Opinion: How a Kamala Harris administration would trap people in poverty
Vice President Harris has yet to propose solutions to address poverty in America. If we fill in the blanks based on her past policy support and legislative proposals, we find a champion for ideas that keep people locked in poverty, rather than set the unfortunate on a path of upward mobility.
Hard-left policymakers like Harris posit that universal basic income (UBI), which gives people a standard welfare payment with no work requirements, is the solution to economic insecurity. Instead of growing earnings potential or human capital, UBI advocates want to grow the poor’s dependence on government.
However, they never seem to consider how people change their behavior when they receive no-strings-attached cash. Recent research published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, studying the impact of $1,000 monthly UBI payments on low-income households, found predictably negative outcomes: Fewer recipients worked, hours worked each week fell, and overall income (excluding the cash transfers) fell.
The intuitive folly of UBI is probably why public support for it — even among lower-income individuals — is lower and has declined recently. In 2020, the Pew Research Center found that less than half of Americans supported the idea, even amid double-digit unemployment during the pandemic. As of October 2023, polling from the State Policy Network shows support is down to 35 percent.
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