- A guaranteed-basic-income program in Austin gave people $1,000 a month for a year.
- Most of the participants spent the no-strings-attached cash on housing, a study found.
- Participants who said they could afford a balanced meal also increased by 17%.
A guaranteed-basic-income plan in one of Texas’ largest cities reduced rates of housing insecurity. But some Texas lawmakers are not happy.
Austin was the first city in Texas to launch a tax-payer-funded guaranteed-income program when the Austin Guaranteed Income Pilot kicked off in May 2022. The program served 135 low-income families, each receiving $1,000 monthly. Funding for 85 families came from the City of Austin, while philanthropic donations funded the other 50.
The program was billed as a means to boost people out of poverty and help them afford housing. “We know that if we trust people to make the right decisions for themselves and their families, it leads to better outcomes,” the city says on its website. “It leads to better jobs, increased savings, food security, housing security.”
While the program ended in August 2023, a new study from the Urban Institute, a Washington, DC, think tank, found that the city’s program did, in fact, help its participants pay for housing and food. On average, program participants reported spending more than half of the cash they received on housing, the report said.
IDK, I’m a leftist, and am skeptical about UBI because it’s more of a free-market approach to solving a problems, rather than just directly solving problems. I.e. the government could just build more and better homeless housing, and expand section 8 to cover more of the cost and more people. I’m a bit afraid UBI would be used as an excuse to cut social programs, in a similar way that school vouchers are used to cut spending on education and leave families paying for what the vouchers don’t cover.
Bingo. A UBI is attractive because the people that keep the economy rolling are nearly completely unable to access what the economy produces. Why are we trying to keep this broken mess limping along with a UBI? The economy is designed to produce poverty and a UBI will do very little to change that fact.