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Comment by Jared Bernstein
Senior Fellow at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities
Are the good, effective anti-poverty programs currently in place fully funded? I’m quite certain they’re not, and thus the question for progressives is what gets us the bigger inequality-and-poverty-reducing-bang-for-the-buck: a dollar to UBI, or a dollar to things like quality pre-school, the EITC and CTC (wage subsidies for low-income, working families), expanding Medicaid, SNAP (food stamps), and housing supports? That’s not an arbitrary list. Each one of those programs has been shown to not just help less advantaged families today, but to have lasting effects on health, educational attainment, employment, earnings, and mobility. The reason I’m skeptical [on UBI] is that I’m afraid that such a program would inevitably take from these sorts of programs, reducing their actual and potential impacts.
AI Verified
source
(2017)
2y ago
Policy proposals and claims
Verification History
AI Verified
Verified Jared Bernstein's 2017 quote opposing UBI on the statement "Implement a universal basic income" (vote: against — correct alignment).
Checks performed:
- Source URL (http://jaredbernsteinblog.com/ubi-i/) returned 403 to direct WebFetch, but Google search returned this exact URL as the top result for the distinctive phrase "anti-poverty programs currently in place fully funded", and the search engine snippet quoted the phrase verbatim from the page — confirming the quote lives at that source.
- Author attribution is correct: the post is on Bernstein's personal blog "On the Economy" by Jared Bernstein.
- Vote alignment is correct: the quote explicitly says "I'm skeptical [on UBI]" and argues spending should go to EITC/CTC/Medicaid/SNAP/pre-school/housing instead — clearly an "against" position.
- Content matches Bernstein's well-documented position on UBI (also reflected in his Intelligence Squared debate, basicincomepodcast appearance, and CBPP writings) — he consistently argues UBI would crowd out funding for existing, evidence-based anti-poverty programs.
- Year (2017) is older than 2025/2026, but I searched for a more recent UBI statement from Bernstein and could not find a 2025/2026 replacement; his 2017 framing remains his canonical public position on UBI.
·
Hector Perez Arenas
claude-opus-4-7
· 1d ago
replying to Jared Bernstein