Well duh, people kept doing the same thing in their lives bcs they knew the “guaranteed income” was only guaranteed for the duration of the experiment.
I think it depends on the person and their exact financial situation.
I once took a higher-paying job that I didn’t like instead of a lower-paying job that I probably would have enjoyed. If I had extra income coming in from another source, perhaps I wouldn’t have made that decision.
But some other people might not be affected by the extra money. They might make the same decision regardless of the extra money.
,<<<
1100/mo is:
13,200/yr per person, or
53,800/yr for a family of four, or
79,200/yr for a family of six
[QUOTE=""]
[/QUOTE]
well, if two people living together would get $26k (tax free?)), then a good number would likely either not work, or work part-time or under the table.
Four friends pooling together their $53k and sharing an inexpensive home probably wouldn’t bother to work. Not working would mean not needing to live in a pricey area.
Romani, you seem to really despise the American system of opportunity and freedom. Aren’t you fortunate to live somewhere you can complain in public? I noticed you want to spend other people’s money. At what point of income would you say we need to start handing over our income for others to manage? What gives you such faith that the government does better with our resources than we do?
While people argue about giving money to poor people, the wealthiest people in the world just take.
The link in post 15 shows us
a taking at an average of $33 million per person. And the public is clueless.
These are the wealthiest people taking in the world and they can never be satisfied. Never. It is mental illness. It is also mental illness to trash those less fortunate.
Those in power know how to push buttons, set up diversions and throw the masses off course.
Some of our kids pay taxes at higher rates than the wealthiest people in the world.
It seems like there would be some way to make it a win-win. For the citizens of a country to be able share equally in an amount of money that would otherwise trickle away in social programs, perhaps they should do a certain amount to reciprocate for the country, by helping socially and environmentally.
I often am shocked at the $$ going into specific “programs” that seem like they would do so much more good being handed directly to the persons in need.
Say you had 10k to give to a family in poverty. How would you go about doing it?
One-time contribution or annual?
My first thought was - this is enough to pay for monthly family health insurance.
I would feel free to take part-time work and spend some time on my own projects if I didn’t have to worry about paying for health insurance.
Marian…you have 10k right now that you are targeting at one family. What do you do?
Fendrock i think that’s the goal of this experiment. It was crowdfunded by a thinktank kind of group that believes people will be free to explore creativity. I believe their statement was that machines will be taking over soon and we need creativity to explore other ideas for commerce and human resources or productivity.
I don’t know.
In most instances, the family would know far better than I would how best to use the money, and the most sensible alternative would be to let them make their own choices.
But some families include a person with a substance abuse or gambling problem. In those instances, if the money was given to the family directly, it probably would go to waste. The family wouldn’t benefit from it.
How do you create a system that can deal with both possibilities – the family that will make choices that work well for them and the family that includes a gambler or substance abuser?
Eyemamom, you are so off-base in your accusation of my views on the American systems it’s almost funny.
Recognizing the deficiencies and working to correct those does NOT mean I despise it.
Define “anything”. The whole “amount to anything” phrase is so vague as to be useless.
There are 8 billion people on the planet-amounting to something can simply mean going about your day without causing harm to other people. Or it can mean developing a way to vaccinate at-risk children in poor countries quickly and easily. It’s just sort of a useless way to phrase it, I think, because there’s no way to define amounting to something subjectively.
In most cases that 1100 would be spent, and therefore would stimulate the economy at some level. I’m not going to judge the worthiness of how other people spend their money.
Romani, I’ve never heard anything out of you to make me think you didn’t have an entitled attitude of what successful people should do with their money or how superior every socialist European country is to the US.
Oh good grief. Let’s not get political, and let’s not get hostile.
I agree, I didn’t like the phrasing of “amount to anything” either but I took it straight off the article title for easy searching. One of the lottery winners, did quit work but went to back to school full time. I think it makes for a great socioeconomic experiment, but it’s always the same- the have nots get to enjoy some financial freedom and the haves cry, freeloaders. I don’t judge what people do with their funds, that’s between them and their conscience.
^^^There’s no call for personal attacks, now.
I asked Mr R what he would do if he had this guaranteed income. He said that it would make him feel much better about being a stay-at-home dad when the time comes and that he’d probably quit his job to volunteer full time with special needs kids.
He currently works at an educational day care and doesn’t make much more than 1.1k a month. He wants to go back to working with special needs kids but the pay was just too darn low 
(not that this job is much better, but the hours are much more consistent and we’re fortunate to be in a position where he can afford to work a low wage job doing what he loves- which is working with kids).
For me, the 1,100 would be nice but I’m not sure I’d change anything. My PhD monthly stipend is about double that and really, nothing has changed (though, to be fair, my mortgage is eating almost all of the income bump that I got transitioning into the PhD program lol). I’d love an extra 1k in research funds every month though :D. Since my research centers on California and I live in Michigan, even with the generous funding I get from my program and various grants, traveling to California is a financial stretch.
This is not a new idea, and there are actually people on both sides of the aisle that see this is a good plan.
FWIW, this idea has been endorsed by Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek.
On Hayek: http://www.libertarianism.org/columns/why-did-hayek-support-basic-income
Friedman (in his own words): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xtpgkX588nM
edit to add: it should be noted that obviously the point is not to ADD the minimum income to the social programs that already exist.