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title: Universal Basic Income Pitch

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# Universal Basic Income Pitch

## What is UBI?
Universal basic income is a form of social welfare, people receive supplementary income from the state. 
- Full basic income, if it provides above the poverty line.
- Partial basic income, any amount below the poverty line.

No country has implemented either for their full population, however there have been pilot projects all over, including in [Ontario](https://www.ontario.ca/page/ontario-basic-income-pilot)

Some countries have a child benefit that is similar to UBI as it is a buffer income for people taking care of children.

### Automation
There is an ongoing automation revolution leading to menial jobs being eliminated. Like cashiers in virtually every big box store. People are losing their jobs and the minimum wage is not being increased in relation to increases in productivity, at least in North America. Should the state protect workers pushed out of their industry by offering a supplemental wage? For example, truck drivers in the future with self driving trucks.

### Living wage
A living wage is the hourly wage a worker needs to earn to cover their basic expenses and participate in their community. This is not the same as the minimum wage. How do organizations determine the living wage for an area?

Ontario living wage: https://www.ontariolivingwage.ca/living_wage_week_2022

Personally what I consider a living wage is having enough money to have your physiological needs met, as seen in Maslow's hierarchy of basic needs.
![basic needs](https://i.imgur.com/MBB3Gwk.jpg)

UBI could serve as the gap closer between minimum wage and living wage.

### Why talk about this?
We need to understand our topic so that we know what kind of data we can pull from the internet about it. Our job isn't to solve this issue or to give our opinions on it. We need to focus on delivering objective data about the topic in a clear and concise manner.

## Visualization
An amazing example from Stanford University: https://basicincome.stanford.edu/research/ubi-visualization/
However this is a lot of research and not necessarily data that we can pull from social media websites.

### Idea 1
Comparing the gap between minimum wage to living wage to identify where UBI would be needed the most. Is it even possible to pull this data from social media? Finding minimum wage could be simple enough as it is defined by the law for every country. Calculating a living wage would be much more complex. We would have to factor in the consumer price index for an area, rent, water, food costs, etc. Then a geographical heatmap of where the gap is high and where it is low. Clicking an area of interest could pull up the exact numbers. 

![heatmap](https://i.imgur.com/C7rIza5.png)

### Idea 3
Where is basic income being talked about. Geographical heatmap of "buzz"

### Idea 2
Show where basic income has been tried. Can we find this just by pulling data from social media?
![map](https://i.imgur.com/xB3QEi6.jpg)

### Idea 4
Sentiment analysis. See if we can determine overall political sentiment towards the issue. 
![pie chart](https://i.imgur.com/mVta9Fr.jpg)

### Idea 5
Dynamic word cloud.
![word cloud](https://i.imgur.com/iPIfVIQ.jpg)
