(RightWing.org) – Universal Basic Income (UBI) programs are one of the more controversial topics in the political landscape. A wide variety of plans are moving forward, especially in ultra-Liberal California, where groups are vying for money to give away to people under their spheres of influence, often Woke-centric subsets of the population. Certain residents in the Coachella Valley area should have received their first payment already.
“Universal?” Not so Much
On May 15, a group of 30 people in Palm Springs, California, were scheduled to receive the first of 18 monthly payments of $800 each. The money is available under a pilot program formed by two nonprofits, Queer Works and the Desert AIDS Project (DAP), and will be paid out only to those who are members of one of the two organizations.
The Queer Works “about” page of their website says that their founder, Jacob Rostovsky, “is an active political activist [and] was appointed to the California Board of Barber and Cosmetology by Governor Gavin Newsom to fight for inclusion of non-surgical gender-affirming processes on insurance panels.”
The original memorandum of understanding between the city and the nonprofits said that the UBI initiative would be available only to those in the transgender and gender non-binary (TGNB) community that they serve; more recently, they claim it will be “open to all.” In this case, “all” means those who are members of organizations that are either on the spectrum of the LGBTQ+ population or “an advocacy-based health center” that is specifically geared toward those with AIDS.
Unspent Funds
Some of these UBI and payment discussions began during the recent pandemic when people were forced out of work and into lockdown, including a stimulus package spearheaded under former President Donald Trump’s administration. Those were universally distributed to American citizens. However, a good portion of the money passed out in different programs from that era remains unspent, and Republicans in Congress are looking at recouping that money in an effort to bolster a plan for raising the national debt limit before the June 5 deadline set by the Treasury Department.
Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) addressed this idea in a March 28 letter to President Joe Biden as part of the Republican compromise that would keep the government running, noting that these funds “have sat dormant for over two years.” Democrats, as expected, are vehemently opposed to the idea.
Perhaps the opposition comes because the GOP proposal runs counter to the Socialist/Communist ideal enshrouded in the idea of a UBI by pushing back against aspects of their agenda they were able to set in place.
The Republican proposal would officially rescind Biden’s student loan forgiveness plot, create work requirements for some people getting by on food stamps and Medicaid, and roll back some aspects of the Inflation Reduction Act where the Democrats rewrote the definition of “infrastructure.”
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