The Bridge Project, a $16 million experiment, is New York City’s first guaranteed income program. It’s meant to help one of America’s most at-risk groups: single, impoverished mothers.
This is a great idea! But the implementation has some flaws.
The experiment, run by a nonprofit, hopes to reveal the effects of poverty and how it can be solved – to provide evidence to support “universal basic income”-type solutions.
But in order to get that data, the people involved are unfortunately getting studied like science projects, not human beings.
Three groups of mothers selected for the program are getting three different amounts of money per month for three years: $1,000, $500 and $0.
The families’ spending habits and mental and physical health are all tracked. This information is supposed to reveal how the money contributes to their well-being and developmental progress. But it might just contribute to the dehumanization poverty already inflicts on them.
It's obvious by now how detrimental poverty is, and there are mountains of evidence that when people are able to cover their basic living needs, everyone benefits.
If policy makers need “proof” from experiments like this one that families will spend the money “wisely,” they already have it!
Helping these mothers is a great idea, but the fact that this program even exists shows a truth: our economic system doesn’t prioritize the well-being of low-income families.