The Patriot Post® · UBI Breeds Laziness

There are bad ideas, and then there are really bad ideas. Universal Basic Income (UBI) is an idea that belongs in the latter category.

Back in 2020, during the Democrat presidential primary, businessman Andrew Yang seemingly introduced the idea to the wider public, touting it as a signature policy of his campaign platform. According to Yang, as the U.S economy evolved into more of a tech-heavy system, millions of Americans could find their jobs displaced nearly overnight. With these American workers lacking the skills for the new emerging economy, they would find it difficult to gain employment that paid well enough to sustain them.

Yang’s solution, then, was to provide these folks with some form of a UBI, roughly $1,000 a month, which he marketed as a “Freedom Dividend.” Of course, that “freedom” would be at the taxpayer’s expense. But Yang and others have justified UBI by arguing that everyone deserves to have at least enough income to survive. Put another way, merely being alive entitles everyone to a government handout for their basic needs.

The claim is that UBI will free people to engage in certain socially positive endeavors, such as starting a new business, staying at home to raise a family, or writing the next great American novel. The underlying assumption is that the only reason more people aren’t doing this now is because they can’t afford to.

The history of lottery winners should be enough to expose the fallacy of this assumption. But it took a study from the National Bureau of Economic Research to confirm that human nature has not changed, even in the 21st century.

The study gave a group of 1,000 low-income people $1,000 a month over a three-year period. It also gave a control group of 2,000 people $50 a month. The first group was aged 21 to 40 and had an annual income of $29,000. The $1,000 a month UBI equated to a 40% increase in their overall income.

The result of this windfall was that these people worked … less. That’s right. These individuals worked 1.4 fewer hours a week. In fact, their annual income dropped by $1,500 a year, excluding the $1,000 UBI. For every one dollar these people received, their income dropped by 12 cents.

Furthermore, the claim that UBI would help to spur great individual development and social engagement was proven false. Instead, the study found that these individuals spent less time on self-improvement, less time with their kids, and less time looking for work. What they did spend time on was more leisure activities.

The study thus showed that UBI made people lazier — the exact opposite effect of what its advocates claim. Instituting UBI nationally would hurt people by robbing them of the very natural incentive that drives productivity, creativity, and development. Instead, it would condition people to accept not only mediocrity and poverty — but also government dependency.