by Kate McFarland | Aug 7, 2018 | News
Photo: Stormy weather in Ontario, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 Jeff S. PhotoArt
Ontario’s guaranteed income pilot has been ended nearly two years early, prompting researchers and advisors who contributed the project to speak out.
On Tuesday, July 31, Ontario’s recently elected Progressive Conservative (PC) government announced the cancellation of the province’s guaranteed income experiment, reneging on a statement made during the campaign that the PC would see the three-year experiment through to its end if elected to form the new government.
The abrupt and unexpected announcement stirred the ire of politicians, anti-poverty advocates, and, not least, program participants themselves. Nonetheless, Lisa MacLeod, who presented the news at a press conference in her capacity as Minister of Children, Community and Social Services, has held her ground, dismissing claims that the PC broke a campaign promise as “fake news” since the party never included a commitment to the experiment in its campaign platform. Her words, however, have left many unappeased and continuing to fight to save the project.
Those who have spoken out again this decision of the PC government’s include several individuals involved with the implementation of the experiment, such as project advisors Hugh Segal and Kwame McKenzie, and at least one researcher who spoke to the press anonymously out of concern for confidentiality.
Former Canadian Senator Hon. Hugh Segal
The Honourable Hugh Segal, former Canadian Senator of the Conservative Party, was appointed as Special Advisor on Basic Income by Ontario’s Liberal government during the project’s initial planning stages. In this role, Segal authored the comprehensive discussion paper (“Finding a Better Way: A Basic Income Pilot Project for Ontario“) that laid the groundwork for the design and implementation of the experiment.
When MacLeod announced the pilot’s early termination, Segal responded with a scathing opinion column in The Globe and Mail, in which he foregrounds the issue of fairness to participants: “These people believed the promise that they would not end up worse off for signing up for the pilot project. They have now been let down badly.”
“[W]hen a party gives its word – as then-Official Opposition leader Patrick Brown gave me in 2016 and PC Party Leader Doug Ford echoed through his spokesperson during the 2018 election campaign – that it would let the pilot project go forward before judging the results […] , this assurance influenced those signing up.”
Segal also addresses the assertion of MacLeod and PC government that the experiment was too expensive to continue: “Looking at the cost of the pilot project is fair enough – but frankly, simplistic. We know that poverty is a perfect predictor of poor health and early hospitalization, bad educational outcomes, substance abuse and problems with the police – all of which cost Ontario billions.”
Drawing a connection to Premier Ford’s key policy goal of ending so-called “hallway health care” (hospital facilities so inadequate that patients must be treated and housed in corridors), Segal additionally speculates that a guaranteed income could lower hospitalization rates as low-income individuals begin “eating better, living more balanced lives and making progress in work, education and family.” He laments that “we will now never know” whether the policy would have had such predicted positive effects on health outcomes.
Dr. Kwame McKenzie
Dr. Kwame McKenzie, psychiatrist and CEO of the Wellesley Institute, had been named Special Advisor to the Ontario Basic Income Pilot by the previous provincial government. Like Segal, McKenzie is now concerned about the effect of the experiment’s cancellation on those currently enrolled in it. The psychiatrist tweeted on August 1, the day after the experiment was cancelled, that he “woke this morning more worried about the health impacts on participants. This is a high risk situation.”
McKenzie spoke to CBC Radio about his concerns, emphasizing that participants currently face a “difficult and stressful time” which could lead to many and severe possible physiological consequences. He noted that many of those who enrolled in the pilot have made “life-changing decisions” founded on the belief that they would have a three-year guaranteed income, and argued that they now need both adequate financial support (he recommended at least a year to wind down the project) and personal support in making new decisions.
Also like Segal, McKenzie believes that a guaranteed income could have promoted key objectives of the PC government. He stressed, for example, its potential to result in better jobs for low-income people. Asked by CBC about MacLeod’s work-focused approach to welfare, McKenzie stated that he agrees that “good jobs is a great health intervention” (while cautioning that bad jobs tend to worsen health). He went on, however, to explain that a guaranteed income might have offered a effective means to achieve this goal, bemoaning “Now I guess we’ll never know.”
Speaking anonymously to CBC, another researcher on the experiment’s academic team more directly addressed MacLeod’s allegation that the pilot project is not working: “There’s no conceivable way that they were told the project wasn’t working. We just don’t have any data to know whether it was working or not.”
The researcher acknowledged that individual recipients have gone to the media with stories that are “very positive” but underlined the fact that these reports might not be representative: “[T]he whole point of our project was to just stand back from all the stories people are telling and try to look at the data in a reasonably scientific way.”
If the experiment had continued as planned, the research group was expected to evaluate outcomes in many areas — potentially including, among others, food security, stress and anxiety, healthcare usage, housing stability, education, and employment — comparing data gathered from the 4,000 guaranteed income recipients to that collected from a control group.
Results had been expected to be reported to the public in 2020.
by Guest Contributor | Jul 27, 2018 | Opinion
Voting is a sacred right, offering American citizens a voice in the local and national governments that set rules on their behalf. Yet, millions of citizens who have the right to vote in principle do not have the right to vote in practice.
Even putting aside felon disenfranchisement, impoverished Americans are disproportionately excluded from exercising their right to vote owing to the expense of taking off work on election day and the paperwork they face due to voter ID laws and frequent relocation. Universal Basic Income (UBI), by eliminating the financial stress underlying these barriers, has the potential to greatly expand voter turnout and civic participation more generally, restoring voting rights promised by the constitution.
Last month, a paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research found that unconditional cash transfers, such as UBI, increase voter participation across two generations. By helping financially disadvantaged children catch up with their peers in a number of important ways, the transfers narrowed long-term participatory gaps in voting. The researchers found that cash transfers causally encourage greater voter turnout by increasing high school graduation rates and improving social skills among the children of recipient households. The only caveat, it seems, is that adults who received the cash transfers did not change their life-long voting habits—a fact that could make universal basic income more politically palatable to Republicans who would need not worry about the policy immediately undermining them in elections through increased turnout.
But beyond the parents’ transmission of voting habits to their children, I would argue that a UBI would make a sizable number of adult voters more civically engaged even if they did not vote more per se.
Take my mom as one example. Working erratically scheduled shifts as a Walmart cashier and other part-time jobs on the side, she lacks the energy to thoroughly research candidates or volunteer politically. Even when given the days off to vote, she often feels insufficiently informed about the candidates and realizes that the dominant party’s primary winner will nearly always win the election in our hyper-partisan state. A basic income, by relieving financial uncertainty, would lend her more agency to care and fight: not just pull a lever on Election Day but also participate actively in the democratic process. The ability to scale down her part-time cleaning work around election time would give her time to make a better-informed choice or volunteer to make calls for a local campaign.
Like my mom, Americans below or near the poverty line face more than just material barriers to voting; there is also a widespread sense that the political system is too saturated by dark money and elite manipulation to ever change. While the ivory-tower bemoans the historically low voter turnout rates in recent presidential and midterm elections, the underlying logic behind the indifference to voting is reasonable when viewed through this prism.
In the 2016 election, Pew Research Center reported that 25 percent of people who chose not to vote cited “dislike of the candidates or campaign issues,” alongside 15 percent who believed their vote “would not make a difference.” By putting money, now a critical mechanism of political speech, into the hands of working-class Americans, they will have more power to support candidates who truly represent them, donate to organizations holding politicians accountable once they are in office, or consider becoming candidates themselves.
And this is not just pie-in-the-sky thinking. In Taiwan, where there are discussions to bring forward a national referendum on basic income, polling from UBI Taiwan asked 879 Taiwanese citizens what they would do if they had a UBI. Nearly 2 in every 5 said they would pursue greater vocational training or education, and approximately 1 in 10 said they would volunteer more. Many more were simply undecided. These preferences suggest that, with more money, people would take steps to become more engaged and informed citizens.
From empowering women to leave abusive relationships to helping people navigate structural unemployment from automation, UBI remains a pragmatic method to move society forward. Although the policy is not a panacea, by helping to restore voting rights for low-income and middle-class Americans, a UBI would give voters the power to fight for solutions to problems a guaranteed income cannot directly solve. And that’s why it’s got my vote.
About the author:
James Davis is on the Board of Directors of UBI Taiwan. He is an incoming M.P.P. Candidate at the Harvard Kennedy School and holds a B.A. in economics and history from Columbia University.
by Andre Coelho | Jul 27, 2018 | News
Barack Obama. Credit to: CNBC.
Despite having failed to actually endorse basic income, for the second time, international media is portraying Barack Obama as a supporter. For instance, the Trumpet, a news depot that “seeks to show how current events are fulfilling the biblically prophesied description”, depicts Obama as a hard-core socialist, sending him an indirect message saying that “the Bible warns against a get-something-for-nothing mentality”. However, and apparently, being knowledgeable in clerical issues and having served in the Church of England ministry, hasn’t stopped Dr. Malcolm Torry from supporting and studying in detail the basic income policy.
Another online news service, the Independent Sentinel, which announces it “report[s] the news the media won’t”, blatantly calls Obama a communist. A communist who has “saddled us [in the United States] with the far-left system of healthcare which has been an expensive and failed experiment”. Considering the nature of the privatized-insurance based healthcare system in the US, Sweden’s healthcare could be called an extreme-far-left successful case study. This news article joints Barack Obama and former Greek minister Yanis Varoufakis as unrepented communists who promote basic income, a policy under which “people become enslaved to the State”.
The Mic reports the same event on a soberer tint. However, its post starts out by pointing that Obama “come[s] out in support of an economic policy that is far to the left of anything being proposed by most sitting U.S. politicians”. The writer and basic income Scott Santens once claimed that basic income was neither left or right (it’s forward), but apparently polarized politics is still very much popular in the US.
Quartz Africa reduces the focus on Obama’s reference to basic income itself, to highlight his speech on inequality, and his views on what should be the solution to humanity’s current crisis: an inclusive capitalism, “which protects collective bargaining, breaks up monopolies, enforces laws that root out corruption”. Unresolved remains Obama’s belief that “a job […] provides dignity and structure and a sense of place and a sense of purpose”, while saying in the same breath that “we’re gonna have to consider new ways of thinking about these problems, like universal income.”
In a CNCB article, on the other hand, a more cautious approach is taken concerning Obama, who is, arguably, a more fervent supporter of a job guarantee than a basic income. He his cited to have said that “the job of giving everybody work that is meaningful [will get] tougher, and we’re going to have to be more imaginative, […] to protect the economic security and the dignity that comes with a job”. The article also mentions Obama’s former vice-president Joe Biden, who basically supported that view integrally.
Whether former US President Barack Obama is a basic income supporter or not, it is rising to become one of the most debated issues in contemporary politics. Robert Reich, former President Clinton’s secretary of labor and ex-member of Obama’s transition advisory board, already looks at some sort of basic income policy as “inevitable”, along with tech moguls like Elon Musk. And that’s not only over the elite’s dome, it’s also among the average American citizen, whose support for the policy has been steadily increasing over the past few years, reaching almost half of the population according to recent polls.
More information at:
Karl Widerquist, “Obama speaks favorably about UBI but stops short of endorsing it (for the second time)”. Basic Income News, July 18th 2018
Andrew Miller, “Barack Obama Voices Support for a Universal Basic Income”, the Trumpet, July 19th 2018
S. Noble, “Barack Obama Promoted Universal Basic Income in South Africa”, the Independent Sentinel, July 18th 2018
A.P. Joyce, “Barack Obama signals support for a universal income”, Mic, July 17th 2018
Lynsey Chutel, “Barack Obama says the rich owe the world a huge debt”, Quartz Africa, July 17th 2018
Catherine Clifford, “Barack Obama suggests cash handouts be considered to address workforce challenges”, CNBC, July 18th 2018
André Coelho, “UNITED STATES: Joe Biden believes that jobs are the future, rather than basic income”, Basic Income News, September 23rd 2017
Catherine Clifford, “Ex-Labor Secretary: Some kind of cash handout ‘seems inevitable”, CNBC, July 13th 2018
André Coelho, “United States: American citizens support for UBI rises four times, compared to a decade ago”, Basic Income News, July 10th 2018
by Guest Contributor | Jul 20, 2018 | Opinion
Written by: Michael Laitman
There is no controversy about the benefits of breast milk, but its politicization is giving us food for thought. The New York Times claimed that the US government unsuccessfully threatened to retaliate against nations backing breastfeeding to favor the $70 billion-dollar infant formula industry, an accusation fervently denied by the current administration. Beyond the sensational headlines, the key factor is that such an important health-related topic for mothers and children has been put back on the table. It is also time to open the discussion about practical measures to encourage breastfeeding to benefit society.
Breast milk is rich in nutrients and includes antibodies to fight off viruses and bacteria protecting the baby from infections and allergies. While those who can’t breastfeed can use baby formula from a site like tastyganics.com, it may not provide that same level of protection. In fact, breastfeeding can save a baby’s life. It boosts the immune system, reduces infant mortality, and helps for a quicker recovery from common childhood illnesses. A Harvard study in 2016 estimated that 3,340 premature deaths a year among both mothers and babies could be prevented in the US alone given adequate breastfeeding. It also lowers a mother’s risk of breast and ovarian cancer, and osteoporosis.
It also reduces stress for both mother and baby, which helps to relieve common ailments such as colic. Whilst many believe that something like Infacol is the best cure for colic, gripe water, which has been used for generations, has been found to be just as effective. Gripe water, which is a simple syrup that can be made at home, has slowly been replaced by medication such as Infacol, and whilst, yes, they can be used together, there’s really no need to use Infacol when a natural alternative exists. This is a similar situation to breastfeeding, with formula slowly replacing natural milk over the years. The formula industry now has such a hold on new mothers that it’s hard for many of us to remember a time when breastfeeding was considered normal.
Besides the physical benefits and what laboratory experiments show, breastfeeding is one of the best ways of bonding with a baby. It releases oxytocin, which is the hormone responsible for other loving behaviors that make us feel good about a person.
Extended breastfeeding for the first two years of life allows for the child’s proper development, and women express more maternal sensitivity well past the infant and toddler years, according to a study by the American Psychological Association. Beyond such findings, there is also a natural inner connection between the mother and the child that allows for positive biological and internal development, which starts inside the womb.
The Need to Support Stay-at-Home Mothers
Considering the vital role mothers play in each individual’s development from the earliest of ages, it stands to reason that stay-at-home mothers should be given all the support possible to raise the next generation. They need to be entitled to receive financial assistance that will let them perform their remarkable duties without worrying about how to make ends meet, giving them a sense of freedom and control of their lives.
In today’s world, however, this is not the case. The bulk of the burden falls on the mother, who is usually expected to prioritize her career over her family, juggling tasks and becoming increasingly exhausted and unsatisfied. With the massive rise in the cost of living, mothers in most societies struggle to manage a balanced life, considering work as an economic necessity rather than liberation and personal progress and fulfillment. It can be difficult for mothers to get this balance right. Necessities are of different kinds. Home amenities like HVAC, electricity and water requirements are in addition to long-term and current expenditures. They need money for their family, but they also need to look after their kids, so they can’t work. This means that mothers often have no money to do anything, such as home improvements. So many stay-at-home mothers want to improve their homes, but they have no money to do so. They want faux stone panels on the outside of their home, but they are unable to do this. That’s why it’s so important that these mothers get more financial support to make sure they can improve their home or provide more for their family. Mothers get caught in an ever-tightening entanglement of commitments at work and home with very little restitution at any level. In extreme cases, there have been situations where work-stressed mothers abandoned their children while they rushed to work, e.g. a hospital CEO forgetting her child in a hot car where the child died, or a McDonald’s employee leaving her child alone in a public park while she worked her entire 9-hour work day.
Moreover, childcare can be extremely expensive and many women usually work just to cover its costs, challenging the whole purpose of going to the workplace. The so-called advancement of women’s rights to choose is in practice an oxymoron. At the end of the day, women who decide to fulfill a traditional role as stay-at-home mothers do not receive enough recognition, value, and economic support from society, as if raising a new generation were not the most important enterprise of all.
The same way science has been unable to create an artificial uterus that brings an embryo to life, a mother’s role of nurturing and educating the child is irreplaceable. We cannot pretend to be wiser than nature. If we really want to empower and foster women’s self-determination, society should create conditions for a comfortable motherhood.
Why UBI Should Prioritize Mothers
This is precisely where UBI can enter to encourage mothers who wish to raise their children full-time. UBI should benefit women first and foremost, particularly mothers who based on their own personal preference choose to leave the workplace in order to raise their children. Basic income should be provided for mothers without preconditions: not as welfare or charity, but as a remuneration for a crucial job in society.
Prioritizing UBI for mothers would be a win-win situation: it not only would help mothers, it would directly boost support for the entire next generation of society that mothers are now raising. Many personal and social problems, such as depression, anxiety and mental illness later in life, can be traced back to phenomena such as childhood neglect, stress, and traumas. Therefore, UBI would let mothers live with reduced economic stress, freeing them up to focus on caring, bonding with, and raising their children.
Likewise, as I’ve mentioned before, basic income for mothers would allow their participation in pro-social, connection-enriching activities, such as groups for pregnant women, parenting and home economics, among others, to enhance their motherly abilities with a supportive social climate. Naturally, such engagement in society would also positively influence their children.
Instead of treating mothers as second-class citizens, they should be recognized as “society’s CEOs”-the ruling force in creation, the only ones capable of giving birth to and nurturing a whole new generation. Keep in mind that the world is our roof, humanity is our home, and women are the pillar of this structure. Motherhood plays a critical role in giving birth to a new humanity. Therefore, taking a step forward in promoting UBI as critical support for mothers is a decision of utmost importance for a more promising future to all.
Michael Laitman is a Professor of Ontology, a PhD in Philosophy and Kabbalah, an MSc in Medical Bio-Cybernetics, and was the prime disciple of Kabbalist, Rav Baruch Shalom Ashlag (the RABASH). He has written over 40 books, which have been translated into dozens of languages.
by Karl Widerquist | Jul 18, 2018 | Opinion, The Indepentarian
This piece was originally published in Cake: The Nonmusic Music Magazine in 1996. It is, I think, the first article I published anywhere. I reproduced it here, because the original piece is not online.
Someone asked me to write about sports, but I’m like I don’t play any sports, I ride a bike, but that’s not a sport, that’s transportation. A sport is a physical activity that you do for fun or for a challenge. I don’t think that my bike riding qualities because I use my bike almost exclusively for transportation, but there’s sport to it.
The city is just the right size to ride a bike. Almost everywhere I go is less than 20 minutes by bike, twice as fast as by car and a lot quicker than public transportation. The city would be the perfect place to ride a bike, except it sucks. But, it only sucks because all those people who don’t realize that it’s the perfect place to ride a bike and insist on driving cars. Cars are too big and dirty for the city. Parking is impossible, they create traffic jams, and make the air really disgusting. Half the city has been plowed under to make extrawide streets and free parking spaces for cars, talk about government handouts. Still there’s not enough room for all the cars, but they keep driving in. At least they make biking sporting. My friends think it’s too scary to ride a bike in the city. But, to me, “scary” is walking home late at night risking violent death; risking accidental death trying to squeeze between two buses, that’s “sporting.”
Taxis are the worst, the natural enemy of the bike. They’ll honk at you for the crime of being in front of them. Then they’ll pass you and stop right in front of you with no apparent sense of irony. You can try is to get way over to the side of the road — typical rookie mistake. This saves you from getting honked at by people in a hurry to speed up to the red light in front of you, but it makes you vulnerable to all sorts of mishaps you can’t get in the center of the road. You can get driven off the street by cars making right turns, or buses and taxis stopping to pick up people, and, sooner or later, you’re going to get doored. One night a guy opened a taxi door right in front of me and clipped my handle bars. “Are you all right?” Next thing I knew I was lying face up on the pavement. The driver and the passenger both got out and stood over me, the passenger said, “Are you OK?” I was dazed and bruised and not quite cognizant.
“HOW ARE YOU?”
“I’m fine thanks.”
“He’s OK,” and they sped away.
Karl widerquist in the mid-90s
Pedestrians can make for sport. As the light turns they leave from both sides of the street. Do you try to get through the center before the two groups come together or do you go behind a group on one side after the last one leaves the corner. Pedestrians and bikers get along OK. You stay out of their way; they stay out of your way: no problem. Except, for the deer people. Most people know that if their crossing the street and they see a bike heading strait for where they’re standing right now, that if they keep going they’ll be well away before the bike gets there. Not the deer people. They walk right out into the street, and stop right in your path. You wouldn’t think a primate could be that stupid. But, dodging them is a sport.
This is not to say that there are not a lot o’bad bicyclists out there, there are. There are enough that I wouldn’t blame pedestrians for being scared. There was this guy who used to ride his bike in full football padding, helmet, face mask, shoulder pads, the whole bit, outside his close. I’d be stopped at a red-light, waiting for a break in in traffic to go. He’d zoom past me into a break I didn’t see. I don’t see him around lately. I wonder if he’s still alive.
Red lights, there’s a sport. To bicyclists every traffic law is a suggestion. I mean I try to stay out of everybody’s way, but if nobody’s comin’, I’m goin’, full speed. What’re they gon’a do, take your license away? This is safe, as long as you look, there is no risk to it at all, but it’ll kill me eventually. Like that scene in “Slaughterhouse Five” where the guy says, “I’ve seen my death, I’ve been there many times…” In Manhattan almost every street is one way. Parents teach their children to, “Look one way before crossing the street.” Sooner or later I’ll be looking left when the cross traffic is coming from the right and I’ll be on the grill of a garbage truck.
Simply standing at red lights is its own sport, you try to balance yourself while you wait for a break. A bike can’t come to a complete stop and still stay balanced, the trick is to inch forward, pull yourself back, inch forward… You could stop and put your foot on the ground. There is no practical reason for balancing, it’s just a sport.
The most challenging sport in city biking is keeping it. Bike theft is incredible in the city, I’ve lost count of how many bike’s I’ve lost. Legend has it that thieves use liquid nitrogen to make locks brittle and easy to break. But, theft can be beaten. You got’a have the worst bike and the best lock. First I tried one of those U-locks that “guarantees” against theft. Quite the bluff, actually, they’re one of the easiest locks to break, you can’t make a claim unless the bike was registered, you have a police report, a receipt for the lock, a receipt for the bike, a recent assessment of the bike’s value, you have to recover the broken lock, and the guarantee is void in Manhattan away. I wonder if they’ve ever paid on one of those guarantees? Now I’ve got a five foot, double reinforced metal square link chain that weighs more and costs more than my twenty year old girls ten speed, purple frame, with florescent orange spray painted stripes. That heavy chain makes it a lot more difficult to get up those hills, but it’s worth it. Theft is not a sport, it’s just aggravation.
One big drawback of using your bike for transportation and sport is that you arrive everywhere right after your workout. You change close a lot. One summer I took a job as a bike messenger. The biking was great, the actual delivering the packages wasn’t so great. That summer there was this huge heat wave. One day it was 100 degrees with 100% humidity, and I had to take a package to the Chanel Perfume company on the 30th Floor of a Fifth Avenue high-rise. It looked like one of those banks that Dickens described in a Tale of Two cities, it had all this old looking wood everywhere, everything was extra-fancy. There was this giant bottle of Chanel No. 5 encased in glass. Of course, I’m dripping with sweat. I go up to the receptionist at a big oak desk she said, “I’m not signing for it, take it to receiving, on 31, one flight up.” I walk toward the Oak wood circular Staircase, “No, you can’t use the stairs, go back into the lobby and take the elevator.”
When I’m on my way back down, the elevator stops again on the 30th floor, a model gets in. She’s obviously just been shooting an ad. She’s wearing a long flowing black shoulder showing dress. I’m wearing shorts and a short sleeved shirt so soaked in sweat that you can’t tell that I haven’t just been swimming in the ocean with all my close on. I’ve accessorized with a clipboard and a messengers bag that’s held together with duct tape. She leans against the back wall and puts all her weight on her left leg as her right leg comes out of this enormous heretofore unseen slit in her dress. There are mirrors on all the walls and the door and the ceiling, so that wherever you look you see the beauty and swamp thing. She has long flowing light brown hair. I have sweat is flowing out of my crooked bicycle helmet. She shifts her weight. Her right leg disappears and her left leg emerges from another unseen slit. So I straightened my helmet.
-Karl Widerquist, New York, NY 1996
