Universal Basic Income Has Been Tried Before. It Failed Miserably Every Time

Democrats have found that promising only free college and healthcare isn’t enough to win the vote they need to get elected. So they’ve found a new golden calf to hold onto; universal basic income, or UBI.

The concept of UBI has been made popular thanks to Andrew Yang. Other Democrats are now jumping onto the UBI bandwagon like Tulsi Gabbard or Bernie Sanders who wouldn’t outright say he supports giving away free money, but said that “every American deserves a minimum standard of living.”

But the problem with all this is that UBI has been tried before. It failed.

The more known failure of UBI was in Finland. Finland did find that it made people happier who received a no strings attached basic monthly income. But it also made them lazier. In fact, Finland actually ended the expirement and passed stricter welfare rules because of it.

The Finnish government started the pilot program in 2017 with 2000 rando adults between the ages of 25 and 58. It gave them a no strings attached monthly allotment of about $500 a month. It determined that the practice actually makes people less productive, thus becoming permanent leeches on the system. They ended the practice effectively, and instead set up mandatory work requirements to receive welfare.

In the United States, it’s also been tried. between 1968 and 1980, the Federal Government tried the experiement in six states with random individuals. The hope was that a universal basic income would provide work. In fact, it did the complete opposite. The expirement found that the UBI reduced “desired hours of work by 9 percent for husbands, by 20 percent for wives, and by 25 percent for single female heads of families.”

For single males who were not a household head, UBi reduced hours worked by a whopping 43%.

People on UBI also lost their jobs easier, and when unemployed, a husband took on average two years longer to find a new job, and for wives over a year. For single mothers, they did not go back to work.

For every $1,000 in additional benefits, there was an average reduction of $660 in earned income, meaning that $3,000 in government benefits were required to increase net income by $1,000. This makes UBI mathematically impossible.

For the Democrats though, it makes perfect sense.

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