Universal Basic Income with Rutger Bregman and Roth IRA
Jill on Money with Jill Schlesinger
Audacy
4.6 • 1.9K Ratings
🗓️ 1 February 2018
⏱️ 26 minutes
🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS
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Summary
Despite the fact that we are nearing the ninth year of a global economic recovery, poverty remains a problem. In the United States alone, recent numbers from the Census Bureau show the rate to be just under 13% with more than 40 million people considered to be living in poverty. Globally, more than 1.3 billion live in extreme poverty, meaning they subsist on less than $1.25 a day. While there are no easy fixes, there are a few ideas that have been tossed around. Some that have been tried and proven, at least on a small scale, like the concept of Universal Basic Income (UBI), something that has very much interested me over the last couple years. The basic concept revolves around the idea of all citizens of a country receiving a regular, livable and unconditional sum of money, from the government. You may think that this is a dressed up welfare program that will only encourage people not to work. On the contrary, dozens of successful basic income experiments around the globe have proven that the vast majority of us actually want to do something with our lives -- we just need the means to get on our feet. Check your negative knee-jerk reaction at the door and open yourself up to at least learning about UBI, which can be an investment that pays for itself. After all, poverty in its current state is incredibly expensive and ineffective. “Better Off” is sponsored by Betterment. We love feedback so please leave us a rating or review in Apple Podcasts. "Better Off" theme music is by Joel Goodman, www.joelgoodman.com. For a recap of every episode, visit https://www.betterment.com/resources/topics/inside-betterment/better-off-podcast/ Connect with me at these places for all my content: http://www.jillonmoney.com/ https://twitter.com/jillonmoney https://www.facebook.com/JillonMoney https://www.instagram.com/jillonmoney/ https://www.youtube.com/c/JillSchlesinger https://www.linkedin.com/in/jillonmoney/ http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/jill-on-money http://betteroffpodcast.com/ https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/better-off-jill-schlesinger/id431167790?mt=2
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hi, I'm Jill Schlesinger host of Betteroff. Is there a case for a universal basic income? |
| 0:10.0 | Today on the podcast, I'm talking to someone who says there is more than a case. |
| 0:14.6 | There is a need for it. |
| 0:16.4 | Basic income you can see it is venture capital for the people. |
| 0:19.0 | It's an investment that pays for itself. |
| 0:21.1 | We are paying through the nose right now in terms of higher health care spending, higher dropout rates, more crime. Poverty is |
| 0:27.6 | incredibly expensive and we've got a lot of evidence that if you just get people out of poverty better for everyone. |
| 0:35.4 | Welcome to the Better Off podcast. We're sponsored by Betterment, the largest independent online financial |
| 0:41.5 | advisor. Now remember part of the reason we love doing this |
| 0:45.2 | show is that we want to introduce concepts that you may not hear about in your |
| 0:51.2 | normal day-to-day existence. This is not just about your own |
| 0:55.6 | financial life but it's about big concepts as well. I ran across a really |
| 1:00.9 | interesting guy, his name is Rutger Bregman. He wrote a book called |
| 1:05.5 | Utopia for Realists. This is the case for a universal basic income, open borders, and a 15-hour work week. |
| 1:15.0 | The reason why I found this so fascinating is I had seen his TED Talk, but I also really |
| 1:22.0 | began to wonder, well what does happen if robots take away all these jobs? |
| 1:28.0 | What are we going to do with these millions of people who are kind of shut out of the economy? And is going to happen and what's going to go on and I got really kind of uptight about it. |
| 1:38.8 | So I thought I would actually find someone who's an expert. |
| 1:42.2 | The problem is that he lives overseas and |
| 1:45.0 | we had to do this by Skype so it's not going to sound quite as crystal clear as you're |
| 1:49.0 | used to but check this out it's a fascinating interview. |
| 1:52.7 | Rutger Bragman, again, the book is called Utopia for Realists. |
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