A proposed law that will pay pregnant people and young adults graduating out of the foster care system up to $1,000 a month will potentially create dependency on the government, according to a Freedom Foundation attorney.
“Once you establish a policy like this and extend a benefit, people become reliant upon it and you are never able to modify it,” said Timothy A. Snowball, litigation counsel for the Freedom Foundation, a conservative think tank. “If California signs this thing into law, we will never not have a basic income like this.”
Lawmakers unanimously approved Senate Bill 153 and allocated some $35 million to the guaranteed income program, which does not restrict how payments are spent, according to media reports.
"True programs that are safety nets are a temporary support for someone when they're going through a particular problem or particular period until they are sufficiently back on their feet or able to provide for themselves," Snowball told the Southern California Record. "That is something different than a permanent entitlement."
The Freedom Foundation’s other concerns about guaranteed income include:
Disincentivizes earning
“You have to go beyond good intentions,” Snowball said. “It's not enough that someone intends something good to happen from public policy. The question of course is always what are the unintended consequences going to be? The unintended consequences of these kinds of transfer payments are usually a negative effect on incentives."
Inflation
“When you increase the amount of the money supply in the economy, one of the things that usually is going to happen is you're going to have inflation and prices are going to go up as the value of each individual dollar goes down,” said Snowball.
Open flood gates
“If you're just printing money out of nowhere or paying out of people's tax dollars, why stop at $1,000? Once this becomes law, not only are other states going to be looking at it but I wouldn't be surprised if the federal government looks at this,” he said.
Creates dependency
“The idea behind the United States is the government was supposed to ensure equality of opportunity rather than equality of result,” Snowball added. "In the declaration of independence, Thomas Jefferson is talking about the pursuit of happiness. He's not talking about the guarantee of happiness. And so the idea is not that the government should intervene in the economy or should be intervening in individuals' lives in order to ensure that they have a just result or an equitable result. The idea is that you should level the playing field sufficiently so that individuals can go out and pursue their own betterment and their own economic development without being mistreated.”