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Scott Santens 🧢🏄‍♂️ Profile picture
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18 Jul, 4 tweets, 1 min read
I started binging my way through Dr. Stone recently and it's one of my favorite things I've seen in years. It's 10 billion percent pro-science, and it's so clever how it teaches physics and chemistry and an appreciation of trial and error and how everyone is valuable to humanity.
No human could build human civilization on their own. We are all interdependent, and all our many diverse interests are additive. We are greater together than the sum of our parts, and we must escape this zero-sum thinking that says that others must have less for us to have more.
We're all better off working together for a mutual goal of human progress. One of our biggest barriers is poverty which in a world of abundance hinders positive-sum thinking. The fear of poverty also hinders trial and error. We must all be free to fail for us together to succeed.
We have to make sure that every single one of us has enough resources to contribute to the whole and to flourish as free individuals. We have to begin to trust each other that whatever our individual interests are, being free to focus on them will lead to us all being better off.

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More from @scottsantens

Scott Santens 🧢🏄‍♂️ Profile picture
15 Jul
No one would have received a CTC payment today if not for Democrats winning both Senate seats in Georgia. That would have never happened without Mitch refusing to send out a $2,000 stimulus check while Ossoff and Warnock ran on changing that.

Victories lead to other victories.
Furthermore, it was the passing of the $600 stimulus check that helped pave the way for the $2,000 push in Georgia, and two key players in that were @AndrewYang and @HumanityForward. That 2nd stimulus check almost never happened and many complained it was too little to support.
But little victories are still victories, and strategically they can make all the difference in winning extremely large victories.

Also the $600 was possible because of the $1200 which was possible because of a shift toward unconditional cash as the best emergency response.
Read 4 tweets
Scott Santens 🧢🏄‍♂️ Profile picture
7 Jul
Over 10 years after the 2-year universal basic income pilot ended in Namibia, this follow-up report has been published. It includes interviews with recipients, like this one with Josef Ganeb, a bricklayer, whose business flourished during the #UBI pilot.

bignam.org/Publications/B…
Rudolphine Eigowas is a dressmaker and her business flourished too but when the pilot ended, problems born of money scarcity returned.

"I just want that they bring back the BIG, the whole Namibia must get the BIG - the problems are not only here - the whole Namibia must get it!”
Christian Swartbooi repaired shoes during the pilot. Over ten years later his eyesight prevents him from continuing that work and he wishes #BasicIncome would return.

“BIG was working.” His wife, Crecia, continues: “With the BIG we never had to suffer, but now we are suffering.”
Read 10 tweets
Scott Santens 🧢🏄‍♂️ Profile picture
29 May
This article is a lesson in how to be a terrible journalist. As one example, he wants readers to think that Jackson's successful basic income pilot is evidence of how it'll replace government services, leaving people worse off, because of a boil advisory.

prospect.org/api/amp/econom…
He also plants the notion that perhaps Tubbs deserved to lose in Stockton as punishment for choosing to get people cash versus fixing local journalism. And he links to my article about the importance to our health of preventing poverty (vs just treating the effects) as "ominous."
In just the first two paragraphs he wants readers to think that the *only* reason Yang may become the next mayor of NYC is because of UBI's massive popularity, and that despite being a frontrunner, Yang can only get 4 volunteers, and that if elected he'll be NYC's Michael Scott.
Read 4 tweets
Scott Santens 🧢🏄‍♂️ Profile picture
17 May
Parents will receive their first child tax credit payment on July 15. Each month thereafter for six months 39 million families will receive another. We should make them permanent like Romney proposes, plus extend monthly payments to childless adults too.

nbcnews.com/news/amp/ncna1…
The monthly child tax credit is essentially the income guarantee for families that Nixon proposed half a century ago. That's how long ago we could have started dramatically reducing child poverty, but we chose not to. It's time to change that for good.

humanityforward.com/blog/scott-san…
There are however some problems with the design of the new child tax credit. Because the IRS handles them, tax filing is required. So make sure and file! But there will be many low income non-filers who earn too little to file who don't know they qualify.

peoplespolicyproject.org/2021/05/17/irs…
Read 4 tweets
Scott Santens 🧢🏄‍♂️ Profile picture
11 May
Some progressive guaranteed income supporters are making the claim that a targeted guaranteed income approach will reduce inequality more than universal basic income (UBI) because they want GI to exclude the rich. Here's why I think that's false and based on bad analysis.

THREAD
Let's say you're a very wealthy GI supporter and you think GI should be means-tested in the same way the stimulus checks were so that you receive nothing. The total cost is seen as less than the cost of UBI, and your taxes go up $1 million a year. That indeed reduces inequality.
However, now consider a $20k/yr UBI that would be considered much more expensive than a $20k/yr GI. Do you think your taxes would go up by only $1.02 million? If so, you'd see the exact same loss of disposable income as a $20k GI design. But that's a very unrealistic assumption.
Read 8 tweets
Scott Santens 🧢🏄‍♂️ Profile picture
15 Apr
Among families earning under $50,000, 56% mostly used their $1400 stimulus check to pay down debt, 26% mostly saved it, and 18% mostly spent it.

Among families earning over$100,000, 38% mostly paid down debt, 39% mostly saved it, and 23% mostly spent it.

economicsecurityproject.org/wp-content/upl…
I think it's important to note that based on the above numbers, 77% to 82% of the stimulus checks put no upward pressure on inflation at all because the money didn't chase any goods or services in limited supply.

In fact, paying off debt is deflationary.

yesmagazine.org/economy/2019/0…
So why spend $850 billion on stimulus checks if the majority of the money was saved or used to pay off loans instead of being spent into the economy? Because money can be for survival or loan forgiveness or a feeling of security for a rainy day.

Let people decide for themselves.
Read 6 tweets

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