Dennis PragerFounder, PragerU · Founder of PragerU | NYT best-selling author

Paying People To Stay Home Is An Achievement?

22 Aug 2024 · 0 min

Watch on YouTube

0:07

In a brief dialogue, two speakers examine the characterization of pandemic-era expanded unemployment benefits as a form of universal basic income. Speaker A questions whether paying people to stay home qualifies as UBI. Speaker B references Bernie Sanders’ praise of the American Rescue Plan’s expansion of unemployment benefits during COVID‑19, noting that Sanders framed the payment to stay home as a notable achievement of the Biden‑Harris administration, a claim the speakers dispute.

You're staying home and we'll pay you. Well, isn't that— what is the name of the, the term? Universal basic income. Isn't that what that is in a sense?
Universal basic income. And you heard Bernie Sanders bragging about the American Rescue Plan and how it expanded the unemployment benefits during COVID and all of the things that it did. And one of the biggest things that it did was it paid people to stay home. And somehow Bernie Sanders was marketing that as an achievement of the Biden-Harris administration, and it's not.