How would a massive federal spending program like a universal basic income (UBI) affect the macroeconomy? We use the Levy Institute macroeconometric model to estimate the impact of three versions of such an unconditional cash assistance program over an eight-year time horizon. Overall, we find that the economy can not only withstand large increases in federal spending, but could also grow thanks to the stimulative effects of cash transfers on the economy.
Democratic presidential candidate Rep. Tulsi Gabbard 
Tulsi GabbardLawmakers call for universal basic income amid coronavirus crisis Tulsi Gabbard calls for giving Americans K a month during coronavirus outbreak Biden consolidates majority support in new Hill/HarrisX 2020 poll MORE (D-Hawaii) called for introducing a universal basic income (UBI) of $1,000 a month until coronavirus “no longer presents a public health emergency.”
“Most Americans don’t have that safety emergency bank account even for a short term, what to speak of if you’re talking about weeks, or in this case people are looking at potentially months,” Gabbard said in an interview on Hill. TV.
Her proposal, H.R. 897, would give a UBI of $1,000 per month to all adult Americans “until COVID-19 no longer presents a public health emergency.”
The House is preparing to vote on Thursday on a coronavirus-relief bill that would provide Americans with paid sick leave, food assistance, free coronavirus testing, and more substantial unemployment benefits.
But Ocasio-Cortez pushed for a more sweeping response, including expanding Medicare or Medicaid to cover all Americans, a freeze on evictions, a universal basic income, ending work requirements for food-assistance programs, criminal-justice reform, and freezing student-debt collection.
“This is not the time for half measures,” she tweeted on Thursday. “We need to take dramatic action now to stave off the worst public health & economic affects. That includes making moves on paid leave, debt relief, waiving work req’s, guaranteeing healthcare, UBI, detention relief (pretrial, elderly, imm).”
First wave 🌊.
Your questions answered — an update (11−03−2020): Professor Neil Ferguson on the current status of the COVID-19 Coronavirus outbreak, case numbers, intervention measures and challenges countries are currently facing.
Read all reports including estimates of epidemic size, transmissibility, severity, phylogenetics, undetected cases, prevalence and symptom progression here: https://www.imperial.ac.uk/mrc-gida
Andrew Yang says a Universal Basic Income program would greatly help individuals and their communities during the coronavirus outbreak.
“In the case of the Industrial Revolution, people’s lives didn’t improve for seven decades,” Frey says. “That’s two generations. I think we need to be very concerned about some of these short-term effects on people.”
Frey says for seven decades wages were stagnant, food consumption decreased and “people’s living standards deteriorated.” The economy was doing quite well, but most of the workers weren’t seeing the benefits of that economy.
“Because people’s living standards deteriorated, people rioted against mechanized factories. The Luddites are often portrayed as these irrational enemies of progress, and to some extent, that’s right if you take a very long term view,””
The case against the flawed argument that automation won’t be so bad.
Those calling for a government-funded universal basic income are acting as though it’s a hot new idea. It’s not. It’s been tried before—and it didn’t work.
In essence, universal basic income—also known as guaranteed minimum income—provides cash payments to all citizens, regardless of need.
Advocates range from tech billionaires Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg to libertarian scholar Charles Murray.
Universal Basic Income usually creates a confusion and heated debates when people get divided between doomsday and Utopian scenarios. With faster than expected development of AI, we might be faced with no choice. In such case, what will UBI mean for most of us and how will it be implemented?
Let’s say it was possible to buy your health by the day. How much would you be willing to pay for each year of perfect health? What if you could buy years of health for your loved ones, too? At what price point would you draw the line?
This sort of difficult calculus, on a much larger and chronologically longer scale, underpins many decisions we make in medicine — not just decisions that we make as patients, but also the decisions that are made for us by employers, health insurance funders and policymakers. We don’t have the resources to pursue every possible treatment, to research every possible breakthrough, so how do we allocate the resources available? It turns out that there is an entire field of healthcare economics devoted to understanding the costs and benefits of conventional medicine, and to navigating the trade-offs between more expense and better healthcare.
Determining the costs and benefits of new areas like genomic medicine is especially tricky, because we have so much less experience in these areas, and even experts cannot yet fully agree on the spectrum of harms and benefits.
Andrew Yang today announced the creation of Humanity First, an organization that will fund programs for universal basic income and data as a property right.
