During the 2020 election Andrew Yang became a household name. While he didn’t end up winning, I wouldn’t say his candidacy was unsuccessful. The main idea that he ran on was universal basic income (UBI). This was the idea that the government would give every adult a certain amount of money every month. Yang’s plan was to give every adult $1,000 a month. While plans vary, the base idea of UBI is the same, everyone should have some form of an income. Clearly, there is a poverty issue in America. In 2020 the poverty rate in America was 11.4%, so something needs to be done about this, and I think something that could help the most is UBI.
It’s not too hard to understand how giving people money would help with poverty, so I don’t feel the need to argue that, rather I want to debunk some of the common arguments against UBI.
The one argument against UBI I hear the most is that having UBI would make people work less. The argument seems solid here. If people were getting money from the government, why would they choose to work, but this isn’t the case. To start, the amount of money that would be given out monthly wouldn’t be enough for most people to live on, but for the sake of this argument, let’s say it is. There have been studies done in America and in other countries that disprove this.
In Finland they did a study over the course of two years. During this timeframe they picked a group of 2,000 to give €560 a month, this equates to around $600. This money had no strings attached to it, and the recipients could use this money on whatever they wanted. This actually had a positive impact on employment among people who got the experimental UBI. This trend has also been shown in other studies done on UBI.
The other main argument is the price. People argue that it’s too expensive, and we wouldn’t be able to afford it. They would be right, it would be expensive, but it’s worth it. I’m not a policy maker, or an expert on the government’s budget so I can’t tell you the specifics of how to pay for it, but if we have the money to spend $778 billion on our military, I’m sure we could find a way to help deal with poverty.
Also, this concept has been proven to work in America. In Alaska, every resident who has lived there for over a year gets an amount of money that can range anywhere from $500 to $3,000 at the end of the year. While it isn’t as full scale as a UBI that I think should be implemented, it is a concept that has been proven to work time and time again, and it’s time we implement it federally.
Mark Warren can be reached at [email protected] or on Twitter @MarkWarren1832
Mira
A universal basic income not only will improve employment, but it also will help with mental health, creating families, quality of life, education, and so much more. We have folks complaining day in and day out that no one is having kids, everyone is depressed, students take out too many loans, etc, and a clear resolution to ALL of those is UBI.
Lawrence Moran
Mark, in 2019 there were some 259,393,206 adults in the US. So, if we gave each of them $1000 a month, we would need $3,112,718,472,000 dollars a year. The entire US federal budget for 2019 was $4,450,000,000,000. You would need to spend 70% of the entire federal budget to pay for your proposal. Incidentally, the military budget in 2019 was $693 billion, or roughly 22% of the federal budget. With that money we could give every American adult the grand sum of $223 per month. Of course, it would mean completely dismantling our entire military structure and leaving the country completely defenseless. That is okay though, right? Peace love and understanding and all that. No country would ever think of invading another country, especially if that country had unilaterally disarmed itself, right?