by Toru Yamamori | Nov 13, 2015 | News
Left Unity’s regional branch for Bath and North East Somerset puts a motion for an unconditional basic income for the party’s national conference which will be held in 21-22 November 2015.
The motion says, ‘[w]e believe that a party of the left should have policies to create a fairer distribution of wealth. The principle of CIP [citizen’s income payment] is well established under different names a system that would enable the discontinuation of the current unemployment benefit system. The payment would be made to all citizens higher than current unemployment benefit levels.’
All motions raised for the coming national conference can be read here (pdf).
Left Unity was founded in 2013, following the appeal by Ken Loach, acclaimed film directer, for a new party to oppose austerity and neoliberalism.
by Josh Martin | Oct 24, 2015 | News
Streithorst writes an eloquent, thorough introduction to basic income, highlighting its ability to empower the consumers most likely to spend. Capitalism utilized higher wages and growing debt in previous golden ages to promote consumer spending, and Streithorst argues a basic income could facilitate such spending once again as technological unemployment continues to grow. Streithorst believes a basic income would stimulate demand, grow GDP, and decrease inequality.
Tom Streithorst, “A New Golden Age Part III: The Basic Income Guarantee”, Los Angeles Review of Books, 13 October 2015.
by Timothy Roscoe Carter | Oct 19, 2015 | Opinion
[The following is an excerpt from a book in progress, The Poverty Abolitionist’s Handbook.]
Q: Basic income seems like such a fringe idea. I do not want to waste my time on something that is not going to happen. Is a basic income politically feasible?
Image via FMDam.org.
A: In the U.S. Presidential campaign of 1972, both incumbent Republican Richard Nixon and Democratic challenger George McGovern included versions of a basic income in their campaign platforms. In 1988, two men in Indiana sued for a license to marry each other, and the judge not only threw out the case, but also levied a fine of $2,800 on the men for wasting the court’s time with a frivolous lawsuit. The judge wrote that the plaintiffs’ “claims about Indiana law and constitutional rights are wacky and sanctionably so.”(1) Today, it may seem like basic income could never be taken seriously by mainstream politicians and it is hard to remember just how much of lunatic fringe idea same-sex marriage was one generation ago. But with all of human history against it, activists moved the zeitgeist in favor of same-sex marriage in just one generation. With hard work, poverty abolitionists should be able to advance public opinion back to where it was in 1972.
And we are making progress. In 2014, the idea of basic income received more media attention and support from political leaders around the world than at anytime in the past 30 years. And as the slowly growing crisis of technological unemployment demands attention from political leaders, basic income will be discussed more and more openly as the only practical solution.
Do I really believe there is a reasonable chance of a basic income being adopted in the United States in the next five years? Sadly, no. But with hard work, adoption in the United States in 20 years is certainty feasible. And even if it takes 50 years to abolish poverty, would not that be worth it?
(1)Arthur Leonard, Judge Denies Marriage License to Gay Male Prisoners, 1988 Lesbian/Gay L. Notes 63.
Q: Would children get the basic income?
A: Why not?
Actually, there are a lot of different opinions on this. Some say yes, some say no, some think children should get a smaller basic income, and some think children should get a full basic income but all or a portion of it should be held in trust until they are adults. Some jurisdictions actually provide small basic incomes, or nearly basic incomes to children even though they do not provide them to adults, through baby bonds and child tax credits. The most common reason given for saying that children should be denied the same basic income given to adults is that it will encourage poor people to have children who will be dependent on the state, but there is little support for this. Adults with a basic income will not be poor, and birth rates decline as incomes rise. For someone not already in poverty, it is unlikely the basic income will be large enough to make having a child a financially smart move. But whatever you believe about children and a basic income, remember that children are fully human, so any deviation from what adults receive needs to convincingly answer the question, “Why not?”
Q: Would people in NewYork City get the same basic income as people in Oakley, Kansas?
A: The truth is we do not know whether or not “top ups” would be needed in more expensive areas if there was a basic income. Currently, most people are forced to live in cities because that is where the jobs are, and rents are high in cities because the property owners can extort money from people who have to live there because they need to live near their work, and retail prices are high in cities because rents are high. What would population patterns be like if people could just move to rural areas and live off of a basic income if rents got too high? Would rents go down in cities if people were not forced to live where jobs are? We simply do know the answer to those questions. So it would be best to start with a basic income that is universal, unconditional, and uniform at the national level, and be willing to revisit the idea of top ups for more expensive areas when we know what life with a basic income is like. Meanwhile, local governments can offer smaller basic incomes to their residents financed from local taxes and resources to add to a national basic income. A national basic income should not force Alaska to stop paying dividends to its residents from its oil revenues nor American Indian tribes from paying its members dividends from casinos, for example, nor any other local government from offering refundable tax credits.
Q: Would visitors to the country, whether documented or not, be entitled to the basic income?
A: The short answer is “no”. I know of no well-sussed basic income proposal that contemplates sending payments to anyone beyond citizens and legal permanent residents (LPRs), and as a practical matter, it would seem unlikely that any proposal to make payments to anyone beyond LPRs would pass. Indeed, many basic income supporters prefer the terms “Citizen’s Income” or “Citizen’s Dividend”.
However, after a basic income is established for citizens and LPRs, it may be worthwhile to revisit whether other visitors can get a basic income as a separate societal decision. Unlike for children, the burden would be on those who want to extend benefits to visitors, and there are good reasons to extend the basic income beyond LPRs, and good reasons not to extend the basic income beyond LPRs.
Q: What are some good reasons to extend a basic income beyond legal permanent residents (LPRs)?
A: Some possibilities:
* Any humane society will provide at least some social benefits to the poor within their borders, however they got there, and cash payments might simply be more efficient.
* Poorer immigrants either spend their incomes or send a portion to poor relatives back home, so cash payments to them will either stimulate our economy or act as foreign assistance well targeted to the needy in nations with intimate ties to ours.
* Immigrant workers who do not receive a basic income are more easily exploited as cheap labor and would be unfair competition for citizens and LPRs who do receive a basic income.
Q: What are some good reasons not to extend the basic income beyond citizens and legal permanent residents (LPRs)?
A: Some possibilities:
* The basic income could be a magnet drawing an unsustainable number of immigrants. It would be easy to be overly skeptical of this concern, because anti-immigrant voices have been claiming for decades that immigrants come here for welfare benefits, and that is simply not true. Immigration tends to rise and fall with jobs, not availability of welfare benefits. However, the general utility of cash benefits may make them so qualitatively different from welfare benefits that people might start coming here just to receive them.
* Granting cash benefits to other poor visitors might interfere with the alternate humane policy of trying to extend LPR status to as many of them as possible, reducing both the pressure on other immigrants to become LPRs, and the pressure on politicians to extend LPR status to far greater numbers of people.
* Rather than extend the basic income beyond citizens and LPRs via unilateral legislation, we might choose to do so via reciprocal treaties, encouraging other nations to establish a basic income and/or leading the establishment of a global basic income.
Q: How can you possibly think it is moral for some people to live off of the work of others?
A: What I find immoral is *forcing* some people to work for the benefit of others. That is why I support a basic income guarantee. It was Vladimir Lenin in Bolshevik Russia who stated, “Those who don’t work don’t eat.” Whether that sentiment is expressed by Lenin or by Charles and David Koch in 21st century America, it is powerful members of society demanding that the government use its guns to enforce a Utopian ideology that benefits them personally on the masses that did not consent. If everyone had a basic income, then no one would be forced to work for others. With a basic income, producers would have to be induced to work voluntarily, either by appealing to their good nature or by offering them special benefits such as recognition or extra money.
Q: If everyone received a basic income, would not employers simply reduce salaries by the amount of the basic income, since their employees would need that much less money to live on?
A: Wage substitution from a basic income should only occurs at the lowest subsistence level wages. Because no one will work for less than they need to live, supply drops off at that point. Giving those people other regular income that is not sufficient to live off of reduces what they need to live from employers. This is why a minimum wage will still be necessary until we have a basic income that is higher than what people need to live. However, a wage substitution effect should not occur once there is a basic income above subsistence level, since recipients would be empowered to leave jobs where they did not believe they were being paid adequately.
There should be no wage substitution effect on skilled labor. Everyone making over subsistence level is getting paid based on the supply of and demand for their specific skills. There are plenty of people willing to do the work of a nurse for much less than nurses make, but they cannot because they do not have the skills. At subsistence level, the “supply” in the supply and demand labor curve is the supply of bodies. Above subsistence, the “supply” is the supply of skills. A UBI at less than subsistence level can allow bodies to supplied for less, but no basic income will directly change the supply of skills.
Q: Do we currently have any empirical evidence of what the effect of a basic income would be on wages at the macro level?
A: No. The Alaska Permanent Fund and the Earned Income Tax Credit do not appear to have affected wages either positively or negatively, while the Speenhamland System in England in the early 19th Century does appear to have generated a wage substitution effect. However, none of these cases is illustrative. The amount of Alaska Permanent Fund payments is too variable for employees to count on what they might receive, and it pays people in a state where the supply of even unskilled labor is consistently tight. The Earned Income Tax Credit is means tested, applies primarily to workers with children, and is too complicated for most of its recipients to understand for them to rely on it. The Speenhamland System was an extremely heavily means-tested income support program conditional on work. No basic income experiments have been conducted at a massive enough scale to see effects on labor markets.
by Vito Laterza | Oct 18, 2015 | News
Celebrated Chinese-American community activist, writer and philosopher Grace Lee Boggs died in her house in Detroit, Michigan, on Monday, October 5. She turned 100 in June this year. Her vision of a community-driven socialist alternative to capitalism resonates well with some of the concerns of the basic income movement. While basic income was not a central theme in her work, she endorsed the idea of a city-level universal basic income (UBI).
She was born in New York and grew up in a Chinese immigrant family running a restaurant business. A brilliant scholar, she completed her PhD in philosophy in 1940. After that, she became increasingly drawn into full-time political activism. In 1942, she started her close collaboration with Marxist revolutionary theorist C.L.R. James and the Johnsonites, which lasted for two decades. The Johnsonites were revolutionary socialists who focused more than other Marxist groups on marginalized groups like women, people of color and youth, and rejected the notion of a workers’ vanguard party.
Lee Boggs’ personal encounter with Marxism and socialism was shaped by a focus on race and poverty, in particular the systematic discrimination faced by black American working class communities. In 1953, she married Detroit-based black activist and autoworker Jimmy Boggs, author of the influential 1963 book The American revolution: pages from a Negro worker’s notebook. In the same year she moved to Detroit to live with him. The city remained her home until her death. Grace and Jimmy partnered in community activism, political struggles and revolutionary writing.
Jimmy and Grace Lee Boggs
Throughout the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, Grace and Jimmy were prominent in organizing the civil rights and Black Power movements in Detroit. They collaborated with towering figures like Martin Luther King and Malcom X, and organizations like the Black Panthers. After the decline of mass political activism that started in the 1980s, they continued to focus on community work and alternative urban livelihoods. Jimmy passed away in 1993, and Grace continued with these activities until her death.
In a 2011 piece, Grace Lee Boggs mentions a workshop presentation in the early 1990s in which she had imagined a future where Detroiters would come together to implement a city-wide UBI by the year 2015:
Because Detroiters have developed a deep sense of moral responsibility, citizens decided in 2015 A.D. to adopt a Universal Basic Income Grant (UBIG) as an alternative to welfare. The UBIG is based on the idea that every citizen has a right to the basic material necessities of life, including health care and education, and every citizen also has a duty to share in the responsibilities of the community, city, nation and planet, and to contribute in some form to the overall well-being.
Lee Boggs’ engagement with UBI was more complex than her words above let transpire. Her take was heavily influenced by evolving ideas about work, community and the rejection of the capitalist system. Her socialist approach was informed by Marx’s critique of alienation and wage labor under capitalism. Lee Boggs’ association with black working class communities became a pragmatic entry point into the concept and practice of revolution – which she always saw as something changing, shifting and emerging from uncertainty, rather than a linear path driven by monolithic ideas. Revolution, for Lee Boggs, was what people did on the ground when they took practical action informed by a long-term vision of the society they wanted to build.
Her work speaks to UBI activists because she lived through the decline of formal jobs in the Detroit automotive industry, and the social and economic devastation black communities experienced as a result. In the 1960s, all the signs of the crisis were clear, with black workers losing their jobs in large numbers due to automation and other irreversible structural changes in global capitalist production. In the following years, Lee Boggs was particularly concerned with the dramatic contradictions emerging from the decline of formal labor coupled by rampant consumerism. She identified the capitalist system as the main cause of the breakdown of communities plagued by mass unemployment, crime and drugs.
The Boggses led decades of urban renewal experiments emerging from the ashes of capitalism and focusing on youth entrepreneurship, urban agriculture and community education. Where others saw a post-industrial wasteland, they saw opportunities to build a new society that would break away from consumerism and dependence on large-scale structures like the state and big companies. The James & Grace Lee Boggs School and the Boggs Center to Nurture Community Leadership are among the many projects that carry their legacy today.
The basic income grant that Lee Boggs envisioned was to be delivered by self-governing Detroiters coming together, not as a large-scale redistributive mechanism at state or federal level. It was closely tied to the duty to participate and share with others locally and globally, and to behave responsibly towards other humans and the natural environment. The strong connections between UBI and the community would have neutralized the potential negative effects of linking cash grants to mass production and global capitalism.
In a 2012 talk at the New School in New York, Lee Boggs provided the following comment on Martin Luther King’s proposal of a guaranteed annual income (something quite close to a federal UBI):
I’m not sure I’m ready to propose a guaranteed annual wage. I think that’s too simplistic. … I think we need to do a lot more with ourselves, with our economy, and envisioning a new kind of economy. You can think so much in terms of re-distribution. Or you can begin thinking about justice in terms of restoring another way of life.
Whether one agrees with Lee Boggs’ communitarian conception of UBI or not, her work is a major contribution to basic income debates. Lee Boggs’ writings emphasized the dignity of work, and how its redemptive qualities had little to do, if at all, with wage labor. On the topic of change, she was an advocate of “visionary organizing.” She believed that community activism in the “here and now” could bring about global systemic change only if driven by a strong vision of the future to come. Her mature views about revolution and social change are presented in her powerful book The next American revolution: sustainable activism for the twenty-first century, first published in 2011.
Her radiant presence and profound insight will be sorely missed. She influenced basic income advocates like Scott Santens, who celebrated her life work with these words: “Some people see where the arc of history should bend, do all they can to make it bend, and live long enough to see it bend.” She will continue to inspire thousands of UBI activists engaged in small-scale experiments that are already sowing the seeds of a future world where UBI becomes the norm.
Grace Lee Boggs in post-industrial Detroit. Credit: Quyen Tran. © PBS POV
Essential readings
Grace Lee Boggs, “Visionary organizing and the MLK Memorial,” James & Grace Lee Boggs Center, September 2011.
Grace Lee Boggs, “Jobs aren’t the answer,” James & Grace Lee Boggs Center, September 2011.
Grace Lee Boggs at the New School, New York [TRANSCRIPT], April 22, 2012.
Grace Lee Boggs, Living for change: an autobiography, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998.
Grace Lee Boggs (with Scott Kurashige), The next American revolution: sustainable activism for the twenty-first century, Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 2011.
Documentary film “American Revolutionary: the evolution of Grace Lee Boggs,” directed by Grace Lee, June 2013.
Ryan Felton, “Grace Lee Boggs, longtime Detroit activist, dies aged 100,” The Guardian, October 6, 2015.
Michelle Chen, “Grace Lee Boggs’ century of social renewal,” Al Jazeera America, October 7, 2015.
Thomas J. Sugrue, “Postscript: Grace Lee Boggs,” The New Yorker, October 8, 2015.
Barbara Ransby, “The (r)evolutionary vision and contagious optimism of Grace Lee Boggs,” In These Times, October 6, 2015.
Jordan Weissmann, “Martin Luther King’s economic dream: a guaranteed income for all Americans,” The Atlantic, August 28, 2013.
by Vito Laterza | Oct 14, 2015 | News
Debora Serracchiani, President of Friuli-Venezia Giulia
The center-left government of the Italian region of Friuli-Venezia Giulia is about to roll out a minimum income experiment – the actual wording used in the legislation is “measures of active inclusion and income support”. It was approved in June by the regional parliament. The cabinet finalized the implementation guidelines at the end of September.
This is far from a universal basic income, but institutes a basic floor for all families below a certain income, regardless of family members’ current or previous occupational status. Families that earn 6000 euros per year or less, and have been residing in the region for at least twenty-four months, will receive a monthly sum between 70 and 550 euros for twelve months in the first instance. The monthly payment is determined by existing family income – there are six income bands – and the number of dependent children.
They can apply for a second period of twelve months, after a two months break. The award is conditional on signing an “inclusion pact”, which is a plan beneficiaries agree with social services to improve their financial situation. It can include training courses, further education and other labor market integration activities.
Local newspaper Il Piccolo reports that the scheme roll-out is expected to start in November this year. It is estimated that there are up to 10,000 beneficiaries eligible for this measure. Italian newspapers do not clarify whether this figure refers to the total number of individuals in the receiving families, or the number of applicants. Either way, it is clear that only the very poor will be covered.
Italy, like Greece and unlike most European countries, does not have a universal unemployment subsidy or a national guaranteed minimum income (GMI). A GMI scheme was piloted at the national level in the late 1990s, but discontinued in the early 2000s. Some of Italy’s 20 regions experimented with similar measures throughout the 2000s, but none of them went beyond the experimental phase. Friuli-Venezia Giulia center-left government had already instituted a five-year experiment in 2006, but the scheme was interrupted prematurely by a center-right government in 2008.
Friuli’s reintroduction of a minimum income is not an isolated case. Another region, Basilicata, adopted similar measures in recent months, and others, like Piedmont and Lombardy, are expected to do so in the near future.
Friuli’s law was promoted by the regional president Debora Serracchiani and her cabinet, and approved with votes from across the political spectrum. The center-left Democrats, who lead the regional coalition government, and their regional allies of Left, Ecology and Freedom, supported the measure, with the favorable vote of the opposition party 5 Star Movement – a populist formation with increasingly far right views about migration and borders.
The 5 Star Movement is the main opposition party in the national parliament, and has been campaigning for a “citizenship income” (a form of GMI) at the national level for some time now. In recent months, they have intensified their campaign. Popular support for a national GMI is growing, fuelled by increasing poverty and social discontent caused by the combined effect of austerity and lack of economic growth.
Matteo Renzi, Italy’s Prime Minister
Three legislative proposals to this effect have been deposited in the national parliament, but none of them has reached the stage of a parliamentary vote. The 5 Star Movement proposal is the most far-reaching of them and calls for a GMI of up to 780 euros per month. Matteo Renzi, Prime Minister and leader of the Democrats, has rejected this proposal, but promised to include in the next budget more modest measures to mitigate poverty.
If you want to find out more, here is a list of relevant sources:
Marco Ballico, “Sei ‘scaglioni’ per l’assegno antipovertà [Six bands for the antipoverty payment],” Il Piccolo, September 22, 2015.
Roberto Giovannini, “In Friuli sussidio per i poveri, i grillini votano con il Pd [Subsidy for the poor in Friuli, 5 Star Movement votes with Pd],” La Stampa, July 2, 2015.
Friuli-Venezia Giulia, “Legge regionale 10 luglio 2015, n.15 [Regional law July 10, 2015, n.15]”.
“Renzi: no al reddito di cittadinanza, per combattere la povertà serve il lavoro [Renzi: no to citizenship income, we need jobs to fight poverty],” September 30, 2015.
Josh Martin, “ITALY: Conflict over report of a basic income experiment in Lombardy”, Basic Income News, May 18, 2015.
For a brief history of GMI experiments in Italy, see Varvara Lalioti’s academic article “The curious case of the Guaranteed Minimum Income (GMI): highlighting Greek ‘exceptionalism’ in a southern European context”, forthcoming in the European Journal of Social Policy. An earlier version is available here.
