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Comment by kcplate | Hacker News Reader

I personally used to be a proponent of UBI, but after 2020 and watching some of the impact of Covid and what increasing government financial payouts has done to employment malaise and to the economy, my skepticism has increased. I am not convinced that the benefits outweigh the costs like I once did.

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This ignores data that shows how many older people retired, and how large that effect is.

Sum up the number of people who died, were injured, retired, our found better work, and it had a much greater effect than the government payouts. Otherwise, these problems would have already largely resolved already. Those extra payments are gone.

I made no claim here other than my opinion changed beaded on my observations. And I am pretty sure that creating 20% more money out of thin air has a downstream economic effect far beyond the day the check was cashed

This is exactly where I am too. I thought replacing all of our existing safety net programs with UBI would be perfect until the COVID money happened. I knew some people would choose to just live off of it forever and never contribute to society again, but I didn't realize just how many people it would be.

Total employment in the US is higher today than it was in 2019.

I'd like to see some data to support that claim. Fed data shows the opposite--the employment ratio is down 1.5% from its 2020 peak. That's at least a million people who've stopped working.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/EMRATIO

https://www.statista.com/statistics/269959/employment-in-the...

This isn't jobs data... This is an estimate, by an unknown source, as to what the employment numbers might be be at the end of 2022. From your site:

> In 2019, around 157.54 million people were employed in the United States. For 2022, an increase by almost 2 million employed people is expected.

Also, do we think this estimate is recent? The US economy has not been adding jobs as expected, and has undershot recent projections by a lot. New hires were 300K short of projections in November[0] and 200K short in December!

[0]https://www.cnbc.com/2021/12/03/jobs-report-november-2021.ht...

[1]https://www.cnbc.com/2022/01/07/hiring-falters-in-december-a...

Where are these people? The benefits ended a couple of months ago.

I don't know, but I definitely still see more "closed today due to lack of staffing" signs today than I've ever seen in my life before the lockdowns. And even places that are open still have noticeably fewer workers.

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