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Universal Basic Income 38 minutes ago

iowa gave people 500 a month and some of them ended up paying more rent

by Bram Yilmaz

reading up on the Iowa UpLift pilot for a seminar. $500 a month to working families round Des Moines for two years, report out in the summer. people felt more hopeful, fine, every pilot finds that the bit nobody headlines: families on housing vouchers saw their rent go up something like $150 a month because the cash counted as income. people on social security payments had a chunk clawed back too. so for some of them the "basic income" was more like $350, or less not trolling but this is my issue with pilots. they test the cheque and not the system it lands in. a real UBI either replaces those benefits or sits on top of them, and those are two completely different costings so which is it? and if it replaces them, who ends up worse off. change my mind

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Comments

Niamh Carr 37 minutes ago

we have this at work already without any pilot lol. staff on universal credit turning down overtime because once the taper kicks in they keep about 45p of every extra pound, and thats before travel. managers think theyre lazy, theyre not, theyve done the maths so bram's right that the system it lands in matters more than the cheque. i'd just say a flat payment that doesnt taper away is kind of the fix for that, not the problem. its the clawing back that makes people stop

Omar Ramirez 37 minutes ago

Bram, I'd agree with the diagnosis and argue with the conclusion. What you've found is a design problem, not a hole in the idea. Many US pilots spend months negotiating waivers so the payment doesn't count against housing or disability support, and the ones that can't end up measuring the clawback as much as the cash. Iowa seems to have hit exactly that. On your either/or, I'd take a third route. Leave disability and housing support alone, since those exist because some costs aren't evenly shared, and let a flat payment replace the parts that are just basic income with paperwork attached. Here that's roughly the standard allowance in Universal Credit. It makes the costing smaller and the politics easier. Nobody campaigns to protect the means test itself.

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