the air's cleared up a bit since this morning.

for the sake of pointing it out somewhere, is $1000/month a gimmick? yes. that's not going to accomplish anything, whatsoever. you'd might as well just pass a tax cut for landlords, which is where the idea, as he's promoting it, really came from.

i've talked a lot about a gai in the past, but i wouldn't want to implement it as a dividend like that. so, no, i'm not in favour of sending everybody the money, that's just going to create inflation. the post-work anarchist position has little patience for these arguments about labour being an escape from poverty (that's hilarious. really.) or this idea that you just need to send people to school to eliminate poverty (i don't want a bourgeois office job, dammit!), but it doesn't see the idea as a dividend. it's more just a way to rebrand welfare as a livable subsidy by having it swallow things like disability payments and artist's grants.

i don't reach much friedman, so i might be getting the idea wrong, but the gai as a negative income tax is more along the lines of the way that post-work anarchists see this implemented. so, you'd do your taxes at the end of the year, and if your income is below a certain level then you get a top up to the minimum.

so, let's set the minimum to $30,000. if your taxable income is $30,001, you'd get nothing. if your taxable income is $15,000 you'd get a $15,000 subsidy, either in a lump sum or via monthly payments. and, if your income is $0 you'd get the full $30,000 in subsidies.

so, the idea is that (1) you make sure that the minimum is livable and (2) you give it to everybody, whether they have a job or not. it's a literal guaranteed minimum amount of income, whoever you are. further, you'd have to tie it to inflation to stop the landlords from cashing in on it.

just sending everybody $1000 is pointless, and the unavoidable conclusion is that the candidate is either using it as a gimmick to win votes the way that many candidates float around tax cuts or legitimately doesn't understand the point of the policy.