Yeeeees, give us more gov aaaaid

...if free money was so good for the boomers, then surely, it'd be good for everybody else?

Yes, this is the idea: if you're gonna give people money, doing it without middlemen and inefficient bureaucracy is probably preferable:

For decades, people have debated the merits] of guaranteed income programs, also called universal basic income, as an alternative or complement to traditional welfare. Driving the efforts is the idea that the most effective way to improve people’s lives is to give them cash and let them spend it how they want.

"The concept resurged in popularity a decade ago, driven by fears of automation and rising wealth inequality."

Across Silicon Valley, experimental guaranteed income programs have quietly taken off. Google began funding six different initiatives in 2022 as part of a $50 million donation to nonprofits in the San Francisco Bay Area, saying basic income could be a novel way to prevent homelessness in one of the nation’s most expensive locations. Each program has hundreds of participants who receive around $1,000 a month, and academics study the results. State and federal tax laws limit the lengths of the programs and the payment amounts.

Impressive:

"The studies have found that most basic income programs improve short-term employment and mental health while reducing food insecurity."

All of the program participants, including the ones The Times followed, were previously homeless and transitioning off a housing stipend that paid for a portion of their rent, and many received the payments on top of other social assistance like food stamps.

Already indicating quite a lot of the problems with these efforts... they don't remove previous social assistance/programs, just add another on top, whereas the entire (liberal! dignity!) point of UBI is to scrap all (=ALL; looking at you, communist boomers #1561260, #1592946) the existing ones.

One morning in December 2024, Mikole Weeks, then 35, received a phone call with surprising news. She had been chosen for an experimental program called guaranteed basic income, and it came with cash: $1,330 a month for an entire year, with no strings attached for how it could be spent.

On top of a 2k housing stipend and a 1k UBI? Lady is raking.it.in:

Ms. Weeks saw the pregnancy as a sign to turn her life around, and she did. She got sober and secured a $2,100 monthly housing stipend through Abode, a social services provider, for an apartment in Santa Cruz, a beach town about 40 miles south of Google’s Silicon Valley headquarters. She started working part time as a house cleaner for $20 an hour.

Very heartfelt story... grandpa died, mother moved out fr Tenn to live with them, hashtag free babysitting:

She used some of the basic income money to pay for swimming lessons and music classes for Sky; on the weekends, they visited museums or a nearby aquarium. What she felt most was relief, she said, no longer having to wait until her food stamps reloaded every month to go to the grocery store. She could also afford to treat herself occasionally, getting her hair and nails done without worrying about paying for the electricity bill.

In a recent study of 3,000 universal basic income participants by OpenResearch, an organization partly funded by Mr. Altman of OpenAI, money spent supporting friends and family increased 26 percent, the most of any category. That was more than the increases for food (6 percent) and child care (11 percent).

The cynic in me also thinks this isn't too surprising: give a man a fish, and all that; nothing much changes if all you do is taper things over with money, you and your wellbeing unaccountably carried by someone anonymous other:

...worked out OK, though:

Ms. Weeks began feeling more settled. In August, she got a job at a hotel restaurant in Santa Cruz, working 32 hours a week making $24 an hour plus tips, health care benefits for herself and Sky and membership in a union.

Nicholas Marquez, 44, could barely walk up the stairs to his Santa Cruz apartment one morning in mid-December 2024, his body still exhausted from open-heart surgery a week earlier. His power was shut off because of an unpaid electric bill, and his refrigerator was empty until more food stamps would arrive on Jan. 1.
Then he got the news from Abode that he had been selected for the guaranteed income program. “It felt like I had won the lottery,” he said.

uh-hu:

His heart and kidneys had been declining for years, he said, “punished by a lifetime of bad decisions” and a drug addiction. Unable to work, he was living on social assistance of around $800 a month on top of a housing stipend. At the end of each month, Mr. Marquez had to choose whether to pay for electricity, for laundry or for groceries. With the basic income payments, he could do all three. It was the first time he could pay to do laundry in six months.

Good life:

When his second payment hit in February 2025, Mr. Marquez brainstormed things he wanted to buy next. A new television and a PlayStation 4, to entertain him on days spent on the couch after dialysis; curtains for the living room; a blender to make smoothies.

...ouch, pretty tragic:

In the spring of 2024, KaMesha Staples, now 40, was financially stuck. She was making $800 a week as a part-time drug addiction counselor in Vallejo, Calif., a working-class city 30 miles north of Oakland. But she was spending $1,000 a week on child care for her two daughters.

“It felt like we were at a standstill, like crabs in a bucket,” Ms. Staples said. So she decided to quit her job and rely on social assistance.

"One year of payments was “just enough time not to get comfortable,” she said, and the urgency motivated her."

Fair enough:

“One of the things that we’ve been learning is how one very small thing can actually become a giant thing that derails your entire family’s life very quickly,” Ms. Kisch said. “Being poor is actually really expensive.”
“The payments made it feel like my 10 problems turned to nine,” Ms. Staples said. “I had more time to think about the life I wanted to start living.”

oh, the permanent income hypothesis rears its ugly head: #1594162, #1595072

As the months passed, however, Ms. Staples did not save as much of the basic income money as she had expected. “I got used to spending what I had,” she said. “That was my biggest regret.”

Yupsz:

The program’s end is what researchers often call “the cliff” and the first test of its long-term success. It hit Ms. Staples hard. She missed a car payment and needed help from her grandmother to pay it off. A week later, she was short on money again, so she started driving for DoorDash.

"“Less helpless is how I feel now,” she said."

https://archive.md/Spx3H