Guaranteed income programs are popping up everywhere in the US. It is time to expand beyond local pilot programs and embrace a nationwide Citizen Dividend, an annual distribution of a share of business profits to every American, to beat back against rising economic inequality and hold true to our deepest American values.
Three years ago, perhaps the only widely known American guaranteed income program was the Alaska Permanent Fund which doles out annual payments to every Alaskan funded from state oil and gas revenue. In recent years, pilot programs giving $500 – $1,000 a month to low-income residents have been implemented or proposed in Stockton, California; Jackson, Mississippi; Phoenix; Pittsburgh; and Chicago.
Perhaps the simplest, widest-reaching, and easiest to implement form of guaranteed income we could adopt would be the Citizen Dividend. The debate around guaranteed income often boils down to two fundamental questions: Who deserves the income and how can we pay for them? With a national Citizen Dividend, we answer both of those questions clearly and compellingly.
First, who deserves this income? We all do. No business in this country turns a profit without using wealth we all own together – our natural resources; our societal resources like our roads, our public safety, and our education system; and our inherited systems like our Constitution and our courts. Every citizen has an equal ownership stake in these forms of collective wealth. Therefore, each American deserves some slice of the profits realized by their use. Sure, individual hard work, talent, and good strategy help bring about business success. Imagine though trying to create value without energy, roads, courts, and an educated workforce. It would be downright impossible.
Second, how do pay for this income? A Citizen Dividend is funded through one form of our collective prosperity – business profits. Businesses should retain 95% of their profits to invest in growth, return wealth to private shareholders, and pay the government for the services our society needs (e.g. taxes). But 5% of those profits should be returned to each American in recognition of the collective wealth that was used to create those profits.
Easy to understand and clear in its funding, a Citizen Dividend would have a meaningful positive impact on the lives of Americans and on the fabric of our economy. Using 2015 estimates on business net income, a Citizen Dividend could return $570 to each American every year – or over $2,200 for a family of four. This payment – which amounts to nearly two months of rent or food for the median American family – could stave off some of the harshest impacts of rising inequality. But perhaps more importantly, it would challenge the false narrative that profit is created merely through individual action and that wealth should be hoarded by those who have the opportunity to do so. Instead, it would reinforce a deeper American story, that we are our best as a nation when we come together across all our differences to blaze a trail toward a common future.
A Citizen Dividend breathes life into the spirit of our nation’s first motto – E Pluribus Unum – out of many, one. It is time we recognize what truly belongs to every American and be bold in our willingness to build an economy that reflects our best values. It is time for a Citizen Dividend.
Brian C. Johnson is the CEO of Equality Illinois and the author of Our Fair Share: How One Small Change Can Create a More EquiBrian C. Johnson has served in education and advocacy, community organizing, and political activism at local and national levels for two decades, dedicated to the American promise of fairness for all. He’s been featured on CNN and in The Washington Post, USA Today, and TheNew York Times. Johnson currently serves as the CEO of Equality Illinois, one of the nation’s most successful LGBTQ civil rights organizations. He lives with his husband and their daughter in the Lincoln Square neighborhood of Chicago, Illinois.
This year, the Freiburg Institute for Basic Income Studies (FRIBIS) will hold its first annual conference on Monday and Tuesday, 11-12 October 2021. It aims to shed light on an emerging topic in the economics of UBI: the monetary issues of a UBI. Monetary aspects are becoming more important due to an increasing economic interest in monetary innovations and major disruptions in central banking and finance. UBI research is being increasingly influenced by this development. The biggest UBI pilots use specifically minted currencies to ensure local spending, and new strands of transformative economics propose monetary financing or community currencies as financing mechanisms for a UBI. FRIBIS acknowledges this evolution by creating research teams in order to keep up-to-date with research in this field. At this year’s conference, FRIBIS will present this teams’ research, as well as other research activities. In addition, research collaborations will be presented and there will be keynotes and panel discussions with very honorable guests.
The conference provides the audience, in addition, with contributions of other FRIBIS teams in parallel sessions. FRIBIS teams integrate in a unique way the activities of civic society actors, activists, and scientists, so that civic society actors and activists can show their contributory potential.
The conference will be held online. It will be livestreamed over the FRIBIS YouTube channel. Guests are invited to ask questions in the YouTube Chat.
Programme and links to watch the sessions (free on YouTube) are on this webpage.
Unconditional Basic Income Europe (UBIE), an alliance of organisations and individuals across 27 countries, is fundraising to send 20 young basic income advocates aged 16-30 to the European Parliment in Strasbourg October 8-9th, for the European Youth Event (EYE) 2021. The group this year is twice as large as the one that went on behalf of UBIE in 2018 and include many from underrepresented communities. Among other things they will be leading a workshop on ‘Policies for a fairer economy’ which will include basic income. It is also a good opportunity, they say, to advocate for UBI policies at the European Parliment and exchange their views with experts, activists, influencers and decision-makers on a high level.
Although expenses are refunded by the EU Parliament, attendees have to pay travel, etc. up front. You can make a donation here.
On Wednesday 6 October 2021, the Institute for Policy Research, University of Bath, and Bristol Ideas are running their second virtual conference, ‘Is it time for UBI?’. The conference is free to attend.
Leading thinkers, politicians and policymakers will come together to debate and explore new approaches to macro-economic policymaking, the prospects for Universal Basic Income, and the political economy of social and economic change.
Speakers include: Kate Bell (TUC), Young Jun Choi (Yonsei University), Anna Coote (New Economics Foundation), Diane Coyle (University of Cambridge), Geoff Crocker (author of Basic Income and Sovereign Money), Sarath Davala (Indian Network for Basic Income), Anna Dent (policy and research consultant), S Mahendra Dev (Indira Gandhi Institute of Development Research), Martin Ford (author of Rule of the Robots), Cleo Goodman (Basic Income Conversation), Paul Mason, Jane Millar (University of Bath), Bernhard Neumärker (University of Freiburg), Thomas Palley, Nick Pearce (Institute for Policy Research, University of Bath), James Plunkett (author of End State), Sumbul Siddiqui (Mayor of Cambridge, Massachusetts), Kate Soper (London Metropolitan University / University of Brighton) and Paola Subacchi (Queen Mary University of London).
The programme, biographies of speakers and registration can be found on this web page.
Villagers gathered to celebrate their basic income in the local church building
By: Billy Juma Munda, Evans Ododa, Lena Stark
Kowiti-A is a small village in Kisumu County in Kenya. It is twenty-three kilometres away from Kisumu town and has a population of 782 people of which 415 are adults and 367 are children below 18 years. Most of the people are engaged in farm-related livelihood activities. The village population is distributed among six clans. The nearest town Ahero is about 3 kilometres from the village.
About a year ago, two teachers from this village made a chance acquaintance, through social media, with members of an organisation called Mission Possible 2030 (MP2030). The context was basic income. They had heard about the idea of basic income from a local politician and began exploring it on the internet, only to realise that a global movement for it exists. MP2030 believes that without waiting for nation states to implement a basic income policy, we should start implementing a basic income by mobilising both individual donors and communities. This conversation led to MP2030 launching a project in Kowiti called Equalize in a humble way. From September 2020, the project gave a basic income of about 1100 Kenyan Shillings(KES) (10 US Dollars) per month to 10 people randomly selected through a raffle.
To facilitate money transfers, the teachers formed a local community-based organisation called Rural Action CBO (RACBO) so that it is a community initiative and money transfers happen in a transparent way. MP2030 transferred money to RACBO which in turn transferred to individuals via M-PESA, which is the popular mobile money transfer platform in Kenya.
These ten people received money for about eleven months, when another chance acquaintance gave a big boost to the project. This time the acquaintance took place between MP2030 and impact Market. impactMarket is a decentralized poverty alleviation protocol built by impactLabs, a company based in Portugal. It uses blockchain technology to enable any vulnerable community to implement poverty alleviation mechanisms, such as for instance, an Unconditional Basic Income. The protocol uses Celo Dollars, or cUSD, a stable-coin whose value is pegged to the US Dollar.
Ordinarily, you need an app for it and therefore a smartphone. As most of the villagers have no smartphone in Kowiti-A, collaboration with Fintech partners Refugee Integration Organisation and Kotanipay were needed to make sure the villagers would receive a currency they can actually use for buying goods and services: Kenyan Shillings – KES.
M-pesa outlet in Kowiti-A
Money transfers in Kenya are relatively easy, because of the widespread use of m-pesa, a mobile payment system. After the so-called USSD integration (where the CELO dollars are exchanged for KES in the background), someone with a sim card can receive KES, and withdraw cash at an m-pesa shop in the village. One phone can have two sim cards, so two people can receive per phone line. it is not entirely without intermediaries yet, but less than 6% is lost in the transfer from CELO dollar to cash-KES.
Because of the collaboration with Impact Market and its Fintech partners, the process accelerated very quickly and by mid-August about 240 adults began getting a basic income of 7 USD a week. By end September 2021, all the 415 adults will get the basic income for a period of one year. The total amount allocated to Kowiti project is 166,000 US Dollars, i.e., KES 18.28 million. Each individual will get a total amount of KES 44,000 (USD 400). If this sounds unbelievable, the results that will flow from this initiative will be more so, several times over.
What kind of basic income is it?
It is very interesting and also surprising that this humble project almost fulfils all the five main characteristics of the BIEN’s definition of basic income.
Universal: Basic income is given to the entire adult population. Children are not included more for technical reasons – in the smart contract adopted by ImpactMarket only those who have a mobile phone line can be provided money.
Cash: The recipient encashes the transfer into the national currency at any m-pesa store in the village
Individual: Money is transferred to individuals and not households.
Periodic: Money is transferred once a week.
Unconditional: There are no conditions whatsoever that the recipients need to fulfil after having received the money.
What does this money mean for these villages?
Based on a 2015 household budget survey, Kenya defines its overall poverty line in rural areas as an individual per capita monthly consumption expenditure of less than 3252 KES (USD 30), and extreme poverty as per capita consumption expenditure less than 1954 KES (USD 18).
In this project, the recipients receive a monthly top up of 3000 KES (USD 28) which is a substantial boost to their income levels. In this first month of receiving the money, it was observed that many people who never used to eat a breakfast, have begun to eat breakfast. Food seems to be where the money is visibly going. In the coming months, this project is certainly going to have a big impact on the lives and livelihoods of the people of Kowiti-A. These narratives will be published on the website of Mission Possible 2030 in the coming months.
Billi Juma Munda and Evans Ododa are teachers living in Kowiti-A. Lena Stark is the Chair of Mission Possible 2030. For more information about the project, write to Lena at lena@missionpossible2030.com
