It doesn’t matter if it’s not a lot of money. The point is that it’s still free money you get for doing nothing. Private companies pay fees (taxes) to the state and the state puts that in a fund and distributes money from that fund to the citizens whether they do anything or not. That’s “distribution of wealth.”
As far as I know, socialism is still socialism even if you just do a little bit of it.
Whatever you think of this, it is basically just an adjustment to welfare. It won’t involve anyone who isn’t already either on welfare or about to qualify for welfare. So the main question is whether it represents an increase, or a redesign.
It’s my rather uneducated impression that U.S. welfare is handed out in portions that include food stamps and other directed amounts. Canadian welfare tends to be just one check that the recipient is supposed to use to cover all expenses. Almost inevitably it isn’t enough to cover rent, food and utilities so people end up getting most of their food from food banks. The official food banks are tied up in all sorts of regulations so a lot of pressure then falls on church-run food banks to feed welfare recipients.
Within certain limits a guaranteed income is probably a smarter option than welfare anyway. You don’t want to encourage people not to work but if welfare is less than enough to live on, it just creates crime and leads to the welfare recipients becoming unemployable (they can’t afford to get to job interviews even if they want the jobs, or they miss them because they are scrounging all over for food).
I think the solution is a basic guaranteed income that can be cut off if recipients refuse to comply with reasonable program requests to upgrade working skills or apply for work. Keep it just over the sum total of basic rent and food/utilities to prevent anyone from wanting to choose that option over better paying work.
Welfare hasn’t worked as intended, whether you believe it is a good or a bad thing, it basically provides something like 80% of what’s actually needed in most (Canadian) cities so the results are predictable. We probably end up paying more in taxes to cover the crime and health care problems created.
The PFD fund is multi-billions in value, and they only disburse a small amount of interest. I don’t think that is socialism, that is derived from oil taxes, that’s capitalism and it is a big shot in the arm for the Alaskan economy.
I lived up there for 16 years and got various amounts.Did I work for it? No. I just did some service for just a couple oil companies, I only contracted and didn’t work for them directly, but without the PFD being created the oil companies would have just had bigger profits and would have given it to their shareholders (who don’t work for it either).