Scott Santens

When it comes to rent, that's a different issue.

And we have to tackle that even separately.

Yeah, so first of all, it's an interesting question to even say effectively.

I think that one person's rational expenditure is another person's wasteful expenditure, but it's entirely rational and not wasteful to that person.

And I think that's even part of the problem with all this government spending is that you get a whole bunch of bureaucrats together and they decide where money should go.

And in making those decisions, of course, it's oftentimes...

incredibly wasteful and ineffective and people don't actually get what they need.

So I think that it makes far more sense to make sure that people get to choose for themselves where that money should go.

And I think that by and large, and we see this from the evidence of experiments too, that people do know what they need most and that's what they spend it on.

When it comes to housing, this is actually a good example.

Yeah, yeah, actually, I can combine those.

So in the experiments in the 70s, we did these negative income tax experiments, and they took place in New Jersey and rural North Carolina and Seattle and Denver, a bunch of different cities across the country.

And one of those in – actually, a couple of them, but specifically in Gary, Indiana, in that experiment –

we saw that there was a large increase in homeownership.

So people use that money and they use that to buy homes.

It actually increased homeownership by 26%.

And this was actually pretty, pretty surprising to the researchers because a mortgage is a very long-term expense.

This is, you're signing up for something for like 30 years and you're

people knew that they weren't going to get this more additional income for 30 years.

They knew you could get it for like five years or something.