This November, UBI is on the ballot in Oregon under the misleading label of “Oregon People’s Rebate.” Financed by the contributions of wealthy California progressives, it would give about $1,600 a year to every Oregonian – regardless of age and income – and pay for it with a 3 percent tax on the sales of corporations. You can bet the pressure to hike the giveaway would begin the moment it was enacted.

Washington Post columnist Megan McCardle reports the record of pilot Universal Basic Income-type programs is dismal.  Economists who worked with SUPPORTERS of UBI found recipients of medical debt forgiveness, “experienced no improvement in their financial health, their psychological well-being, their cognitive capacity or their physical condition.” In another pilot, recipients decreased their work hours and spent most of their extra time on leisure.

Our recent UP inflation study by Casey Mulligan found that if Kamala Harris’s proposed pandemic UBI had passed, cumulative inflation during Biden’s term would have been not 20% but north of 50%.

Universal Basic Income has been called “a leisure good for the theory class” of Marxist professors, welfare bureaucrats, and high-tech economic illiterates who dreamed it up. The good news is that if it loses big in uber-liberal Oregon, it could set the movement back years nationally.