by Andre Coelho | Jun 16, 2019 | News, Research
The National Academy of Social Insurance recently (April 2019) published a paper where the idea of implementing a relatively small basic income ($200-$400 per month, at least initially) has been explored by authors William Arnone, Peter Barnes, Renée Landers and Griffin Murphy, supported by the Economic Security Project. The paper goes into detail on potential mechanisms by which this basic income might be implemented in the USA.
This study intents to deliver information on how to fulfil the vision outlined in the historical document “Need for Security”, from 1935, where it was clearly summoned that “the one almost all-embracing measure of security is an assured income. A program of economic security, as we vision it, must have as its primary aim the assurance of an adequate income to each human being in childhood, youth, middle age, or old age—in sickness or in health.”
From the paper synopsis it can be read:
This concept paper examines the possibility of providing a base level of income to certain subsets of, and perhaps to all, U.S. citizens as a means to increasing their economic security. The authors begin by highlighting the extent of contemporary financial insecurity and continue with a discussion on how an assured income program might complement existing social insurance and social assistance programs. This is followed by an examination of past and present programs that share goals with the assured income concept described, and an exploration of how these programs might provide a basis for the Social Security Administration’s administering an assured income benefit.
More information at:
William Arnone, Peter Barnes, Renée Landers and Griffin Murphy, “Assured Income”, National Academy of Social Insurance, March 2019
by Andre Coelho | Oct 10, 2018 | News
There is a plan for distributing dividends, unconditionally, for all Americans. It has been coined as the Social Wealth Fund (SWF), an idea developed and pushed by the People’s Policy Project (3P) founder Matt Bruenig, a known lawyer, blogger and policy analyst in the United States. 3P is a think tank founded in 2017, focused on studying policies benefiting citizens at large.
This plan, described in greater detail in a booklet, rests on the idea of turning national a kind of wealth fund such as the Alaska Permanent Fund (APF). However, unlike the APF, the SWF would have to rely on other sources of revenue (other than oil). Bruenig’s suggestions range from voluntary contributions, managing state-owned physical assets through the fund, various kinds of taxes (including eliminating tax breaks for the rich), leveraged purchases, to monetary seigniorage. This income is supposed to come from the highest earners in society (ex.: corporate taxes, financial taxes, philanthropy, stock exchanging), distributing it by all people.
Peter Barnes, an advisor to the Economic Security Project, has written about the SWF. According to him, the SWF is “refreshing”, because apparently none of the past policies have solved or even reduced inequality, such as “greater funding for education, infrastructure investment, low interest rates, a higher minimum wage, trade wars, tax cuts, or even a federally guaranteed job”. The inequality problem runs deep in society, and that’s where an unconditional dividend distribution of commonly owned assets could really be effective.
As for distributing dividends, Bruenig’s idea is to set this as a percentage of a five-year moving average of the fund’s market value. This could equate to a withdrawal rate of, say, four or five percent. If, at a given moment, the total fund value is $10 trillion, then the available dividends for distribution are $400 billion (Note 1).
On an article published by Anne Price and Jhumpa Bhattacharya, on wealth funds and racial inequality, the concept is summed up nicely:
“Often referred to as a Social Wealth Fund, Citizens Wealth Fund or Sovereign Wealth Fund, this concept rests on the principle of shared ownership, and builds from the foundational vision that all Americans have a right to reap benefits from wealth that we all created together.”
Note 1 – billion = 1 thousand millions
More information at:
Matt Bruenig, “Social Wealth Fund for America”, People’s Policy Project, 2018
Peter Barnes, “Opinion: All Americans would get an income boost under this new plan to share the country’s riches”, Market Watch, September 10th 2018
Anne Price and Jhumpa Bhattacharya, “Why a Social Wealth Fund Must Account for Racial Inequity”, Medium, September 19th 2018
by Patrick Hoare | Nov 1, 2017 | News
David Simon. Credit to: Flickr
Whilst talking about his new HBO show ‘The Deuce’, David Simon, creator of the award winning series ‘The Wire’, has advocated for a “guaranteed income” to be introduced in the US.
During an interview with David Remnick on The New Yorker Radio Hour on the 29th of September, when asked about the nature of his politics given the content of his journalism and shows, Simon said that he was a “lefty” on “around 85% of the issues” citing a “guaranteed income” as an example of a policy he supported. He explained that, as far as he could see, “we’ve reached the death of work”, and “where we’re going as a society” in terms of “automation” means that we should be guaranteeing people some sort of income. Whilst it was not clear from the interview whether Simon was referring to a Universal Basic Income (UBI) or some form of Guaranteed Minimum Income (GMI), he explained that direct cash transfers to the financially poor were economically viable since the “20 or 30 or 40 thousand dollars” people would receive would go “right back into the economy”. He also pointed out that former US president Richard Nixon initially supported a form of GMI in the 1970s, alluding to the fact that even those who weren’t traditionally seen as being in favour of governmental welfare based solutions to economic growth could be amenable to related mechanisms.
Simon’s thoughts are somewhat of a continuation of the ideas he expressed in a talk at the Festival of Dangerous Ideas in Sydney in 2013. In a critical analysis of the prevailing iteration and implementation of capitalism, he lamented the idea that ‘profit’ was the metric through which we judged the health of both an economy and a society. Although he was unwavering in his support of capitalism as an economic model through which growth and progress occurs, he said that the use of it as a framework to assess the moral justness of people’s experience was mistaken and has led to ‘greed’ being considered as good. In order that we fulfill the notion of what he considers society to be – “that everybody feels as if, if the society succeeds, I succeed, I don’t get left behind” – he believes that “labour doesn’t get to win all its arguments, [and] capital doesn’t get to [either]”, but rather that “it’s in the tension, it’s in the actual fight between the two, that capitalism actually becomes functional”. In this regard, his advocacy of some sort of guaranteed payment policy chimes with other social commentators such as Peter Barnes, author of ‘With Liberty and Dividends for All: How to Save Our Middle Class When Jobs Don’t Pay Enough’, who see basic income as a social dividend rightfully distributed to everyone as a way of representing the fact that the majority of wealth is created together by society.
More information at:
David Remnick, ‘David Simon on the Rise of Pornography’, New York Public Radio, 29th September 2017
‘About Basic Income’, Basic Income Earth Network
Peter Barnes, ‘With Liberty and Dividends for All: How to Save Our Middle Class When Jobs Don’t Pay Enough’, Amazon Books, 30th August 2014
by Sara Bizarro | Sep 13, 2017 | News
Hillary Clinton just released a new memoir, What Happened, about her 2016 campaign for US President. In the memoir, she claims to regret not embracing a type of Basic Income proposal, which she dubbed “Alaska for America”, as part of her platform.
Clinton attributes her enthusiasm about Basic Income to a book by Peter Barnes, With Liberty and Dividends for All: How to Save Our Middle Class When Jobs Don’t Pay Enough. The book, Hillary says, “explored the idea of creating a new fund that would use revenue from shared national resources to pay a dividend to every citizen, much like the Alaska Permanent Fund distributes the state’s oil royalties every year.”
Hillary endorses Peter Barnes’ idea of a national dividend and, like Barnes, she suggests that it should be financed in part from the revenue of shared national resources such as “oil and gas extracted from public lands and the public airwaves used by broadcasters and mobile phone companies” and the “same with the air we breathe and carbon pricing.” Clinton goes even further, however, saying that she would additionally view “the nation’s financial system as a shared resource” and implement a “financial transactions tax”. She suggests there could be a capitalized fund financed by these resources which would not only provide a “modest Basic Income” every year – which appealed to Clinton as a way to increase incomes – but also “make every American feel more connected to our country and to one another-part of something bigger than ourselves.”
Hillary says that she and her husband were fascinated by this idea and spent weeks working with her policy team to see if the idea was viable and could be included in the campaign. The proposal would be called “Alaska for America.” The campaign did not pursue this proposal because, according to Clinton, “we couldn’t make the numbers work.” In the book, Clinton also quotes Republican former U.S. Treasury Secretaries James Baker and Hank Paulson who proposed a nationwide carbon dividend that would “tax fossil fuel use and refund all the money directly to every American” as an alternative to government regulation. Again, however, Clinton claims she looked at the proposal but couldn’t make the “math work without imposing new costs on upper-middle-class families.”
If we look back, Basic Income was seldom mentioned during Clinton’s Presidential campaign, and, when it was, she was dismissive. Asked about the idea by LinkedIn’s Daniel Roth, during a discussion of education and job training, the Democratic nominee replied, “I’m not ready to go there,” and proceeded to discuss the need to create new jobs. At the time of this interview, she viewed Basic Income as an undesirable alternative to full employment, concluding, “[W]e’ve got to help create better opportunities … without just giving up and saying, ‘Okay, fine, you know, the rest of us who are producing income, we’ve got to, you know, distribute it and you don’t really have to do anything anymore.’ I don’t think that works for a democracy and I don’t think it works for most people.”
In the LinkedIn interview, Hillary suggested that job loss due to automation could (and should) be addressed by skills training and the creation of new jobs. Her memoir, however, seems to treat technological unemployment as a more dire threat, saying that she takes Silicon Valley seriously when they claim “this could be the first great technological revolution that ends up displacing more jobs than it creates” – and one which requires us to think “outside the box.” She mentions she was so impressed by this that her staff lived in fear that she’d start “talking about ‘the rise of the robots’ in some Iowa town hall”. She adds: “Maybe I should have.”
Hillary concludes this portion of her memoir by urging us that “we have to think big and think different”, suggesting policies like “taxing net worth instead of annual income” in order to reduce inequality. She says we need to “rethink how Americans receive benefits such as retirement and health care so that they’re universal, automatic, and portable”.
More information at:
Russell Berman, “What Hillary Clinton Says She Learned From Her Defeat”, The Atlantic, September 12th, 2017
Anders Hagstrom, “Hillary Clinton Pursued A Universal Basic Income Plan For Her Campaign”, The Daily Caller, September 12th, 2017
Ezra Klein, “The Vox Conversation with Hillary Clinton”, Vox, June 22nd, 2017
Tyler Prochazka, “UNITED STATES: Hillary Clinton asked about Negative Income Tax and does not answer the question”, Basic Income News, August 27th, 2015
by Kate McFarland | May 21, 2017 | News
Boston Review, an American political and literary magazine, has published a forum on basic income as the periodical’s spring 2017 print edition. It is also freely available online.
The forum begins with a lead article by Temple University law professor Brishen Rogers (“Basic Income in Just Society”), with responses from Roy Bahat, Peter Barnes, Annette Bernhardt, Juliana Bidadanure, Diane Coyle, Patrick Diamond, Philippe van Parijs, Connie Razza, David Rolf, Tommie Shelby, Dorian T. Warren, and Corrie Watterson.
Introduction to the special edition:
Technology and the loss of manufacturing jobs have many worried about future mass unemployment. It is in this context that basic income—a government cash grant given unconditionally to all—has gained support from a surprising range of advocates, from Silicon Valley to labor. Our contributors explore basic income’s merits, not only as a salve for financial precarity, but as a path toward racial justice and equality. Others, more skeptical, see danger in a basic income designed without attention to workers’ power and the quality of work. Together they offer a nuanced debate about what it will take to tackle inequality and what kind of future we should aim to create.
Boston Review has published articles about basic income occasionally in the past, and published several recent articles on the topic outside of the forum (including “No Racial Justice Without Basic Income” by the California-based social justice group The Undercommons and “Basic Income Works” by Paul Niehaus and Michael Faye of GiveDirectly).
According to Wikipedia, the magazine has a circulation of about 62,000.
Reviewed by Dave Clegg
