If 100 homeless people were given $750 per month for a year, no questions asked, what would they spend it on?
That question was at the core of a controlled study conducted by a San Francisco-based nonprofit and the USC Suzanne Dworak-Peck School of Social Work.
The results were so promising that the researchers decided to publish results after only six months. The answer: food, 36.6%; housing, 19.5%; transportation, 12.7%; clothing, 11.5%; and healthcare, 6.2%, leaving only 13.6% uncategorized.
Those who got the stipend were less likely to be unsheltered after six months and able to meet more of their basic needs than a control group that got no money, and half as likely as the control group to have an episode of being unsheltered.
$750 a month would improve the lives of plenty of people who aren’t homeless too. Up to and including the middle class.
But I suppose a UBI is a non-starter everywhere in the U.S. but Alaska.
You want universal anything it’s an uphill battle because of the cattle shouting about the cost or some nonsense.
Those who will make more money with UBI will just be mad they get taxed slightly more.
That would basically cover my student loan payments, so it would be equivalent to loan forgiveness for me. Improve is an understatement, that would actually allow me to save money. Right now my wife and I make slightly above area median income and we’re just treading water financially. This would be a game changer. We could actually consider having a kid.
For what it’s worth 750 a month is probably less than what a kid costs. Depends on where you live but that seems decidedly low price for a kid
It cost near $7k in healthcare costs when my son was born. That’s $1750 a year so far…
It’s more than that per month just for childcare, assuming they are anticipating they will continue to work. It’s significantly more than that in food, Healthcare etc per month. If all you need is $750/month to have a child, than you can already have a child.
But the reality is, their lifestyle will eat that $750, and they’ll continue thinking they can’t afford to have a child. And, frankly, they probably can’t. Children are for the poor and the upper-middle class and above. It’s weird, but it’s true.
A non-starter unless it’s building up pro fossil fuel constituency.
/murica eagle screech
Imagine having money, but still being stuck in Alaska.
Almost like the 1% are stealing from each and every one of us. With a fraction of their profits each one of us would live a better life.
A fraction of a fraction. It really is mind-boggling how much money is being generated by some of these billionaires that isn’t being taxed.
Not taxed, not labored by them for. It’s like an exclusive version of Las Vegas where you can bring your own loaded loaded “I make dictate the terms” dice and marked “Heres some insider information” cards.
For this, we are pressured to thank and admire them as benevolent job creators. It’s wild how irrational they’ve manipulated everyone into being.
Our oligarchs can’t feel like god without creating a hell to feel superior to.
Schadenfreude is a hell of a drug. Even many of our struggling citizens try to get a fix by blaming the powerless homeless and believing they somehow deserve to die of exposure, hunger, treatable disease, and police harassment.
Giving people money improves their quality of life?
Who would have guessed?
“What can we do to help these people whose problem is that they don’t have money?”
“Give them money?”
“That’s just crazy enough to work!”
Wait a sec. You’re telling me that giving money to people that don’t have money helps them do things that require money?! I’m shocked.
Those who got the stipend were less likely to be unsheltered after six months and able to meet more of their basic needs than a control group that got no money, and half as likely as the control group to have an episode of being unsheltered.
I feel extremely bad for the control group.
yeah. stuff like this really feels like human experimentation (because it kinda is). i wish people were more willing to just implement these UBI programs at the government level. the results would be so nice
It’s unfortunately necessary. They have to have evidence the strategy works before public money can be spent on it.
To get that evidence, they have to do studies, and those studies have to be serious, which means following the standard scientific methods. Which means needing a control group.
It just happens that the control group in this scenario is getting the short end of the stick.
So do I, but their sacrifice has led to good quality data that shows that giving unhoused people money without conditions helps them to reintegrate, become housed and hopefully employed and again contributing to society as a whole. It’s a silver bullet against thinking like “don’t give that homeless person money; they’ll just spend it on drugs!” that we have been force-fed for decades. Hopefully, that may lead to better outcomes for them.
$750 a month is like $9000 a year.
I spend $500 on groceries!
I think this program would help a lot in so many ways and I hope it passes.
Multiply that by 653,000, and then ask how much you’re willing to chip in to that.
EDIT: people don’t seem to like reality sprinkled on top of their fantasy world where mere suggestions of how things SHOULD be automatically makes them so.
Sure, it would be nice to gut the defense budget to care for Americans in need. But you know we’re not doing that. So that leaves us to accept the reality of it:
It’s going to fall on taxpayers. And we’re strapped enough as it is.
So I ask again:
How much of that $5.8BN are all of you willing to chip in, k owing that we’re not selling aircraft carriers or raiding the defense budget coffers.
That’s 0.7% of the 2023 US defence budget ($857.9B). I’d much rather have my taxes going to help people in need.
Right, but we live in the real world where things like that are irrelevant because no one is going to challenge it. So I task you to come up with a solution where we can solve this without having to rely on people to do the right thing.
I’ll save you some time.
There isn’t one. Taxpayers are a renewable source of income. Were the Soylent green. As long as they can make us pay for it/ there’s no need to fix anything.
And $5.8BN is a lot to come out of our taxes.
That is $489M. There are 160M tax payers in the US.
Everyone gives and extra $5/mo, and we can raise it to $1000/mo UBI. Then incorporate more people as the tax base increases.
That’s $5.85 billion dude.
750*653,000 = 489,750,000.
How so that $5.85B?
$9,000/yr multiplied by 653,000 is $5.8BN per year. Try and keep up.
Do basic math. If we are talking about $5/mo per person, that means you got $60/yr per person. 60*160M=$9.6B.
When taking taxes, 1 $10B isn’t a ton of money, let alone half that. And that’s just taking total tax payers at a flat rate. If you graduate it according to income, you could easily make this manageable for all persons. $5.89B is .13% of the total US tax revenue. So an additional .13% of tax revenue to help out .17% of the US population.
Keep up.
Translation: “I have money so you can go die, you stupid poor”
Also, I’m broke as fuck. So, I AM the stupid poor. I just understand how the real world works. You can’t solve this problem without dipping into fantasy suggestions.
$8.5BN is a lot of money. Just so you know.
lol… it’s always easy when it’s other people’s money.
we could probably cut back on one of our 14 aircraft carriers
Right. So without resorting to fantasy, what’s a realistic suggestion.
If you want a serious answer, there are a lot of options. Closing tax loopholes for corporations, higher taxes for the wealthy, a freeze on additional military spending, stop outsourcing so much to contracted companies that blow through money for nothing (e.g. the reason why most people think government services are bad), etc. Those could all allow UBI to exist without raising taxes on the lower and middle class.
Again, I said- without resorting to fantasy. None of those things are even remotely possible.
Okay? It sounds like you just don’t want an answer. Many of those changes are actually very possible if more young people start voting in elections instead of just being apathetic or having that defeatist/“realist” attitude. If you think nothing can get better ever then yeah, every solution is “fantasy.”
They’re possible, but not remotely probable. And I’d love an answer. Just one that has a remote chance of actually happening. My head isn’t in the clouds banking on wishful thinking. I’m down here on the ground, trying to keep my expectations based on reality.
I realize this is an unpopular opinion, but as the saying goes:
A pessimist is a well-informed optimist.
$750 a month would be life altering for me.
Life altering like you can buy food and clothes?
and perhaps sleep on an actual bed for the first time in over 20 years.
yes
In my country that’s a very solid salary.
But it’s important to remain in context of the US and the starting point is around 0$, so having only 750$ still makes you very poor.
All these UBI experiments ever seem to demonstrate is the “BI” part.
But the part that needs to be demonstrated, IMHO, is the “U”.
Well we can’t do that until we do that. And shitting on the experiments means we’ll never do the Universal part.
This isn’t really true.
We generally don’t experiment with economic policy because it’s not practical.
The main impediment to UBI is not supporting data, but political will. Voters are so used to punishing poor people that UBI just doesn’t resonate with the voting public. Of course that will change with the continuing encroachment of automation.
Additionally UBI is not all or nothing. You could increase it over time. If 20% of average salary is the objective, then start with 1% this year and increase it by 1% each year for the next 19 years. It will take 20 years to dismantle the other welfare systems anyway.
You know that’s a good point. It takes a few years to get a UBI up to full throughput anyways. I think part of the problem with that approach is it will be more expensive to start, at least on paper. And God forbid we spend money on anything other than the military. But it’s certainly true, we don’t need to switch it like a light switch by any means.
It’s not the critics of the experiments that are the problem.
The “experiments” are just watering down the idea of UBI into “just rename existing benefits programs”.
You’d need to restructure an entire country’s tax systems to really do a proper experiment. No country could just afford to give everyone free money. You’d have to structure it so the average person pays back exactly what extra they got, and build affordable housing for the people that actually choose to live on just UBI.
Nobody is choosing to live on just the UBI though. Study after study shows that people do more economic activity with a proper UBI, not less.
And yes, we are at the precipice where we either make the jump or not.
We can’t meaningfully advocate or plan for its implementation unless we have some idea how it would work. And that it can work.
The sorts of experiments in the OP get us no closer to that. They prove nothing that wasn’t already pretty uncontroversial and obvious, and offer no insights about how these programs might be implemented universally.
Pointing this out does not hold back UBI. Ignoring it, however, does.
We know it can work. We know how it will work. The math works, the psychology works, there’s nothing else left to do but do it. This is just the latest in a long line of studies on this going back decades. Doubting it at this point is just putting your head in the ground.
The math works
This is the part where the citations you link are extremely important.
You could, just read the thread. You don’t need to keep responding to each level.
And the math is either generally available as a thought exercise or specific to the model being discussed. There’s not really an in between.
How will it work, then?
Everyone gets x amount. As you go up in tax brackets y amount is subtracted at tax time until you get high enough that the entirety of x is reclaimed. For this there are several programs we can completely shut down and the same funding would provide anywhere from 500-1500 dollars a month. (Depending on whose math you believe).
everything you’re saying here and in the replies makes perfect sense and is very clear. unfortunately, it looks like you’re arguing with someone who isn’t willing to listen to reason
To be honest, that’s the point. They might not listen to reason but it’s pretty obvious to any one else stopping by.
That sounds like means-tested welfare programs, which we already have. UBI by definition is unconditional.
In other words, you’re talking about “BI” but I’m asking about “U”.
There is no means testing. The IRS has all the information it needs already. Getting rid of the means testing is where the bulk of the available money comes from.
And as far as the Universal part goes, we can’t do that until we actually do it. Asking to test that is a bad faith argument used by the GOP because it’s literally impossible to do without actually implementing the program.
The problem is giving X amount per month to homeless people is not a representative study for something called “universal” basic income. It’s just a basic income for homeless people.
One of the biggest theoretical problems with giving everyone X amount per month is that it will simply drive up inflation since there are now $X/mo/person more in circulation (meaning everything will simply go up in price to absorb all that extra money). An experiment like this, as beneficial as it may have been for the participants, unfortunately has no value in proving whether or not that IS actually what happens.
This was my initial reaction also, but taking a closer look the article doesn’t say anything about UBI. This is not a UBI experiment.
A fair point. But it looks, swims, and quacks like a UBI experiment.
Not really, you can’t criticise it for not being like UBI while saying it’s similar to UBI even if it does not purport to be UBI.
Correct. It’s basic income for homeless people.
We’re honestly not at a point where UBI is sustainable. However, this clearly demonstrates that replacing existing welfare with straight up cash, and changing how that cash scales down as people approach a “normal minimum” income, is vastly superior to our current system
this clearly demonstrates that replacing existing welfare with straight up cash, and changing how that cash scales down as people approach a “normal minimum” income, is vastly superior to our current system
These experiments aren’t even trying to demonstrate that. And they don’t.
Except they do, because they show the value of fungible, no-questions-asked support
It’s not “BI” that needs to be demonstrated. It’s “U”.
Plus, these experiments do in fact ask questions about recipients’ income. Just like regular welfare programs.
I think you should reread this thread.
I think you’re neither serious nor sincere about making UBI work.
Interesting take- Why?
Now watch how out of touch conservatives are when they start claiming that these people are living in luxury. It’s a great project and I’m not trying to demerit the people in charge, but $750 doesn’t go far at all in a place like San Francisco
Remember when they flipped their shit over obama phones? Like, poor people were getting free or low cost cell phones. The horror! What’s next, food stamp steaks? What? You mean food stamps aren’t limited to gruel and powdered milk?
Ppl in SF are sure as shit not turning that down. At the minimum that’s your food for the month sorted out.
Oh yeah for sure, it’s a great thing. I’m just trying to get an “in” before any conservatives come ITT and start talking about how this will just enable them or let them live easy. Like you said, it’s enough for food and maybe somewhere to sleep and that’s about it
When they say “live easy” they mean it literally. They’re against the idea of a society where people can easily get the bare necessities without having to put in effort and work for it. As if that’s a bad thing.
You work for the luxuries, you should be able to live, as in keep your heart beating, with relatively little effort in a country that produces such excess.
There’s also been a lot of success with providing housing to the homeless. When they have stability, they use it to create a better life for themselves, and that translates to lower costs in terms of enforcement, ER visits, legal aid, and incarceration.
The US doesn’t provide for this in federal policy because we like our laws to reflect the cruelty and malice we have in our hearts for perceived undesirables.
If you are mentally ill or had a streak of bad luck, it’s your own fault. Be smart and get born rich like almost every rich person does. My God why are people so stupid?
/sWhoa there rich people were born the same way we were. They followed a simple 7 step plan.
- Stay in school. Even if it’s stupid and boring.
- Don’t get D’s in school or else Dad has to make another donation and that comes out of my allowance.
- Keep my nose clean. Nobody thinks cocaine powder is a fashion accessory.
- Start a business.
- Get 1 million dollar “loan” from my parents.
- Have my parent’s lawyer “talk” to the town council about why I didn’t need permits for my business.
- Graduate college and activate my trust fund!
See rich people work hard to get rich.
The overwhelming majority of people who inherit wealth lose said wealth within 3 generations.
70% by the second generation and 90% by the third
Almost like money doesn’t equal ability.
How did they collect data on what these homeless people were spending the money on? Sounds like some questions were asked after all…
Receipts probably
Couldn’t they have just given them a card and just checked the bank statements later.
Yeah, I bet that “uncategorized” is just the amount of cash they took out, some of which might have gone to drugs, some of which might have gone to other random cash shit.
And that’s ok. Sounds like they spend it on the same things people with jobs/income do.
Yeah, nothing wrong with enjoying some substances and hopefully the money enables them to not have to rely on dealers who take advantage of people who can’t afford to ask questions or be picky about what they put into their body.
Yeah, and TBF being homeless is shit. When I was, I self medicated with smack and booze just to turn down the volume on the screaming insecurity and worry I felt pretty much constantly. Some homeless people are also mentally unwell and need additional support but a lot will take whatever help is available and use it to improve their lives.
750$ a month changed the lives of people that had nothing? Yeah, right. Obviously!
Studies that test obvious expectations are actually super important. Sometimes the results are not what you expect, and the rest of the time, you have a study to point to whenever someone tries to say there’s no evidence of that outcome.
The problem is this is the umpteenth study in the US alone. We know it works. It’s just a bunch of rich people crying because they’d lose leverage over their “workers”.
Wow, that’s a big deal to me to learn that. I would have never considered that. Thanks a lot, very bro of you.
Well, there is an opinion that homeless people would use all money for booze, tobacco and drugs, etc. A study like this helps to contradict such opinion.
What else are people supposed to use their money on. People be projecting all the time.
It isn’t listed here in the citation, but tobacco, alcohol and drugs represented 2% of the expenses.
An important bit of information if someone’s gonna use it as an argument.
I wish we have UBI.
ubi is unfortunately not really feasible from an economical standpoint, unless the amount is really low; then it can probably be funded by taxes, even within the current system…
but tbh I don’t think it’s worth it…
i think focus should be put on making work/the job market more fair and inclusive to everyone instead.In the future, it could be implemented by taxing robots. But even then, there is no guarantee that a future with UBI is as rosy as it is made to be.
One red flag here is that they don’t mention how they chose whom to give the stipend to.
That being said I think its a great idea and correlates with other studies that show that money is the best thing you can offer someone who’s struggling. Not food, not shelter, money.
I’m not an American but this will be tough to sell as you guys are notorious for porking away public funds (e.g. covid payouts) so this is much more complex than the article implies.
easiest way to avoid misuse is to give it to all. if your doing alright you will pay more tax equal to what you get, if your struggling it will be a boost, if your in mills/bills club you will pay more than your getting. Anyone who falls to the struggling level would have it immediately though with no paperwork or offices to go to and less bureaucracy to pay for (have to add this for the folks who don’t see why its helps them if they are not getting a net gain)
Agree. Simple systems are more resistant to corruption.
you’re = you are
Your = possession
For the purpose of this study, though, they did not give it to all. There was a control group that was not getting any money whatsoever, along with…ya know, the rest of the homeless in the area that weren’t part of the study.
If all participants were chosen entirely at random, ok, but if there was a selection process, then that’s going to affect the results.
