NOVEMBER 28, 2025 YPSILANTI GROUNDCOVER NEWS Pregnant residents and parents of newborns in Ypsilanti can apply for temporary Unqualified Basic Income December 1st TONY Groundcover contributor Starting at 9 a.m. December 1, 2025, pregnant residents of Ypsilanti, and those with newborns born on or after December 1 can apply for RxKids (rxkids.org); an unqualified basic income program. The program provides $1,500 during pregnancy, and $500 per month for six to 12 months of a newborn’s new life. Unqualified basic income is undeniably effective at increasing quality of life and addressing the immediate needs of those in poverty. Giving people basic income benefits entire communities far more than what it costs. The RxKids program has been operating elsewhere in the state of Michigan and evidence shows improvements for the entire community, such as lower rates of postpartum depression and lower rates of eviction. New and/or expecting parents who receive this income will lift the economy of Ypsilanti, both in the true measure of the purchasing power of the people, and the more common false measure of how much capital is being passed between wealthy parties. In its $81 billion 2025 budget, the state of Michigan granted $270 million to the program. The Senate Fiscal Analysis Agency estimates funding maximum payouts statewide would cost $750 million. Private funding is currently baked into the program. "Each community where Rx Kids operates must contribute philanthropic money," Sneha Dhandapani reported on her interview with co-director Luke Shaefer in “Michigan Public.” (www.michiganpublic.org/ health/2025-10-08rx-kids-gets- 270-million-in-new-state-budget) RxKids, though brief and insufficient, is a limited implementation of a universal basic income (UBI). (The current program is called unqualified basic income because it is not universal.) UBI is likely to play a major role in all our lives going forward. Giving people money is a direct solve to poverty, it is the most effective medicine for the symptom, though we dare not neglect the underlying disease. If we don't address the root causes of poverty, this and other UBI programs will: continue to be underfunded public-private partnerships, become means-tested, be bound within layers of unnecessary hierarchy and bureaucracy, and eventually be eliminated. Many social safety nets have already suffered this fate and the remainder are sliding down this pipeline. When the Black Panthers fed school children for free, they were shut down and replaced with the far inferior product of "free and reduced school lunches" where people in poverty are forced to prove how poor they are before the state will let their kids eat. If we all agreed that everyone deserves to eat, there would be no crisis when the federal government cuts food funding. We would not worry if benefits are cut off because the children would be fed as a certainty, regardless of politicians and billionaires. Our need for social safety nets is increasing. Poverty is increasing. Our hamstrung social safety nets that require means-testing, with complex applications and byzantine mazes of hoops to jump through on dysfunctional websites and in soul-sucking waiting rooms, are not enough. UBI is giving people a life without demanding they earn it. It's as obvious and evident that UBI eliminates poverty as it is that abolishing rent solves homelessness. If you don’t want people to be poor, pay them. If you don’t want people to be homeless, let them have homes. UBI improves people's material conditions and enables people to survive the growing automation of work. However the so-called philanthropists funding UBI research and the political system driving UBI policy are the root cause of poverty. Every Ypsilantian who gets this money is getting a fraction of what they're owed in stolen labor value and unjust rent. As someone who wants to see as much wealth redistributed into as many hands as possible for the sake of all our survival, I have a few concerns about the future of this project. "RxKids is a program of Michigan State Public Health Initiative, in collaboration with Poverty Solutions at the University of Michigan and administered by GiveDirectly." - rxkids.org My minor concern is that this is a research project. Researchers want data. The methodology of researchers creating a usable dataset, and the methodology of social workers trying to deliver the maximum assistance to the maximum number of people, are not the same. What is in the best interest of the people and what produces Photo courtesy of the Ann Arbor Area Community Foundation. 7 the most valuable dataset are not always going to be the same. This contradiction in interest is something to keep an eye on. RxKids’ published data appears to be gathered at the community level, with local statistics before and after the program is run and compared to communities that didn’t get the income. There is a risk of well-meaning scientists standing in the way of humanitarian support that people desperately need, to improve their dataset, and other malpractices for the sake of the publishing motive. The data, as you may expect, show UBI creates a wealth of material benefits for communities from reduced poverty to healthier people. You can find the project’s published papers on their website, rxkids.org/impact/ research/rx-kids-publications/ I cannot stress enough how beneficial it is to Ypsilanti for every eligible new parent and pregnant Ypsilantian to apply for this income on December 1! My major concern is philanthropy capitalism. Billionaires do not have good intentions toward people. Reducing poverty is contrary to their agenda. Poverty exists as a result of their wealth extraction. Poverty is the void left by their thievery. Philanthropist billionaires who stole and sold your data, who extract billions from underpaid workers, and those who continue to do so see UBI as a replacement for traditional social safety nets like SNAP and Social Security. They know UBI is a tool we need to survive in the automation paradigm they are creating, that they've dragged us all into, and they want to control it. They want to own it long enough to eliminate our existing social safety nets, then eliminate it. Similar to how Microsoft will "Embrace, Extend, and Extinguish" social software standards, the wealthy embrace, undermine and extinguish social safety nets. The easiest way for capitalist greed to corrupt social safety nets into profit extractors is with public-private partnerships. Public-private partnerships — from Section 8 housing to localized monopolies — bandage over fallout from the ever-widening wealth gap while exacerbating the root cause. Billionaires exist only because of labor value stolen from underpaid workers, and the property taxes in politician's budgets are paid for with ever-ratcheting unjust rents. Of all the money missing from your paycheck, and all the money you lose to the landlord, they're willing to give a tiny fraction back; it gives them clout at parties and makes them all richer in the long run. There’s mud in the pie, but it’s not a mud pie. RxKids is a research project feeding tech billionaires data they use to take more control over our social safety nets. RxKids is a public-private partnership between the state and the wealthy creators of poverty. RxKids will help people. The program already is helping people. I want to see it expanded, owned and led by the people, and I want to see it signed into law that forever going forward Michigan will pay universal basic income to all newborns, not for six-totwelve months, but for their entire lives. The billionaires can afford it, they owe it to us, and it’s the state’s most basic responsibility to seize their blood money and return it to us in full. We won’t let them starve, we aren’t them. In the meantime, if you are eligible apply December 1!
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