by Michael Lytton | Aug 2, 2016 | Opinion
An article on basic income appeared in The Hindu newspaper recently and is potentially significant because it was written by a Member of Parliament in the ruling BJP party. Does it reflect possible government policy? No one, including Varun Gandhi, is telling. Moreover, what he means by the “need to talk about basic income” is anyone’s guess.
The article is a bit of a mish-mash of history in North America, but also includes reference to the cash transfer pilots in India. Gandhi makes the usual mention of the 1970s Canadian experiment in Manitoba with a negative income tax, but I think interested readers should examine the more recent work of Evelyn L. Forget, the author of the oft-cited study “The Town with No Poverty: The Health Effects of a Canadian Guaranteed Annual Income Field Experiment.” (The 2008 draft version of this article has an extended discussion of the history of the idea in North America. However, the draft isn’t available on ResearchGate.)
At the University of Manitoba, Dr. Forget has a project that asks the question, “Is MINCOME useful in the development of a Basic Income pilot in Ontario and elsewhere?” She points out that the sociopolitical environment, research methods and policy context are all different now than they were in the 1970s and demanding a critical examination of the relevance of the old experiment.
From her ResearchGate site you can download an April 2016 presentation prepared for a symposium on UBI pilot design for the Ontario government. You might also access the following valuable documents: “Cash Transfers, Basic Income and Community Building,” and “The Experiment that Could End Welfare.”
Mr. Gandhi’s piece extols the virtues of a basic income but overstates his case in a number of areas—village sanitation, access to drinking water, growth of rural employment and the national economy, and the pursuit of happiness. He even makes the startling declaration that with respect to automation and the threat to work “the basic income stands out as a panacea”. With such statements you might wonder if he’s being serious, or aware that he could inadvertently be discrediting the idea with extravagant claims.
India presents complex development challenges and it’s not clear that a basic income is the best or only approach. For example, Joseph Stiglitz, who generally supports the idea of a basic income, argues that targeting the needy is a necessary trade-off when public budgets are tight. And, I wonder, when aren’t they tight?
India is home to more than one-third of the world’s stunted children. If current trends continue, by 2030 India will have the world’s highest global burden of under-five year old deaths (17 percent). It has more poor people in absolute numbers in eight states than the 26 poorest sub Saharan countries combined. The main reason for extreme poverty in rural areas lies in the still largely agrarian economy and its very low productivity due to small landholdings and underemployed farming labor. Droughts have also taken their toll. People resort to informal agricultural work because there is no alternative, or landowners need to supplement their incomes and join the landless in seeking wage labor. It is estimated that 5.5 percent of a country’s GDP will be required to provide education for all by 2030, yet in 2012, India invested 3.9 percent. Corruption is endemic.
With such a constellation of issues, interventions can quickly get complicated, producing tensions between targeted transfer approaches and universal approaches. Nutrition is one example. Pakistan is modifying its unconditional cash transfer program (the Benazir Income Support Program) so that it can better respond to—read target— the nutritional needs of women and children.
India currently addresses the underlying determinants of nutrition—food security, rural livelihoods, and sanitation—with a smorgasbord of programs that include the Public Distribution System, the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA), and the Swachh Bharat Mission. These centrally sponsored programs are then delivered by state governments, where there are risks of corruption or of states simply not prioritizing nutrition.
Others argue that without targeting for health, households will not get around to malnutrition or education. At the same time, studies confirm that health deficiencies lead to cognitive deficits and experts recommend that health and cognition be addressed in tandem to potentially reinforce each other.
But out-of-pocket health expenditures, especially for non-communicable diseases (NCDs) can impoverish Indian households. A recent systematic review of the global impact of NCDs on household income (Jaspers et al., 2015) found that cardiovascular disease (CVD) patients in India spent 30 percent of their annual family income on direct CVD health care.
Finally, providing equal amounts of finance on a per pupil basis is not necessarily a formula for equitable education funding. For children who enter an education system with disadvantages associated with poverty, gender, disability or ethnicity, more resources may be needed to achieve opportunities equivalent to those enjoyed by more privileged children.
As they say in India about so many things, what to do?
More information at:
Jaspers, Loes, Veronica Colpani, Layal Chaker, Sven J. van der Lee, Taulant Muka, David Imo, Shanthi Mendis, et al. 2015. “The Global Impact of Non-Communicable Diseases on Households and Impoverishment: A Systematic Review.” European Journal of Epidemiology 30 (3): 163–88
Feroze Varun Gandhi, “Why we need to talk about a basic income”. The Hindu, June 30th 2016
by Kate McFarland | Jul 24, 2016 | News, Testimonies
Harmony Hackney describes herself as a “housewife and quasi-revolutionary who went to school for motorcycle repair, where she went $9k into debt to learn how to read the manual, and an Associate in Science in paralegal studies, where she went $15k in debt to learn how to read the manual.” Since neither motorcycle repair nor paralegal work panned out as a career, Harmony now studies the history of her home state of Florida and “the nine generations of Floridians who came before her.” She plans to publish a book on the subject in the near future.
In this Basic Income Interview, Harmony was asked how she learned of basic income and why she supports it. Here is her reply:
I was looking for alternatives to the way the majority of us struggle each day and only manage to accomplish the barest levels of survival for our cultures. Since we have an abundance of things, but not an abundance of consumers, basic income seems like the most reasonable solution.
I support a basic income because it’s cheaper and more effective than our current process. My family has never been very well off; we’ve only ever managed minimal survival. My parents would work two and three jobs and we still couldn’t climb any higher. So we had to rely on assistance. For each piece of the process we had to go to a different office, fill out tons and tons of forms, get mailed tons of forms, mail back tons of forms, and spend a lot of time just waiting to fill out more papers or turn in more papers. That was back before the internet, but honestly the process hasn’t changed much. It’s still a series of separate offices, separate parts of the government, and separate places to fill out and turn in various forms. Now think about the cost of all that. How much is it costing to manage all of those forms and papers and all of that redundant information? And all of this serves no other purpose other than prevent just handing money to people.
We have entire sections of our government doing nothing but acting as a middleman between money and people who need money. When you go down and file for food assistance, you fill out all your forms, get approved, and they give you a card with a sum on it. Only that sum is in a special currency so that you don’t get real money. An entire section of government is devoted to calculating, managing, overseeing, enforcing, investigating, and distributing this special currency, which is additionally regulated so that it can only be used for these specific things. In addition, we have a whole other section of government that then collects this special currency, with all the bureaucracy that entails, who then redistributes the special currency as money. Imagine how much we could save if we simply eliminated all the extra stuff and just handed everyone a set amount of money.
And more than just saving money, we could save our environment as well. Think about how much we produce that gets thrown away because people couldn’t buy it. But we have to keep producing at that amount, and work to produce even more, so that we can make enough to live on. In addition to that, most of our jobs are make-work. It’s work that’s created just to say you are working. We have an abundance of fast food, retail, and other service jobs that can easily be automated. But we don’t because low wage workers are cheaper, and because we have been conditioned to believe that our existence is only justified if we are part of the workforce.
Most of my free time is spent studying and writing about history. I’ve discovered some very fascinating things that no one else has had the time to research. I’m being encouraged by other history professionals to continue my work and eventually publish my findings. Unfortunately, I’ve reached a point where I have to go to where records are in order to complete my research. Since we live paycheck to paycheck, with nothing to spare, I can’t finish my research. This is why it bugs me when someone says that a basic income will make people lazy. I’m not lazy now. Why would I suddenly become lazy just because I can choose to prioritize my time to suit me instead of a corporate machine?
Photo used by permission of Harmony Hackney
Basic Income Interviews is a special recurring segment of Basic Income News, introduced in July 2016 by Jason Murphy and Kate McFarland. Through a series of short interviews, we aspire to display the diversity of support that basic income receives throughout the world.
Have your own thoughts to contribute? Want to see yourself in a future Basic Income Interview?
Visit our interview form to let us know who you are and why you support basic income.
by Tyler Prochazka | Jul 23, 2016 | News
Probably for the first time in US history, the basic income is becoming an issue in the presidential election. Most of the candidates have already made their positions known. Two candidates, Jill Stein and Gary Johnson, appear to be the most supportive of the basic income. Although, Stein recently said basic income is a “visionary goal” and not something she is going to push as part of her agenda.
Hillary Clinton
The candidate said she is “not ready to go there,” but she would expand the earned income tax credit. She said distributing money without producing income is not something that “works for democracy and I don’t think it works for most people.”
Gary Johnson
Johnson said he was “open” to the idea of a Universal Basic Income based on its ability to save bureaucratic costs. Johnson directly supports the FairTax, which has a basic income component in the form of a prebate.
Jill Stein
UPDATE: On a recent CNN interview, Stein said guaranteed minimum income is a “visionary goal and not one of the practical goal posts of our agenda.”
“(Guaranteed basic income is) not something I’m willing to move forward at this point,” she said.
Donald Trump
Trump has not commented on the basic income. Requests for comment from the campaign were not returned.
by Guest Contributor | Jul 23, 2016 | News
The Government of Ontario is moving to undertake a basic income pilot project. In recent weeks it has been receiving expert information and advice, for example from Jurgen De Wispelaere (formerly on the Board of Basic Income Canada Network and now a member of its new Advisory Council). On May 26th De Wispelaere presented to the government’s Deputy Ministers Social Policy Committee.
Two of the most knowledgeable experts concerning the Manitoba Mincome experiment of the 1970s are its former executive director, Dr. Ron Hikel, and University of Manitoba economist and researcher Dr. Evelyn Forget. At the recent North American Basic Income Congress in Winnipeg, Dr. Hikel spoke about Mincome and lessons learned that could be applied to the Ontario pilot. I also recommend watching Dr. Forget’s appearance on June 13th on Steve Paikin’s program, The Agenda: the 17 minute video reflects Evelyn’s sweeping knowledge of the history and results of Mincome.
Another encouraging sign of the Ontario government’s seriousness behind giving basic income a try was its appointment last month of the Hon. Hugh Segal as the pilot’s special advisor. A trailblazer for basic income in Canada over the past 40 years, Mr. Segal will now “deliver a discussion paper to the province by the fall to help inform the design and implementation of the pilot….The discussion paper will include advice about potential criteria for selecting target populations and/or locations, delivery models and advice about how the province could evaluate the results of the basic income pilot” (source).
Ontario’s Premier, the Hon. Kathleen Wynne, has publicly recognized that Ontario needs to investigate basic income as an alternative to welfare. Among welfare’s many problems: its profound stigmatization of “clients” of the system. And on that, I recommend David Calnitsky’s fine academic paper exploring the non-stigmatizing effects of Manitoba Mincome.
by Rob Rainer
Basic Income Advocate and Member, Advisory Council of Basic Income Canada Network
by Tyler Prochazka | Jul 18, 2016 | News
With the US libertarian presidential candidate pushing double-digits in the polls for the first time in history, many are starting to take former New Mexico governor Gary Johnson’s policy ideas seriously. While signing books at the libertarian Freedom Fest conference, Johnson said he was “open” to the idea of a Universal Basic Income (UBI).
Like many libertarians, Johnson said he liked the idea of the UBI because of its potential to save money in bureaucratic costs, freeing up more money to give people directly. During the exchange, we discussed how directly giving a basic income would increase the value of each dollar spent for the recipient, as opposed to in-kind services, such as food stamps, which restrict purchases.
At the same time, I asked Johnson about his position on the carbon tax and using these funds to fund the basic income. He once again said he was “open” to the idea.
“There are a lot of smart libertarians that support the carbon tax, so I don’t discount the idea,” Johnson said.
Johnson was attending Freedom Fest in Las Vegas to discuss term limits and answer questions about his candidacy with his running mate, former Massachusetts governor William Weld. He is currently polling around 13 percent against Donald Trump, Jill Stein, and Hillary Clinton.
Photo source: Instagram
