CA Passes First State Universal Basic 'Income' – AKA Additional Welfare

P. Gardner Goldsmith | July 19, 2021
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Turning into statute what leftist slickster Governor Gavin Newsom proposed in May, the California Assembly will soon send residents more welfare cash taken from those who actually produce things and earn their livings.

The legislation is the first example of a so-called “Universal Basic Income” handout in the nation, and some who back it are eager to see the U.S. government further breach its constitutional bounds to institute a similar disaster.

As Veronika Kyrylenko reports for The New American:

California is poised to create the nation’s first state-funded program making guaranteed-income payments to some categories of residents after lawmakers unanimously passed a bill calling for the monthly checks with no restrictions on how they are spent.

And, if anyone hopes there was some political faction -- some party redoubt -- backing freedom and opposing this socialism? Not so.

The state House and Senate passed the legislation unanimously on Thursday. It would provide funding for monthly payments of between $500 and $1,000 to ‘pregnant people’ (i.e., pregnant women) and young adults who formerly lived in foster homes. 

And remember when I wrote in May about how Newsom and other big-government spenders of other people’s money were claiming “surpluses” after getting big “COVID Relief” handouts from the feds – handouts that show how dependent the states are on Federal Reserve-created, D.C.-dolled, fiat currency? This is yet another example of the poisonous fruits of that federal handout system.

The bill will become law, earmarking $35 million for the program in its first year, when Governor Gavin Newsom signs it as expected, since it was Newsom who proposed the program in May as a way to use part of the state’s budget surplus of more than $75.7 billion.

And, as Kyrylenko and the Associated Press (AP) note, the welfare-pushers have a typically spurious, logically unsound, and historically disproven so-called “rationale” for their added welfare handouts.

Unlike most public benefits, such as food and housing aid, there are no restrictions on how that money is spent: ‘The idea is to reduce the stresses of poverty that cause health problems and make it harder for people to find and keep work,’ according to AP.

Because, as we all know, politicians already haven’t gotten people attached to the medical welfare machine through Medicaid, the CHIP (Children’s Health Insurance Program) health insurance idiocy (which lets families four-times above the poverty line get government-subsidized health care for their offspring, who can be up to 26 years of age), Obamacare, and a myriad of other types of government-tied “aid” that has replaced real charity with faceless prolific politicization.

Related: 'Universal [Except for White People] Income': Oakland to Provide 600 Minority Families with $500 a Month

And, how can the welfare-pushers argue that handing people cash when they don’t work will fire them up to look for work? That’s a question that goes all the way back to Rome's "bread and circuses"back to Plymouth Plantation, when Governor William Bradford wrote in his notes that forced sharing of other people’s wealth led to sloth among the people, reduced industriousness, and led to near starvation shortly after the establishment of the settlement in 1620.

And it’s not as if the welfarism of Universal Basic Income (UBI) hasn’t recently been tried.

Regardless of the obviously unconstitutional reality of the feds handing state politicians a bunch of borrowed cash that future generations will be enslaved to pay off, UBI as an experiment has been attempted, and its failure, well documented.

As Vijay Menon writes for the Foundation for Economic Education, an experiment in supplying people with a “baseline income” (termed a “negative income tax”, aka, a handout) was conducted from the late ‘60s to 1980:

The experiment, which ran from 1968 to 1980, consisted of four random, controlled trials across six states designed to test the negative income tax. Similar to the universal basic income, a negative income tax guarantees a minimum income, which phases out as earnings increase.

The results were predictable, and ugly.

Evaluations of the experiment found that the negative income tax 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.’

What a shock.

For single males who were not heads of households throughout the experiment, the reduction in hours worked per week was a staggering 43 percent.

If recipients lost their jobs during the experiment, they experienced significantly longer spells of unemployment compared with non-recipients—more than two months longer for husbands, almost a year longer for wives, and longer still for single mothers.

Additional evidence comes from TJ Roberts, writing for the Advocates for Self-Government, and his report on the disaster of UBI in Finland, from 2017 to 2018.

It’s pretty clear that this push for UBI in the U.S. is not about “helping” anyone except the politicians who put their faces on screen and in front of crowds, telling the welfare recipients that if it weren’t for them, the poor sods would be starving.

It’s clear that this is not care. It’s not charity. It’s not constitutional. It’s not new, and it’s not beneficial.

It’s sanctimonious enslavement of the productive to seduce the non-productive, even as it promotes even more sloth.

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