Trump and progressive Democrats want the same thing?

UBI would help many more out of poverty, plus give the middle class many more economic opportunities.

 

Now that MMT has relieved us from the burden of deficits and debt there is no need to focus on free college, job guarantee, and the dozen or more, welfare programs(including Social Security). Give everyone the cash stipend of UBI and the individual will find their own path to success.

 

A Universal Basic Income has been tested in Finland. What happened?

Most Finns had the comfort of basic financial security for the period of time they needed to find good jobs. (People inherently like to work.) Most rarely stayed in the program for more than 9 months.

And when they did find finally a good-job, they entered a normal pattern of life. (Rather than becoming criminals.)

There were not very many who stayed very long in the program because, in fact, humans like the activity of working. Not just for the money, but also for the social-interaction that work also provides.

PS: Unfortunately the program was deactivated. Europe was in a major recession and the Finnish government did not have the money to sustain the program. But, I'm sure in due time they will restart the program.

 

I'm loathe to incur your wrath again...but:

A basic axiom of MMT is that a sovereign floating currency issuing government can always sustain public policy by fiscal means; the real constraints are real resources not finance (money). Do you think the real resources available in Finland (people, physical resources, technology) were suddenly reduced by "a major recession")?

[Unfortunately, the nations that joined the Euro area, like Finland, were automatically denied this option, since the ECB (operating according to mainstream neoliberal, balanced budget - "austerity" - rules) is in charge of the banking systems of the formerly sovereign governments whose former currencies were abolished].

Not that I'm hung up on national sovereignty - politically, the world urgently needs an international rules based system (obviously), with a world bank being the central bank of all the national CBs which would all still maintain their currency issuing capacity. … but that's another story)].

Note: A JG (ie, guaranteeing zero un+underemployment) is part of the MMT inflation control mechanism: if an economy becomes overheated, the government can tax the sectors involved in the overheating, and the resulting loss of private sector jobs will be picked up by the JG program, which has a fixed (above poverty) wage that is lower than the "over-heated" (inflationary) private sector wages.
Thus the JG represents an inflation anchor , owing to MMT's proposed JG employed buffer pool of workers , which replaces the unemployed buffer pool, expressed in the hideous NAIRU fiction of mainstream neoliberal economics.

That's why a UBI is not part of MMT policy. As you yourself have noted, a UBI cannot always (if ever) be afforded in the wonderful world of mainstream neoliberal macroeconomics, a world in which - despite the theory - the "invisible hand" and real full employment (not the nonsense statistics that pass for full employment) only ever exist together briefly, in the real world.

 

Have you even had a brief look at the study? When you say "most Finns", out of the 172,000 unemployed Finns, only 2000 received the income. Since when is 2,000 "most" of a population of 172,000?

Only 2% of the 2,000 (which is ~40 people, in case you don't math) moved to self-employment.

Total work time was .4 days more. During the year.