UBI update from Jeff Childers…

For full effect listen to Dire Straits while reading

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wTP2RUD_cL0

Last week, the National Bureau of Economic Research published a vastly important study titled “The Employment Effects Of A Guaranteed Income: Experimental Evidence From Two U.S. States.” It was so important, in fact, that it was immediately classified and secured in Hillary’s server closet. What happened was researchers tracked a 3-year program where poor people were given $1,000 per month and observed how the gifts changed their behavior. I’ll give you one guess how it turned out.

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You’d think it would have gotten some press. It was the type of trial they like to call the ‘gold standard,’ a randomly controlled trial (RCT). As a control group, the study randomly assigned 2,000 other participants who only got $50 per month, just enough to purchase one additional child-sized mocha frappuccino at Starbucks.

The results were, shall we say, unencouraging. People who got the free money saw their annual individual income drop by about $1,500 compared to the control group. (Table 3.) But they had more time to write rap music lyrics, and you just can’t calculate the benefit to society accruing from one more song about hitting the hoe’, except they didn’t write any hit new rap songs or any other genre, for that matter.

For every dollar received by giftees, total household income (excluding the gifts) fell by at least 21 cents, and total individual income fell by at least 12 cents. Average annual non-employment (idleness) was higher in the gifted group by +1.1 months compared to the control group. And it was literally killing them. Giftee group members reported increased rates of disabilities, which obviously limited their ability to work, so please don’t ask.

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According to a recent (July 31st) LA Times article, there are over a 150 “free money” trials currently ongoing across this great nation. As you might expect, the media has only covered the studies where the researchers’ reports showed some kind of positive benefit, usually fortunate trial participants self-reporting feeling happier. Who wouldn’t be happy?

This NBER trial, arguably the largest and most well-controlled of the studies, was covered by the media in the same way a german shepherd covers a favorite chew toy by burying it in the yard.

Psuedoscientifically named ‘Universal Basic Income’ (UBI is the required 3-letter acronym) might be the most subversive idea they’ve yet come up with, except of course the notion is as old as time itself. Free gifts of money from the government, so-called “guaranteed income,” would be the ultimate political panacea.

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The dependents would be sure to only vote for politicians who promise to keep or increase the gifts. Over time, string after string would be tied to the gifts, ensuring recipients behaved in state-approved ways. Uncooperative people —like misinformers— would be formally or even mysteriously ‘disqualified’ from posting memes about vaccine injuries, for instance.

Worse, this has been tried before many, many times, and it has never worked in all of human history. But six thousand years of failure has never discouraged young socialists. Hope springs eternal, out of a hole in the ground near Hoboken, just south of the New Jersey Turnpike. Maybe this time, it will work!

Never give up, hopeful socialists insist. Try, try again! Nevermind Albert Einstein’s definition of insanity (trying, trying again but expecting a different result). Nevermind Benjamin Franklin (“when people find they can vote themselves money it will be the end of the Republic”). And nevermind the foundational wisdom literature underpinning Western Civilization (“The one who is unwilling to work shall not eat.” 2 Thess. 3:10).

Those quaint, old-fashioned ideas are patriarchical, non-inclusive, and most importantly, inequitable.

Opponents of UBI include pessimistic killjoys like Stanford economist Thomas Sowell, Nobel laureate Robert Lucas, Harvard economist Greg Mankiw, and MIT economist Daron Acemoglu. On the other side of the politically lucrative debate stand visionary lowlights like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, when she’s not bartending or managing her new Congressional stock portfolio.

They act like free money is a novel concept they just came up with in a flash of brilliance while at a conference at the Ritz Carlton, reaching for the loofah with eyes covered in soap suds. Eureka! Let’s just give them cash!

In the first century AD, Roman poet Juvenal coined the term “panem et circense,” which is Latin for “I left my wallet in my other sports coat.” Unfortunately, even though it was in Latin and sounded very intellectual, and it took people a while to catch on, Juvenal used his fancy-sounding excuse a little too often, and eventually the other Romans stopped inviting him out for dinner at the Parthenon.

Juvenal’s flip phrase has also been widely translated by far-right sourpusses as “bread and circuses,” a concept reflecting how Roman emperors declared themselves to be gods, since they could so easily control the people by giving them free stuff the emperors took from citizens and foreigners they didn’t like. But as economist Herbert Stein famously said, free money that can’t continue forever, won’t.

It didn’t work for the Romans. And the Romans never had to pay off a $35 trillion dollar debt. In the U.S. today, there is $2.35 trillion in physical currency (money) in circulation. Every single dollar and coin, if somehow scraped together into a giant pile, wouldn’t make a dent in the debt. Just saying.