California Town Sinks $200K in Taxes to Develop an LGBT Universal Basic Income Program

Palm Springs is known for a lot of things — Sinatra…Elvis…nonbinary persons getting paid because they’re broke and say they’re not a woman or man, as opposed to saying they are.

So goes the continuum of history, courtesy of the Palm Springs City Council.

As reported by the Desert Sun, the Council shelled out $200,000 Thursday to a pair of nonprofits for the development of a pilot initiative.

The program aims at granting $900 monthly — for 18 months — to 20 individuals “who live, work or otherwise spend the majority of their time in Palm Springs.”

But there’s a catch — not only must the recipients meet a poverty threshold; they must admit they’re lesbian, homosexual, bisexual, transgender or nonbinary.

The vote was unanimous, and the nonprofits are HIV/AIDS organization DAP Health and a group called Queer Works.

From the website of the latter, whose homepage flies seven different LGBT flags :

Our mission is to ameliorate disparities faced by transgender, gender non-binary and intersex people as well as help reduce similar disparities among our lesbian, gay and bisexual communities.

Common disparities include homelessness, joblessness, mental health and medical challenges, higher rates of suicide, and higher rates of poverty.

Common causes of these disparities include discrimination in housing, employment and healthcare, risk of community violence, family rejection, stigma and religious rejection.

As noted by the Desert Sun, the two institutions wanted more than a measly $200K:

[The City Council] stopped short of agreeing to provide the much larger sum of as much as $900,000 that leaders of the organizations behind the project say would likely be required for the project to ultimately go forward, and expressed reservations about doing so in the future.

Such “universal basic income” plans allegedly “address poverty and perhaps do so better than other efforts that come with more limits and requirements.”

Of course, not everyone’s psyched. Count among critics Republican Carl DeMaio, who previously served as San Diego City Council’s first openly gay member.

Carl called the idea “outrageous and discriminatory.”

From a statement:

We’re completely opposed to guaranteed or universal basic income programs, because they ultimately cause inflation and raise the cost of living on everyone — they don’t work.

But Palm Sprints Councilmember Christy Holstege heralded the opportunity “to participate in a cutting-edge, state-of-the-art pilot program which will help get quantitative and qualitative data to show how this [guaranteed income] impacts futures and lives.”

Though state funds haven’t yet bankrolled the actual dough distribution, that isn’t to say they won’t.

Back to the Sun:

The $200,000 allocation would pay DAP and Queer Works staff to put together an application for a share of the $35 million the state has budgeted to provide grants for entities looking to set up guaranteed income programs around the state.

A split may be upcoming:

Queer Works CEO Jacob Rostovsky said that the City of Palm Springs would likely need to agree to match the funds provided by the state for the state to agree to fund the program.

Universal Basic Income has gotten a fair amount of support over the past few years. That’s not particularly surprising, given the surge in Americans favoring socialism.

It should be noted that many of those proponents, so far as I can tell, believe “socialism” means you magically get to own the company for which you work. So if Uncle Sam is passing out kingship, pour on the communism and let’s bathe in cash.

As for rainbow-centric assisted living, Southern California gay mecca West Hollywood is also giving it a shot:

In case you missed it…

Hollywood Town Shells out Universal Basic Income — but You Have to Say You're LGBTQIAhttps://t.co/MzqI1u0wbI

— Alex Parker (@alexparker1984) April 3, 2022

Stayed tuned for more towns joining in.

Perhaps in the end, we’ll all be LGBTQIA+. Somewhere, some straight suckers will be paying us just to be ourselves.

And if we still, for some odd reason, choose to have jobs…we’ll all be the CEOs:

People really think that capitalism means "making profit"? No wonder people hate socialism, they don't even know what it means. In socialism, the business model is EXACTLY the same, just that the workers own the business instead of some rich dude. FFS…

— Shawn The Atheist (@ShawnTheAtheist) February 15, 2020