by Guest Contributor | Jun 2, 2014 | Opinion
It’s a bit bizarre if you ever stop and think about rent. When you’re homeless, though, you have a lot of time to think, and it’s hard to think about anything other than paying rent.
If you’ve ever been unfortunate enough to find yourself homeless and don’t have friends or family to crash with, you quickly learn that there really is no place at all for you to go. Actually, the problem is sleeping- there are countless places to kill time for free, places where you can sit, stand, or pace without being chased out or looked at funny. Homelessness really isn’t bad at all during the day. There are shops, parks, libraries, cafes- plenty of safe, climate controlled areas to spend the day. But when night comes and all the free places to linger shut their doors, things get tough. And when the urge to sleep starts to overwhelm you, when all you want in the entire world is to simply lay down unmolested for a few hours, the difficult reality of homelessness sets in.
If you have a vehicle, it’s a bit easier-find a secluded place to pull over, lean your seat back as far as it will go, and try and get some sleep. Every area has its own pro’s and con’s. In a poor neighborhood, residents don’t call the police- they see far worse criminal activity than a person sleeping in their car. But it’s hard to sleep in a sketchy area where a sleeping person in a vehicle-probably with all their world belongings packed into it-presents an easy target for robbery. If it’s the summer, you’ll find yourself faced with a dilemma-the further down you roll your windows, the less the oppressive heat builds up in your car, soaking you in sweat and giving all your belongings the telltale scent of someone without access to a shower or laundry. But the lower the windows go, the more danger (and strange noises in the night) you expose yourself to. It’s not an easy decision to make.
You can try and park in a nicer neighborhood, but the odds of police interrupting you increase greatly. If you are smart you’ll pick a spot near a major highway. When the cops knock on your window, just say “I’m on my way home from work, I was tired and pulled over for a rest.” (Try to disguise the fact that you’ve got all your worldly possessions packed in there with you. Resist the urge to hang your sweaty t-shirts on a coat hanger hooked above your window. These are obviously not a sun visor.) Maybe the police will buy your story or maybe they won’t, but at least with the “on my way home” you have plausible deniability. It would be pretty hard for them to prove you are truly a vagrant and not just a weary motorist making a safe decision. Most of the time you’ll just get an exasperated “move along,” a shorthand way of saying “I don’t hate you, but go be someone else’s problem.”
If you are homeless and don’t have a vehicle, your problems are much worse. All plausible deniability of your homelessness is lost the moment you lay down in public. In many places, there is nowhere that’s legal for you to sleep. As mentioned before, there are tons of public places you can be awake, but the moment you want to rest your head you’ll realize how bad the options are. Either find someplace deserted (risky for many reasons), congregate wherever the other homeless do (still not legal but usually de facto allowed), or crash someplace public and get hassled by the owner or police (humiliating, potential legal consequences.). There are no good options, but congregating in “acceptable” homeless areas like a train station is usually the best bet to avoid the shameful and humiliating “move along”, or even worse, legal repercussions. But some cities, exasperated with a growing homeless population, are starting to crack down by criminalizing homelessness and kicking out the unwanted.
In light of the impossibility of homelessness, what the heck are you supposed to do? If you weren’t fortunate enough to be born into a property-owning family or haven’t earned enough income through labor to purchase property, you have to pay rent. Granted, homebuyers have their own woes – it can be really expensive to own property simply because it can take a chunk out of the income in terms of mortgage or property tax and other additional costs (take a look at this post on how to lower property taxes in Texas, among other states). However, even rent is a sizable chunk of your income even for the most basic accommodations. In my area, $500 is about the bare minimum you can find, renting a single room in a run-down house owned by slumlords. This is about half the take-home pay of a full-time minimum wage job. In short: $500. Pay this much money every month, to someone (whose wealth was likely hereditary to some degree)… or else you are a vagrant and a criminal the moment you attempt to lay down.
There are rarely any other options. Whatever public spaces exists have policies to prevent people from living there. “The Park closes at Dusk.” “Camping requires a permit.” “No loitering.” You can’t just “Go West” and get a plot of land from the government anymore. No free acreage to sow and reap with your own labor. You can’t pitch a tent or build a cabin in the woods. Hunting and fishing require permits and have tight restrictions on when and what you can take- not enough to live off of. You aren’t permitted to be self-sufficient. Everything and everywhere is owned and has been owned for hundreds of years, and that ownership is passed down hereditarily. Most people are granted nothing, and must pay hundreds per month for the privilege of laying their head down on the ground. This is a tax on being alive.
A government is obligated to provide the necessities of life to its citizens, or at the least, the tools for them to get the necessities. (If not, the social contract between citizen and state is worthless to the citizen.) In 19th century America, you’d be given a plot of land out West to make your way. Now, everything and everywhere belongs to someone and there’s nowhere for new people to go, and so you must pay for the privilege of living on someone else’s land. A minimum wage employee has to tithe 50% of his wages for the right to sleep without being a vagrant. This is an enormous tax levied on the working class, a brutally regressive tax that bears a strong resemblance to feudalism.
A UBI should provide enough money for a human being to have all the things that he could provide himself in nature, in a world that isn’t divided into centuries-old hereditary land claims. A UBI should provide enough money for food, shelter, heating, and a bit extra to trade for random necessities and shortfalls. $1000 a month per individual is a good starting point. This is not charity, this is a refund to the brutal regressive tax that is extracted from everyone who didn’t inherit sizable property holdings. No one should have to perform $500 of labor for some hereditary landlord every month simply for the right to lay down and sleep. In the mid-to-late 20th century, when wages were high and capital ownership was more equitably shared, the tax on being alive was not quite so burdensome and regressive. But seeing as we have moved to the era of corporate welfare, massive wealth disparity, and laughably low wages, this tax has become more than the working class can sustain. UBI provides a way to simply and directly refund this tax.
-Tom Radtke <thomas.radtke@gmail.com>
by Guest Contributor | Feb 5, 2014 | News
A group, working within the Liberal Party of Canada, is gathering support, hoping to get the party put the call for a basic income pilot project into the party’s official platform at the party’s convention in February 2014. The group is also willing to work with Canadians connected to other parties or without part affiliation.
More information about the movement go to: https://www.basicincomepilot.ca/
-Jamie McCaffrey
by Guest Contributor | Feb 3, 2014 | Opinion
Today, January 20th, is recognized annually in the U.S. as Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. If still alive, Reverend King, Jr. would have celebrated his 85th birthday five days ago. Yet in so many ways this monumental man remains with us, in words, imagery and most of all, wisdom and inspiration.
Renowned for his leadership on civil rights, Rev. King, Jr. was also an indefatigable champion of social and economic rights. In what today we can call a sharp rebuke to the food bank and similar phenomena of ephemeral poverty relief, Rev. King, Jr. held that “[t]rue compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.” In other words, get to the heart of the matter: work upstream more than down, lest beggaring shall persist evermore.
In his seminal book of 1967, Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community? Rev. King, Jr. wrote that he had become “convinced that the simplest solution to poverty is to abolish it directly by a now widely discussed measure: the guaranteed income.” He noted the major benefits guaranteed (i.e., basic) income would render, the “host of positive psychological changes [that] inevitably will result from widespread economic security.”
Foremost among them: “The dignity of the individual will flourish when the decisions concerning his life are in his own hands, when he has the assurance that his income is stable and certain, and when he knows that he has the means to seek self-improvement” (underlining added for emphasis).
This – the value of human dignity – is the core value underlying the growing movement for basic income in Canada. We can and must talk about values of equality, good health, learning, family stability, creativity, entrepreneurship, prosperity, citizenship and more, all of which basic income serves to support. But underlying them is the value of dignity. And in the context of social security this means that no one should have to prostrate themselves to secure a humane floor of decent income upon which they can move forward.
Happily, it appears that basic income has encouraging support among Canadians. A recent national survey for The Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation, by the Environics Institute for Survey Research in collaboration with Concordia University, found that 46% of Canadians are in favour of a “guaranteed annual income” while 42% are opposed: the remainder could be supportive (“Depends”) or did not have an answer one way or the other (see also this infographic).
Yet in these early months of The BIG Push campaign for basic income security in Canada, we know that this historic national effort is, at heart, a struggle – a social, cultural and political struggle – for the values of Canadians. Indeed, of those 46% reported to support basic income, 19% are “strongly” in favour and 27% “somewhat” so, whereas of the 42% who are opposed, 25% are “strongly” against and another 17% “somewhat” so. This suggests the challenge of winning over to basic income’s support many of the undecided, the indifferent and the skeptical.
In a footnote that appears beneath the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, Pierre Elliott Trudeau claimed that “[w]e must now establish the basic principles, the basic values and beliefs which hold us together as Canadians so that beyond our regional loyalties there is a way of life and a system of values which make us proud of the country that has given us such freedom and such immeasurable joy.”
And yet, 32 years following adoption of the Charter – what one Member of Parliament told me last year was the last “big thing” in Canada – we remain a nation in which “the right to life, liberty and security of the person” (per Section 7 of the Charter) is severely compromised by the poverty that plagues an enduring and large swath of the population.
Indeed, as health columnist André Picard has reported in The Globe and Mail, a 7.4 year gap in life expectancy exists between poor and wealthy men in Canada, for women a 4.5 year gap. And that’s the national average: in a place such as Hamilton, a 21-year gap in life expectancy of the rich and poor has been documented.
There are many practical reasons why the time has come for basic income. But at root this is a values-based matter of vital public policy. Something deep inside human beings is giving rise to the call for basic income. And that’s because, as Rev. King, Jr. also said so well:
On some positions, Cowardice asks the question, “Is it safe?” Expediency asks the question, “Is it politic?” And Vanity comes along and asks the question, “Is it popular?” But Conscience asks the question “Is it right?” And there comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular, but he must do it because Conscience tells him it is right.
by Guest Contributor | Jan 27, 2014 | Opinion
Max Sawicky’s post on the liberal case against a universal basic income (UBI) characterizes the rationale for UBI as poverty elimination at low overhead cost. While he’s right that this is one of UBI’s benefits, he misses its much larger goal. What distinguishes UBI from the anti-poverty programs we already have in the US is that it eliminates poverty through redistribution that is explicitly unconditional and universal—it goes to everyone, whether or not they work or are looking for work. Low overhead costs are simply a bonus of abandoning the means-testing and monitoring of work effort that are the foundation of all the programs Sawicky wants to expand.
The idea of unconditionality is counterintuitive. Work makes our riches possible, and all should contribute, if they can, to that work. UBI does not reject this principle of reciprocity, but challenges the priority of that contribution: should subsistence be conditional on work first, or should subsistence be guaranteed to all first, and work for anything more come after basic needs are met? Clearly, throughout most of human history, when life was dominated by scarcity of resources, the answer was the former. But why should that be the case in post-scarcity societies?
For some, the problem with unconditionality is not the fear of freeriding, but of abandoning efforts to provide meaningful and rewarding work for all. It’s easy to imagine the dystopic scenario in which millions are mailed monthly checks to stay home so we don’t have to create jobs for them, or provide childcare, or invest in the infrastructure required for a thriving economy. Just let the bankers do the work and pay the taxes that fund everyone else’s UBI. But that’s not so different from the welfare state we have now in the US—except that without the UBI, 50 million Americans live below the federal government’s wholly inadequate poverty threshold.
Advocates of UBI envision a society in which absolute poverty is eliminated and productive and rewarding work is defined and shaped by individuals, not the government. Anyone who wants more than the minimum provided by the UBI will need to work, but the UBI will give them what sociologist Erik Olin Wright calls “a permanent strike fund.” They’ll come to the labor market with leverage to negotiate better wages and working conditions for unappealing work, and with funds that make more rewarding but lower paying work feasible. Those who perform unpaid care or voluntary work will have an income without the government monitoring their performance in exchange for a stipend. Time spent on education and vocational training will no longer have to be weighed against earning an income to live on. Entrepreneurs will have a bit of venture capital with which to support themselves while they try out a business. Higher wages at the bottom of the wage scale will cause more automation of the most routine jobs, but the labor savings are shared with all through the UBI.
A utopian fantasy? Hardly—but a more democratic and pluralistic version of what we have now. Income inequality remains, but those at the bottom of the income scale have their basic needs met without having to prove their deservingness. Gender inequality remains, but women receive, on balance, a redistribution of income from higher earning men whether they work or not. Children go to school with full stomachs and warm clothes, and have more of a chance to use their education to improve their lot in life. Most importantly, citizens are no longer divided into groups vying for a bigger share of a stigmatized social assistance budget, but a unified force with the political clout to defend and expand the UBI. Individuals freed from the constraints of poverty help shape the contours of the economy through their inalienable and renewable economic “votes,” as they do in the political sphere. Like political democracy, it’s not perfect, but it’s better than the alternatives.
How do we get there? Not by expanding the programs Sawicky lists, which even if expanded and more generously funded will inevitably exclude some from coverage. Instead, we should push for a UBI modeled on the one he doesn’t mention but which happens to be the strongest anti-poverty program in the US—Social Security. Social Security is the closest thing we have to a universal benefit in the U.S. It’s not unconditional, but it’s inclusive eligibility rules mean that almost 90% of seniors are covered by it. Because it’s paid individually, it provides an independent income to spouses of covered workers even if they’ve never been employed themselves. Because it’s not means-tested, it doesn’t create a disincentive toward other forms of retirement savings or earned income. And because it’s nearly universal, it creates a powerful solidarity among its recipients that has successfully resisted calls for its defunding in the name of deficit reduction or “privatization”—unlike the fragmented, stigmatized, and politically powerless recipients of the programs Sawicky thinks we should expand.
The UBI should be universal, unconditional, individual, and untaxed. Income above the UBI should be taxed progressively, with steeper increases above median income. To more effectively target child poverty than a $10,000 adult-only UBI would do, the UBI should go to children as well and be pegged to the poverty threshold of a family of four—a minimum of $6,000 per person. To the extent that they pay lower benefits than the UBI, other programs can be eliminated and their budgets used to fund it. For those that pay higher benefits than the UBI, as Social Security does for many recipients, their budgets can be reduced to the supplemental amounts alone, with the savings used to fund the UBI. Additional funding can come from phasing out the $100 trillion in tax credits that go overwhelmingly to taxpayers with incomes far above the poverty line. And yes, we’d probably still have to raise taxes on the wealthiest Americans. But, as with the payroll taxes that fund Social Security, we’d know exactly where those taxes are going—to eliminate poverty.
Many on the right object to redistribution on any terms, but as Sawicky notes some on the right see UBI as the form of redistribution least disruptive to the market, and so prefer it to minimum wages, closed union shops, and employment stimulus programs that favor certain industries over others. This “market efficiency” aspect of a UBI could be the key to a bargain between the left and the right to guarantee all Americans economic security. It would be ironic if it turned out that the left was more attached to a punitive and stigmatizing welfare state than the right.
This article was written by Almaz Zelleke.
by Guest Contributor | Oct 16, 2013 | News
[Craig Axford]
Basic Income European Citizens' Initiative
Every morning at around 8 a.m., basic income guarantee campaigners in Europe receive an update from the European Commission on the number of signatures gathered in each country in support of the European Citizens’ Initiative for an Unconditional Basic Income. As of this writing with about 206 days to go, just over 17.2% of the required signatures have been gathered. Use the link provided to follow the European campaign’s progress.
Basic Income 2013 EU Signature Counter, European Initiative for an Unconditional Basic Income
