Kamala’s Plan to Pay People to Not Work

Kamala’s plan to pay you for not working is a takeoff of the communist Universal Basic Income (UBI) plan. It has failed every time it has been tried.

According to the Stanford – Basic Income Lab, the concept emerges from the social democratic, anarchist, and socialist thinkers. They want to end poverty.

COMMUNISM IS UBI, UBI IS COMMUNISM

UBI sounds good—at first. However, it becomes very expensive, especially as more and more people leave employment to collect it.  Where would those new revenues come from? Mostly from the middle class, at least indirectly, with higher taxes and prices of necessities. The administrators would have to hit Capital Gains. It would eventually destroy capitalism.

Some say it will replace welfare, which it never does. If so, it would simply cause the same inequality, pushing money upwards.

The idea is to give every American a fixed income, meaning the government would have all the money and distribute it. They would make cash payments, and there would be no restrictions or work requirements.

A NEW STUDY AND KAMALA

The Wall Street Journal notes A recent study confirms that universal basic income—no-strings-attached benefit checks offered to recipients regardless of need or contribution to the program—discourages work. That’s relevant to the presidential race. Kamala Harris has called more than once for paying UBI-like benefits.

This is what Kamala did per WSJ:

As vice president, Ms. Harris cast the deciding vote to create a temporary UBI for parents through a significantly expanded child tax credit in 2021. Tens of millions of households collected these payments, which grew to as much as $3,600 a child, even as the program’s work requirement and work incentive features were suspended. A University of Chicago study calculated that if the change were made permanent, it would result in 1.5 million parents exiting the labor force.

[…]

As a senator, Ms. Harris proposed two even larger UBI programs that would have displaced more work. In 2019 she introduced her “signature” bill proposing a UBI for lower-income adults, including childless adults. According to a Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta report, high effective marginal tax rates on modest-income work (due to progressive tax rates coupled with phasing out current benefits) already “effectively lock low-income workers into poverty.” The phaseout of Ms. Harris’s new $3 trillion entitlement would only increase current disincentives to work and advance.

In 2020 she proposed a pandemic UBI program to issue most Americans $2,000-a-month “crisis payments.” That reckless proposal would have doled out a total of $84,000 to each adult and up to three children in households with adjusted gross income under $200,000 (or $150,000 for single-parent households). The total cost would have been $21 trillion.

There are other studies. One such study, conducted in Finland in 2017, found that people were happy to receive free money, but they wouldn’t work.

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