Universal Basic Income vs. Sprawling Bureaucracy
The Political Orphanage
Andrew Heaton
4.9 • 1000 Ratings
🗓️ 17 June 2020
⏱️ 74 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Universal Basic Income (UBI) has been advocated in various forms by Thomas Paine, Andrew Yang, Milton Friedman, and Richard Nixon: a minimum income floor available to all Americans. How does it stack up compared to our existing welfare state? How would it work, and can we afford it? Scott Santens is a UBI proponent who has advised Andrew Yang on UBI, and is now senior policy advisor to Mike Broihier. He sits on the Board of Directors for the Gerald Huff Fund For Humanity.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to the political orphanage, |
| 0:07.0 | Glee searching for solutions to problems, engaging in big picture thinking, and working |
| 0:15.6 | across partisan fault lines to improve our country, our planet, and select parts of our |
| 0:20.6 | solar system. |
| 0:21.6 | I'm your host Andrew Heaton, and if we were in the same room |
| 0:24.4 | right now I'd try to hug you. I am joined today by Scott Santons who is an |
| 0:29.9 | expert on Universal Basic Income and who I'm very excited to talk to and I will not attempt to lay out your honors and credentials because you have so many. |
| 0:39.0 | So you're out of board of directors for a think tank or an organization you're actively |
| 0:44.0 | fighting Mitch McConnell like what all you doing how do you fit into this? |
| 0:47.2 | Yeah yeah I'm on the board of directors of the Gerald Huff Fund for Humanity which is a |
| 0:51.8 | nonprofit devoted to basic income advocacy and |
| 0:55.2 | make sure that happens. |
| 0:56.7 | And I'm also the senior policy advisor right now to Mike Breyer, who is running for a Senate |
| 1:02.2 | in Kentucky to beat Mitch McConnell. |
| 1:04.4 | And is he, I assume he's already gone through the primaries, he is the designated Democratic |
| 1:08.3 | candidate? |
| 1:09.3 | No, no, primary is still happening. |
| 1:11.2 | So that the big day is June 23rd. Okay. All right. So you got a lot going on. And from what I can tell you you are I don't know if I'd call you the Godfather of UBI because it's been around quite a long time but you're definitely a heavyweight |
| 1:25.1 | You're a heavyweight within the UBI world. I see your name come up a lot. I've had people recommend you specifically |
| 1:30.7 | So so that this this is a project a concept that you care passionately about and that you were regularly out advocating. |
| 1:37.0 | Yeah, yeah, for sure. And I've been, I got under this topic back in 2013, so that's how long I've been at this and I actually |
| 1:47.6 | crowdfunded my own basic income and I've been living with a monthly crowd on basic income since 2016 and of course that's what really enabled me to focus on this full time. |
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