I wonder if it would be feasible to pick a small town in the US and have private parties contribute enough to run such an experiment -- perhaps with better record keeping.
Say a town of 3000 adults and 1000 needed help to get to a 'living wage' level. Let's call living wage an average of $40K per year and, on average, the 1000 people needed about half that to get to that level.
$20m/year plus administrative costs, let's say $5m. $25m for the experiment. Say we run it for a guarantee of 5 years, so that is $125 million.
Too bad. A bit beyond a kickstarter level.
Maybe somebody could supplement it with a reality show.
That article is very negative on the whole idea and is short on facts of the experiment and long on conclusions.
One point it made that had me thinking was that it would be impossible to cover enough of the population because the poverty line is so close to median income.
Well, what if we didn't cover everyone? What if we picked areas that are having a particularly rough time and used a negative income tax to prime the pump?
Comments
I wonder if it would be feasible to pick a small town in the US and have private parties contribute enough to run such an experiment -- perhaps with better record keeping.
Say a town of 3000 adults and 1000 needed help to get to a 'living wage' level. Let's call living wage an average of $40K per year and, on average, the 1000 people needed about half that to get to that level.
$20m/year plus administrative costs, let's say $5m. $25m for the experiment. Say we run it for a guarantee of 5 years, so that is $125 million.
Too bad. A bit beyond a kickstarter level.
Maybe somebody could supplement it with a reality show.
There is was a negative income tax experiment in 70s in Seattle:
http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc1/NegativeIncomeTax.html
That article is very negative on the whole idea and is short on facts of the experiment and long on conclusions.
One point it made that had me thinking was that it would be impossible to cover enough of the population because the poverty line is so close to median income.
Well, what if we didn't cover everyone? What if we picked areas that are having a particularly rough time and used a negative income tax to prime the pump?
I think reality TV would prefer if mincome made for worse outcomes.