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  • There's always this tone when you read articles about poverty, that this is this intractable

  • problem that we barely understand, let alone, like, have the tools to deal with. We have

  • the tools. It's called cash. The government spends billions of dollars on these really

  • complicated schemes to end poverty, but the problem with poverty is not having enough

  • money. The simplest solution when someone doesn't have enough money is to give them

  • money. And so that's more or less the idea of a universal basic income. So lots of people

  • have supported a basic income, or a guaranteed income or whatever you want to call it. Martin

  • Luther King endorsed one in his last book. Milton Friedman, the libertarian economist,

  • outlined a specific plan for one. Charles Murray, who wrote The Bell Curve, is an avid

  • proponent. One thing that gets lost is that it really was a mainstream political idea

  • in America, as recently as the 1970s. Richard Nixon tried to pass a guaranteed minimum income

  • inspired by Milton Friedman. It got very close to passing. George McGovern, who ran against

  • him, ran against him on a platform that included a more generous guaranteed minimum income.

  • Jimmy Carter tried to pass a minimum income as president. But the point is, this was a

  • really mainstream idea. It wasn't something that was like crazy, like it sometimes feels

  • like today. And a few things happened to make it that way. The big one was that there were

  • a bunch of experiments that tried out a version of a basic income called the Negative Income

  • Tax in a bunch of different cities in the US and in Canada. And it's one of those experiments

  • where people will still argue about what the results actually said to this day. What got

  • reported and passed along by politicians was no one is going to work if you implement this.

  • That's not true. There was an effect on -- people worked fewer hours, but it was a pretty modest

  • effect and it's really hard to say where it came from. Like one place it probably came

  • from was people staying in school longer. But the overwhelming feeling in Washington

  • was, OK, we had this idea; we tried it; it didn't work; let's move on. But it's totally

  • possible to end poverty, and we shouldn't act as though this is something that no one

  • has thought up a way to fix. People have thought up a way to fix it --

  • the question is if we think it's worth it.

There's always this tone when you read articles about poverty, that this is this intractable

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