Free Republic

For years, Kipp Kahlia felt stuck. The Long Beach guitarist used to tour the country with reggae artists. But 20 years ago, after contracting intestinal parasites on a trip abroad, Kahlia had to take a step back from gigging. Her health deteriorated and visits to doctors drained her savings. Recently she decided to start a business performing social justice songs at events. But with no extra funds or time, she had to pause the venture. “With all the struggling I was doing, my attitude took a hit,” Kahlia said. “The more you witness yourself being down and out, the more...

CHICAGO (CBS) –Mayor Brandon Johnson spoke Friday in favor of a basic income guarantee program at a conference held in Chicago. "We are ushering in a more dynamic, prosperous economy by giving people a guarantee that their lives have meaning," Johnson said. About 3,200 families are receiving direct payments in the first-ever Cook County Promise Guaranteed Income pilot program for low-earning households.

A new, multi-million dollar program was announced Monday in Harris County that looks to help bridge economic inequality and reduce poverty. Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo and Commissioner Rodney Ellis introduced the $20.5 million investment program called Uplift Harris. The program will be proposed during Tuesday's Commissioner's Court meeting Tuesday. As the first of its kind for the city, a pilot program would launch later this year, if approved, where families living below 200% of the federal poverty line - approximately $40,000 for a family of four - will receive $500 a month to support household needs. However, Commissioner Ellis...

Let’s just call it what it is, right up front: blatant wealth redistribution — the cornerstone objective of the Democrat Party. They know it, they know we know it, and they know we know they know we know it.Moreover, everything the Democrats support or oppose can be connected to the ballot box with no more than two dots. Toss in a depth of hypocrisy that knows no bounds and a willingness to lie without impunity, and there you have it — Joe Biden’s Democrat Party. Today’s example is quintessential.As reported by The Center Square Staff on John Solomon’s Just the...

Have you noticed it’s becoming harder to differentiate satire from reality? When I first saw the headline about a city in California approving a program to provide transgender and nonbinary residents a guaranteed income, I was sure it had to be from the Babylon Bee. Oh, but it’s not. It’s also not an April Fool’s joke. It is very much accurate. Earlier this week, the Palm Springs City Council voted unanimously to fund a pilot program that would guarantee a basic income for transgender and nonbinary residents. So far, $200,000 has been allocated for this program, which is far less...

In the final chapter of his 1967 book "Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community," Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. proposed a bold approach to eliminating poverty. "The solution to poverty," he wrote, "is to abolish it directly by a now widely discussed measure: the guaranteed income." Five decades later, the approach is being tested across the U.S. The idea is simple but controversial. People receive a set amount of money periodically with no strings attached. Advocates believe that this gives recipients, often in the most marginalized groups, freedom to spend it in ways that are most beneficial...

The votes — 36-0 in the Senate and 64-0 in the Assembly — showed bipartisan support for an idea

(CNN)The Biden administration took steps Friday to reverse one of the most controversial health care moves of President Donald Trump: Allowing states to require Medicaid recipients to work in order to receive coverage... ...The Trump administration contended that requiring people to work will better their health and is therefore in keeping with Medicaid's mission. The approvals were one of its most high-profile efforts to inject conservative ideals into the Medicaid program, which provides coverage to nearly one in five Americans.... ...The Supreme Court agreed to take the Arizona and New Hampshire cases in December, with oral arguments scheduled for March...

WASHINGTON — A quarter-century ago, a Democratic president celebrated “the end of welfare as we know it,” challenging the poor to exercise “independence” and espousing balanced budgets and smaller government. The Democratic Party capped a march in the opposite direction this week.... ...The new Democratic stance is “a long cry from the days of ‘big government is over,’” said Margaret Weir, a political scientist at Brown University.... ...Republicans’ increasing efforts to define themselves as a party of the working class, has scrambled the politics of economic policy across the ideological spectrum....

With close to 30 million Americans still unemployed and thousands of businesses facing an uncertain future, calls for a “guaranteed income” are becoming louder. Guaranteed income is giving cash to people who need it because they’re living in poverty. It should not be confused with a “Universal Basic Income,” which is money given to everyone regardless of employment situation or wealth. The idea is centuries old but has actually been tried in very few nations. The most recent experiment occurred among 2000 unemployed workers in Finland. And, not surprisingly, it was mostly a failure. There were slight improvements in the...

The idea of giving poor people cash with no strings attached in lieu of government welfare payments has been floating around the leftist fever swamps since the 1960s. It's called universal basic income and Chicago will apparently develop a pilot program to test it.WLSTV: Some Chicago families could start collecting a $1,000 check every month with no strings attached. That's the new proposal from a task force created by Mayor Emanuel. The idea is to break the cycle of poverty. The pilot program would give 1,000 struggling Chicagoans $1,000 a month.Supporters say people could use the extra cash to...

• Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes says the federal government could give U.S. workers a stipend of $500 per month by repealing the Trump tax cuts. • Hughes, an advocate for a basic income, argues that less than a third of Americans have reaped the benefits of the president's tax cuts. Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes said Thursday the federal government could give U.S. workers a stipend of $500 per month by repealing the tax cuts passed late last year. Hughes, author of "Fair Shot: Rethinking Inequality and How We Earn" and an advocate for a basic income, argued that less than...

Michael Tubbs, the 27-year-old mayor of Stockton, California, has a radical plan to combat poverty in his cash-strapped city: a “no strings” guaranteed basic income of $500 a month for its residents. Starting in early 2019, Tubbs plans to provide the monthly stipend to a select group of residents as part of a privately funded 18-month experiment to assess how people use the money. “And then, maybe, in two or three years, we can have a much more informed discussion about the social safety net, the income floor people deserve and the best way to do it because we’ll have...

Guaranteed jobs seem to be the newest way for upper-class Democrats to demonstrate they are looking out for the working class. It’s not just a side project, either. Some pundits have suggested that the policy should become “the central tenet of the party’s platform” in 2018. Instead of guaranteeing jobs to any economically fraught American though, Democrats should first aim to liberate the American worker from the outdated labor laws applied to the 21st century economy. Let’s face it: the rules of the labor market are rotten at the core. Their expiration date has well and truly passed. Simply creating...

Hawaii state representative Chris Lee has introduced a bill to guarantee economic security for the state's residents. Amidst fears of technology leading to job automation, Lee's Universal Basic Income (UBI) measure would ensure that that all residents of Hawaii are able to receive a steady income, regardless of their employment status. Prominent billionaire businessmen including Richard Branson, Mark Zuckerberg, and Elon Musk have expressed their support for the bill. "In the modern world, everybody should have the opportunity to work and to thrive. Most countries can afford to make sure that everybody has their basic needs covered," Virgin Group founder...

In perhaps the single most astounding passage of her campaign memoir What Happened, Hillary Clinton reveals a campaign proposal she formulated with staffers but never actually released: a universal basic income for Americans, funded by carbon and financial transaction taxes. "I wanted very much to convey a commitment to trying to figure ways to raise incomes," she said in an interview with Vox's Ezra Klein. "The Alaska model where they write a check to every single Alaskan every year based on a formula about the oil and gas revenues was really intriguing to me.” Here’s the relevant passage of the...

I first heard the term “basic income” in the socialist magazine Dissent in 2005. I was a 15-year-old leftist with a taste for weird, radical plans to restructure society: say, having the government buy up majority stakes in every company and then distribute them equally to every American; converting all companies into worker cooperatives; trying a planned economy where the planning is done by decentralized worker and consumer councils rather than a government bureaucracy. Basic income, wherein the government gives everyone enough cash to live on with no strings attached, struck me as an idea in that mold: another never-going-to-happen...

Zuckerberg doesn't seem to understand that handing out cash is not the same thing as creating wealth He is not the first to tout this idea. In fact, it’s been a favorite of Bernie Bro types for a while now. But it’s one thing when some lefty chucklehead on Facebook is pushing the idea of a universal, guaranteed minimum income for everyone - provided by the government with no work requirement whatsoever. It’s another thing when one of the richest and most influential people in the world signs on. Some will suggest this is a signal Zuckerberg wants to run...

The tech industry collectively face-palmed when Trump's treasury secretary said earlier this year that the threat of robots taking human jobs was "not even on our radar screen." There is a growing evidence that robots and artificial intelligence could displace huge swaths of the American workforce....

Speaking with Wired editor-in-chief Scott Dadich and MIT Media Lab director Joi Ito in a recent interview, President Barack Obama reaffirmed his belief that universal basic income would be harder to ignore in the coming decades. UBI is a system of wealth distribution in which the government provides everyone with some money, regardless of income. The money comes with no strings attached. People can use it however they choose, whether to repair a leaky roof or to go on vacation. Advocates say the system is a smart and straightforward way to lift people out of poverty. A growing body of...