by Andre Coelho | Jul 21, 2018 | News
Jeff Bezos. Picture credit to: Evening Standard
Leonid Bershidsky, in this article, posted on the 18th of July, says that the best way to enact basic income is to “persuade tech billionaires to fund universal pay plans”. Motivated by Obama’s latest speech on Mandela’s (posthumous) 100th birthday, he suggests Obama should try have their attention – and money – to finance a basic income. Bershidsky is also convinced that a basic income cannot be financed through more taxes on the wealthy, which would only, according to him, “have a negative effect on growth and innovation”. There are those, however, who object this purpose of growth for its own sake, and propose other directions for society, such as degrowth.
Bershidsky affirms that others may be able to fund a basic income, such as Norway, but that is inconceivable in the United States. In the simplest of ways, he determines the cost of basic income as 327 million people times 500 US$/month, which equals around 2 trillion US$ per year. This kind of reasoning has been done many times before, but it lacks mathematical sense, as Scott Santens has already pointed out. Santens, on a more generous assumption for a basic income in the US, has suggested a gross cost of 3,3 trillion US$ per year. However, and most importantly, that is gross cost, not net cost. Net costs, according to him, can be zero, or even negative, if several reforms occur in welfare and the tax system, such as the elimination of welfare programs (turned obsolete due to their own means-tested nature), the abolition of invisible welfare benefits (those which benefit high earners), reforms in social security (turning pensions and disability benefits into supplements, as basic income is phased in), application of a carbon tax, a financial transaction tax, implementation of seigniorage reform, introduction of VAT (value-added tax) and LVT (land-value tax). To this could be added all the savings possible with the reduction or abolition of poverty, in health care, education and social security.
More information at:
Leonid Bershidsky, “Obama and Bezos Could Make Basic Income Work”, Bloomberg Opinion, July 18th 2018
Scott Santens, “How to Reform Welfare and Taxes to Provide Every American Citizen with a Basic Income”, Medium, June 5th 2017
by Karl Widerquist | Jul 18, 2018 | Opinion, The Indepentarian
Barack Obama, for the second time, has favorably discussed basic income. In his Mandela Lecture, which included some hard-hitting remarks about the rise of strongman politics, Obama discussed the rise of automation and the difficulties it causes for workers. He finished that section of his speech with the following statement:
“It’s not just money that a job provides; it provides dignity and structure and a sense of place and a sense of purpose. (Applause.) And so we’re going to have to consider new ways of thinking about these problems, like a universal income, review of our workweek, how we retrain our young people, how we make everybody an entrepreneur at some level. But we’re going to have to worry about economics if we want to get democracy back on track.”
This speech comes two years after an interview in which Obama said, “[W]hether a universal income is the right model—is it gonna be accepted by a broad base of people?—that’s a debate that we’ll be having over the next 10 or 20 years.”
Neither of these statements is an outright endorsement of UBI, and his most recent statement, talking about how jobs provide “dignity,” “structure,” uses language that opponents tend to use when they want to say that UBI isn’t good enough because it’s “just money.”
But yet, he brought up UBI on his own accord without any direct criticism of it. While the earlier statement says we “will” be talking about it for some time; the later statement says we “should consider” it. So, one can see some movement toward the idea. If nothing else, this statement is a strong reflection of the extent to which UBI has penetrated mainstream political thinking.
https://www.facebook.com/basicincomequotes/videos/1739996622785908/
by Andre Coelho | Jul 10, 2018 | News
Picture credit to: The Conversation.
Approval of a universal basic income (UBI) has risen sharply in the United States. Karl Widerquist cites a 10-year-old poll showing that only 12% of Americans approved an UBI at that time. Now that number is 48%, according to a Gallup poll, conducted at the end of 2017 (on around 3000 adult US citizens).
The cited poll also shows that women show more support than men (52 and 43% respectively), age strongly correlates with that support (54% for youngsters from 18 to 35 years-old down to 38% for people with more than 66 years of age), education level also has an influence (51% for people with less than a bachelor’s degree versus 42% for people with a bachelor’s degree or higher), as well as political orientation (28% for republican voters up to 65% for democratic voters). That same report finds that 73% of Americans think artificial intelligence (AI) will suppress more jobs than those it creates, which might in part justify these results, compared to those 10 years ago.
However, Gallup’s poll shows that, for those in support of UBI, more than half (54%) wouldn’t be available to pay higher taxes in order to finance it. This is more evident in women (57%) then men (51%), and there is a strong educational effect: the higher the educational degree, the more willing supporters of UBI are to pay higher taxes to have it implemented (64% for those with a bachelor’s degree or higher versus 38% for those with less than a bachelor’s degree). Democrats are also more likely (55%) to pay higher taxes to get UBI than republicans (29%). In spite of this result, 80% of all supporters think companies benefitting from AI should pay more taxes (than they do now) in order to finance the UBI policy.
This results for the United States are, in a way, similar to those from a recent survey in Finland, ran by researcher Ville-Veikko and professor Heikki Hiilamo. In the latter, support for UBI, based on the definition by Basic Income Earth Network (BIEN), was also very close to the 50% mark (51%), which clearly shows that the public remains divided when it comes to UBI. Not only in Finland, but also in the United States, even though the survey questions were posed somewhat differently in these two surveys (note 1).
Note 1 – in Gallup’s survey the exact question was “Do you support or not support a universal basic income program as a way to help Americans who lose their jobs because of advances in artificial intelligence?”. In the Ville-Veikko and professor Heikki Hiilamo survey there was no reference to jobs or artificial intelligence.
More information at:
RJ Reinhart, “Public split on basic income for workers replaced by robots”, Gallup News, February 26th 2018
Annie Nova, “Universal basic income: US support grows as Finland ends its trial”, CNBC, May 1st 2018
André Coelho, “Finland: Finland shares unconditional money, but the public view remains polarized”, Basic Income News, February 12th 2018
by Claire Bott | Jun 18, 2018 | News
The Stockton Economic Empowerment Demonstration (SEED) has been the subject of a consideration amount of attention from American and international media lately, with news outlets such as Reuters, the Washington Post and the New York Times publishing articles on the topic.
SEED, which will take place in the city of Stockton, California, will involve giving a regular monthly income of US$500 to a number of residents with no conditions on how they spend the money.
The Reuters report, which is on video, shows a resident, Shay Holliman, weeping as she describes how hard it is to lose your home because you can’t pay the rent, and also includes an interview with Stockton’s mayor, Michael Tubbs, who says that he felt a “moral responsibility” to help those who work hard and yet “fall further and further behind”.
The Washington Post article includes a brief description of the history behind SEED, describing Stockton as “the largest [city] in the country to declare bankruptcy in the years after the recession”, and giving a brief overview of the genesis of the project in a meeting between Tubbs and Natalie Foster, co-founder of the Economic Security Project, which is funding SEED.
In the New York Times, as well as giving a description of SEED, the article provides a profile of Shay Holliman, the woman who was seen weeping in the Reuters report. Other news outlets, such as the LA Times and The Hill, have also reported on SEED.
by Andre Coelho | May 20, 2018 | News
Andrew Yang has already made his name known by leading a presidential campaign which defends the implementation of basic income. Now he extends that with an interview for the Merion West journal, a news outlet particularly associated with low biases. In that interview, posted on the 9th of May, Yang affirms his conviction that humanity is going through an unprecedented shift, while the (United States) political class “is completely asleep at the switch”.
Yang, as other influential people in the United States, especially those dealing with technological developments and digital-based companies, is very worried about the job loss wave in the United States, due to automation. According to him, that is already happening, and will deepen in the near future. To counteract the predictable consequences of such job displacement “by software, AI, and machines”, he defends the implementation of a 1000 US$/month per adult basic income, which he calls a “freedom dividend”. That and a “human-centric capitalism”, an economic system which measures things like “childhood success rate, mental health, levels of engagement with work, freedom from substance abuse”, instead of GDP.
Asked about a possible parallel with the Industrial Revolution, where, despite strifes and strikes, displaced people eventually found new work, Yang says that (referring to manufacturing workers in the Midwest) “there was no magical reorganization of work; instead, many workers went home and killed themselves by the numbers”. According to him, anyone thinking this “magical reorganization of work” is possible, is “not paying attention to the real data on the ground rate now”.
As for basic income itself, Yang approaches it with a certain humour, even, when he says “One thing I’m looking forward to asking, when I’m president, which state would like to have universal basic income first?” However, he states it very seriously when putting forth his conviction that “universal basic income would dramatically improve the lives of tens of millions of individuals and families. There might be some tweaks and tailoring, but I’m very bullish on the substance”.
As for financing, Andrew Yang is confident that a basic income of 1000 US$/month per adult is affordable, considering its price tag is around 2 trillion US$ per year, compared with current welfare costs of 6 trillion US$ per year. That doesn’t equate to ending all welfare benefits, but that it is possible to include basic income within the benefits systems, by introducing an unconditional parcel. Even still, he defends, like Phillipe van Parijs has also proposed in the European context, basic income can be mostly financed with a value-added tax around 10%, or about half of what is practiced in Europe, on average. An expectation of further economic growth, due to a rise in aggregated demand by influence of the existence of a basic income, will self-finance the rest, given an equivalent rise in collected taxes.
Yang also believes that the US current system of social security, health and education are essentially broken, categorizing them as “dysfunctional welfare systems”. According to him, these systems generate vast disincentives amongst the population, or benefit traps. Hence, the introduction of basic income could break those economic and social traps, by providing a financial floor cumulative with earnings from a job. As far as economic policy is concerned, he concludes the interview with a deeper, more general call to society: “In America, we won’t trust our people, but the only thing we will trust are systems, and more systems and processes—and it’s immensely counterproductive. We need to start trusting our people again; we have to trust ourselves.”
More information at:
Sara Bizarro, “United States: Andrew Yang is running for President in 2020 on the platform of Universal Basic Income”, Basic Income News, April 8th 2018
Henri Matilla, “Interview with Andrew Yang, 2020 Presidential Candidate”, Merion West, May 9th 2018
