the staff of the Ridgewood blog
Newark NJ, Newark Mayor Ras Baraka says the city is going to study a pilot program to provide a universal basic income, or basically guaranteeing income for all residents whether they have a job.The Newark mayor made his comments during his annual State of the City address Tuesday night at the New Jersey Performing Arts Center.Newark has launched a taskforce to see if the program is feasible with help from the Economic SecurityProject and the Jain Institute.
In an effort to appeal to millennial voters Baraka said , “We believe in Universal Basic Income, especially in a time where studies have shown that families that have a crisis of just $400 in a month may experience a setback that may be difficult even impossible to recover from,”
While He noted that a third of the city still lives in poverty no details on the plan, like how it would be funded or when a final decision would be made.
Universal basic income or UBI has been tried and failed several time and is the latest chic economic trend looking to placate work ethic challenged millennial’s , and looking to justify inactivity . UBI sounds so much better than welfare . The problem for UBI arises on two fronts ,first it does not address the real issue which is lack of productive skills and lack of life skills.
The second main issue is the more obvious , it discourages work and independence , incentives work hand outs don’t , its expensive , increase in government reach and increase in the size of the welfare state put more people under the thumb of government control ie captive votes.
To date there has not been a successful long-term Universal Basic Income program. A small basic-income program that was tested in Finland was ended after one year , but like most socialistic programs failure seem to encourage replication.
History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.
It has been tried in far more honest cultures and was deemed a failure.
He wants to write checks that he can’t cash
Typical know nothing politician.
In order to qualified you just need apply?
A former employer of mine once said “the city is the parent and has to take care of it’s children, but as a parent it should make some rules”. Well my parents would have told me to get out of bed and make something of myself.
Whoa!!! UBI has been goin on since the 1980s in Alaska, and is currently being experimented with , a pilot program, in several countries. https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2017/01/why-we-should-all-have-a-basic-income
Let’s calm down and see if it works. We don’t want to jump to conclusions too fast, now do we, like Big Pharma that puts out the drugs before they know whether or not they kill people.
Now my edicaton in high school taught me to be cautious about comin to conclusions, to first conduct experiments carefully and thoroughly and think through problems carefully and thoroughly before comin to answers. I wonder if Ridgewood High School teaches kids the same thing? Teachin that most important life thinkin lesson does not cost millions of dollars.
failed every time its tried , Finland just droped it
Ridgwood has become a breeding ground for these left wing loons
The more something fails the more the left wants to keep trying it , stuck on stupid
Finland dropped it but will try other WELFARE PROGRAMS. The Great STATE of Alaska is has basic income program. There will either be more welfare or basic income or combo. So get humane , guys.
Here is from the web:
Europe’s first national government-backed experiment in giving citizens free cash will end next year after Finland decided not to extend its widely publicised basic income trial and to explore alternative welfare schemes instead.
Money for nothing: is Finland’s universal basic income trial too good to be true?
Read more
Since January 2017, a random sample of 2,000 unemployed people aged 25 to 58 have been paid a monthly €560 (£475) , with no requirement to seek or accept employment. Any recipients who took a job continued to receive the same amount.
The government has turned down a request for extra funding from Kela, the Finnish social security agency, to expand the two-year pilot to a group of employees this year, and said payments to current participants will end next January.
It has also introduced legislation making some benefits for unemployed people contingent on taking training or working at least 18 hours in three months. “The government is making changes taking the system away from basic income,” Kela’s Miska Simanainen told the Swedish newspaper Svenska Dagbladet.
The scheme – aimed primarily at seeing whether a guaranteed income might incentivise people to take up paid work by smoothing out gaps in the welfare system – is strictly speaking not a universal basic income (UBI) trial, because the payments are made to a restricted group and are not enough to live on.
But it was hoped it would shed light on policy issues such as whether an unconditional payment might reduce anxiety among recipients and allow the government to simplify a complex social security system that is struggling to cope with a fast-moving and insecure labour market.
Olli Kangas, an expert involved in the trial, told the Finnish public broadcaster YLE: “Two years is too short a period to be able to draw extensive conclusions from such a big experiment. We should have had extra time and more money to achieve reliable results.”
The idea of UBI – appealing both to the left, which hopes it can cut poverty and inequality, and to the right, which sees it as a possible route to a leaner, less bureaucratic welfare system – has gained traction recently amid predictions that automation could threaten up to a third of current jobs.
The Finnish finance minister, Petteri Orpo, told Hufvudstadsbladet he was looking into trialling alternative welfare schemes, including a universal credit system similar to that being introduced in the UK, when the basic income pilot ends.
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It is not about the result, i.e.,- universal income – it is just another Newark “Committee” comprised of the Mayor’s political connections getting money for doing nothing.
Millineals are always trying to figure out how not to work