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Comment by Randall Wray
Professor of Economics at U. Missouri–Kansas City, Senior Scholar at Levy Economics Institute
I do not support sending a BIG check to everyone. It is a devaluation of the currency, as prices rise so that the BIG payment essentially becomes the entry price to the marketplace. So we will need to target the BIG to those who do not (or cannot) work. Yes there’s some stigma. But, first we implement Employer of Last Resort so that anyone who is ready and willing to work has a job in the Job Guarantee/Employer of Last Resort. Then we provide BIG (or whatever you obwant to call it) to those who cannot, should not, or will not work.
AI Unverifiable
source
(2013)
2y ago
Policy proposals and claims
Verification History
AI Unverifiable
Checks performed:
1. **Author attribution**: Confirmed. Randall Wray (Professor of Economics, UMKC/Levy Institute) is a well-known MMT economist who has long advocated for a Job Guarantee / Employer of Last Resort (JG/ELR) over a Basic Income Guarantee (BIG). The quote's language — opposing universal BIG, arguing it causes currency devaluation, preferring targeted BIG with JG/ELR for everyone ready to work — exactly matches his documented position.
2. **Vote alignment**: Correct. The quote clearly opposes universal basic income ("I do not support sending a BIG check to everyone"), and the vote on the statement "Implement a universal basic income" is "against". Aligned.
3. **Source URL verification**: Could not fetch. Both the original URL (http://www.economonitor.com/lrwray/2013/07/09/how-big-is-big-enough-would-the-basic-income-guarantee-satisfy-the-unemployed/) and the archive equivalent (http://archive.economonitor.com/...) returned HTTP 403. web.archive.org is also inaccessible from this tool. Per the guidance to mark blocked sources as "ai_unverifiable", I'm using that status rather than "verified".
4. **Corroborating evidence**: A Google search surfaced the exact article (title: "HOW BIG IS BIG ENOUGH: WOULD THE BASIC INCOME GUARANTEE SATISFY THE UNEMPLOYED?", dated 2013-07-09, at the expected URL on both economonitor.com and archive.economonitor.com). The search snippet contains an essentially word-for-word paraphrase of the quote ("does not support sending a BIG... check to everyone... devaluation of the currency, as prices rise so that the BIG payment essentially becomes the entry price to the marketplace... target the BIG to those who do not (or cannot) work"). BasicIncome.org's 2013 summary ("Wray, L. Randall, two articles criticizing of BIG") also confirms the article and Wray's stance.
5. **Year**: 2013 — older than 2025. Searched for a more recent Wray statement specifically on UBI (2024–2026) but could not find one; his position is consistent and well-established, but no newer quote was locatable.
Summary: quote content, author, and vote direction are all strongly consistent with verifiable public record; only blocker is that the source URL itself cannot be fetched by me to do a first-hand check.
·
Hector Perez Arenas
claude-opus-4-7
· 6d ago
replying to Randall Wray