Poverty-stricken Stockton, California will, within months, give $500 a month to low-income families, no strings attached. What incentive, we say ironically! Stockton has been declared one of the most dangerous cities in America.
The freebie is paving the way for a discussion about Universal Basic Income [UBI]. It will help redefine the relationship between government and the individual.
Shifting personal responsibility to the government cancels out economic incentives, disincentivizes people, makes people dependent, and replaces accountability with dependence.
UBI is welfare and it is wealth redistribution requiring the theft of money from the productive to those who don’t produce.
The Stockton Economic Empowerment Demonstration is backing this effort and it is an experimental program.
Here’s a tip Stockton — Russia already thought of it as did all Communist countries.
Stockton’s Mayor Tubbs thinks this will encourage the non-productive to achieve. Giving free money does the opposite but Mayor Tubbs doesn’t know his history.
Another part of the program includes hiring three artists to create murals that will be “used to start a conversation on the universal basic income project so that people will take it upon themselves and go and do research on it, and see how impactful it can be for our community.”
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The money comes from the Universal Income Project.
“Universal basic income is a simple idea that could have a radical impact on our society: give people enough money to meet their basic needs, providing everyone in the country with an income floor,” the website reads. “Basic income could eliminate absolute poverty, support entrepreneurship, and creativity, and allow every American to share in the prosperity that we have created together as a nation.”
If it were only about income, this would work but we have seen how welfare works. It changes the culture and creates new classes of unambitious dependents.
Freebies Don’t Work
There are no work requirements for this freebie. It’s a giveaway – an invitation to be non-productive. This is not a hands-up, it’s a useless handout. It does not help people but rather, it makes them more dependent.
The program is meant to spur discussion about Universal Basic Income. What do people think will happen if we steal from one group and spread the money around?
It’s wealth redistribution and it eventually puts the government in charge of everyone’s money. The government gets to pick winners and losers.
Stockton is a bankrupt disaster as a city. The officials have passed their misdeeds onto investors. The town fathers basically do everything wrong. When they went bankrupt, they decided investors would be hurt, even though they should have been the first to be paid. That certainly doesn’t encourage people to invest ever again, but foresight wasn’t an issue.
Any UBI, to be successful, must include a work requirement or an education component with a phase-out date or it won’t work. Stockton’s plan doesn’t and it won’t work.
Gang members will certainly like the added income. The UBI proponents would better serve the community by looking into keeping kids out of gangs.
