10mo ago

Some people are being given thousands of dollars with no strings attached in universal basic income trials. They mostly spend the cash wisely.

www.businessinsider.com Some people are being given thousands of dollars with no strings attached in universal basic income trials. They mostly spend the cash wisely.

A common question about universal basic income, or UBI, is how people spend the money, but early trials are showing promising results.

Some people are being given thousands of dollars with no strings attached in universal basic income trials. They mostly spend the cash wisely.

Economics @lemmy.world

MicroWave @lemmy.world

10mo ago

Some people are being given thousands of dollars with no strings attached in universal basic income trials. They mostly spend the cash wisely.

www.businessinsider.com /how-people-spend-universal-basic-income-ubi-food-housing-transportation-2024-4

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BasicIncome @lemmy.world

testeronious @lemmy.world

10mo ago

Some people are being given thousands of dollars with no strings attached in universal basic income trials. They mostly spend the cash wisely.

www.businessinsider.com /how-people-spend-universal-basic-income-ubi-food-housing-transportation-2024-4

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128 comments

Weird how every one of these tests shows most people use the money to better themselves instead of wasting it all like right wing media would say.
Super weird.
- It’s projection. “I’d blow it all on coke and hookers, so obviously everyone else will too!”
  
  The people with the most money do the least amount of work and call everyone else "lazy."
  
  I think it's also just a side effect of their place in life. If you have disposable income already, a few thousand dollars is more disposable income. You can't picture what poverty is really like when you're a few thousand short on bills for the year every year and so you have to give up meals etc to make ends meet.
  
  Well, if only one person does spend it on hookers and blow, it'll be the only headline...such is our news media.
  
  It’s worse than that.
  Conservative ideology is based on the fundamental belief that society is a thin veneer over our base instincts towards self-destruction, and the only way to maintain the façade is with a strictly enforced hierarchy in which power is maintained by a ‘deserving’ ruling class. Conservatism was born during the bloody death of feudalism, in which Ye Olde Ruling Class learnt they must repackage their ideals tied in a bow of capitalism if they’d have any hope of maintaining their wealth and control.
  It’s no coincidence that many of the same familial names holding power carried forward through that transitional period. It’s also no coincidence that the basis of much of that power is rooted in systems of religion.
  The core belief it puts forth is that without a strict hierarchy in which every person knows their place, society will collapse into chaos. That if you’re ‘deserving’, the system will grant you comfort, and if you’re struggling and destitute, that is your lot.
  It’s the ‘just world’ hypothesis, and deviating from it isn’t just bad, it can unravel the very foundations of society. It’s why someone like Obama being elected to the highest office was such an affront. It wasn’t just racism (though that was a big part of it), but perceived as a very dangerous subversion of the system.
  The people who subscribe to this would disagree, and they can’t consciously articulate any of this. It’s in the subtext of their existence – they absorb it via osmosis, through their religious upbringing in the form of fables, and via cultural maxims surrounding family values and patriotism.
  If it were just projection or logical fallacy, it could be reasoned with. But it isn’t and it can’t be.
- It's almost like an individual is the person who knows what is best for themselves, instead of an agency that has never met them and only knows them through means-testing.
- Common sense dictates that's exactly what would happen. The super rich and right wingnuts lack that particular attribute tho.
  
  Yeah but that's because they're way more likely to read Ayn Rand than Thomas Paine.
- Right wing media has the same formula for everything and it somehow keeps working with their brainwashed base. Phrase good things for society to sound bad and repeat it over and over. Don’t use facts, use fear and emotions to achieve this. Anytime an issue is caused by a power center the right supports, blame the individual. Find examples of the issue negatively affecting a person that the base will dislike or not identify with (typically a minority) to prop up blaming the individual. Project any negative attacks from other ideological parties back onto that party brazenly and repeat it over and over. Play the victim if anyone tries to question your motives or actually push back. Make showy gestures of support for traditional value social issues to make your base feel you are one of them (as long as they don’t affect the true agenda of advancing the goals of businesses and the rich). It’s the same playbook for 40+ years and it’s still working.

Oh look UBI experiment number 1578 says the same thing.
And people will still ignore it and pretend UBI is unproven.
- Except of course none of these are UBI experiments. The U has been completely forgotten.
  They're trying to water down the idea of UBI to renaming "benefits". There's only one class of people who would find this advantageous, and it ain't us.
  The reality is that we won't know for sure how it works across an entire population until a small country changes its tax structure to make this possible across everyone. Would people quit shit jobs more often? Would minimum wage be abolished? How much work is considered saturation when all the crap is stripped away?
  Real actual UBI would be an enormous societal change (I believe for the better), and I'm not sure that giving a handful of poor people some money and watching them spend it on things they need to survive is particularly worthwhile. We know that. It's everyone else that might throw a spanner in the works.
  
  Ahhh the, "the experiment is impossible" argument. Except no one ever argues that the math is wrong once the self sustaining tax system is explained. Because it's really quite simple. So we don't need an experiment for that do we?
  We look at people's employment status and their financial literacy. And this is study number 1542 proving that it would not cause massive drop out from employment and people are capable of budgeting the extra money responsibly.
  
  This has been my primary question about UBI: if landlords know that everybody has an extra $1000 per month, what stops them from raising rent by exactly that amount?
  My biggest concern with UBI is that it would be great for a couple of years, and then the greedy fingers of capitalism would find a way to start clawing it back. I don’t see how UBI works without including a bunch of protections to keep the newly financially stable populace from being exploited again.
- But people won't want to slave away for my megacorp for starvation wages if we pay them not to work!
- Experiments like these only proves "BI". Still waiting for someone to explain how the "U" is supposed to work.
  
  There are multiple ideas, all of which have merits and drawbacks because this is reality.
  Piss easy to find them yourself and not pretend like you actually know what you're on about.
  
  Simply put you give everyone X amount. We'll use 100 because it's easy. Then you tax it back on a sliding scale. At the low end they keep the entire 100 dollars. At the high end it is all paid back. In the middle you'd get 100 dollars and owe 50 back in taxes.
  This actually removes a lot of the administrative overhead and allows UBI to circulate a lot more money than you're actually paying into it.
  Less simply, I'll let this guy explain it.

Remember, if these trials can cause change then EVERYONE gets a little extra. And it's cheaper than our current welfare system. AND it actually helps people instead of putting them in a place where getting help ends their desperately needed support. It's a win for everyone except the "I struggled and so should you" crowd which means its an absolute victory for everyone that matters!
- What makes it worse, those people almost never actually struggled. Otherwise they may have learned to suffer some empathy.
  
  I’ve watched someone start to empathize and then talk themselves out of it so many times I’ve lost faith in someone’s ability to learn it.

I remember when the first wave of stimulus checks went out and a bunch of car dealerships suddenly raised the price on their cars by $1000. UBI would be great, but if we don't reign in the corporate-apologist economy first, every product will suddenly be more expensive so they can bleed people of that extra money.
- Oh this is an awesome comment. I love talking about this part of UBI
  I studied Economics in school and dived deep into UBI. Some interesting facts/research for you:
  (Fun fact) The US already has UBI, just a super watered down version. It's called EITC (Earned Income Tax Credit). It's a Nixon brainchild and was thought they could use UBI to reduce the inefficiencies of such a big government. I.e. get one nice UBI check that covers healthcare, retirement, insurance, education, food, housing, etc. blah blah blah, and you can shut down a bunch of federal government agencies that are pretty inefficient.
  The car dealership thing happened because of a variable that we often discount: information (or knowledge). The car dealership knew exactly how much money was coming out and who got it (mostly), and they knew it was a one-off not an ongoing thing. A lot of UBI macro research guesses that we'd see some small inflationary pressure at the beginning when it's new, but then return to normal as it becomes part of every day life. And even if it does, the benefits strongly outweigh the benefits and the Fed has other tools to reign in inflation to balance the affect out.
  Caveat, this knowledge is 20+ years old. I may be way off base.
  
  Just a heads-up, you accidentally wrote "the benefits strongly outweigh the benefits" instead of (presumably) "the benefits strongly outweigh the drawbacks."
  
  Sweet! I sure hope the inflation wouldn't completely invalidate the extra income, but I still have very little faith in American capitalism allowing for there to be money not immediately being funneled into the bank accounts of the 1%.
  
  This second point is going to be impossible to avoid when everyone knows ubi is a thing.
  In my mind I see a huge displacement coming for a large number of workers who get ousted by AI. There will still be jobs, but far fewer in each discipline. Think office workers and coders etc. Once ai matures and integrates, we are going to have millions of people without jobs as companies cut 80 to 90% in each department. UBI will be necessary and everyone who sells shit will know that it exists and we are back to square one because they increase prices. It seems hard to avoid.
  To be clear, I'm all for UBI. It seems like its pretty much unavoidable as productivity per worker continues to sky rocket and wages remain the same.
- There have been UBI trials before and they found that it didn't lead to price increases to any great degree.
  
  Yes but not widespread UBI, I think it would be slightly different like the reference to the stimulus checks where nearly everyone obtained it and it was widely circulated information.
  
  The issue being we've never seen an actual trial of UBI. It's always some sample of the population for a known limited time. UBI as a concept doesn't lend itself to "trials", we won't really know until at least a number of entire cities are indefinitely implementing UBI, and probably would be 3 or 4 years before people start actually acting like it is indefinite.
- Same thing happened to college financial aid. The more aid given the more colleges raised the prices.
- This is a big problem with getting rid of taxes on the working class, or citizens, which as someone trying to NOT exist in society as much as possible. I'm all for, you're telling me i dont have to think about property tax anymore? sign me the fuck up!
  But, unless you fix that shit, it literally will not give you more spending money. Corpos will pay you less, things will cost more, entertainment will cost more. etc...

The entire concept of a scientific study to determine whether people spend this money wisely is bunk, because it’s nobody else’s business how a person’s money gets spent and whether it’s categorized as “wise”.
If we assume that there is an objective, ie scientifically valid, definition of “wise spending”, then we should just go centrally planned communism because the whole point of free markets is allowing people to enact their own value structure in their spending.
The whole idea of basic income, as opposed to all these other services, is based on the same idea: that people’s money is their own.
This study seems nice, but it frames this whole question the wrong way. The whole concept of money is that people have a right to make their own economic choices, regardless of what some centralized authority thinks is “wise”.
- That's not true. There is a wise spending. Or to be more correct there is a foolish spending. Gambling your money away for example is f* stupid.
  
  The point is that the government really shouldn't have any say in which is which. I agree with you that gambling all your money away is a poor financial choice, but that doesn't mean that I think we should ban gambling, because many people enjoy it responsibly. Teaching people financial literacy, and treating addictions is the solution, not policing how people use their UBI.
  
  now let's say you heavily tax gambling at a state level. Suddenly you get more tax kickback from that UBI even though nothing particularly effective was done with it.
  I mean, theoretically, gambling itself, as a tax revenue source is actually pretty good. It's money going to a good cause, even though technically wasted.
- Also it's a huge difference if you get universal income for life or just for a limited time and have to provide for yourself again after that
- Word.
- i actually think in the concept of distributing tax money as UBI, that this is actually a very valid point.
  It doesn't matter how it's spent, you can spend it on a fucking 5 thousand dollar bottle of wine, or you could spend it on food because you are broke as fuck. It makes no difference to either party, that money is still spent and utilized in the economy.
  Where that money goes after however? Now that's a different story, go ask bezos.
- The entire concept of a scientific study to determine whether people spend this money wisely is bunk
  For anything like this to actually happen people will have to vote for it.
  1st you are incorrect because this wont happen if the people arnt educated on what happens when this system is introduced.
  2nd Your correct because you can do all the studies in the world and gen pop would still be too easily manipulated to ever try something out of the box like this.
- Unsure I agree with this. I agree it's not black and white but for example if someone spent it on drinking binges or gambling is that really just their business? The money could have gone to something else.
  
  The cost of the adminstration to make sure no one spends it driving and gambling is more expensive than the money that would be lost drinking and gambling.
  If you do away with the adminstration you can spend that money helping more people who need it. If someone wants to waste that money not helping themselves that is their choice, more people still get helped with the same amount of cost.
- Yeah no, there definitely is wise spending.
  Spending all your money at the casino, spending all your money on alcohol, etc. That's majority different from spending money on food, shelter, an education, etc.
  There's also a difference between spending money that was given to you vs spending money that you did something to earn. That's part of why welfare is such a contentious program in the country. "I want them to have food not half a dozen kids, 17 pets, brand new phones, and cigarettes."
  The fact of the matter is, most recipients don't spend the money on that and they do spend it wisely just like the folks did here.
  But yeah, if you're asking for me or anyone else to give up a portion of our salaries to create universal basic income, etc, it needs to be proven to be a net benefit, and how "wisely" that money is being spent is important.
  We wouldn't rejoice at a politician taking more money from the public fund for a personal trip to the Bahamas. If it's shown this money just becomes vacation money, it's clearly not needed and frankly shouldn't be given.
  Understanding how the money is spent is important.
  
  The fact of the matter is, most recipients don't spend the money on that and they do spend it wisely just like the folks did here.
  And the fact of the matter is a lot of money is wasted on administration making sure those people who wouldn't waste their money aren't wasting their money.
  Think about it this way: for X amount of tax dollars you could help 10 families in need and cover the administration costs to make sure they are spending it wisely.
  For the same X amount of dollars you could help 20 families in need with no administrative oversight, and 1 of those families doesn't need or misuses the money.
  In the second scenario you're still helping 9 more families that need it at no additional cost.
  
  status quo is worse

The conclusion is basically of course a UBI works - you give most people extra money, they'll spend it on things they need and things that are worthwhile rather than blowing it all on vices.
It's something we see time and time again, and anyone who genuinely believes otherwise is either rich or blind.
- I’ve always felt that the push back comes from people who assume others are at the same level of means as they are. A lot of people don’t understand food insecurity, or that “you have a car” doesn’t mean the oil was changed this year.
- Or antisocial in the psychological sense, ie "I see it, and I'm not rich, but people suffering under me makes me feel superior, gives me the dopamine rush of schadenfreude, and I'll just go ahead and make shit up in my head about why I believe they deserve their suffering so I can just revel in how much better I'm doing guilt free."
  As an American, its a tragic reality that 10s of millions of us are proud sadists. Not entirely our fault, our owners gained their fortunes by not caring about how their profiteering hurt others, ane they propagandize us to worship and deify them and their mindset of If I hurt you to benefit myself, its just business.
- The thing that keeps it from working is the cost. None of these experiments test the U in UBI.
  Giving even a measly $10k in UBI to every US (for example) citizen of working age would cost over $2 trillion annually.
  The sum of all welfare spending last year was $1 trillion. So, the common argument that cutting other programs to replace it with UBI holds no water--cutting all of it only gets you halfway to a paltry sum that's far below the poverty line, and the whole reason we're talking about UBI to begin with is because people don't feel that those programs do enough to help the impoverished.
  What about military spending? The sum of all defense spending last year was $800 billion. Cutting 100% of it (which would be objectively stupid for reasons I hope wouldn't need explaining) won't get you there either.
  What about taking the billionaires' wealth? The total estimated net worth of all US billionaires is $5.2 trillion. Even if you could wave a magic wand and convert all of this "net worth" 1:1 into cash, that still funds this shitty tiny hypothetical $10k UBI for less than 3 years.
  We are simply not in a state where true UBI is even close to financially viable.
  
  so, basically, according to your example, we could take yearly welfare spending, assuming it's 1 trillion. Every year, delete an entire section of bureacratic bullshit, and then everyone would get 5 grand annually.
  Seems pretty cut and dry to me.
  Now to be fair, that is all of welfare, so not exactly ideal, but still. It's a pretty manageable concept in that regard.

"People spend money on basic needs"

Personally I have never considered that there would be a risk of the UBI recipients to spend the money unwisely.
People needing UBI have a very long standing experience of not getting what they need to minimise their losses on a daily basis, so of course they will invest in that first. They all probably have a ranked, itemised list of all that would help. And I'm willing to bet that said list, on average, would be at least 80% correct (the 20% being influenced by personal sensitivities and beliefs, like a vegan person spending more on plastic based clothing, that wears out faster).
People not needing UBI already have more money than they can find intelligent uses for, and so they already are spending money unwisely.
Nah, the part that concerns me is that as soon as we all get UBI, and I do mean the very next day, rents are gonna rise by 33% of the amount of the UBI, the cost of food will rise by 33% of the amount of the UBI, and the cost of all the rest combined will rise by 34% of the amount of the UBI. It will be back to square one, and all we will have achieved will be funnelling our taxes straight into the pockets of for profit, private megacorporations.
We need to "fix" that megacorporation problem first.
- You mean rents will go up by 100% of the UBI, food will go up by 100% of the UBI, and healthcare will go up by 10,000% because it's a day ending in the letter Y.
- Start a competing business that doesn't make any profit.
  
  How can you be so thick? If the problem was with profits, we'd have solved it essentially on day one of capitalism.
  No, profits are good, it means you can live from your work.
  The problem here is greed. And you know what? Unlike with finding out that you're too stupid to get this, finding out where profits stop and greed start is a hard problem. Not individually, because that is about when a business owner starts paying their workforce less and starts buying stupid useless crap to show their status or grow their comfort much beyond the average... No, systematically. Because differences in management style mean that sometimes it makes sense to shrink everyone's income (including the CEO's) to be able to address challenges. But you can't easily tell that apart from greed and dodging taxes.
  
  a competiting UBI business?

Here in the US, our society is in practice neutral towards human life. We (usually) don't actively kill each other, but we're completely comfortable letting our fellow citizens die under a freeway of exposure for the crime of not producing capital value for our owner class.
Instituting something like UBI would be a significant step towards finding congruence with our currently false, empty rhetoric of valuing human life.
Untl then, we as a people can and will continue to pretend that we do, but again in practice, it means the same as saying we value the candy bar wrapper we just threw in the trash.

@testeronious
Some people are being given thousands of dollars with no strings attached in universal basic income trials. They spend the cash.
FTFY

the amount given should be based on some cost of living index just like the minimum wage should be

The crazy thing is that this kind of thing is way closer to actual socialism than any historical society has gotten, but the tankies hate it because it doesn't have enough violent fan service.
- It's because they're akin to the pigs in Animal Farm. They don't give a shit about the proletariat. They just wanna be in charge forever and kill anyone who points that out.

there is no try. do. ubi is not ubi and its benefits only really show when its everyone. One of the main points is for it to go to those who need it when they need it without a whole lot of beuracracy (those needing it being those who are in a position to not be making much money and therefor their tax burden will be less than they recieve)

Don't give away money to the poor! They'll just waste it spending $36 billion on a poorly thought out and woefully executed meta-universe! Only corporations can be trusted to make efficient decisions!

128 comments