An extensive study on universal basic income (UBI), the idea that the government should provide all citizens enough money to live on — an idea increasingly promoted by many on the Left, including Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang — found that the current schemes to implement it are unsustainable, even in the short term, and would not actually improve individual wellbeing or equality as much as simply investing the money in “reforming social protection systems, and building more and better-quality public services.”
In a report published by The Guardian, Anna Coote, the co-author of the New Economics Foundation study, which was produced for the global trade union federation Public Services International, says that after reviewing “16 practical projects that have tested different ways of distributing regular cash payments to individuals across a range of poor, middle-income and rich countries, as well as copious literature on the topic,” the group found that UBI is not only unsustainable, it fails to actually accomplish what its proponents claim it will accomplish.
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