by Guest Contributor | Jul 22, 2016 | Opinion
Donald Trump and the Prospects for a Basic Income
By Steven Shafarman
The Republican Party convention is over, and I’m feeling hopeful. Trump’s triumph may be a big step forward in our campaign to enact a basic income in the United States.
With Trump’s speech, and the convention’s overall tone, the party has completed its transition and come out of the closet. It’s now the Repugnant Party.
Our best hope is a landslide defeat, leaving Trump and the Repugnant Party in the dust. That will also leave Republicans with the task of rebuilding, seeking to reunite their Pro-Trump, Never-Trump, and Stuck-with-Trump factions. They’ll need a platform that’s positive, uplifting, and optimistic, something like a new version of Reagan’s “morning in America” — and they’ll have that, if the reborn Republican Party endorses a version of basic income.
Republicans might call it a “negative income tax,” quoting Milton Friedman, who strongly endorsed it in several books and many articles. Perhaps they’ll favor “Citizen Dividends,” to underscore the fact that the basic income is for citizens only, not immigrants. During their convention, they loudly denounced Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party as the establishment status quo, and the cause of everything that’s wrong in America today. Republicans can reinforce those arguments by touting basic income as a way to cut taxes, end corporate welfare, and achieve many of their other goals and values.
Democrats will be pressing hard to bring rapid progress, and President Hillary Clinton will be eager to prove that she is much more than a third term for Barack Obama. She can do that by talking about basic income, even if she only floats it as an idea, stopping short of full-on support. They might like UBI, universal or unconditional basic income, using the “U” to emphasize liberal values. If Clinton doesn’t act, Bernie Sanders and his supporters may became our champions, running with this issue and taking over the Democratic Party.
We Americans will have a basic income within the next ten years, I predict, possibly within two to three years.
Steven Shafarman is a co-founder of Basic Income Action, a life member of BIEN, and on the coordinating committee of USBIG. His forthcoming book is The Basic Income Imperative: for peace, justice, liberty, and personal dignity. (If you are or know a literary agent or publisher, please contact him through www.basicincomeaction.org.)
Donald Trump photo credit: Gage Skidmore (2013)
by Guest Contributor | Jul 22, 2016 | Opinion
It was a remarkable moment in 1969 when President Nixon offered universal basic income (UBI) legislation that was passed twice by the US House of Representatives, but failed to garner enough votes in a Democratic controlled Senate on both occasions. It was defeated despite the intellectual clout of 1200 bi-partisan economists, including Milton Friedman who designed the “guaranteed income” bill, and John Kenneth Galbraith who publicly supported the bill. The irony: a public welfare program proposed by Republicans was stalled by Democrats, who viewed the suggested $1,600 ($10,000 in today’s dollars) per year for each recipient as insufficient. [1] While Europe maintained a broad network of intellectuals, publications, and conferences promoting the idea, UBI policy has been largely absent from American political discourse ever since, other than among a committed following on Reddit, some forward thinking academics, and US affiliates of BIEN.
Andrew L. Stern
President Emeritus SEIU
Columbia University Richman Center
Ronald O. Perelman Senior Fellow
Over the past year, though, growing support from an array of thought leaders suggests a rising tide for UBI in the US. President Obama, in an interview with Bloomberg News this June, discussed the need to “build ourselves a runway” to ease the transition into an increasingly automated labor force. [2] Bernie Sanders has, on multiple occasions, expressed his support of UBI, stating in a 2015 interview that he is “absolutely sympathetic to that approach.” [3] Recently, UBI has received full-throated support from leading thinkers like Berkeley’s Robert Reich, Columbia’s Joseph Stiglitz, INET President Rob Johnson, Google CEO Eric Schmidt, former Zipcar CEO Robin Chase, Judith Shulevitz – writing in the New York Times, and Nobel Laureate Angus Deaton. This June past, my book Raising the Floor: How a Universal Basic Income Can Renew Our Economy and Rebuild the American Dream was released, and has helped to expand the discussion of UBI to progressives, unions, and mainstream media outlets like the FT, CNBC, NPR, Fortune, and the New York Times.
Matthew Kessler-Cleary
The interest in UBI is gaining prominence and commentary in mainstream think tanks across the political spectrum, which is an anomaly in our modern, divided political dynamic. From the progressive to libertarian poles, at places like Roosevelt Institute, INET, OSF, CATO, and AEI, basic income is gaining support as a solution to the economic crises of our present, and future. In the fall, the CATO Institute, whose Michael Tanner is a libertarian thought leader and key discussant in my book, is planning to host a forum in Washington, DC including Charles Murray and myself.
Global developments around UBI should also help to bolster UBI’s place in American political discourse. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has incorporated basic income into the Liberal Party’s platform, [4] and Canada is preparing a basic income experiment for residents of the Ontario province.[5] Following the city of Utrecht’s decision, several other Dutch cities will test basic income policies in the coming years. [6] As these trials play out, hopefully with positive results or lessons that allow for improvement, the American public and their elected officials will have solid evidence upon which an American policy, perhaps city or state based experiments, can be built. Already, a small-scale basic income experiment will be carried out by Y-Combinator in Oakland, where unconditional income will be provided to roughly 100 Oakland residents for 6-12 months. [7]
In my book, I state that the American response to the tsunami of job upheaval will look more like the response to the Vietnam, rather than the Iraq War. In the Vietnam era a draft placed the children of middle-class families at risk, as they are again, as present and future technologically motivated job loss does not spare college graduates or white-collar occupations.
During the Vietnam era, the selective service draft mobilized parents from every walk of life to be vocal anti-war activists. Once their own children could be drafted to fight and die, many parents began questioning whether President Johnson had any justification for sending troops there. The draft also mobilized young people: Vietnam did not fit into their college and career plans, nor did the idea of killing people or getting killed in a far-off land.
Job loss has for too long been considered a condition of a more blue-collar, uneducated, and low-skill labor force. Not only is this prejudicial and inaccurate, but it is no longer supported by employment statistics. Unemployment and underemployment among recent college graduates is still significantly higher than pre-Recession levels, indicating that in the New Economy, white-collar jobs are susceptible to job erosion much as blue-collar jobs have been for the past several decades. [8] So while it was easy for legislators, prominent thinkers, and middle and upper class individuals to discuss job loss from the comfort of their personal professional security, as economists still do, they and their children are increasingly affected by the shifting labor paradigm. Job loss and erosion in the white-collar economy has the potential to mobilize a far more diverse and broad political movement to search for solutions to the economic and employment challenges of the future.
While there is a myriad of ideas on how to combat the restructuring of our emerging socio-economic paradigm, none have as of yet enjoyed the broad political support that UBI does. None provide such a simple means of addressing very complex problems: ending poverty; offering stability during any economic transition; or providing for universal assistance as technology creates a tsunami of labor market disruption. In the United States a new conversation has started on UBI, and it is our responsibility to ensure that the momentum does not wane. The time is now, and the solution is simple: make Universal Basic Income an American reality.
References
[1] https://www.jacobinmag.com/2016/05/richard-nixon-ubi-basic-income-welfare/
[2] https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2016-obama-anti-business-president/
[3] https://www.vox.com/2015/7/28/9014491/bernie-sanders-vox-conversation
[4] https://www.liberal.ca/policy-resolutions/97-basic-income-supplement-testing-dignified-approach-income-security-workingage-canadians/
[5] https://qz.com/633974/ontario-canada-announced-a-plan-to-test-universal-basic-income-for-all-citizens/
[6] https://qz.com/473779/several-dutch-cities-want-to-give-residents-a-no-strings-attached-basic-income/
[7] https://blog.ycombinator.com/moving-forward-on-basic-income
[8] https://www.epi.org/publication/the-class-of-2015/
by Kate McFarland | Jul 21, 2016 | News
In the 1970s, Denver, Colorado and Seattle, Washington were selected by the United States federal government as sites for experiments of the negative income tax (NIT), an idea then popularized by Milton Friedman and Richard Nixon.
Like a basic income, a NIT involves the distribution of unconditional cash transfers sufficient to ensure a minimum standard of living — independent of whether recipients are employed or looking for work. (The NIT differs from a universal basic income in that the transfers are not universal, but only given to those whose income falls below a certain level, and such cash benefits taper off with earnings.)
A main purpose of these experiments was to test whether the cash transfers would have a disincentivizing effect on work. In the end, the results did show a decline in average working hours, of about seven percent, which contributed to policymakers giving up on the idea of NIT.
Last month, Sam Brasch of Colorado Public Radio interviewed BIEN Co-Chair Karl Widerquist about the NIT experiments conducted in Denver and Seattle, and their alleged ill effects on the workforce. Widerquist explains that the studies in fact pointed to many beneficial effects of the cash transfers, and argues that concerns about their disincentivizing effect on work have been overblown:
The group that wasn’t receiving a negative income tax record worked relatively less per week than the experimental group receiving the negative income tax. But that was because the people who received the negative income tax took more time to find a good job, not because anybody actually dropped out of the labor force. They didn’t find any evidence of that whatsoever.
The 10-minute audio segment is available online, at the link below:
Sam Brasch, “What if Government Just Gave Poor People Cash? It’s Been Tried In Denver?” Colorado Public Radio, June 2, 2016.
Photo of Denver, CO (1972) CC Bruce McAllister.
by Kate McFarland | Jul 19, 2016 | News
Jim Clark, founder of the World Technology Network, has organized a panel discussion on universal basic income at the Democratic National Convention (DNC), to be held next week in Philadelphia.
Participants will include two of the world’s most notable proponents of basic income: Scott Santens and BIEN cofounder Guy Standing. From the opposing side, Jason Pontin (Editor in Chief of the MIT Technology Review) will complete the panel. Clark will moderate the discussion.
The universal basic income session will take place on the morning of Monday, July 25, and is planned to be recorded and streamed live. (Details to be announced.)
In addition to the panel on universal basic income, Clark has organized sessions on technological unemployment, evidence-based solutions to combat poverty, and utopian and dystopian scenarios for 2026, according to his Facebook announcement of the event.
An expected 4,769 delegates will be in attendance at the DNC, where they will select the 2016 US Presidential candidate for the Democratic Party. According to a recent article in PhillyVoice, approximately 50,000 people in total are expected to arrive in the city for the convention.
Thanks to Genevieve Shanahan for the typo-spotting — and, as always, thanks to my supporters on Patreon. (Click the link if you too would like to support my work for Basic Income News.)
Photo of 2008 Democratic National Convention CC Kelly DeLay.
by Kate McFarland | Jul 18, 2016 | News
Founded in June 2016, and currently in its preliminary organizational phase, National Campaign for Basic Income (NC4BI) is a Political Action Committee supporting basic income policy initiatives at the local, state, and national level.
NC4BI advocates for the abolition of poverty, and supports only policies that are “progressive” in the sense that these policies will improve the position of the majority of individuals and especially of those who are currently the most disadvantaged. Beyond that, NC4BI will continue to seek a basic income that secures participation, without exploitation, in culture and society.
Prior to the creation of NC4BI, the only major US-based basic income organizations — the US Basic Income Guarantee Network (USBIG) and Basic Income Action (BIA) — were not constituted to engage directly in lobbying or other direct political action. The mission of USBIG is to promote discussion of basic income, including the organization of an annual North American Congress on the topic. Similarly, BIA is in the process of incorporating as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization, a status which imposes legal limitations on its ability in participate in political activity.
NC4BI is distinct in that it is designed to be able to engage in direct political action (it will be set up as a 527 organization under the US tax code) — and with the specific aims of building political coalitions to influence elections and policymaking.
Founding members of NC4BI include Steve May (Vermont Basic Income Exchange); Jason Burke Murphy (member of the USBIG and BIEN co-ordinating committees); Michael Howard (coordinator of USBIG and co-editor of Basic Income Studies); Liane Gale (organizer of BIG Minnesota and co-organizer of the Basic Income Women Action Group); and Kate McFarland (editor of Basic Income News and member of the Executive Committee of BIEN).
To keep up-to-date with the activities of the National Campaign for Basic Income, follow its Facebook page.
All supporters of Basic Income in the United States are invited and encouraged to join NC4BI. In addition to liking and following the organization on Facebook, potential members may email contact@nc4bi.org for information about NC4BI and how to become involved, or contact one of the founding members directly: Liane Gale (liane.gale@gmail.com); Michael Howard (michael.howard@umit.maine.edu); Steve May (smaydirect@yahoo.com); Kate McFarland (mcfarland.309@osu.edu); Jason Murphy (jason.burke.murphy@gmail.com).
Image Credit: Russell Shaw Higgs (via flickr)
An earlier version of this post used the acronym ‘NCBI’ rather than ‘NC4BI’. ‘NC4BI’ was since chosen as the official acronym of the organization.
