Albert Wenger

And I just think we have this sort of incredibly negative image where we go, oh, you know, that's just bad.

I mean, people are going to spend it on drugs and they're going to laze around and they're going to do no good.

And there is literally no evidence to support that.

All the evidence from all the basic income trials that have ever been run are that people are like, wow, I can take better care of myself.

I can invest

and education i can take better care of my family um of my friends um so all the evidence points that people when given money actually in communities actually know what to do with this money um yes there'll always be examples where it doesn't work but the overwhelming evidence is that people are actually going to figure out how to solve their problems when they have the resources to do so

Is that accurate?

Well, there's a couple of things.

There's welfare programs, but more importantly, it's taxes, right?

So

the way the US income tax system works today is just, the whole thing is just, it's all screwed up in many ways.

So if you are on welfare programs today, you have zero work incentive because you start working, you lose all your welfare, but you only make a little bit of money.

So the taxes that you effectively face, people who are on welfare today often face tax rates that are above 100%.

So it has completely nuked all work incentive for them.

So that's crazy.

Then the next thing that's crazy is that

There's a whole bunch of people who are not paying any federal income tax.

Mitt Romney famously tanked his own campaign when he called them out and berated them.

But it's the tax code.

The tax code says if you make below a certain amount of money, you don't owe any federal income taxes.