The Town with NO poverty....Dauphin, Manitoba

[SoCalDem]

This town experiments with a "guaranteed living income" for all people.. and it did work for a while...

Seems to me that it could work again, and maybe for less than the administration costs of the programs we currently use..

I looked and looked, but never found some information I heard once on the UCTV channle. The speaker said that it "costs" over $42k a year per poor family, to adminsiter the various bits of aid they receive.

While looking, I found this interesting article...


http://www.uniter.ca/view.php?aid=38460


Researchers Examine the Town With No Poverty

Whitney Light

Once upon a time, in a place called River City, there was a community where everybody was treated equally and nobody knew poverty… Although it may sound like a fairytale, River City, code for Dauphin, Manitoba, really did exist. From 1974 to 1977, the residents of Dauphin participated in the only Canadian guaranteed annual income (GAI) experiment. The Mincome experiment, as it is known, was one of five projects developed to find out what would happen if people were promised a yearly minimum income. Would people still work? The projects began during the 1970s when “history was changing in some fundamental ways,” says Dr. Evelyn Forget, professor of Economics at the University of Manitoba. “People believed we were just a hair’s breath away from creating a just society.”

A hopeful young Premier of Manitoba, NDP leader Ed Schreyer, was interested in the concept of the GAI. He and the cabinet RED Committee, dedicated to social justice, secured the province as the Canadian test site. Similar experiments had been undertaken in the U.S. in New Jersey, rural areas of North Carolina and Iowa, Seattle and Denver, and Gary as part of President Johnson’s “war on poverty.”


snip

[haele]

1. What's sad is that apparently, no one did follow up and much of the data

was never looked at. For instance, they tracked the "work effort decrease" but there is no indication if that decrease is linked to single parenthood or to the number of babies or toddlers at home - I know of many single parents that are working two minimum wage jobs to keep their kids fed, and with a guaranteed minimum income, they'd quit one job in a heartbeat. Thus, your work effort decrease appears.

It's also interesting to note that kids appeared to complete secondary school, instead of quitting to get jobs to help the families out. That's a problem in our lower income communities, where the eldest kids often drop out of school to help out with taking care of the younger kids depending on the culture - or take care of themselves.

However, it doesn't seem as if anyone really wanted to look at the data on poverty and wage equity from a "first/second world" North American country.
Which makes sense in a cynical way - when the dollars and investments are actually discussed, no one likes to admit that a couple million hard working urban people require a larger amount of base income and resources per person per year to stay above poverty, instead of a couple million hard working rural people in a third world country who may only need $20 per person per year to stay above poverty. There's still too much of a cultural stigma to poverty when a country is otherwise "successful" - it's sooo much easier to say someone is stupid or lazy or makes poor choices and it's their own fault for being poor than actually address an underlying problem such as education, mental health, social networks, luck (i.e. opportunity). Sympathy only exists when poverty is far away, or there's not the chance that "there for the grace of Dog, go I..."

Inflation will also kill sympathy a program like that. It would expose the statistical lies certain governments use to measure consumer inflation and value of currency, and governments do not want to deal with that issue.

The price of high end consumer products have nothing to do with consumer inflation and community poverty - the price of a loaf of bread and gallon of milk do.

Haele