Andrew Yang wants to give $1,000 a month to every adult in the US. Kamala Harris' proposal for a "basic income" would give a $6,000 tax credit to families earning less than $100,000 a year and a $3,000 tax credit to single filers earning less than $50,000 a year. The money would be paid monthly or annually. The Tax Policy Center estimates her plan would cost $3 trillion over the next decade and $3.4 trillion in the following decade.
In 1911, Swedish-born labor activist Joel Hägglund wrote this parody of the 1868 Christian hymn In The Sweet By & By:
You will eat by and by,
In that glorious land above the sky;
Work and pray, live on hay,
You’ll get pie in the sky when you die
"Pie in the sky" quickly entered our vocabulary. It means "a fanciful, unrealistic notion or idea; a pipe dream." I support the idea of a "universal basic income" but Yang's proposal and Harris' proposal are nothing more than "pie in the sky." The Atlantic just posted a video calling for universal basic income. One person commented, "What I would love to do is work my butt off to give money to all the slackers of the world." If every nation had worked throughout the 20th century to limit, or reverse, population growth, conditions wouldn't be so bad now. We have far too many people on this planet and not enough jobs, food or water for them.