🌈Ranibow Sprimkle🌈

Republican lawmakers in Arizona are joining a chorus of conservatives across the country trying to ban basic income programs, which offer residents no-strings-attached payments.

Arizona state lawmakers introduced a bill that would ban any municipality or county from making payments to a person as part of a guaranteed basic income program. The law, House Bill 2375, describes a "guaranteed income program" as any program where someone receives payments that are "unearned" and can be used for any reason.

Numerous cities across the country are experimenting with guaranteed basic income programs either through local initiatives or nonprofits. The programs typically provide monthly payments of $500 to $1,000 to low-income residents or families to spend however they want.

In Denver, for example, a basic income program that gives some people up to $1,000 a month was recently extended after participants reported increased housing security. [...]

Let's have the conversation about UBI.

Let the actual data and facts end the bad faith arguments.

I was a participant of the now cancelled UBI pilot in Ontario Canada. I was happier, safer, was able to move and work at better jobs.

And oops there it is. Better jobs.

Better jobs

It's a class barrier. They need a poverty class to function

#people being able to leave jobs that maltreat them is a threat to capitalism

Despite every moment of life being indescribably precious and a wondrous mystery, I will spend it caring about dividends and how many rental properties I have.

Rich people are truly dead inside. 

I can't imagine caring this much about numbers that absolutely will never impact my life. This person is making more in passive income than I've ever made in my life and he's just like "but but I need more :(".

I mean, fuck that guy, but psychologically it's interesting.

Some desperate remnant of his soul knows what he needs. As soon as his debt is cleared, he goes on to live what many would call an utterly charmed life: working no more than 20 hours a week, travelling and spending time with friends (which he, at $150,000 a year and no mortgage, has ample money to do). He has a loving relationship also.

But his brain is so rotten that he cannot understand happiness anymore. He is incapable of conceptualising it other than in money.

A man who has everything except the ability to feel it.

How poetic.

But fuck that guy.

I want to hit this man.

I want to rob this man.

Meow appears beside Rogue, holding a sign: "Heist? Heist."

This man is so so so close to realizing a fundamental truth to how humans operate, but I genuinely don’t think he’s going to get there. Although I’m not sure he realizes it this man views the money he earns as a direct translation of his sense of personal achievement and engagement. 

Which means that when he says he regrets the months he didn’t pick up more hours to earn more money, what he’s describing here is boredom. He’s doing it in the crassest, shallowest, most income-obsessed and unattainable for most of us way possible, yes. But this man is expressing that once he achieved a certain financial goal he relaxed, enjoyed himself, got bored, realized on some level he was understimulated, and then started working more hours to meet whatever stimulated activity threshold he personally needs. 

This is infuriating because this man experienced the counter-argument to that nonsensical talking point that if we meet people’s financial needs with a universal basic income they’ll grow lazy and won't do anything. 

Anyone trying to develop $200,000 in passive annual income is not working three minimum-wage jobs to live paycheck-to-paycheck. This man’s basic financial needs were met. Working more hours to make more money is just his own personal code for ‘I still needed to use my mind to do things’ (using what might be the only metric of personal achievement he might actually have). This man lived the argument for universal basic income and I genuinely don’t think he realizes that. Once his basic income needs were met he still needed to do things to keep himself stimulated and engaged with his own life.

You see a version of this play out with retirees who leave their jobs, go home, and very quickly find themselves in need of new activities or friends or engagements to keep them present and stimulated in their lives. Ensuring someone’s basic financial needs are met doesn’t make them stop doing things, humans don’t work that way.

Reblogging for the psychology lessons

There is, I believe, a line in an Agatha Christie story about a man so desperately unhappy he doesn’t know he’s unhappy. “Ah, a rich man,” responds the nun.

that is exactly my point of view. if all people were given universal basic income, we could have tens of thousands of boring, tedious, dangerous, and long term harmful jobs done by robots, while humans are free to explore their passions without fear of poverty and homelessness.

in a good society, automation means a boom in the arts. language, painting, music, dance, writing, philosophy, architecture, etc. these are the sectors that advance tremendously during periods of human health and flourishing

Back in the 1960s, we were told that automation and rising productivity would mean shorter work weeks with higher pay. Instead we have multibillionaires, growing poverty, and crumbling infrastructure. The money is all there, it’s just being hoarded.