Colorado's Universal Basic Income Experiment Gets Surprising Results (coloradosun.com) 304
In November of 2022, "More than 800 people were selected to participate in the Denver Basic Income Project," reports the Colorado Sun, "while they were living on the streets, in shelters, on friends' couches or in vehicles.
One group received $1,000 a month, according to the article, while a second group received $6,500 in the first month, and then $500 for the next 11 months. (And a "control" group received $50 a month.) Amazingly, about 45% of participants in all three groups "were living in a house or apartment that they rented or owned by the study's 10-month check-in point, according to the research." The number of nights spent in shelters among participants in the first and second groups decreased by half. And participants in those two groups reported an increase in full-time work, while the control group reported decreased full-time employment. The project also saved tax dollars, according to the report. Researchers tallied an estimated $589,214 in savings on public services, including ambulance rides, visits to hospital emergency departments, jail stays and shelter nights...
The study, which began in November 2022 with payments to the first group of participants, has been extended for an additional eight months, until September, and organizers are attempting to raise money to extend it further.
One group received $1,000 a month, according to the article, while a second group received $6,500 in the first month, and then $500 for the next 11 months. (And a "control" group received $50 a month.) Amazingly, about 45% of participants in all three groups "were living in a house or apartment that they rented or owned by the study's 10-month check-in point, according to the research." The number of nights spent in shelters among participants in the first and second groups decreased by half. And participants in those two groups reported an increase in full-time work, while the control group reported decreased full-time employment. The project also saved tax dollars, according to the report. Researchers tallied an estimated $589,214 in savings on public services, including ambulance rides, visits to hospital emergency departments, jail stays and shelter nights...
The study, which began in November 2022 with payments to the first group of participants, has been extended for an additional eight months, until September, and organizers are attempting to raise money to extend it further.
Is it really that surprising (Score:5, Insightful)
People in need do actually spend money on improving their situation. This has been pretty consistently show before, e.g. https://www.bbc.com/worklife/a... [bbc.com]
Considering how much we spend on all sorts of shit, I wish we'd invest into larger scale experients to help drive policy in a scientific manner rather than just going by vibes.
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Yeah I think there's a core difference as well as giving for example a struggling, working family a UBI versus giving a homeless or disabled person a UBI. UBI tries to fix one problem and one problem only: a lack of income. The former group usually is usually assisted with that issue and as you mentioned will generally spend that money on needs.
The latter group has underlying core problems that are not solved by income, at least not yet, it's just shuffling their core issues around for a little while but
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Income should help many homeless people with finding housing, which in turn will help many of them find employment. If you literally have nothing including no home it's quite difficult to address any of your own problems.
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Depends on the situation though, is there affordable housing in your area you can afford with your new money, especially if you don't also have a job or long work history since you've been int hat situation so long, or are disabled or addicted.
Like if you had a junkie cousin and he said he need $1k to get a new apartment you'd be like "no, you gotta let me help you clean up your shit first". Money solves a ton of problems but you have to be in a minimum state to even try those, we just need to recognize th
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I have a dream... A dream in which laws come complete with acceptance criteria. How do we measure whether or not a law works? Set the acceptance criteria ahead of time: "This act shall be deemed successful if the following conditions are met within XXX years..." And, if the acceptance criteria which were set by the people who passed the law are not met, the law can easily be repealed.
Legislature by vibe just plain sucks.
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People in need do actually spend money on improving their situation.
That did not happen here. The data shows the control group experienced the same 45% improvement. It wasn't the money. Perhaps for 45% homeless is naturally temporary?
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People in need do actually spend money on improving their situation.
That did not happen here. The data shows the control group experienced the same 45% improvement. It wasn't the money. Perhaps for 45% homeless is naturally temporary?
If California is any indication, about 66% of homeless people are only homeless for a short period of time. So that seems like a low number, but it could be that "a short period of time" is still longer than this study's duration, that the 66% number is based on the total population of people who *became* homeless during a given period of time, rather than out of all of the people who *were* homeless during that period of time (the latter of which would include chronic homeless from previous periods, and t
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I guess being able to afford clean clothes, personal grooming, cab fare to the job interview, and a working cell phone makes you more employable.
Private charities have helped with that. Collecting suits, shoes, etc. Some barbers have been giving free haircuts. I think we should promote such private programs more, the efforts are more likely to leverage local knowledge than something from the state capital.
Some data analysis please (Score:2)
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>Which payment plan gave better payoff, bolus up front or uniform monthly? What was the control group?
Group A: $566 - 12000 = -11434 per person
Group B: $753 -12000 = -11247 per person
Group C: $674 - 600 = 74 per person
Group C was the control group, which also provided the best payoff.
> Does data imply a boost is all they need or you will support this person the rest of their live?
You would obviously need a longer study for that. Researchers mentioned this also in their conclusion. But according to th
Misleading headline, results not surprising (Score:5, Insightful)
Every basic income pilot program does this, it's not surprising anymore. The first time it increased employment it was counter-intuitive, anyway, but ten or twenty experiments in, it's just not weird or surprising anymore.
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Agreed. Saying this is surprising is admitting to having not read anything about similar programs.
Did *not* help them get housed, though (Score:2)
From the graph in the article on how many were housed at 10 months:
Group A ($1000/mo): 44%
Group B ($6500, then $500/mo): 48%
Group C ($50/mo): 43%
And then later down, a graph for how many are still sleeping outside.
Group A dropped from 29% to 9% (20% drop)
Group B dropped from 43% to 25% (18% drop)
Group C dropped from 36% to 16% (20% drop)
Those are statistically identical for a group of 800 people.
The second graph also makes me question how they selected their groups. Shouldn't the fraction sleeping outside
Thats NOT a UBI experiment (Score:5, Interesting)
The addicts need a separate type of help.
But the kicker is that this type of spending literally pays for itself. Spend a million dollars on programs like this, and the result is 1.5 million less tax dollars spent on cops, hospitals, jails and halfway houses. The conservatives that oppose these programs are basically shouting “I INSIST WE SPEND MORE TAX DOLLARS ON THE POOR THAN NECESSARY”. This has been shown in dozens of studies.
But this is NOT a UBI scheme.
Re:Thats NOT a UBI experiment (Score:5, Insightful)
The conservatives oppose them because rich conservatives tell them to oppose them, because other rich conservatives own large chunks of the prison industrial complex, or its ancillaries (eg, police equipment manufacturers) and it would be terrible if those folks went broke and had to get a real job.
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Everyone, it's time to find the "conservative" declaring it's welfare so it costs more money.
We can't "spend" more money because we already spend more money: This seems to be a tautology but is actually, a contradiction. Furthermore, the usual answer of Small Government reduces budgets but paradoxically, not the spending of money.
Re:Thats NOT a UBI experiment (Score:5, Informative)
That’s a cash-transfer scheme to alleviate poverty, and it’s been shown to work, over and over again.
It did NOT work in this case. The control group experienced the same 45% improvement. Perhaps for 45% homelessness is naturally temporary?
I'm all for helping people, but this study is saying we need to look somewhere other than cash transfer.
Re:Thats NOT a UBI experiment (Score:4, Informative)
That’s a cash-transfer scheme to alleviate poverty, and it’s been shown to work, over and over again.
It did NOT work in this case. The control group experienced the same 45% improvement.
The control group experienced a 3.58x increase in the number of people who were paying for their own housing. The other groups experience a 7.33x and 8x increase, respectively. They did *NOT* experience the same improvement. They experienced the same end state. There's a difference. You can't just blindly compare outcomes between experiment groups that don't start out at the same point.
Say you have a clinical trial. The control group was mostly stage 1 cancer. The experimental group was mostly stage 4 cancer. The control and experiment groups both have 50% remission rates at the end. Did the drug do nothing because the groups ended up with the same outcome? I mean, to be brutally honest, you can't say for sure with just those numbers, but it is likely that the drug saved a lot of lives. To find out for sure, you have to do cohort analysis on the raw data, comparing groups of people who started out at similar stages.
The same thing needs to be done here, with cohorts based on whether they started out in a house or apartment that they were paying for, living with family or friends, living in a shelter, or living outside on the street. Each of those groups should be further subdivided into sub-cohorts in each group based on whether they were or were not employed at the start of the period and whether they have children. Each of the various combinations should be analyzed independently.
Mind you, this is a path that can lead to p-hacking, but you would legitimately expect differences between those groups in terms of how well a UBI helps them, so it isn't quite the green jelly bean theory here.
Save taxpayer dollars? (Score:3)
The project also saved tax dollars, according to the report. Researchers tallied an estimated $589,214 in savings on public services, including ambulance rides, visits to hospital emergency departments, jail stays and shelter nights.
But who wants to save taxpayer dollars when we can instead funnel all of it to medical service providers [fiercehealthcare.com] and incarceration service agencies [morethanourcrimes.org]? I mean, those corporate jets don't pay for themselves!
Control group showed the same signal (Score:4, Interesting)
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According to the article, the control group showed similar improvements. Therefore, it is not due to UBI.
The control group was likely the result of a placebo effect. The small amount of money they got -- or perhaps just the idea that someone gave a shit -- was enough to boost their confidence and let them pull themselves out of their situation. Either way, it worked.
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A real control group would have got $zero but still been watched/studied. $50/month was not a control, it was a different test group.
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According to the article, the control group showed similar improvements. Therefore, it is not due to UBI.
The control group was likely the result of a placebo effect. The small amount of money they got -- or perhaps just the idea that someone gave a shit -- was enough to boost their confidence and let them pull themselves out of their situation. Either way, it worked.
Not necessarily. It may simply be that for 45% homeless is naturally temporary.
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According to the article, the control group showed similar improvements.
Not true at all. The control group showed a similar number of people paying for their own housing at the end of the period, but started out with twice as many people paying for their own housing as the experiment groups did, so the improvement was actually considerably smaller.
The control group also showed a decline in full-time employment, while the experiment groups showed an increase in full-time employment.
Questionable Savings (Score:2)
There seems to be a disconnect between my idea of savings and this. So to spell it out, $9.2 million was spent on various aspects of this study, which resulted in an additional $589,214 being spent on something other than the public services for which it had been explicitly designated. In particular, this did not result in $9,789,2
UBI doesn't lend itself to "experiments" (Score:3)
Again, we have a tiny fraction of a percent of people, means tested to receive money among an overwhelmingly larger population of people not receiving benefit. So they are in competition with an advantage, which isn't how UBI would work.
Also, they go in knowing the party will be over in a matter of months, so even if hypothetically they would be inclined to "coast", they would know they need to be prepared to go without.
This is just more means tested welfare.
The experiments do not model how a level playing field would look, how funding it would be implemented, how the economy would react to a new numerical baseline for "income", and people's behavior of it is a confidently permanent benefit rather than a short term benefit that you need to prepare to go without.
There's nothing surprising about this (Score:2, Insightful)
We just changed the name from welfare program to UBI because we've had decades and decades of propaganda attacking the word welfare and associating it with groups of people we dislike.
If UBI ever gets off the ground in any real capacity they will do the same thing again. I'm not s
Hmm (Score:2)
One group received $1,000 a month, according to the article, while a second group received $6,500 in the first month, and then $500 for the next 11 months. (And a "control" group received $50 a month.) Amazingly, about 45% of participants in all three groups "were living in a house or apartment that they rented or owned by the study's 10-month check-in point, according to the research."
So we can conclude one of two things. Either:
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One group received $1,000 a month, according to the article, while a second group received $6,500 in the first month, and then $500 for the next 11 months. (And a "control" group received $50 a month.) Amazingly, about 45% of participants in all three groups "were living in a house or apartment that they rented or owned by the study's 10-month check-in point, according to the research."
So we can conclude one of two things. Either:
The other factor was that the control group started out with twice as many people who were self-housed. Look at the ratio between the start and end of the time period and you get very different results. In the control group, 3.58x as many people were self-sheltered after a year, in the equal payments group, 7.33x as many people were self-sheltered, and in the front-loaded group, 8x as many people were self-sheltered.
This study should be repeated somewhere else with proper randomization.
If you combined (Score:2)
Not surprising at all (Score:2)
"Looks like UBI works" is the usual outcome of UBI experiments. If it didn't show good outcomes then that would be surprising.
I still think universal basic services is an even more promising idea though, because it can't advertise a price floor. Notice that most of the money these people were given ended up in the hands of property owners to pay for housing. In a situation where everyone started getting UBI, we could potentially see a situation where landlords increase rent by the amount of UBI people recei
Re:Universal basic question (Score:5, Informative)
Apparently because, in this case and if the figures are correct, the project has saved you money!
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But at what cost did we get those savings if we include the money they received?
Group A: $566 - 12000 = -11434 per person
Group B: $753 -12000 = -11247 per person
Group C: $674 - 600 = 74 per person
Money spent did not improve outcomes (Score:3)
The control group performed the same. The additional money spent did not improve outcomes.
Its seems that for 45%, homelessness is naturally temporary?
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What savings? From the summary: about 45% of participants in all three groups "were living in a house or apartment that they rented or owned by the study's 10-month check-in point".
The control group performed the same. The additional money spent did not improve outcomes.
The control group ended with the same value for that metric. One could argue that the additional money did not improve outcomes for that metric (though the groups had different starting points, making that argument specious — more on this later). But the summary also says:
The number of nights spent in shelters among participants in the first and second groups decreased by half. And participants in those two groups reported an increase in full-time work, while the control group reported decreased full-time employment.
Over the long term, those differences could result in a significant reduction in homelessness even if the effect didn't show up during the first year.
Also, the groups were not random. If you look at the percentage of people who we
No, the data suggests basic income did not work (Score:5, Interesting)
Apparently because, in this case and if the figures are correct, the project has saved you money!
No, the data suggests basic income did not work. From the summary: "about 45% of participants in all three groups "were living in a house or apartment that they rented or owned by the study's 10-month check-in point."
Note "all three groups." This means the control group experience the same result. Those receiving significant benefits had the same result as those who did not.
What we may be learning from this data is that for around 45% of the homeless, their condition is temporary not persistent.
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Now, the actual project's own reporting [denverbasi...roject.org] does echo this:
But, you appear to be ignoring:
Specifically Group A ($1k pcm) 18% to 23%, Group B (Lump Sum) 24% to 37% and Group C ($50 pcm) 26%
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Re:What to do with "excess" people? (Score:5, Insightful)
Because a not-insignificant part of the population actually believes this and in my opinion and as a former libertarian "Taxation is theft" is brain-turn-off statement that discards everything we know about America, history, civilization and human cooperation and basically says "fuck everything we built over 200+ years".
You can 100% disagree with how much tax is taken, how it's taken and where it gets spent. Those aeguments can and should happen and some taxes are bad. I don't like property tax for example but those are a far cry different that the argument OP is making.
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Well said, the "taxation = theft" crowd make me crazy.
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Pull our your wallet, look at the bills. Is your name and photo on it?
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It's money that is taken from you under the threat of arrest or worse if not paid, with several layers to disguise it as something not as aggressive, or "not you paying for it" when you indirectly do it anyway.
It is also needed, but we're on an era of computers where you probably can calculate and deliver a single "government bill" that tells you exactly what services you're getting for it and how much you need to actually pay etc.. instead of just sneaking it in everything.
Re:What to do with "excess" people? (Score:5, Insightful)
You participate in society, you enjoy the protections and benefits of living in the United States, you as a citizen are able to part in voting and representation. You have an inferred contract with the government and rest of us in society.
Easy example is property. The very concept of someone owning a piece of land is a collective societal agreement that does not exist outside of those foundations of the state and it's institutions. There is no ownership in nature. The thing that keeps me and 20 of my boys from rolling in and taking your land is that you have the implicit protection of the state that you in fact own it and everything flows downhill from there.
As Hobbes put it:
Signs of contract are either express or by inference. Express are words spoken with understanding of what they signify: and such words are either of the time present or past; as, I give, I grant, I have given, I have granted, I will that this be yours: or of the future; as, I will give, I will grant, which words of the future are called promise.
Signs by inference are sometimes the consequence of words; sometimes the consequence of silence; sometimes the consequence of actions; sometimes the consequence of forbearing an action: and generally a sign by inference, of any contract, is whatsoever sufficiently argues the will of the contractor.
Re:What to do with "excess" people? (Score:5, Informative)
Constitution doesn not actually mention God anywhere. They had a philsophical understanding that they felt those rights exist but they also understood the fact those rights require enforement to actually exist. Jefferson wrote as such in the Declaration of Independence where that statement of god-given-rights derive.
We have to remember the founders were products of European Enlightenment which was big shift to the idea that government exists to serve the people and that is a necessry function. What Jefferson argues was the the people have a right to replace such government when it becomes untenable to those goals
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.
Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.--Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government.
Re: What to do with "excess" people? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: What to do with "excess" people? (Score:3)
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So if you eat at a restaurant, and then they ask that you pay, and they threaten to call the cops when you refuse, is that considered theft?
If you want to live in a society, there are services you are benefiting from, so it is only fair that you pay for those. If you don't like that arrangement, you are free to move to a country where fewer services are provided and the tax burden is lower.
Re:What to do with "excess" people? (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, income taxation is theft, no matter how red your face turns or how loudly you lie and claim it's not.
What would help is if you used anything in the rest of what you said to justify that statement. Literally begging the question here, your issues with how taxes are levied or what they are used is not answering that question. They are valid questions but they don't support your premise.
It's not theft because again, you signed a W-4, you took gaineful employment consenting to participate in society, be emplyed (or own) a business that is protected by US law and strength and enabled by generations before of economic growth and institutions. Hell even in America you don't even have to pay it until you make over $11,601
I can just as easily say that you while living in this country, working, consuming and enjoying all the benefits by not paying taxes are engaging in theft against me and everyone else who does contribute. You can only pay your taxes in USD, by earning USD you have an inferred contract to that agreement.
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You don't consent to participate in society, your parents make that decision for you when you are born, and you can't get of it.
1. "Negative contracts" ("if you don't actively get back to us and say no you are bound by this contract") are illegal.
2. Children can't be part of a contract. Such contract is invalid.
Still, this is exactly what the state does, with the assistance of the parents, when a child is born.
Tax is collected under the threat of lethal violence, which basically is the definition of robbery
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Re:What to do with "excess" people? (Score:4, Insightful)
Nobody's forcing you to participate. If you really hate civilisation that much, you can leave it & go & live in the wilderness for as long as you like. Nobody will bother you & it's free of charge.
This is a key point. The ideology of "taxation is theft" is Newspeak. In reality, the refusal to participate in society-wide taxation is the real theft because such zealots never intend to deprive themselves of the communal benefits of public taxes and budgets. They just figure that they will be able to use public roads, schools, libraries, police/fire departments, militaries, etc. for free. Someone else will pay for those services. That is truly theft.
Of course, we should keep in mind that opposing specific taxes and budgets is different from the ideological trope that all taxation is evil.
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forcibly taken
Did you fill out a W-4? Then you agreed to pay income tax.
Did you buy property? You agreed to pay you local property tax.
Did you buy goods? You agreed to pay sales tax.
Which tax was forcibly taken from you?
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All of em.
If you don't pay taxes, you go to jail or worse.
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Wrong.
Don't want to pay income tax? Don't have a job! Or just work under the table.
Don't want to pay property tax? Don't own property!
Don't want to pay sales tax? Don't buy goods from licensed establishments. Barter all your goods.
As they say EZ-PZ
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You: Wrong
The rest of us: Way to lose a debate one word outta the gate.
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Or make sure your total income is below the minimum you have to earn in order to owe income taxes.
See, when Republicans say "everyone should have skin in the game" they mean they want to strip you of your right to not pay income taxes! /s
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Well, no. Taxation is by definition a non-voluntary, but lawful exaction. The fact you could in theory avoid taxation by avoiding working or buying things doesn't change that non-voluntary aspect. You still have to pay even if you'd rather not.
However that doesn't make taxation *theft*, because theft is by definition *unlawful* and taxation is by definition *lawful*. That said, something being lawful doesn't make it *right*.
What's going on here is an attempt to borrow the emotional response to "theft
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True it is in fact a complex issue but now we are into the philosophical debate of social contract theory which is worth having but that's not whats being discussed here, there is philosophy and then there is reality. These are all things the Founders grappled with, many forget we tried the minimum taxation, very small Federal government approach first before we had the Constitution. I am particularly fond of Thomas Paine myself on the issue
Society in every state is a blessing, but government even in its b
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Did you fill out a W-4? Then you agreed to pay income tax.
If someone uses force or credibly threatens to use force on you, that's not an agreement. By your logic, slaves agreed to be slaves because they went out and picked cotton.
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So your employer is engaging in slavery? Well you do have problems in that case...
Re:Universal basic question (Score:5, Insightful)
It's fair to pay taxes if you are using government resources. Social security, roads, water, sewer, police, military defence, etc. Nobody in America is an isolated individual anymore receiving zero benefit from the government, this is no longer the era before the wild west. If you want your utopian society you'll have to go find some uninhabited and unowned piece of land somewhere not under the jurisdiction of any government (probably need to get a space ship to be honest here).
Re:Universal basic question (Score:5, Insightful)
People benefit from all kinds of government spending even without direct usage of service though
Roads, even if you don't drive all the goods you buy get shipped over them
School, even if you don't have kids an educated work force contributes to the greater property of the country which we all benefit from
Anti poverty benefits, you get the lower crime rate because poor people aren't anywhere near as desperate as they would be otherwise and the lower incarceration rates from the lower rates of crime which saves a shit ton of money
And so on...
Re:Universal basic question (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Universal basic question (Score:4, Insightful)
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Do you have a ranch in the middle of nowhere, with only private roads, and the land was not originally granted tof use by the government:? Ie, not originally a land grand or a part of Spanish, French, or British territory? No water service from the city or county, no electricity that uses interstate transmission networks? Completely and totally off the grid?
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You realize folks had roads before income tax right?
For the first thousand years from about 4000 B.C. to 3000 B.C., that *might* be the case, or it may just be that the remnants of roads outlasted any sort of financial records.
That said, during the period in question, the peoples who built those early roads also captured their enemies and used them as slaves. It's easy to build roads if you don't have to pay the people who do it. That does not make this a reasonable way for governments to operate.
For approximately the entire history of roads, and for the e
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Is there a form or checkbox I can fill out so I only pay taxes on things I use?
Do you always know, in advance, *all* the services you will/may use? Probably not, especially emergency services.
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Re:Universal basic question (Score:5, Insightful)
The government uses force to compel me to give them part of that payment.
Wrong you live in society. That business does not exist as it does without all the systems of society behind it. Don't want to pay? Don't have a job
I agreed to a mutually beneficial arrangement with the previous owner of my house to give them money in exchange for it.
Wrong, the only reason that person has "ownership" to even giv eyou is because of society, the state and the judicial system and all the others. Don't want to pay the property tax? Don't own property in that jurisdiction.
I agreed to a mutually beneficial arrangement with the owner of the goods to give them money in exchange for said goods.
See first answer. The reason that store is able to conduct business is due... are you catching a theme here.... the stability and grwoth and laws of the country and society we live in. Don't want to pay that sales tax? Find someone willing to barter with you.
Nobody is forcing you to do those things. What you are saying is you want to be able to take advantage of all that our great society has built maintained and protects and shirk everything else. Unacceptable and downright un-American.
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Wrong you live in society.
That makes the threat and use of force okay? Don't pay their protection money and see what happens.
Wrong, the only reason that person has "ownership" to even giv eyou is because of society, the state and the judicial system and all the others. Don't want to pay the property tax? Don't own property in that jurisdiction.
What a fantasy. The government doesn't exist to confer what are natural rights. We already have the rights. I can own property with or without the government. I own my body regardless of what the government has to say about it. The government is there to protect my natural rights, not stomp on them and simply ratchet up their use of force until a small minority at a politburo is satisfied I've been thoroughly
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That makes the threat and use of force okay?
Did I say that? Who are you arguing with here? https://x.com/raffysoanti/stat... [x.com]
I can own property with or without the government.
Please explain this and how that works and does not devolve into simply "might makes right" when me and 20 of my trusted and armed boys decide that property in fact belongs to us. We got a stamped deed right here (do ignore that the judge is also a buddy of mine, remember neither of us subscribe to central authority here).
Your natural rights are just words without something there to enforce them onto the rest of society. Your
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Unacceptable and downright un-American.
Don't water this down. It's not un-American, it's borderline inhuman. We as a species function with social needs. You can look back thousands of years to tribes to find evidence that we understood the benefits of common work for society. This transcends countries, race, and time.
Being a selfish POS is not un-American, it's just being a selfish POS in general.
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So you're moving to Haiti then? There's no government left to tax you there, it should be paradise. Sorry to see you go and all that blather.
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Are you registered to vote in November?
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This has bee discussed philosophically for centuries, probably millenia. There's schools of though like Hobbses or Locke, Rousseau, etc. The general idea though is that via your participation in said society you are consenting to it. You as the individual are admittedly heavily incetivized to consent but we consent nonetheless.
It's a complex question with no good answers but Hobbes discussed express and inferred contract:
https://pressbooks.bccampus.ca... [bccampus.ca]
Signs of contract are either express or by inferenc
Re:Universal basic question (Score:5, Insightful)
Why the fuck should some fentanyl-addicted menace to society get $1000 that was forcibly taken from me by the government via taxes?
If multi-billion dollar international businesses can get hundreds of billions of dollars when their incompetence and failure comes to light, why can't a person get $1,000?
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You and every other non-fentanyl-addicted citizen in Colorado are also getting $1,000. Unless the majority of citizens in Colorado are homeless people on fentynal, your argument is invalid. But, I understand not wanting to pay the taxes.
At a glance, the $0.0000167 cents you're going to pay on your personal taxes for that person is a lot cheaper than the $0.005 you're going to pay to law enforcement, sanitation contractors, emergency dispatchers, painting contractors, transportation authority contractors, an
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You and every other non-fentanyl-addicted citizen in Colorado are also getting $1,000.
No. Let's not "educate" the silly poster you're replying to with more silliness.
The taxation required (Score:3)
Well, not really. The first time UBI goes out, you need the full amount to distribute (and at least federally and in some states, they can do this by selling debt instruments, rather than forced taxation.) However, a very large part of that will go directly back into the economy, where it will be recovered by the taxing authorit(y|ies) over a fairly short period of
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The libertarian paradise? The concerned citizens overthrew the government so now they're run by autonomous forces assisting the safety and defence of like minded people.
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Something like that yeah. For various reasons there's not really anything by the way of government to get in the way of free enterprise.
They are indeed petty much run by autonomous forces assisting the safety and defence of like minded people. Also enrichment.
Those forces are commonly known as gangs.
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Ah, the irony... However the gangs have morphed into paramilitary forces. Pretty soon they'll be a defacto government, at which point there will be a new revolt of concerned citizens, repeating the cycle and ruining the paradise.
Re:Sure (Score:5, Insightful)
What a weird libertarian daydream. Private industry also has no reason or motivation to help.
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It still beats going through a Communist Revolution in a few decades because AI, robotics, and monopolization all led to a 90% unemployment rate affecting everyone with an IQ lower than 130, as literally all jobs the IQ-disadvantaged can work in can be done better and cheaper by machines, and thus the 0.1% now control 99.9% of all wealth.
Since Bismark it's known Welfare has the core purpose of preventing Revolutions. That's what they're good for: a very cheap form of insurance for the prevention of massive
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The cotton gin, telephone switchboard, steam engine and computers are going to wipe out all the jobs.
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Oh, hi again! Back to the old habit of answering to something different from what was actually said, and pretending to have refuted the original point?
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All of those problems are about equally likely to exist in big corporations too
Re:Haha.. another UBI "experiment" (Score:4, Insightful)
Another misleading experiment that does not actually study "Universal Basic Income", but another, unrelated, question.
"More than 800 people were selected". As soon as you read "selected" and it is not uniform random, you should stop right then and there. It means the study misses the main part Universal. Everyone from a homeless person, to Jeff Bezos should be eligible. Why? Not only it is literally in the definition, it is part of the reasoning behind UBI. The goal is removing perverse incentives in the welfare programs which have arbitrary limits and cutoffs. By giving everyone the same amount regardless (and should probably tax free as well), you remove that variable from the system.
I could go into why it also fails on Basic and Income parts of UBI, but this is already too long.
These studies test some aspects of UBI.
It's difficult and expensive to test everything at once. If you want a larger study of actual UBI, fund it.
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We already funded that during the pandemic, didn't we?
And what were the results again?
- Some people increased their standing, got a new degree, started a business
- Some managed to protect what they had
- Some went downwards, jumped on to a hype wagon (like meme stocks, or transitory jobs) to lose more than what they started with
And what about inflation? How much of it do you expect to be because of massive stimulus?
(And please do not say "greed", cooperation are already greedy, we know that)
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And what about inflation? How much of it do you expect to be because of massive stimulus?
(And please do not say "greed", cooperation are already greedy, we know that)
It's wholly unsatisfying but it's probably correct that both things are true here. Government stimulus absolutely contributed to inflation, there was simply more money circulating. Anyone who denies that trillions injected into the economy did not contribute to inflation can safely be ignored on economics issues. The argument to that is that the benefit was worth the cost, or the alterative was a worse option.
I personally think it was necessary on the most part and we had a large economic "tech debt" acc
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Yes, I mentioned the stimulus was a natural experiment for UBI.
And the results were not liked by anyone. That is why there are not enough studies on its effects (again, as you also mentioned the massive inflation), but rather try to observe "lab condition" parts of it.
(And, yes, we know giving people money no strings attached, will help some of them, while hurting others)
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I also don't think it's appreciated when we talk about these measures that the government took during that time that private industry shed something like 20M+ jobs in the span of like 6 weeks. We immediately had a UE rate 50% higher than 2009. Thats a complete shock the system and I don't think there were any plans for such a thing, I don't know if we expected private industry to be so immediately ruthless in that sense (although we should have). There was definitely some well deserved panic and off the c
Re:Haha.. another UBI "experiment" (Score:5, Insightful)
> "More than 800 people were selected". As soon as you read "selected" and it is not uniform random, you should stop right then and there.
The point of an experiment is to learn more. In this case, they want to learn what people do and how their lives change when you give them no-strings-attached money.
Literally nobody is curious about how someone making millions of dollars a year or more will have their lives changed with an extra $1k/mo or whatever. Jeff Bezos' life will not be altered by what is equivalent to one extra second worth of income per month. Why waste limited funding for the experiment on that?
However, you find someone who is unemployed and/or homeless, and give them even a little bit of money, and it can completely alter their way of life. Honestly the only surprising thing about this study is that people are still surprised that giving homeless people homes (or in this case, the money to afford a home) makes them not homeless anymore.
> The goal is removing perverse incentives in the welfare programs which have arbitrary limits and cutoffs.
And that is exactly what it did; There were no perverse incentives of cutoffs among the test group. Again - and I cannot stress this enough - nobody gives a shit what a wealthy person will do with with a negligible amount of extra cash.
> I could go into why it also fails on Basic and Income parts of UBI,
I bet you couldn't...
> We had a real life, natural experiment during the pandemic. (Almost). Again, almost everyone received a $1,000 check per month
Oh boy, the word "Almost" is doing a lot of work here!
=Smidge=
Re:800 is not 341M (Score:4, Informative)
UBI can in theory scale up but I think what get's lost on the idea at large scale is that it's supposed to be a replacement for existing welfare programs, not a supplement to them.
As Milton Friedman theorized about Negative-Income-Tax: [wikipedia.org]
The alleviation of poverty was mentioned in Capitalism and Freedom, where Friedman argued that in 1961 the US government spent around 33 billion on welfare payments e.g. old age assistance, social security benefit payments, public housing, etc. excluding mainly veterans' benefits and other allowances. Friedman recalculated the spending between 57 million consumers in 1961 and came to the conclusion that it would have financed 6000 dollars per consumer to the poorest 10% or 3000 dollars to the poorest 20%. Friedman also found out that a program raising incomes of the poorest 20% to the lowest income of the rest would cost the US government less than half of the amount spent in 1961