openpolitics.com

It’s Payback Time for Women

Basic income proposals are sprouting up again, from the right as well as the left. Charles Murray of the American Enterprise Institute thinks a guaranteed income could replace the welfare state.

.. That’s why some members of the Silicon Valley elite, better known for their contempt for government, advocate all-inclusive, no-strings-attached cash grants.

.. THIS is all very nice, skeptics say, but the U.B.I. still represents a moral hazard. Give people money for nothing, and the lazy will grow lazier and the rest of us will be bankrupted.

But that does not appear to be the case. On the contrary: The U.B.I. gives workers less reason to loll about at home than do perversely disincentivizing policies like the one whereby a dollar earned is a dollar cut from a welfare check.

.. Basic-income experiments have shown that recipients make greater use of medical services and break the law less often than nonrecipients.