Politics

Good point and cheers for a thoughtful reply. :) The article states that two private foundations paid out about $10 million to finance the pilot program. The city of Denver seems to have no direct investment in this program, but it's unclear from the article. It states that State university students did data gathering during the project and paid up to $30.00 for each response from stipend recipients. Given the above, I would respectfully suggest that these self-reports exchanged for money may be biased, confirmation bias could be a huge factor. The university is the only entity that has released their findings so far, which means that the only metric we have is the pilot project director's opinion that, to paraphrase, "It went so well, we need more funding!"

To your good point about the city potentially recouping expenses through tax revenue, growing Denver's tax base doesn't appear to an objective of this program, as 55% of recipients did not appear to use the money to help themselves get legally eligible for jobs, i.e. you need a legal address to receive paper mail to get on a payroll in the US, because employers want it to put down on the paperwork for taxes. Employers want to please the IRS more than they want to hire you, unfortunately for a person without an address on record. It DOES NOT mean they didn't get jobs. It just means that if they did, they are under the table jobs.