Twitter Founder Drops Millions on Universal Basic Income Experiment

One of the wilder ideas that has been posited during this, the strangest presidential election in modern history, is that America could still proper if everyone was just given free money every month.

It’s known as “universal basic income”, and it’s just what it sounds like:  Money for nothing that allows Americans to cover basic needs like clothing, food, and shelter, while allowing them to continue to work and educate themselves on top.  This was a main tenet of Andrew Yang’s somewhat short-lived campaign, and now Twitter founder Jack Dorsey is giving UBI a whirl.

Dorsey said on Thursday that he would donate $3 million to Mayors for a Guaranteed Income, a group of mayors of more than a dozen US cities who plan to launch guaranteed-income pilot programs in their cities and lobby federal lawyers to consider a national one too.

The group has said the pilot programs could affect about 7 million Americans in cities including Los Angeles; Atlanta; Newark, New Jersey; and Jackson, Mississippi.

Opponents of the scheme believe that the guaranteed income will compel an inordinate amount of America to drop out of the full time work force, thus stagnating our ability to grow economically.

The aforementioned Yang is already running experiments of his own, giving 20 different New Yorkers $500 each per months for the next 5 years, after which time he will assess the pros and cons of the program.