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Ontario Launches Universal Basic Income Pilot (www.cbc.ca)
Reader epiphani writes: The Ontario Government will pilot universal basic income in a $50M program supporting 4,000 households over a 3 year period. While Slashdot has vigorously debated universal basic income in the past, and even Elon Musk has predicted it's necessity, experts continue to debate and gather data on the approach in the face of increasing automation. Ontario's plan will study three communities over three years, with participants receiving up to $17,000 annually if single, and $24,000 for families.
Over 300 billion in debt, double the debt of California with only a third of the population....
Except Ontario doesn't have control of the monetary supply so CAN'T print it.
As such, it DOES have to come from somewhere.
Sounds like a public works program. It's one of the few things that gets support from both sides of the aisle, so you might be on to something.
Drill baby drill - on Mars
They already did a basic income experiment back when Prime Minister Trudeau was called Pierre.
In short... Most everyone kept working or didn't start working as early but stayed in school longer.
Also, hospitalizations went down, particularly for mental health problems.
But if you want a real Twilight Zone mindfuck - look up Nixon's basic income experiment.
Run by Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney.
Granted... they saw it as a way to eliminate social programs instead of to expand them. But even they found that there was no change to "work ethic" - everyone still kept working.
Apparently, being "at or just above the poverty line" is simply not enough for most people.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
In what insane world is businesses "pushed away" by people having money to spend ?
And I am prepared to bet when the results come in you'll be proven wrong - because we've been doing experiments like this for decades and you've been wrong EVERY OTHER TIME.
What WILL happen ? A tiny reduction in the workforce: caused by mothers taking extended maternity leave and young people who otherwise couldn't afford it going to get a college education. A massive drop in the unemployment rate as people who could never DARE risk it before suddenly are able to open their own businesses - and employ their neighbours. Increases in the people's average healthcare (with subsequent reduced costs for Canada's single payer healthcare) and a thousand other good things. Bad outcomes: none.
They did this exact same experiment, in Canada in the 1960s under the name MinCome. We know what the results were. There is no reason to believe they won't be replicated YET AGAIN as in all the the hundreds of other experiments that have been done in this regard for over 200 years now.
In all that time - there was exactly ONE experiment where a failure was reported, the report claimed an 'increase in sloth, lack of willingness to work, increased abuse of the bottle and sexual immorality'. It's an interesting case - since it was the first ever UBI experiment and it happened in England almost 200 years ago now to deal with the massive poverty the Industrial Revolution caused. It was also the very first example of a government commissioning a massive piece of research (over 15000 interviews) to build up a huge stack of big-data from which to draw a report in order to smartly evaluate a policy.
There's just one problem: the report was a complete fraud and fabrication. In fact, it was written BEFORE the interviews were even done by a bunch of fraudsters who just wrote what they thought probably would happen based on their own puritan belief systems. They never even READ the data they claimed their report was based on.
It would take over a century before anybody ever actually did. When they did - they discovered the exact OPPOSITE in the data from what the report said was in there - yet another resounding success.
That report even blamed the UBI for the worker's protest marches of 1821 - ignoring that these happened ALL OVER England, not just in the one little town where the UBI experiment happened.
The only experiment where UBI was EVER reported as anything but a massive economic and social success -was a flagrant fraud.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *