Lina Hildago: $500/month for 1,500 ppl using tax money

Sounds like a UBI pilot program. If so, fantastic.

 

Inflation

 

It's about $6 a person too...

 

Tax the churches.

 

Making the recipients public is stupid because it would open them up to harassment.

As for tracking what they're spending, that's a dumb waste of time that will do nothing but give people who already hate the program more reasons to pop a blood vessel when one red cent is spent on anything not 100% necessary.

Personally I hope all the recipients spend it on hookers and blow. That's real joy in this hellscape.

 

@TMac'n

Houston needs to spend that money fixing roads, cleaning up trash, getting more police. As well removing drug addicted homeless people and getting them proper help and shelter.

 

When poor people get money this line usually get spoken.

But I don't think the people saying stuff like "this results in inflation" understand you are basically admitting that a wealth divide in society is a necessity.

 

I'm not sure he's saying this will cause it (the city is not printing new money, folks) as much as he's saying this may be the reason for the program.

 

The ultimate goal is to make productive citizens
It’s not really that hard. There’s lots of low skill labor jobs out there

 

This is awesome. I love programs that spend money that @TMac'n thinks somehow still belongs to him even though he gave it to the government.

 

Who are the 1500 recipients? Will it be tracked? Is this forced charity in essence? What cutoffs is determined from the 1500 that separates from the other approximate 4.7 million county residents? Could the money be better server elsewhere? ….so many concerns and questions immediately come to mind

 

I looked for an Uplift Harris website but came up empty. Unsurprising, I guess, that they announced something before they were ready. But, it's a pilot program, so it is essentially a science experiment. They would have a randomized sample among eligible applicants and another control sample, they'd collect a bunch of data on both on their circumstances before the program and on outcomes so they can draw some statistical conclusions about the program impacts. Other experiments and pilots have found it doesn't make recipients lazy welfare queens but instead results in more stable households and more income from employment. I think Harris County is looking for results like that.

From what I've read, to qualify you just need to be a family making under 200% of the poverty line (which is scaled by the number of people in a household). I presume you have to live in Harris County. Maybe there will be other qualifications. It would launch in September so I we'd see more later. You would have to apply and they will randomly select among applicants.

The money comes from the American Rescue Plan Act, which was the law that injected a bunch of stimulus money to fight off the depressionary effects of Covid. I assume Harris County had to apply to a federal agency for funding for this program. So these are federal dollars that the federal government had already borrowed from our grandchildren and decided to fritter away, and not local tax dollars. The money couldn't be used anywhere else; if we reject it, the money would go back to the feds and probably not be spent on anything else. If you're worried about Harris County being a good steward of its funds, they just got $20 million in federal money to inject into to the local economy, which sounds like a win.

The recent debt ceiling agreement clawed back a bunch of unused covid stimulus money. I can only assume they were able to get this program funded before the debt ceiling thing. There is also some uncertainty per the article below about whether Texas law will allow them to do this program. Seems like a no-brainer to me because we'd be spending federal dollars for local benefit and even if its wasteful it's still money in our pockets. But it wouldn't be the first time our state leaders turned away free money to spite Houston or out of hatred for the poor.

https://www.houstonpublicmedia.org/...-families-with-financial-support-if-approved/

 

If they do it for 18 months and we see a decrease in crime, it’s a good investment. 13 million is pennies for a county the size of Harris county

 

Another dumbass enabling program spearheaded by our communist County Judge.

 

Great idea - thanks OP for posting.

Hopefully the program will be successful and your property taxes will go up even more in the future!

 

Y'all act like this is revolutionary. There have been other test programs of various versions of UBI all across the country already. Here's a short list of a few dozen of them, including a few others in Texas:

https://mashable.com/article/cities-with-universal-basic-income-guaranteed-income-programs

It's no different than other pilot programs cities and counties have experimented with to solve society problems.