AUTHOR’S SUMMARY: There’s no way toward a sustainable future without tackling environmentalism’s old stumbling blocks: consumption and jobs. And the way to do that is through a universal basic income.
Alyssa Battistoni is an editor at Jacobin. Her work has appeared in Salon and Mother Jones, among other venues.
Alyssa Battistoni, “Alive in the Sunshine,” The Jacobin: a magazine of culture and polemic, Issue 13, undated, 2014.
Illustration by Edward Carvalho-Monaghan -the Jacobin
Very interested in Basic Income, both in the US and in Kenya, where I have been looking for something like this to contribute to in the future. I live within the boundary’s of the 47% described so unfairly by Mitt Romney but know that these experiments in basic income would be a boon to the niche filling, aspirational, small business and self-employed.
I started collecting social security five years ago and my partner starts this month. It has allowed us to experience the extra security that basic income provides and also to regain our ability to make capitol improvements in our Cafe, thereby preserving the 115+ brick building, integral to the original downtown buildings in our small city. Too bad we couldn’t have had a basic income when we started……we’d be paying federal taxes with the 53 percent for most of these past 30 years.