Name: Annie Lowrey - Give People Money and the Case for a Universal Basic Income The Daily Show
Uploaded: 2018-09-05T14:46:12.000Z
Duration: 7 min 34 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

My guest tonight is a contributing editor

for The Atlantic,  and author of the new book,

The imperative

Give People Money:  How a Universal Basic Income

-Thank you for having me. -This is a book

that will get some people really orgasmic

and some Republicans nightmares for years.

So, the idea would be that a government--

in this case, our government-- would give everybody

the equivalent  of a social security payment.

So you would just get $500 or a thousand dollars a month, maybe,

just for living and breathing and being in the United States.

That's it. It's a very, very simple, revolutionary idea.

-Right. Okay, so simple idea, complex in execution. -Yes.

You know, because as soon as you say "universal basic income,"

immediately, people jump to communism, socialism,

-Right. -you are going to give people money,

then your first question is, why would people bother working?

Right. So, the idea is that it wouldn't be enough money

So if you had $500 a month from the government,

it's very unlikely that you would quit working.

We have, actually, a lot of studies that have shown

that even with more money than $500 a month,

-tend to be the parents of young children, -Right.

they tend to be young folks who are staying in school for longer

and then they tend to be older folks who perhaps retire,

So you have groups of people who may be using

universal basic income to improve their lives,

you know, to raise children, to earn an education.

In the title, you say:  How a Universal Basic Income

So, the idea is that if there were a future

in which a lot of jobs started to be replaced

how would a lot of people support themselves?

It's one that people are really worried about.

would kind of have to step in to help keep...

to fall back on, you might not take a job with poverty wages.

-to actually improve working conditions. -Right.

And we've seen just a remarkable reduction

in the power of the labor force versus their employers.

And so this would be kind of a solve for that.

I mean, you've gotten a lot of pushback on this book, you know,

The Wall Street Journal,  for instance, saying:

Isn't that more important than just giving them a handout?

a giant jobs program that was designed to employ,

that would be a really hard and expensive thing to do.

And the great thing about giving people money

is that you give them a choice, and you support the economy,

and that way you don't have to come up with

'Cause that's the big question you have here.

-I mean, like, if you look at the numbers... -Yeah.

-would cost $3.9 trillion per year, -Right.

Even if you take away all of the Republican's tax cuts.

That's still gonna be five percent of paying for it,

Well, the United States is a low-low tax country

-I heard it's the highest taxes in the world. -It is not.

Subtitles ListPlay Video

Annie Lowrey - Give People Money and the Case for a Universal Basic Income The Daily Show

debate

improve

tend

poverty