San Francisco is Trying a UBI for Musicians
San Francisco adopts a UBI for musicians. I'll tell you why it's cool, and I also tell you why it's not…
Today we have a millennial favorite: UBI. But this time it's just for musicians, just to help them kinda get moving along in the San Francisco area, interesting topic. I'll tell you what I think about it right now.
San Francisco annoucned that they're instituting a $1,000 UBI for artists and creatives that live in the city. Now, UBI is not something that's uncommon, it's kind of becoming more frequent of a topic to speak about, people like Andrew Yang have been advocating for it for several years now, and if it goes way farther back than that, but the San Francisco Mayor has really put her foot down on this one, and it looks like it's gonna go through and it looks like it's gonna happen for about 130 or so musicians in the San Francisco area.
Now, there's a lot of people out there that are really in favor of this move, and there's a lot of people who think it's a total waste of money, or maybe just not the best use of funds in this particular time, but... Let's talk about the pluses and the minuses of both show, I think the good is pretty obvious in this situation, 130 artists are gonna get $1000 a month at the start of next year for a period of months, if not an entire year… Who knows? I feel like once you start going down this rabbit hole wind as it end, but that seems to be the culture there, and some of the people and some of the artists that are in that community, they're not happy about this because obviously San Francisco has more than 130 artists.
And how do you go about choosing the artists that you want to fund this particular way, what makes an artist worthy of $1000 versus an artist that's not worth $1000. So some of the major criticism of the band has been because it's not a broadbased program, it's not something that's equal, for all of that have claimed taxes as being an artist or a musician over the past year or more.
Michael Tanner, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, says that it even could be used for political agenda reasons, let's face it, what politician doesn't do everything for a political agenda reason, but whatever, he argues that the real benefit of the UBI should be... Like I said before, Universal and all fair across the board, and it just kinda seems like he's not in favor of the whole idea of it being 130 artists that's plugged for this benefit. Other voices are a little bit more excited about the future of this UBI program, saying that, yes, this is sort of like a pilot thing, 130 people are gonna get it now, but maybe the expands in the future.
He also makes the point that the UBI that these 130 artists are gonna be getting is universally allowed to be spent on anything, so you don't have to just spend it on say food, if you were to get food stamps, etcetera. Get it. That said, both people who are in favor of this idea or not so in favor of this idea, all agree that how do you select 130 musicians or artists to get this type of benefit and leave everybody else behind in the beginning upsetting anyone. But I think it gets back to the whole idea of the pandemic has totally wrecked us and we're all without work right now, and basically anything that we can get from the government is definitely a help, but also to what sort of longterm ramifications come with continuing to reach to the Governor for support. I guess it's that longstanding debate, how much government do you want in your life and are you willing to wait it out for all this to turn around to keep going back to work, or is it something that you really want that money from the government now to help you out.
Either way, it's an interesting idea and I like interesting ideas, I like ideas that make me think and think about the future and think about what an artist's life could evolve into being… UBI is popular or some people... And some people, it's not... I'm really anxious to hear what you have to say, so make sure you leave a comment down below and tell me what you think of this idea of choosing a select amount of artists for a pilot program to sort of see if this UBI thing works.
Another interesting thought about the whole process is taking this UBI, does it help or hurt you if you're trying to buy a house or trying to advance in life and you need to show income, is this UBI going to hurt you in making those larger purchases or is it gonna be viewed negatively by the people who loan money for you to do bigger and better things with your artistic career, essentially, is it viewed sort of like welfare or is it viewed as just like a grant program that doesn't show up so negatively on your tax returns also, if this ends up being a great thing for artists, how does that fit into the mold of art being separate from government and politics and having a unique role and voice in expressing opinions about either the political climate or the way the country is going, or any of that type of stuff to start to burn the line too much to where art is now influenced politically by the dollar bill that's being paid them monthly, as I said before, I really like ideas that make me think...
I really like ideas that make me ponder the future, and this is definitely one of them. So make sure you leave a comment down below and tell me what you think of UBI and this whole San Francisco situation. How would you do it if you did it? Would you do it? Would you accept it? Tell me what you think.
And you've gotta be kidding me, right? You think I forgot about the artists of the day, not so fast, my friend. Today's artist is Jesse Fischer, and he just released this brand new record called resilience, that's really, really awesome, making a lot of waves online, and he's been doing thi interview series to talking with some of the artists that played on the record as well as other people and how they showed resilience in their own artistic careers, he's a really great guy to get to know his catalog with SoulCycle, a band he used to have for years and years, and may still have... I'm not sure they've been doing a lot of great work, like I said, for years, and Jesse's a super creative dude, he seems to have his hand on the pulse of everything that's happening in New York City. So make sure you go check out Jesse Fischer this week.