another poster that this type of lottery already exists in several states: https://www.google.com/search?... [google.com]
So really all you would need to do is possibly modify the terms to allow the winners to be more easily tracked and not allow them to opt for the lump sum.
Wealth inequality is worse than you think (Score:1)
Re: (Score:1)
Nope, because UBI will come out my pocket. and it can't be $500, would have to be more than $2,000 a month. Six trillion a year on the backs of people like me that work? Nope, you have to get a job.
Naive (Score:1)
Like all socialist ideas, UBI sounds like it ought to work. And it would, if it weren't for...people.
Some people are lazy. Some are dumb. Some are, literally, crazy. No surprise: many of these people are on benefits. Are you going to let them starve?
No? Then you don't want UBI, because lazy, dumb or crazy people will blow their UBI on booze and bling, and then be destitute. So you will wind up with UBI *and* all of the old programs.
Re: (Score:2)
That's not a UBI experiment (Score:3, Informative)
If the money is coming from outside those in your experiment, then it's not a test of universal anything. Because it's impossible to scale it up to encompass the entire population.
Re: (Score:3)
No wait, I think Mr. Math (Andrew Yang) is on to something.
Let's just ignore the fact that $500/month isn't an income level most people can live on - at $6,000/yr it's a fraction of the US Federal Poverty Level of $12,760/year. [hhs.gov]
There's what, 320 Million Americans? What if we just printed out $500 checks to every American, every month - that's only $500/month x 12 months/year x 320 Million recipients, or about $1.92 Trillion dollars/year - that's not so much, really, except it's about $120 Billion more that t [cbo.gov]
Re: (Score:2)
Thank you, Captain Obvious! (Score:4, Funny)
"I think that millions of Americans got the $1,200 stimulus and liked it,"
Was anyone, who attained schooling beyond third grade, surprised by this outcome? Wow. People like free money - who knew?
I have an idea (Score:2)
chibi (Score:1)
Why these studies? (Score:2)