John Rogers: UBI saves boatloads of public money. That should motivate certain types of people. But it’s also kind. Which fills those same people with a straight up berserker rage.

UBI saves boatloads of public money. That should motivate certain types of people. But it’s also kind. Which fills those same people with a straight up berserker rage.

Individuals who received the $1,000/mo or $500/mo payments were more likely to find a stable, full-time job than before they received the basic income. Results showed 45% of participants secured housing, while $589,214 was saved in public service costs. "It's freedom. It's freedom from poverty..."

Denver gave people experiencing homelessness $1,000 a month. A year later, nearly half of participants had housing.www.businessinsider.com Participants in Denver's basic income program received up to $1,000 a month. They became more housing secure and landed full-time jobs.

But will UBI actually work? *does 457th short term pilot test program that unequivocally proves that it does* Well would you look at that!

we need another test to make sure that it works in cities with a population between 74,308 and 76,121 nestled at the base of mountains between 6400 and 7500 feet in elevation, with an ethnicity distribution within 2 percentage points of…

Yes yes but obviously being kind AND spending less money will not work at larger scales over time. We have to keep the current more expensive and cruel system that does not work at large scale over time.

It’s things like this that have me thinking if I ever got given a time machine to do the whole “set right what once went wrong” trope my target would proooobably be John Calvin.

America without Calvinism....the mind boggles...

Right?! It’s so woven into the foundation of virtually everything we do here, I gotta think eliminating that motherfucker would help at least a *little*…

I'd go further back and put Paul the Apostle out of everyone's misery, because that'd most likely prevent something like Calvin ever arising in the first place.

I just envisioned that world and I am incandescent with rage that we don't live in it.

Oh god, excellent point. Ugh, fucking Paul…

Why stop there? Zoroaster I'm coming for you!

Now I’m picturing some time traveler just desperately trying to go further and further back in time, knowing they only have one shot at this so gotta find exactly the right person at exactly the right time…

That's why I love the cats game Chrononauts, it's kind of like that.

Card* Though the idea of flipping cats to simulate time travel amuses.

Ahhh... Believing suffering is caused by moral failing and not wanting "them poors" to get aid they aren't also getting "The aid for me is righteous and justified, the aid for them is a waste and evil!"

Well the universal part fixed that too. Lol Ok well you get the hand out too

For some reason every time I argue that with them they defer back to the evil of handouts in general while receiving them and not seeing the problem, absolutely lovely

ubi removes the justification for much of the prison, surveillance, etc industrial complexes since they mostly exist to function as a war on the poor.

So does housing first for homeless populations, and access to preventive healthcare and care for illnesses before it rises to emergency room required, and so many other things like that. It's one reason I got out of disability policy work. Government (mostly) knows what to do but won't/can't.

As always, the cruelty is the point. We are so poisoned by the prosperity gospel and the Protestant work ethic.

Yeah. For some the most important thing is that Those People are suffering.

Homelessness in America needs to be unsurvivable, because having the power to fire you isn't enough, your boss also wants the power to kill you.

People got mad at me yesterday when I mentioned how UBI would reduce the type of crime we are victims of over and over.

i'm not pro UBI (i'd rather see the basic necessities of life decommodified) BUT it's always blown my mind that "just giving people money is good for the economy" isn't seen as the most obvious thing ever. you can't believe in marginal utility and not also realize this!!

like there's decades of data that shows the stimulus with the best economic multiplier is "just give poor people money"

You can be for both, and arguably should, because basic goods and services is no alternative. They can never be fully universal. www.opendemocracy.net/en/oureconom...

Why ‘Universal Basic Services’ is no alternative to Basic Incomewww.opendemocracy.net It's time for advocates of ‘Universal Basic Services’ to stop juxtaposing the idea of more and better public services with giving people basic income security.

giving this a glance now and a more in depth read later (prepping for a 7hr drive and i gotta get movin 🙃). i don’t necessarily buy into a lot of the framing in this piece but i will meet you in the middle in that its not like you can str8 to universal services given where we are now

even some of the best exemplars of extant housing policy (like idk, vienna) are still framed and constrained by being stuck in a market economy. but i think that theres not necessarily a single holistic solution to [the problems] which is another of my hesitancies with UBI

MFs like "what do you mean my players need more action points per turn so that fine-tuning the balance doesnt create problems?"

"maybe you should kill the final boss with a wooden sword and 3AP/turn like i did when i was your age!!!" says paladin whose parents gave him a chest filled with potions that restore 5AP and can be used as a free action

Man I wish there was disability or unemployment checks in my country. You have no idea how not having to worry every month if we'll make enough to eat would free me to just work on all my creatives projects with a mind unburden by anxiety.

also, many of those people who saving public money might motivate are also the same ones who don't think the public support UBI reduces the need for should exist in the first place. (unless they need it)

There is a sizable subset of the population who would rather burn down their own house than let someone else live in it or anywhere near it. It's never been about saving money, it's about maintaining the hierarchy.

I want to believe that there is some limit to how much extra money someone would pay to hold up a discriminatory system. But I’m not sure even that exists.

I have yet to witness it. Conservatives consistently vote for and uphold systems that cost them more money, as long as said systems punish those they see as their moral inferiors, which most definitely includes poor people.

Can't even run UBI trials in Texas due to the craven a-holes in power making it illegal to just give people money (unless those "people" are multi-billion dollar corporations, then that's just fine)

We will spend a million dollars to make sure a single grand doesn't potentially go to someone who Doesn't Deserve It

prosperity gospel wears the boot that’s on your neck

It'll never happen in America because they can't make it whites-only in 2024.

Bingo. When community swimming pools were forced to desegregate, whites chose to close them rather than having blacks also benefit from them. Racist white ran govts in the south reject welfare funding because it must go to black families, too. They would rather suffer so long as blacks also do.

As one of my favorite TikTok folks says. "Because of racism, it's always racism!"

In America, certainly, so many things still are.

The G.I. Bill only passed after the second world war by making it whites-only. Sure, yeah, the invincible might of American goodness saved democracy in Europe, but back home they didn't want to practice it.

Hell, when schools were forced to desegregate in the late 1960s, Jerry Falwell came to national prominence fighting against that. slate.com/human-intere... The American religious right as we know it has ALWAYS been a white supremacist political movement dressed up as a religion.

Racism was expressed differently in "liberal" America. There it was why can't everyone just be made white? Paternalism became erasure of the "other" and is perhaps best expressed by the peak of the genocidal Indian boarding schools coinciding with peak liberalism in the US.

We could easily transition from fossil fuels if we could somehow harness the incredible power of "someone might be getting away with something!"

I rue the day I learned of means testing.

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