This essay was originally published on Basic Income News in August 2012. Last February two conservative commentators, Bill O’Reilly and Lou Dobbs, from the Fox News Network, praised the Alaska Dividend as “a perfect Model” of what America should be doing with its resources. It is amazing that prominent conservatives can praise a policy that redistributes income from the wealthiest
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This summer and fall I’ll give at least ten talks in seven cities in six countries including the United States, Canada, France, Scotland, Finland, and Lithuania. Here’s the information I have on each talk so far: Friday, May 18, to Sunday, May 20, 2018, keynote speaker at “New Directions in Basic Income Workshop,” the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, presenting “The
» Read moreThis essay was originally published on Basic Income News in February 2012. The resource curse, as I see it, comes in three different forms. Alaska has avoided the first two, but whether it avoids the third remains to be seen. The first-stage resource curse occurs when resource exports drive up the nation’s exchange rate and drive other industries out of
» Read moreThis essay was originally published on Basic Income News in December 2011. I can’t believe the news. We are in the midst of the worst global depression in 70 years, and the governments of almost every major industrialized country are talking about austerity. They’re cutting government services; laying off public sector workers; cutting pay, pensions, and benefits for public employees—all
» Read moreThis essay was originally published on Basic Income News in May 2011. In March 2011, Brazilian Senator (and tireless campaigner for BIG), Eduardo Suplicy told me and other members of the USBIG and BIEN Committees that he would soon be meeting with President Barak Obama at a dinner during the President’s visit to Brazil. Suplicy asked me to draft
» Read moreThis essay was originally published in the USBIG NewsFlash in October 2010. The political climate in the United States has gotten increasingly unfriendly toward the Basic Income Guarantee (BIG). Since 1990s, Democrats and Republicans have agreed that any politically viable approach to poverty must involve forcing the poor to work. But it is not only cash assistance to the poor
» Read moreThis essay was originally published in the USBIG NewsFlash in April 2010. The Associated Press has been reporting that more than 5,000 and perhaps as many as 10,000 Mongolians have been protesting for a resource dividend. Mongolia is a poor nation, currently in the process of developing what appear to be major mineral reserves. Back in 2008, during
» Read moreThis essay was originally published in the USBIG NewsFlash in February 2010. This issue, Volume 11, Number 55, marks the tenth anniversary of the USBIG Newsletter. The USBIG Network began over breakfast at the Kiev dinner in New York City in December 1999. Five people attended the first meeting: Fred Block (a sociologist at University of California-Davis), Charles M.A.
» Read moreThis essay was originally published in the USBIG NewsFlash in November 2009. The political barriers to the current situation in the United States and the implementation of a full basic income are daunting. On an international basis, the outlook is much brighter. As far as I can tell, there are more basic income projects underway or under discussion worldwide
» Read moreThis essay was originally published in the USBIG NewsFlash in September 2009. Many people believe that the Alaska Permanent Fund Dividend is an idea ready to export—a model that should be copied around the world. Two U.S. Senators have gotten the idea that the Alaska model is ready to be copied, not by the country over which the U.S.
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