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Michigan’s $55M experiment with guaranteed income begins with Flint moms

Michigan’s $55M experiment with guaranteed income begins with Flint moms | Bridge Michigan

https://www.bridgemi.com/michigan-health-watch/michigans-55m-experiment-guaranteed-income-begins-flint-moms

Michigan will experiment with guaranteed income in Flint, one of its poorest cities, giving expectant and new moms $7,500 — no strings attached — to lift the stress of poverty from their newborns.

Michigan’s $55M experiment with guaranteed income begins with Flint moms | Bridge Michigan

FLINT—Eight days after entering the world, Khi’Meir Taylor made another debut — this time in what could be a national spotlight.

Wednesday was the first day of a $55 million experiment to test whether cash payments can protect children from the toxic stress of poverty.

27 comments

FartsWithAnAccent

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Calling it now: They'll find that it works, but then nothing will change once the experiment concludes. Bought and paid for politicians will protect the wealthiest instead of allowing the poor enough to get by, doing everything they can to prevent UBI from being widely implemented.

Goldmage263

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True, especially as many similar programs met the same fate.

AA5B

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You kind of need to help pay for it by getting rid of government programs to allocate money piecemeal. That’s a huge change and a huge commitment, and politicians aren’t good at that.

…. Although I don’t know why the libertarian and other small government folk haven’t latched onto that opportunity

ryathal

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You need to do way more than that. In addition to canceling pretty much every entitlement, you still need more money to give everyone a check.

Theprogressivist

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I am looking forward to the results. It's about time we start testing Universal Basic Income.

FlyingSquid

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Really, we already have the results. And they're good results. Every single resident of Alaska gets oil dividends. I don't like that it's how they have a UBI, but it does give them one and it does help. The only problem is that the amount entirely depends on the oil revenue generated by Alaskan oil in any given year.

Theprogressivist

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TIL. I never knew that. Thank you I'm gonna look into this some more.

Steve

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Is it really every resident, or only legal US citizens?

FlashMobOfOne

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Agreed.

I only wish it weren't a state or local-level thing. If we can find hundreds of billions for other countries' wars, in my mind, there's no excuse for UBI not being the law at the federal level.

Theprogressivist

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Same, although I do understand that at the moment, it's only a local or state level thing because it's still in its early stages. I feel like once enough states or cities experiment then we can gather all that data to create a national system based off what works and find ways to limit abuses on the system.

queermunist

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I'm more interested in paying for domestic and reproductive work i.e. paying people to take care of their kids, cook their meals, mow their lawns, take out their trash, etc. Society can only function on the back of this unpaid labor after all.

UBI is okay too, though.

Theprogressivist

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I get what you're saying, but at the same time, the income isn't replacing your entire income. I see more as supplemental income, kind of like a monthly food allowance where people won't have to worry about struggling for basic necessities.

queermunist

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Even parents who work 9-5 still need to do a ton of work around the home and for their children. That would also fulfill the supplemental role.

But more importantly, it would actually compensate people for the work they need to do to be part of society and keep it running.

FlyingSquid

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I don't think that limiting this help to parents is the right plan. Doing that as a test, fine, but requiring people to have children to get financial assistance is not right.

queermunist

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Who said anything about limiting it to parents?

If you care for a relative you have to do all the same shit, and even if you live alone you still have to do things like cook and clean. Then if you're really industrious there's things like repairing your own car, mending your own clothes, growing your own food, etc.

We all do domestic labor, even if we don't have children. Having children would just increase the work load, and thus pay scale.

Theprogressivist

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Again, I get the sentiment, but that form of system, especially seeing how you're explaining it, seems to create more problems than solve. How would one account for what they have done? It also seems that a system like this would be ripe for abuse.

queermunist

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Abuse as in, someone being paid for work they didn't do? That's... literally what UBI is lol

I will say that, while I prefer domestic and reproductive labor being compensated, I acknowledge it's not a simple problem. It would work in a highly communal society where people have very little time to themselves, since we'd all just see each other doing a good job. It would also work in a mass surveillance society since we'd all be watched 24/7, but that's not exactly good lol

UBI is fine. I'm just grumpy because its not perfectly fair.

FlyingSquid

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Okay, then how is this different from UBI? Are you supposed to keep a log of what you cleaned that day?

queermunist

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Hypothetically, someone who literally plays video games all day and doesn't clean up after themselves wouldn't get any income.

You raise a good point, though, that measuring domestic labor is hard. I spend an hour in the garden, was that because it was an hour of work or because I was working at a leisurely pace? I spent an hour vacuuming the house, is a government inspector going to come check? It's not a practical idea unless mass surveillance gets to a point where there's a camera in your eye that reports to the government lol

So like I said, UBI is fine. I just wish there was a way to compensate unpaid domestic and reproductive labor. That would be more fair.

snooggums

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UBI achieves that because the person who does those things still gets an income without needing a job.

queermunist

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Yeah, and so does the person who doesn't do those things. They receive the same amount, even though one person does more labor. Unfair.

charonn0

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to test whether cash payments can protect children from the toxic stress of poverty

The answer is yes. Obviously.

I keep seeing these pilot programs and small experiments in UBI, and they all prove that people prosper and thrive more when they have more money. Nobody is surprised. Was that ever even in question?

I want to see UBI experiments, plans, etc. that tackle large-scale implementation. We've proven "BI"; that was never the hard part. We need to focus on the "U".

Lightrider

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Defeat the fuckingcapitalists