Yet more support for basic income

http://national.deseretnews.com/article/1677/What-if-we-just-gave-poor-people-cash.html

I just read this fairly short article.  It turns out yet another organization has tried giving poor people cash, this time in developing countries, and surprise, the results are the same as nearly every other trial.  Instead of buying more tobacco and alcohol, poor people given cash spend the money on health care, education, and even starting new businesses.  As usual, they found that giving poor people cash, even in one time payouts, raises their income even many years down the road.  Most of the poor people given cash in this experiment actually spent less on tobacco and alcohol, because they had enough money to spend it on better things.

The evidence in favor of giving poor people cash, with no strings attached (nearly every study and article on the subject uses this exact wording) is already overwhelming.  How much evidence do we need before we do something about it?  Over the last few months (ever since I became familiar with the idea of a basic income) I have randomly come across something providing more evidence that it is a good idea at least once every two weeks, and I have not even been looking.

What all of this tells me is that poor people, in nearly every culture, respond positively to cash donations.  Contrary to popular belief, they do not use the money to get drunk or high but rather use it to get out of poverty.  Most Americans, even liberals, think that welfare should be carefully regulated to prevent misuse of the money.  It turns out, they are all wrong.  Instead of food stamps, we should be handing out cash.  Instead of subsidizing housing, we should be handing out cash.  Maybe it would be better to hand out cash instead of providing Medicare/Medicaid benefits as well.  Who knows!  It might even be better to hand out cash instead of funding homeless shelters and soup kitchens.

I wonder how much money we spend on welfare.  Now, I do not just mean government welfare.  I am talking about all of the welfare from any source, including charities.  Sadly, in the U.S., we donate far more to charities helping people outside of the country than people inside the country, but I still suspect that we spend enough on welfare to fund a major cash based reconstruction effort to get U.S. citizens out of poverty.  I have established before that the overhead on government welfare is huge.  We spend absurd amounts of money to make sure that only seriously poor people get welfare money.  Many charities have higher overheads than the U.S. government (successful charities typically spend a lot of money advertising).  Including all overhead, how much are we spending to carefully dole out charity money in forms that are more difficult to abuse, to only the people that we think actually need it?  Added all together, how much money per person per year is that?  I do not have a clue.  I scraped up some rough numbers for just government welfare spending, which I discussed in a previous article on this subject.  They were pretty amazing.  By itself, the government could payout about half what is needed for a complete basic income (complete meaning that it is enough to get everyone in the U.S. out of poverty).  Even though most U.S. charity donations are going to other countries, I think in-country donations could easily make up the difference.  I suspect that added together, all welfare money spent in the U.S. is enough to get the entire population out of poverty.  Given the evidence that most of those in poverty will become productive citizens if this occurs, it is clearly in our best interest to do so.

A basic income is the cheapest form of effective welfare we could have, because the administrative overhead is extremely low.  The evidence indicates that it would also be a major boost to the economy, not just by increasing spending, but also by increasing the number of successful businesses.  The evidence also indicates that it would reduce harmful behaviors like smoking and excessive alcohol consumption.  It is also likely it would substantially reduce drug use.  The evidence indicates it would improve education as well.  This means that a basic income could be the best solution to many of our current problems.  It could help dramatically in the "war on drugs."  It would effectively end poverty in the U.S.  It would help speed up economic recovery, and it might even result in an economy too robust to fail to dramatically again.  It will reduce smoking.  It will reduce drinking, which would also likely reduce alcohol related violence and would certainly reduce harm caused by driving while intoxicated.  This means it would probably substantially reduce crime (which could eliminate the problem of overcrowding in jails).  It could even pull our failing education system out of the dumps.  While a basic income is probably not the perfect solution to all of our most major problems, it seems to be an essential element of such a solution.  In fact, it may be the only viable solution to breaking down the walls preventing progress for all of these problems.

As the evidence in favor of a basic income mounts, the apparent intelligence of those opposed to it shrinks.  Our lawmakers in the '60s who supported a basic income look more and more like geniuses as more data is generated and revealed.  It is a crying shame that the bill never passed.  Problems have arisen between now and then that never would have happened if they had been successful.  It is time to correct their 50 year long failure and make the U.S. truly the Promised Land.