Chicago just approved one of the US's largest basic-income pilots: $500 monthly payments for 5,000 p

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ipatent

Chicago just approved one of the US's largest basic-income pilots: $500 monthly payments for 5,000 people

The city council voted Wednesday to approve one of the largest basic-income programs in US history — a pilot that will give 5,000 low-income households $500 per month for one year. Participants will be chosen at random, but individuals must earn less than $35,000 per year to qualify.

The council authorized nearly $32 million for the pilot as part of the city's 2022 budget. The program's funding comes from $2 billion in COVID-19 relief dollars allocated to Chicago through the Biden administration's American Rescue Plan.​

Unbelievable.
 
Project of $30 Mil in a city of 3M population, basically a dollar per month from a person to support the 5000 poorest families.
Doesn't sound too bad, given the fact that i willingly donate each month (more than that)

On the other hand -

IMG_20211028_043632.jpg


Maybe they have a goal of reaching $50B, who knows.
 
tango29 said:
Amazing for a city that is all ready broke. Maybe they could put some of that into law enforcement. Every Monday I am ticked off when I hear the weekend crime stats here, and then they give the stats for Chicago. Large size difference, but still horrendous.
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Maybe when people got guaranteed income now they will commit less crime, hopefully although just $500 more per month for somebody already earning $35K a year is not much more.

The whole idea of UBI is to reduce the cost of disbursement of welfare payments and also hopefully reduce the cost of overall social services. If it takes more than $500 per month to disburse welfare payments than UBI would still be superior especially if it leads to lower overall cost of social services in a more optimistic scenario but if they are basing this on individual income, a household of two earning $35K each is $75K in total household income. That's not low-income. That should be middle-income. The highest cost of disbursement of welfare and social services is highest for low-income (no offense) so I am not sure using such a high threshold of income level for UBI will illustrate that effectively the advantages of UBI. And plus the recipient population is so small, just 5000 people. Not sure if you are going to see any effect of this UBI with that small of a size of the recipient population. UBI is most effective in reducing when it's administrated to a huge number of recipients due to its economies of scale. It's called "universal" for a reason; it needs to be implemented universally, not just several thousand people.

Overall you are not going to see much impact from this project due to its small recipients size and higher income-level threshold for the recipients, just like many small size UBI projects around the world. Imo I find UBI is not something that you need to test beforehand; it's something that will just happen naturally once you are there. And honestly we are not there yet, our productivity and/or resource level is not ready yet to support UBI so there is no point to carry out these small projects of just handing out some X amount of money to only selected amount of people. Once we are ready, we are comfortably making enough amount of money, we will naturally be able to hand out X amount of dollars on a periodic basis to groups of people who are still not making it and that's it. In the meantime we should just focus on how to increase our productivity, how to strengthen our economy to get there.
 
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ipatent said:
We should be incentivizing the poor to move out of expensive urban environments and back to agrarian areas.
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What makes you think poverty is limited to urban environments? Ever visit Appalachia? The only difference from being poor in a city and being poor in a trailer park in the middle of nowhere is that it's much harder to provide social services to people spread out over vast differences. And maybe it keeps them out of sight and therefore out of mind?
 
Welfare is a form of UBI (Universal Basic Income). it's been around for years. some people have just abused the it. we'd need a system that creates incentives for people to work (instead of giving $500/mo, let's give something like $50/mo (something one could barely survive on). Andrew Yang's idea on UBI is not going to work. Chances are people is going to use the money for something else or it'd give people idea for avoiding work. if one works, he'd contribute money to the tax revenues.
Alaska has implemented UBI in some form of fashion, yet as of now, Alaska is one the top five states with the highest debt. Illinois' debt is ranked fourth among the 50 states.
 
HeSaidSheSaid said:
Welfare is a form of UBI (Universal Basic Income). it's been around for years. some people have just abused the it. we'd need a system that creates incentives for people to work (instead of giving $500/mo, let's give something like $50/mo...
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How about we give them nothing per month. That solves that then, eh? I do not like the thought of my money going to feed the baby of some person who proceeds to have 10 kids just so they can get free monies. I put the effort in to earn that money. You, as a mother, should not get my money for free with no effort on your part.
 
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