I’ve been wondering if the coronapocalypse might be a catalyst for a wider buy-in to the idea of some form of Universal Basic Income. It got a lot of notice when #andrewyang was running for President but when he dropped out of the race that all kind of died away. But Covid-19 seems to have started things up again.
Spain is heading down the UBI path and Ireland is looking into UBI. I saw an article somewhere this morning (duh, can’t find it now) about some sub-Saharan country that was going to start issuing cash to their citizens. Canada’s doing several payments to many in that country too.
The Big Kahuna being the United States. Folks on the right have long scoffed at the whole idea of UBI and I can remember seeing a bunch of people on social media calling Yang a communist for even suggesting the idea.
But then a strange thing happened. The Treasury started cutting $1,200 checks. Granted, technically not #ubi (since there were some income restrictions), but pretty damn close. After all of that complaining about Yang’s proposal, I would have expected that conservatives in the U.S. would have been denouncing those payments. But that didn’t seem to happen.
Try as I might, I could not find an article about even one person flat-out refusing to cash the $1,200 check that had been sent to them.
And now in Congress, lots of talk about a second round of payments. There has been some vague whining about deficit spending from what’s left of the flash in the pan otherwise known as the Tea Party, but fiscal conservatives seem to have all but vanished. File this one under Massively Ironic: the Wall Street Journal reported that the Ayn Rand Institute received a Paycheck Protection Program loan of between $350K and $1 million.
Jobs sure don’t seem to be coming back. Rent’s due and mortgage defaults are exploding. Maybe we’re not calling it UBI yet, but few people seem to be objecting to getting cash payments from their governments.
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…our biggest export for as long as any of us can remember (or most of us have been alive) has been the US Dollar.
Here, foreign friend, is a green piece of paper. Toil for me. I’m ready for my grapes and massage now.
All the reasons the rest of the world agreed to this deal at the close of WWII really don’t apply anymore. We’re hurdling along on momentum alone, even as it unravels before our eyes.
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Post beneficiaries:
5% - 
95% - 
