What Would You Do With an Extra $500 a Month? A financial experiment in five true stories.

[Sherman A1]

Soon after Michael Tubbs became mayor of Stockton, California, at the age of 26 — the youngest to be elected to a city of over 100,000 and Stockton’s first African-American mayor — he directed his policy fellows to research ways to reduce poverty. Four years earlier, in 2012, the city had declared bankruptcy, and it was still mired with high unemployment and crime. The team came back to report that one way to end poverty was to give people money.

This solution had a name, “universal basic income” (or UBI), and a long history in America as a social-policy idea. It had been embraced by Thomas Paine and Milton Friedman and made a cornerstone of the Poor People’s Campaign advanced by Martin Luther King Jr. Both Richard Nixon and Jimmy Carter had proposed replacing welfare with a guaranteed income. More recently, the idea had been revived by Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, who saw it as a remedy for the burgeoning “useless class” — all those people whose jobs technology is making obsolete.

Tubbs was skeptical, but the following May he attended a conference on the future of work, where he sat next to the economist and developer Natalie Foster. Along with Chris Hughes, a co-founder of Facebook, Foster had launched an advocacy group dedicated to advancing the conversation about guaranteed income. She told Tubbs they were looking for a test city, and he suggested that Stockton might be the perfect place.

Less than two years later, this past February, the Stockton Economic Empowerment Demonstration gave 130 individuals, randomly selected from neighborhoods with a median household income at or below Stockton’s $46,033, their first monthly payment of $500, no strings attached. Over the program’s 18 months, SEED would track how the money was being spent and assess the subjects’ financial security and well-being as well as more subtle measures of the money’s impact, such as their feelings of hope and of mattering.

http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/10/universal-basic-income-stockton-california.html

[stonecutter357]

1. What Would You Do With an Extra $500 a Month? 4 oz of WEED .....

[Sneederbunk]

2. Buy some cashews.