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In addition to all this, this pandemic should have put paid to the "laziness theory" forever. You just have to read around Twitter to see how bored and twitchy everyone is. People generally can't STAND being idle. https://twitter.com/erynnbrook/status/1249732400248225792
The hardest thing for most newly disabled people to deal with is not being able to work. Humans are terrible at being purposeless. We INVENT purpose when we're left alone. We get deeply distressed if we don't have it.
In every pilot we've ever tried, no matter how halfassed, basic income of any type -- unconditional and universal or not -- has improved recipient physical and mental health, lowered substance addiction and abuse rates, lowered crime rates & raised literacy and graduation rates.
It has also has little impact on the number of people who are not working and not looking: people who stay home with UBI are single parents w/unreliable childcare & people just on the border of "disabled enough that working is misery but not disabled enough to qualify for SSDI".
UBI is the simplest, most effective form of social safety net possible. We've tried trickle-down economics for 40 years now, and things have only gotten worse. It's well past time to try the opposite.
