- A guaranteed-basic-income program in Austin gave people $1,000 a month for a year.
- Most of the participants spent the no-strings-attached cash on housing, a study found.
- Participants who said they could afford a balanced meal also increased by 17%.
A guaranteed-basic-income plan in one of Texas’ largest cities reduced rates of housing insecurity. But some Texas lawmakers are not happy.
Austin was the first city in Texas to launch a tax-payer-funded guaranteed-income program when the Austin Guaranteed Income Pilot kicked off in May 2022. The program served 135 low-income families, each receiving $1,000 monthly. Funding for 85 families came from the City of Austin, while philanthropic donations funded the other 50.
The program was billed as a means to boost people out of poverty and help them afford housing. “We know that if we trust people to make the right decisions for themselves and their families, it leads to better outcomes,” the city says on its website. “It leads to better jobs, increased savings, food security, housing security.”
While the program ended in August 2023, a new study from the Urban Institute, a Washington, DC, think tank, found that the city’s program did, in fact, help its participants pay for housing and food. On average, program participants reported spending more than half of the cash they received on housing, the report said.
Wouldn’t this lead you to postulate that the housing crisis in America is real and out of control when the money you give them goes right into housing?
Is this how they intend to fleece America? Give people a guaranteed income paid for by their tax dollars, so it can go right into government subsidized housing, owned and run by a shadow company that the politicians and their buddies just happen to be on the board of?
Honestly if it means guaranteed housing(which it doesn’t) then I’d be down with that. It’s better than getting fleeced with no house.
Have you ever been inside of current government funded housing?
No, but I have to imagine it’s superior to a cardboard box or a bridge
It’s fine, but it depends on upkeep. Just like any other housing. It was a good idea, but needs funding (like roads, bridges, etc.).
Plenty of people live in unmaintained apartments owned by slumlords, but nobody’s saying “look at how bad private housing is!” Few people (dummies) say “look how bad public roads are!” and advocate private toll roads and bridges.
We have all the money we need to fund such projects, provided we stop running eight wars at once abroad and then paying for other countries’ wars too.
You are thinking too small and distracting from the main point here. From a strictly economic standpoint, we have enough money to do all these things.
Uh yeah actually. It’s not a luxury apartment but it’s not bad either.
You must not live in Chicago.
@BobGnarley @Maggoty
Have you ever been without housing? I’m assuming not or you wouldn’t have made that argument.Being bad in one place doesn’t mean it’s bad everywhere. I’m sorry you had a bad experience but elsewhere the government functions as a renter of last resort with properties all over the place. What’s bad is the high rise projects that were made to corral poor minorities and cut them off from the rest of society.
Congratulations, you managed to make people having a place to live sound not just bad, but sinister.
“Kapitalet höjer hyrorna, och Staten bostadsbidragen.”
The Swedes were calling out this game back in 1972.
Of course, our solution was to just stop subsidizing housing altogether and screw over poor people.
Whoa there, we already know the future of subsidized housing is corporate towns. Why give it to the people when you can just give it to their rich boss instead?
I feel guaranteed income amount should be based on government contracted rates for places providing something akin to a single occupancy dorm room. so food and shelter in a basic way is covered.
Who’s tax dollars, it has to be a wealth transfer or the scheme won’t work.
Texas doesn’t have an income tax but it has incredibly high property taxes. In a very real way, this program is literally funded by taxing the super wealthy, including foreign investors. If you are a foreign national that owns a condo in one of the downtown highrises, you still pay property taxes.
Source: Former Austinite.
I had no idea there were so many people who were against a UBI on Lemmy. I’m honestly surprised.
There’s a lot of effort to deny any previous UBI experiment as having even been done. Heck the top reply to your comment here denies this is even a UBI experiment. The line is usually the only way to do the experiment is to do it and that’s the Socialisms so we can’t ever know, sorry poors.
Well, since the “U” in UBI stands for “universal”, and since the group of people who received this money were selected because they were very poor, then this is not a UBI experiment. This is just a welfare program.
Still could be considered an experiment just with a control factor being “the poors”
I’ve been surprised and super disappointed by a lot of the views I’ve been seeing in Lemmy comments lately. Anti homeless, judging addiction, fairly socially conservative, buying into the whole retail theft narrative, and the worst has been the misogyny framed as “realism” or some shit.
I don’t know, it’s not for me.
I’ve always found people have the most shit opinions if it’s a post popular on Lemmy.world
I’m new to lemmy overall are there some places with better political discourse on here?
I’ve been lazy on Lemmy and just stopped searching for new lemmyverses after I hopped off reddit. But I really doubt you’re gonna find good political discourse on the Internet. I’m really disappointed everywhere I turn and I’d rather participate in real life action than argue during the few free hours I have.
What is the retail theft narrative ?
The “narrative” is that theft hurts stores and stealing from stores in low-income areas causes them to close which leads to food deserts
Just pay attention to the instances the comments come from. This account is federated with .world and I am always seeing the most awful takes on here and it seems like most of the time it comes from users there.
I have another account not federated with .world, but it is with pretty much everything else. There’s fewer comments (rarely over 100) but it’s usually actual discussion and not revolving around anti-humanitarian practices.
It’s not a guarantee, but it seems very very high.
It makes sense…I think the FOSS/anti-big tech world brings together a weird mix of far-left socialists and also libertarian types (hence the anti UBI sentiment)
IDK, I’m a leftist, and am skeptical about UBI because it’s more of a free-market approach to solving a problems, rather than just directly solving problems. I.e. the government could just build more and better homeless housing, and expand section 8 to cover more of the cost and more people. I’m a bit afraid UBI would be used as an excuse to cut social programs, in a similar way that school vouchers are used to cut spending on education and leave families paying for what the vouchers don’t cover.
Bingo. A UBI is attractive because the people that keep the economy rolling are nearly completely unable to access what the economy produces. Why are we trying to keep this broken mess limping along with a UBI? The economy is designed to produce poverty and a UBI will do very little to change that fact.
Plus lemmy has just as many shills and bots as reddit, that or it is the ultimate echo chamber, since you can ser pretty much copy paste answers on any controversial topics. The last one seems to be “LLMs are not real AI” (which, they are. Just not AGI)
I’d prefer decommodification of housing but UBI is probably a step in the right direction.
This isn’t UBI though. It’s welfare. It just proves that people will use welfare support responsibly. A real test of UBI would be to give everyone in a community, not just a small pool of low income families the same amount (among other things). That ain’t going to happen.
Fine, then people here are anti-welfare. Either way, it’s a surprisingly conservative attitude.
I agree but some of the arguments here have a hint of truth in them such as the whole landlord thing. I think a lot of folk are wary of anything that sounds UBI related because it boils everything down to ‘one simple fix’. Programs like this work, but they’re only one piece in the puzzle such as taking housing off the market, higher taxes on the wealthy etc. I know you know this stuff. The UBI crowd takes theses studies and uses them to say ‘UBI works’ or ‘UBI can work’ even though it’s not UBI.
The UBI crowd takes theses studies and uses them to say ‘UBI works’ or ‘UBI can work’ even though it’s not UBI.
That’s a bit disengenuous. Of course people acknowledge that economic policy is difficult to experiment with.
People serious about UBI talk about phasing it in over a long period of time, in lieu of “experiments”. For example in Australia we already have refundable tax rebates (I’m sure everyone has these I just don’t know what they’re called), all you’d have to do would be to introduce a $1,000 refundable tax rebate and increase that by $1,000 each year until you get to a reasonable UBI. If, along the way the data showed deleterious effects then you could correct or discontinue.
It’s been done at a town level before, with the same results
https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2020/2/19/21112570/universal-basic-income-ubi-map
You’re surprised that people who are far enough to the right to support genocide would oppose UBI?
It not that people are against everyone having the basics, it is that it mathematically makes no sense. As soon as you give everyone this money, not just a small trial you’ll see that it is immediately eaten in inflation, rent etc.
Much better is to make the first $1000 dollars not necessary. Free staple foods, free healthcare, free low tier usage on utilities, free local public transport.
Giving people $1000 means they can spend it specifically on the things they need. They might need to pay off a healthcare debt with that $1000 far more than they need low tier usage on their utilities.
I think a better idea that universal basic income is universal basic services. Give everyone equal access to healthcare, food, housing, etc. Not jobs, though. Giving everyone a job leads to creating jobs that don’t need to exist just to make sure everyone has work. The USSR had guaranteed employment and that got to where you’d have to go through three different clerks at the supermarket to buy a pound of meat. Also, the State decided what was and wasn’t “work”. Oh, you’re a painter? You think the State will pay you to paint? That’s nice. Pick up that shovel and paint a ditch in the dirt. Oh, you are poet? I have a poem for you, comrade!
Roses are red, violets are blue, load those crates into that truck, or it’s the gulag for you!
I’ve been a proponent for UBI for a long time however after reading your comments I agree with you.
In reality, I’ve advocated for UBI because I feel the govt should provide these basic services. However in reality UBI does just seem like a means to an end.
We really should just redefine what “utilities” are (including internet, phone, public transit tickets, etc) and then provide basic access to utilities for free.
That would require an entire reworking of our economic system, whereas giving everyone $1000 a month would not.
But there’s no difference between giving someone $1000 for food and providing that food for free.
Either way the food is paid for by someone, whether the government hands over the check and then passes out the food, adding a layer of inefficiency, or the government hands out the check and the people buy the food, offering freedom of choice.
I feel somewhat against it simply because I don’t think it’s necessary once you make a certain point of money. Do people making six figures really need an extra 10% or less on top of that?
Means testing has been shown to cost significantly more. That’s why I’m a fan of universal programs and not welfare programs (like the one in this study).
I would argue someone making six figures getting 10% more will have a big impact still. Give everyone the benefit, even billionaires. Using your argument, the billionaire won’t care about getting an extra $1,000 - that’s nothing to them. But no one feels “cheated” because you arbitrarily put the limit, and you know no one else is cheating the system because there is no system to cheat!
Paying for universal programs would require changing our tax structure, which I’m also supportive of.
That’s a good point. I hadn’t considered about testing costs and people feeling cheated and people actually cheating.
I didn’t feel strongly against it and I’m willing to change my mind, and you brought up some good points.
It does sound like a good idea tbh.
For an anecdotal example, when I was in my 20s I worked with an old lady at a fish market who had to strictly regulate the number of hours she worked in a year because she couldn’t afford to make above a certain amount of money. If she went into the next higher tax bracket, she would’ve been kicked off her social security, and regardless of how many hours she worked, wouldn’t be able to make up for the lost money.
Another interesting benefit I’ve heard of from a similar study that gave everybody above a certain age in a town $1,000 a month, but was focused on the impact to the labor pool, was that almost everybody continued to work except for in two categories: pregnant women and high-school students. This coincided with an increase in the average grades of high-school students, the number of kids who graduated, and the number of kids who continued on to college. The theory was that the kids who would normally have to work to help put food on the table were instead able to focus on their studies.
No, they don’t, but I think the idea is that the process of factually verifying someone’s actual income isn’t worth the waste of just giving it to them anyway.
And if everyone got this, rents would mysteriously increase by $1000 …
Fuck these landlords.
For profit housing and for profit healthcare are abominations.
Totally agreed.
Don’t forget for-profit prisons.
Rents are being driven up by illegal collaboration anyways. This just like the inflation argument against minimum wage increases. Prices going up is not an argument against giving people more money. Prices will go up anyways.
Or you could just have prices not go up, and also give people value through strong nationalized programs i.e. public healthcare, public transport, nationalized housing…
Price controls have uhh not gone well historically. Usually they lead to an explosion in the black market and a supply shortage in the normal market. Things stop falling off of trucks because the entire truck is gone. So until we figure out a better way of transferring goods, we’re stuck with money and prices that can be manipulated.
But I agree with the rest of that. Strong government social supports are a great way to rein in the private markets. Having trouble with housing availability? What if Housing and Urban Development (HUD) buys land, builds something, and rents the units at cost? Why is that not an option? Why isn’t there an Online USA University run by Department of Education? Is an opt in government health plan really that scary?
Can we not have one nice thing?
I was not talking about price controls. I don’t know of the USA but government buybacks of housing stock have helped relieve some of the pressure in Europe as well as purpose built high quality housing like in Vienna.
Ah yes that would be a good thing to do. In the US though people think the government can’t be allowed to compete with private business. So we’ll never have anything like that
Unfortunately :/
This trope is dumb and you should feel bad for repeating it. It shows a truly shocking lack of insight into even the most basic middle-school-level economic principles.
In germany we had a 10k€ bonus for all buyers of an electric car. After the bonus ended, all the cars suddenly cost 7k-10k less in about 2 months.
I would argue that this is an example of how the reduction of consumer demand caused companies to lower their prices, unless there was an increase of 7k-10k when the program started as well.
So a subsidy on a specific product category affected prices on that category? That doesn’t prove anything about UBI. UBI isn’t a subsidy on rent—or a subsidy at all—so your example is irrelevant.
EXACTLY! Which is why my Rent has NOT gone in up YEARS!
We all know that if this was a permanent part of the program, every revolving bill (mortgage, utilties, etc.) would all of a sudden rise to get a piece of that extra income. But because this was a temporary program, it probably only increased by the normal rate. So people mostly got a chance to use it without businesses getting greedier.
To all the people saying “hur dur it’s just giving money to landlords”:
-
No it’s not. People who would not have had housing were able to have it. If you think that’s a bad thing because some landlords got paid in the process, you seriously need to have your moral compass checked.
-
To those explicitly linking this to the idea (which is often cited but never backed up with evidence) that landlords (and mysteriously no other segment of the economy) will medically capture 110% of the value of any possible UBI program: This is not the evidence you’ve been lacking. The money wasn’t given to everyone as it would be in a universal basic income program. It was given to people who were struggling. Of fucking course people who were homeless or near homeless spent the money on rent. The fact that people who become able to afford housing mostly choose to spend their money on housing just tells you how much people value having a place to live. It says nothing about how money would flow in a full scale system.
If it proofs anything its that when the poor are given free money people prioritize having a stable, healthy lifestyle.
Should be pretty standard if they want a society worth of peoples contributions.
Has your rent gone up, ever? Thats what’s gonna happen with a UBI. Your landleech thinks you can pay more, so he can charge more.
Meanwhile government (nationalized) housing programs actually work and are cost efficient.
Rent went up 7 percent this year across my state, and it’s already out of control to the point people are paying 4500 a month for a tiny one bedroom in the main city.
Don’t think everyone getting a thousand extra bucks is going to change that drastically. And anyway, if landlords do do that, put in a rent cap in addition.
Then your bills will rise instead. Whoever can cash in - will do so. It is extremely naive to think it won’t become a wealth transfer from the state (taxpayers) to the rich and corpos, like corporate welfare.
Rent price caps are something, but stopgaps aren’t what we should aim for.
You seem to willingly not wrap your head around the fact I’m not berating UBI because I prioritize the economy over the people like a conservative, fearmongering about inflation etc., but because UBI is prioritizing the economy over the people itself by rejecting the far more effective solution of nationalizing necessities (e.g. housing, utilities) and cutting out the profiteering middle men entirely instead of paying them on the grounds that it’s scary socialism.
Market solutions don’t work on problems that are inherent to capitalism. I wish you could see that.
Has your rent gone up, ever? Thats what’s gonna happen with a UBI.
You haven’t said anything to establish a connection between your question and your statement. You’re using the structure of a rational argument but your only evidence is “trust me bro”. Fuck that and fuck you for trying to use sophistry.
My evidence is supply and demand, if it works, then that is what will happen with UBI. Market based solutions do not work for problems inherent to capitalism itself.
-
The sad thing is that high cost of housing is entirely unnecessary exploitation anyway. Just pass a law that transfers all house and land ownership into collective hands and erases all dept based on houses. I bet the vast majority of people would vote for it lol.
Who’s collective hands?
I Holland we have woning bouw organisaties That are BY law obliged to offer services and structured management, checked by impartial state department and who can be relieved of function (transfering the properties to another organization or splitting them up etcetera). Yes, needs to be overview, laws and such. Maybe even subsidies for new buildings.
But NO PROFIT ANYWHERE.
Not for public basic housing. Come on, do we really wanna admit RUZZIA and CHINA beat us on this?
Yeah, but there’s a difference between a local housing authority, and what that guy is suggesting, which appears to be “the state now owns all property, including stuff I’ve already paid for”.
The only people that would vote for that are people that don’t vote.
I’m all for the government taking the role of building new houses everywhere, in vast numbers in order to stabilise and eventually reduce prices. We used to have this in the UK, they were called council houses and the local government rented them out at reasonable prices. Then Maggie Thatcher Milk Snatcher got in power and sold them all off, under the guise of letting people buy the property they were renting. This isn’t a bad idea in itself, but there was another edge to that sword. No more properties would be allowed to be build with the proceeds. In effect it became a state sell-off. It’s been fucked ever since.
No, it would BE BOUGHT by government at fair price (they know the fair price, just look your houses tax bill)
Or built by them.
And then rented out with a certain maximum rental price per Sq Mt like 10$ so 50sq m (500sq ft) = 500$/month
Most importantly, they would be obliged to make it Energy efficient by their contract with the state so much lower electric and heating bill, maybe even topped off with solar, would be small percentage of a new building but cut costs for actual people.
Not saying it’s perfect in Holland (they have shortages because no new land available to build new social housing projects), but it sure works!
I kept it deliberately vague, but the main idea is democracy and public accountability, and that we need to take certain things out of corporate hands. Because it only optimizes for profit and not for social benefit or the nation’s benefit. Basically all the fundamental needs of the people need to become a kind of guaranteed basic right - food water shelter education and communication. And there could be multiple different models.
There are widespread and established neoliberal myths now that only “private” institutions can work efficiently and unbiased. Definitely based on Thatcher, Reagan, Kohl, and then perpetrated by the “third way” leftists that declared democracy as an inefficient tool to order society.
But you can establish institutions with more useful motivations and that are more intelligent to withstand things like shortages. With things like healthcare you actually do want less efficiency, e.g. in a pandemic.
Right now it seems unthinkable, but with the climate and other crisis looming it might become feasible. At least if we have the actual ideology “at the ready”.
Yeah, surely nothing could go wrong with that plan.
Ever been to public housing? There’s a reason it’s usually shitty, and that’s because the people who live there don’t own it, so they have no reason to care for it because they could be moved somewhere else at any time.
The same is true of a lot of average apartment buildings, especially college housing, but they are rigourously maintained by staff.
Public housing in the US is rarely funded enough or maintained properly. It’s almost a cliche in the US, municipalities purposely underfund public programs so they fail, to encourage privatization.
This might sound surprising, but that’s because people are paying for it, and there are consequences for trashing the place (forfeiting deposit etc.)
I’m talking about state owned public housing, which is almost always a catastrophe. And that’s not just because of lack of funding, but because the people who live there have no sense of ownership, and suffer little to no consequences if they don’t keep it in shape.
Like others said, specific examples of failures are “anecdotal” and you’d need to look at this scientifically and account for variables. Propaganda and neoliberal ideology makes this very difficult for the US.
Well, in that case, assuming that collectivizing housing will solve the issue is just as erroneous as assuming it won’t, isn’t it.
Not exactly. Saying something cannot work can be disproven by showing a single example of it working. There are plenty.
What I am trying to say is that housing should not be run for the sole pursuit of profit. People should own their own house, should own and manage an apartment block collectively, or have institutions that “own” and manage housing not for profit but for social and global benefit. But Individuals or corporations shouldn’t be allowed to own other peoples houses for profit. Or land for that matter. At least not as “capital”.
So you can “own” your own house and keep it for your children but you’re more like a steward, you can’t rent it out or own the housing of lots of people. It would cease to become a commodity and be much cheaper then.
That’s very radical and faces many potential problems but you can’t say it’s erroneous proposition. What you’d need are scientific studies that compare different models in different countries and account for all the variables including political corruption to sabotage public housing. And what benefits can be shown.
I don’t propose state socialism because that kind of total concentration of all economic power was shown to be very corrupt. But we need better models because right now wealth inequality is so vast than most housing is being bought off and concentrated for the 0.1% - which is very similar to state socialism too!
Saying something cannot work can be disproven by showing a single example of it working.
But something working in a single instance does not automatically prove it will work in all instances (see: Prisoner’s Dilemma, Efficient Market Paradox)
Yes, collectivized housing CAN work. Private housing cooperatives, for instance (which is what you seem to be describing) DO exist and are a decent alternative for sustainable homeownership. They probably won’t solve the homeless crisis, however.
My point was/is not to argue and collectivized approaches to housing in principle, but only against the idea that there exists some sort of “one size fits all” approach that will do everyone justice. That is simply not the case, regardless of how much some people want it to be true.
Well any discussion about this is good because right now the acceptable ideology and mainstream discussion about this is overwhelmingly one sided. There is no resistance to insane wealth concentration.
I have the feeling that UBI is doomed to fail if the basic necessities of live will continue to be owned and run for profit. Give people $1000 bucks more and the prices will increase because “they” own and control everything.
So maybe there should be two economies: One socialist for the necessities to live a prosperous life (not luxurious or consumerist) and one for all the rest. The first one should be sustainable and some kind of circular economy where everything is build to last and be repaired and recycled, the other is free market made for competition to innovate and create new products and services.
Oh yeah, nothing wrong with a good discussion. Gotta look at the problem from all angles before deciding what is to be done about it, otherwise you often end up making things worse.
As far as that second economy goes… you kinda just have to build that yourself by making IRL friendships with people you can trust to reciprocate.
They spent the no-strings-attached cash mostly on housing, a study found
They had to hand it straight back to greedy landlords in order not to be evicted
Sorted that headline for you, nae bother hen
City with an absurd income-to-rental-price spread: “We’re giving you some money.”
People getting the money: “This will go towards the enormous debts accrued to my landlords who keep cranking up the cost of housing.”
Economists: surprised-pikachu-face. “We thought for sure they would spend it on video games and fentanyl.”
“Housing addiction: the next drug war.” - Republicans/Capitalists
Do not become addicted to Housing. It will take hold of you, and you will resent its absence.
An apartment is a gateway home.
That’s why you spend more than a mortgage note on less space and you don’t even accrue equity.
You mean Conservative TV Commenters Masquerading as Economists. Economists in academia and community driven projects have known this for a while. It’s why stuff like this is even getting trials.
You mean Conservative TV Commenters Masquerading as Economists.
If you’re not a talking head on a Daytime Network TV Show, how am I supposed to trust you?
You know you can trust me because I sell high quality health supplements. So you know I care about you.
Shows a bottle marked “Maggoty’s Gainz”, it’s clearly just a relabeled bottle of Scotch.
‘oh, they have more money now… time for it to be my money’
that happened with me with the covid checks. soon as those came out, rent went up–and up. those quickly disappeared but the rent increases are forever.
YSK that landlords in the US actually collaborated with a software company to drive up rents during that period. The software company told each company exactly how many units to keep off the market to cause large increases in rent prices across the board.
In Utah landlords all have carte blanche to do as they wish, they are all legislatures so they have passed laws giving themselves exclusive authority.
There are no tenant rights or protection laws in Utah. Where I used to live, the landlords would come in and take furniture or valuables that they wanted, whenever they wanted. Tenants have no say in what happens. You can be evicted without cause or notice here for any reason.
Now they’ve strengthened the landlords’ grips with more laws preventing tenants from having the right to sue or contact landlords at all. It’s just a great place to live all around.
It’s a GOOD thing this ended! If they enacted this NATIONWIDE my Rent might Increase! Because it OBVIOUSLY hasn’t increased at ALL since I moved in thanks to not having a UBI!
deleted by creator
Denver seems to be leading America with a lot of these good things. Upfront labor wage policies, marijuana, this. Looking at those mountains is also a plus.
Lots of progress towards helping folks. That Progressive politics in action - we will take your hungry, your tired, your sick.
The study didn’t give us the answer we wanted so we burned the results and cut social programs some more.
Didn’t this basically happen like 10-15 years ago in Canada? I remember hearing about a similar study being shut down and the records sealed when the new conservative administration at the time came into power.
It’s always “this small test just wouldn’t work on a larger scale, so let’s never try at all.”
You might be thinking of this one
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ontario_Basic_Income_Pilot_Project
State Sen. Paul Bettencourt sent a letter to the state’s attorney general asking him to declare a new program in Houston as unconstitutional.
Of course they call it unconstitutional. It actually helps people and the constitution says nothing about helping people. /s
When people can afford houses, they stop being homeless… Amazing
When will humans learn to attack the problem and not the victim of the problem?
We need first universal Healthcare, education and affordable housing, otherwise the money would go to the leeches(landlords,insurance, student debt).
Let’s find out if they can continue it without other states funding their existence.
*gestures to Rafael theodore Cruz at the airport
Texas didn’t fund shit, Austin did. The government of Texas is actively hostile to the city of Austin.
There are two types of UBI supporters- Those that want UBI on top of the targeted welfare program, and those that want UBI to replace targeted welfare programs. If UBI was ever implemented, which kind of UBI supporter do you think the republicans and moderate dems would be?
The ones that would use it as an excuse to get rid of targeted welfare before not having enough votes to continue UBI.
Depends on the lobbyists and whoever is paying the media organizations. If companies realize they have more people to sell to they might lobby to have the former, and the majority of all beliefs are coming from medias spin on things. In theory, you could get Republicans who support UBI by simply getting a few lobbyists, and an anti UBI democratic candidate and poof, Republicans would swear by it. If you have the Republicans and the non moderate Dems, it could pass. Then once in place I imagine both companies and citizens would realize they don’t want to vote it away.
deleted by creator
This is one of mine. I started lobbying for it in 2015 when even all in our group looked at me like I’m crazy. Not so crazy now, am I?
Before anyone asks, Austin is very much so a small town in some ways. Many tech folk moved in for the dot-com boom and never left because we fell in love with the town. We also stayed friends and we communicate often, even as we all moved on to do bigger and better things. Sometimes, all it takes is an e-mail thread to make change.
If there is a pot hole on the street, and the city isn’t fixing it, organize a few people. You might find that someone in your community has the tools you need, and someone else has left over materials.
