Chicago to Try Giving $1000 a Month to the Poor in Guaranteed Income Experiment

The idea of giving poor people cash with no strings attached in lieu of government welfare payments has been floating around the leftist fever swamps since the 1960s. It's called universal basic income and Chicago will apparently develop a pilot program to test it.

WLSTV:

Some Chicago families could start collecting a $1,000 check every month with no strings attached. That's the new proposal from a task force created by Mayor Emanuel.

The idea is to break the cycle of poverty. The pilot program would give 1,000 struggling Chicagoans $1,000 a month.
Supporters say people could use the extra cash to cover unexpected emergencies, increase their savings and improve their health.
The money would come from a mix of city funds and charity.

It's a seductive idea. Even some libertarians like Charles Murray think it's worth a shot. With one dollar out of every three spent by the government on social welfare programs going to feed the bureaucracy, the idea of giving the poor direct cash payments seems an attractive way to save taxpayer money.

Unfortunately, it doesn't work.

Finland ended a similar experiment in April and the results have just been released.

Bloomberg:

Distributing free money to the unemployed improves their well-being, but doesn’t appear to have any significant impact on their job prospects.
That’s according to the preliminary results of a landmark experiment in Finland, the first country in the world to trial a basic income at a national level.

Not again!
They never give up.
Since they haven’t read my previous postings, they are moving ahead with this stupid idea.

Here goes, again:
1. You cannot test a universal basic income by paying 1000 people. Eh? universal = applies to all.
1000 people is NOT all. Basic logic. Too much for stupid people to understand.
2. Paying 1000 people is not going to require raising taxes. They can easily find a million dollars in various places.
3. The people who receive it are going to proclaim it a success.
4. The media will report that the recipients are no longer eating dogfood and can finally get a haircut.
5. When applied to all, taxes will have to be raised royally to pay for this!
To give 1000 to everybody, they will have to collect 1200 in taxes from everyone.
5A. Ah, but not everyone is working! in fact, in a socialist $hithole like Chicago, half of the people are working. So you have to collect 2400 in taxes from everyone who is working.
6. Immediately, money loses its value, and the 1000 doesn’t buy much, so the whiners demand 2000, which soon loses its value, and the parasites march for 4000, (repeat until total bankruptcy).
7. Huge numbers of people move to Chicago.
8. Chicago goes bankrupt and demands money from the state, which demands money from the fed, which tells it to go to hell.

I saw this story a couple of days ago and wrote the reporter asking questions. “My question is: If this is considered income, would this be taxed ? It appears it would have to be fed & state income taxed, plus payroll taxed - who would pay the employer’s side of SS & Medicare ? Plus I didn’t know the City of Chicago had an Earned Income Tax Credit.” so far, no response. Stockton Ca is starting its version this year. I can’t believe the authors of these lamebrain ideas do not see that they eventually have to run out of other people’s money.

Good observations. These things have implications in the web of already in-place entitlements, which are often disincentives in the first place.

To paraphrase Jordan Peterson, wealth/poverty isn't about money, it is about meaning.

Handing out money will make the problem even worse because it puts another barrier between an unemployed person and his reason to pursue an activity that might provide or lead to meaning.

BTW, when you are completely without a means of surviving, just getting by using your smarts (i.e. earning the food on your table) is loaded with meaning.

I’m 100% for LOCAL experiments like this. Other cities should also be able to experiment with extremely strict work requirements for any aid. And I can imagine a variety of other LOCAL experiments with aid, education, etc. We should encourage things like this.

They need to do it like an experiment though. Define some goals and measures. And report on the results. If an experiment meets its goals and other cities want to do the same, they can. If dozens (100s) of cities with a variety of demographics see success, then the feds can think about implementing something.

If you aren’t setting goals, and doing careful, reliable measurements, it’s not an “experiment” - it’s a handout in this case. You can’t go a few years and THEN determine what measures you consider a success worthy of expanding the experiment.

“Now they won’t have to beg on the corners for their drugs and their hooch.”

Supply and demand. With more money, they have the means to demand more drugs and hooch than supply. Hence, higher street prices. And thus a need for begging.

Enjoy paying for this people of Chicago. Its only money.

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