by Kate McFarland | Jan 13, 2017 | News
In a recent interview and article, economist James K. Boyce defends a universal basic income of $200 per month, funded in part by taxes or fees on carbon emissions and financial transactions.
Boyce, an economics professor at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and program director at the Political Economy Research Institute, recently co-wrote a article on the topic with entrepreneur Peter Barnes, who authored the 2014 book With Liberty and Dividends for All. The article was originally published as “$200 Dollars a Month for Everyone? Universal Income from Universal Assets” on Triple Crisis, a blog devoted to finance, development, and the environment. It has also been republished on Medium as “How To Pay For Universal Income”.
Boyce and Barnes argue that a modest basic income could be funded from “universal basic assets” — wealth that is rightfully owned by all members of society, such as that which is derived from appropriation of the commons (e.g. extracting minerals or timber from the land or releasing pollutants into the atmosphere). They argue that universal basic assets also include a portion of wealth generated from society’s financial and legal infrastructure.
On their view, a portfolio of such commonly held assets could (and should) be used to fund a citizen’s dividend of $200 per month to all Americans, distributed automatically via wire transfers to individuals’ bank accounts.
Boyce provides further explanation of the proposal in an interview with Kim Brown of the Real News Network (see video below).
In the interview, while elaborating upon the idea of universal basic assets, Boyce compares and contrasts his proposal with Alaska’s Permanent Fund Dividend (PFD), which provides all Alaskan residents with an annual basic income ($1022 in 2016) from the revenues on a permanent fund created from royalties on the sale of the state’s oil. Boyce notes that whereas Alaska’s PFD incentivizes drilling for more oil, a carbon tax and dividend would dis-incentivize carbon emissions, thereby promoting more sustainable energy production.
Boyce further articulates his ethical justification for a citizen’s dividend in response to a question concerning whether it is fair to give money to those who don’t work for it: “All we’re talking about is returning to people the money that comes from uses of assets we all own or should own in common. So, it’s not about handing out free money. It’s about not letting people use those assets for free. That’s the real handout.”
A transcript of the interview is available on the site of the Real News Network (“Universal Basic Income: A Solution to Inequality, Economic Instability, and Climate Change,” November 21, 2016.)
Cover Photo: CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 Pembina Institute
by Kate McFarland | Jan 9, 2017 | News
A newly launched grassroots campaign is using social media and video to protest recent cuts to the state’s annual dividend.
As reported in previous Basic Income News stories, Alaska Governor Bill Walker vetoed half of the Legislature’s allocations to the 2016 Permanent Fund Dividend (PFD). Often regarded as one of the best examples of “real-world basic income,” the annual PFD provides all Alaskan adults and children with checks of an equal amount, funded by earnings on a permanent fund in which a portion of the state’s oil revenues are invested.
The amount of the PFD reached its peak of $2,072 in 2015. In 2016, it dropped to $1,022 — though it would have been $2,052 absent Walker’s veto.
Although intended to help preserve the PFD during a significant budget crisis, Walker’s action unsurprisingly generated much controversy. State senator Bill Wielechowski filed a lawsuit charging that Walker’s veto was unconstitutional. The suit was dismissed by a superior court judge in November, but Wielechowski has appealed the decision to the Alaska Supreme Court.
With the Supreme Court hearing likely not to take place until April or May, a group of 12 lawmakers and activists have launched the nonpartisan grassroots group Permanent Fund Defenders, which advocates for the restoration of the full amount of the PFD. The group currently operates primarily through social media, and has created animated videos describing the history of the PFD (see below).
On its Facebook page, the Permanent Fund Defenders demonstrate solidarity with the Goenchi Mati Movement in the Indian state of Goa (previously profiled in Basic Income News), which promotes the establishment of a permanent fund and citizen’s dividend based on money from the sale of minerals.
More information:
Liz Raines, “Former lawmakers, political activists launch group to block PFD restructure,” KTVA, January 3, 2017.
Previous Basic Income News reports on the recent PFD controversy:
Kate McFarland (September 22, 2016) “ALASKA, US: Senator files suit against Governor’s veto of half of Permanent Fund Dividend”
Kate McFarland (September 29, 2016) “ALASKA, US: Amount of 2016 Permanent Fund Dividend to be $1022”
Kate McFarland (December 3, 2016) “ALASKA, US: Judge Upholds Governor’s Veto of Part of State’s Social Dividend”
Reviewed by Genevieve Shanahan
Photo: Shell Oil drilling rig, CC BY 2.0 Day Donaldson
by Kate McFarland | Jan 6, 2017 | News
On January 16 (Martin Luther King Jr. Day), American basic income activists will convene at the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial in the nation’s capitol, where they will set up a multi-media display to commemorate King’s support for a guaranteed income.
Source: Bob Fitch photography archive
Organized by videographer and basic income advocate Matt Orfalea, the event is intended to raise awareness of Martin Luther King’s support for a guaranteed annual income. Renowned for his leadership in the Civil Rights Movement in the 1950s and 1960s, King also championed a guaranteed income for all Americans, especially in his final book, Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community (1967). Orfalea states, “Everyone is familiar with MLK’s dream for racial equality but he also had a dream about economic justice. That’s what we want to showcase with our exhibit.”
The exhibit will include posters and banners with quotes from King related to guaranteed income, economic injustice, and job automation, in addition to looped video clip from King’s speeches.
Martin Luther King Jr. Day is a US federal holiday, held on the third Monday in January in connection with King’s birthday (January 15). Because of the holiday, many visitors–as well as reporters and journalists–are expected to be present at the Martin Luther King Jr. memorial. Because of this, Orfalea says, “What’s different about this from other actions is rather than march around, everyone will be coming to us!”
Orfalea has expressed additional plans to create a documentary that will combine coverage of the upcoming event with the historical video clips.
Read more about the event, and receive up-to-date announcements, at its Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/events/1845391152385149.
Martin Luther King Memorial photo CC BY 2.0 Ron Cogswell
by BIEN | Dec 31, 2016 | Bios & background Info, Opinion, Testimonies
“Toward Basic Income and a Peaceful Democratic Revolution”
By Steven Shafarman
My drive to enact a basic income – and most of my ideas about how to attract, educate, organize, and mobilize allies – arose from exploring the way young children learn to walk and talk.
I first wrote about these ideas, though without the term basic income, in the mid 1980s, inspired by the analogy of “the body politic” and Abraham Maslow’s “hierarchy of needs.” Young children, as they learn to walk, outgrow crawling and leave it behind. Their basic needs are provided by parents or other adults. Thus, when everyone’s basic economic security is guaranteed, I believe our society can “outgrow” pollution, racism, war, and other problems.
In 1998, while enrolled in a doctoral program in system science and human development, I self-published a book about how to heal our political system. With that book, I was hooked. I moved to Washington D.C. in the fall of 1999, seeking support for these ideas. I heard about USBIG in 2000, went up to New York for one of the earliest meetings, and presented at the first conference in March of 2002. That’s when I learned about BIEN, and decided to attend the Congress in Geneva. My paper, on how to build a mass movement, was selected and published.
Over the following years, I presented at most USBIG meetings; wrote three more books; started an author mailing list to update my readers; self-published or with micro publishers; gave talks at BIEN meetings in Dublin in 2008 and Montreal in 2014; worked with the Green Party of the U.S., adding basic income to their platform; and made several attempts to launch nonprofit organizations to support our efforts. Yet I was always thinking about young children, and how they learn naturally, spontaneously. My primary profession is teaching people, all ages and any health condition, to breathe freely and move easily, to outgrow back pain, breathing troubles, stress-related disorders, and other difficulties.
While promoting basic income, I’ve been actively thinking of myself as a healthy curious young child, pursuing my dreams, goals, and interests. At the same time, though, I’ve been anxiously wishing I had a basic income; regardless of the amount, that would have been immensely valuable.
The “Tax Cut for the Rest of Us Act of 2006,” H.R. 5257, would have created a small basic income through a fully refundable tax credit. It was introduced in the U.S. Congress, though never debated. Al Sheahen and Karl Widerquist wrote the initial paper, with a title I suggested, and Al and I arranged a series of meetings to lobby for it. After lunch in the basement cafeteria of a House office building, on our way to a meeting on the third floor, we were in an elevator with a dozen congressional staffers. I used that moment to say, loudly, “The reason I’m lobbying for basic income, Al, is that I want to live in a true democracy, without leaving the country.” Several staffers laughed. One said, “Good luck.”
Living in Washington D.C., I’ve had many conversations with people who work at political think tanks, lobbying shops, and similar organizations. Everyone has a specific issue, project, or other focus, and limited interest in new ideas. Liberal Democrats typically respond with a variation of “I love that idea, but … ,” and then explain why it’s politically impossible. Conservative Republicans tend to instantly state a moral or emotional objection; when we have time to discuss it in detail, however, they often agree that it makes sense.
Before autumn 2013, most people had never heard of basic income, although a few recalled ideas from the 1960s and ’70s about guaranteed income, negative income tax, or Richard Nixon’s Family Assistance Plan. That October, our friends in Switzerland filed for their referendum and held their event with the coins, and their campaign was widely reported in the U.S. media. I saw a huge breakthrough. My conversations became far more congenial and productive.
Over the past few years, I’ve been writing a book that, I expect, will attract, excite, and unite people from across the political spectrum and outside it. My title is “Basic Income Imperative: for peace, justice, liberty, and personal dignity.” It’s nearly finished. I have queries out to a number of literary agents, and hope to have a publisher soon.
I now believe – more than believe, actually, I’m confident – that within the next few years we can have a peaceful democratic revolution for basic income. Let’s make history and make it happen.
Steven Shafarman is a co-founder of Basic Income Action, and the author of four books about basic income, with another forthcoming. He also teaches FlexAware and the Feldenkrais Method. He lives in Washington, D.C.
At the end of 2016, the year in which BIEN celebrated the 30th anniversary of its birth, all Life Members were invited to reflect on their own personal journeys with the organization. See other contributions to the feature edition here.
by BIEN | Dec 30, 2016 | Bios & background Info, Opinion, Testimonies
Richard K. Caputo (Professor of Social Work)
My colleague Professor Vicki Lens recommended that I check out the US Basic Income Guarantee (USBIG) Network which was planning its first annual Congress for March 8-9, 2002 in New York City. Professor Lens was familiar with much of my scholarship on low-income families and economic well-being and thought my interests overlapped with the likes of Stony Brook School of Social Welfare Professor Michael Lewis (who coauthored Economics for Social Workers with Professor Karl Widerquist, the Congress organizer and one of the USBIG Network’s founders), among others.
I submitted an abstract based on the research I had done about the Nixon administration’s Family Assistance Plan while writing Welfare and Freedom American Style II. My abstract, “FAP Flops: Lessons Learned from the Failure to Pass the Family Assistance Plan in 1970 and 1972,” was accepted. I presented the full paper on Friday, March 8th, though somewhat intimidated by such knowledgeable notables as Sociologist Professor Fred Block and independent scholar Allan Sheahen (author of Guaranteed Income: The Right to Economic Security), among others. Thus began what turned out to be my ongoing associations with the USBIG Network and BIEN.
Though intrigued by my participation in First Congress of USBIG, I was not taken in by the idea of an unconditional basic income (UBI) guarantee whole cloth. It did not square well with my sense of social justice, nor with my concerns about poverty reduction, though it did address what I saw as the diminished value of wage-based labor in an increasingly global economy and seemed compatible with the social work value of self-determination. As I learned more about the idea and its implications, I was quite taken by what seemed to be the sharp contrast about capitalism and about freedom. At the time, in late 2003 and early 2004, I had been working on an essay, “The ethics of poverty,” for Salem Press, while also thinking about a paper for presentation at the USBIG conference that was to take place February 22-22 in Washington, DC.
I had asked the USBIG primary coordinator at the time, Karl Widerquist, if he knew of any related secular literature dealing with the ethics of poverty. He directed me to the works of Philip Van Parijs (Real Freedom For All: What If Anything Can Justify Capitalism?), one of the two contemporary UBI intellectual heavyweights, the other being Guy Standing (Beyond the New Paternalism: Basic Security as Equality). In my reading of their works, Professors Van Parijs and Standing went head to head about the relationship between capitalism and UBI. For Professor Van Parijs the productive, wealth-generating capacity of capitalism made the UBI possible, enhancing the prospect of each person’s freedom, whereas for Professor Standing capitalism made UBI necessary because of its capacity to eviscerate labor, portending human misery and social unrest. Capitalism as a force for individual and social good vs. capitalism as a force for adverse individual and social consequences made for an interesting mix of scholars and activists who participated in BIEN and USBIG Congresses.
Professors Van Parijs and Widerquist also seemed to be at odds about the idea of freedom. Professor Widerquist, who asked me to comment on an early version of what became his 2006 dissertation from Oxford University (“Property and the Power to Say No: A Freedom-Based Argument for Basic Income”) and the basis of his book Independence, Propertylessness, and Basic Income, dichotomized freedom as a status attribute of personhood, one either had it or did not, implying that a UBI would have to be at a level sufficiently high to enable anyone to reject a job offer s/he deemed unsuitable for any reason while living reasonably well financially. Professor Van Parjis’ idea of freedom was more like a gradient, one had varying degrees of it, enabling him to view any UBI level as an acceptable alternative to not having a UBI at all. I took issue with both, thinking status freedom too narrow if based only on one’s economic circumstances, and a gradient insufficient if the level of UBI had little or no significant impact on the lives of poor individuals and families.
Finally, while drafting the ethics of poverty essay and thinking about a paper for the 2004 USBIG Congress, I also noticed an announcement for the former Yeshiva University Political Scientist Professor Ross Zucker’s Democratic Distributive Justice (2000), which also had a proposal for a guaranteed income. Professor Zucker’s justification for UBI differed from Professor Van Parijs, focusing less on freedom and more on the consumption aspects of making more money available to everyone as consumers.
What I initially learned from my reading of UBI related materials resulted in three articles: (1) “Redistributive Schemes That Skirt Poverty: Reconsidering Social Justice in Light of Van Parijs and Zucker,” published in the Journal of Poverty (2005); (2) “The Unconditional Basic Income Guarantee: Attempts to Eclipse the Welfare State,” published in International Social Work (2008); and (3) “Standing Polanyi on His Head: The Basic Income Guarantee as a Response to the Commodification of Labor,” published in Race, Gender & Class (2008). These articles formed the basis of presentations as several BIEN and related conferences.
While participating in these conferences and meeting international scholars with varying viewpoints and insights about the merits of UBI schemes, I also got the idea for a book documenting how related proposals were faring politically across the globe. With support from Philippe Van Parijs, Yannick Vanderborght, Jurgen De Wispelaere, Michael Lewis, and Eri Noguchi, I applied for and was awarded an $8,000 Summer Research Fellowship from the Rabbi Arthur Schneier Center for International Affairs at Yeshiva University in May 2006, based on the proposal, “Achieving a Basic Income Guarantee: Efforts-to-Date Around the World.” Essentially, I classified the countries I examined into two groups, those, which for all practical purposes rejected UBI schemes (South Africa, Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, Columbia) and those which sought to build upon or expand other social welfare provisions with the eventual aim of achieving UBI (e.g., a child allowance in Argentina, the Bolsa Família Program in Brazil, a child tax benefit in Canada, guaranteed minimum pension income for low-income persons in Chile, expanding the non-means-tested child benefit in Ireland, and baby bond proposals in the US).
I was taken to task somewhat when I presented the preliminary findings at the 2007 Congress of the USBIG Network in New York, though I had retitled the paper, “The Death Knoll of BIG or BIG by Stealth” for dramatological purposes. Few Congress participants were willing to accept that basic income guarantees were dead-on-arrival policy options anywhere. One session participant, Conference of Religious Ireland (later Social Justice Ireland) Co-Director Father Seán Healy, contended that there was more going on in Ireland than what was visibly available online and in the BIEN Newsflashes and USBIG Newsletters, implying also that my research would benefit from more extensive collaboration with those on the ground who could provide greater nuances about UBI-related politics involved in each country.
I took Father Healy’s and likeminded comments from others to heart, realizing that a single-authored book on the topic was unfeasible, perhaps even foolhardy on my part, given the country-by-country variability of the politics and efficacy of advocacy efforts involved in getting the idea of a basic income guarantee on the public agenda.
Over time, I gathered a group of scholars to contribute to my edited volume, Basic Income Guarantee and Politics: International Experiences and Perspectives on the Viability of Income Guarantee, published in 2012 in the Palgrave Macmillan series Exploring the Basic Income Guarantee.
One of the things that impressed me about the BIEN and USBIG Congresses overall was the tone set by Professor Van Parijs. I found Professor Van Parjis quite personable and open to criticism, some of which came from me, though the most challenging perhaps from Rutgers University Law Professor Phil Harvey who clearly preferred job guarantees over income guarantees. I always felt welcome, as I suspect Professor Harvey did, given the number of papers we presented over the years at BIEN and USBIG Congresses. On several occasions, I heard Professor Van Parijs iterate that the primary role of BIEN was to promote discussion about the merits of the idea, about ethical and practical considerations that one might argue for and against UBI so that our collective thinking about it would be enhanced.
The prospect of UBI remains a scholarly interest of mine, though UBI seems a difficult sell politically in the US. Even the self-identified libertarian Charles Murray, one of UBI’s major proponents, acknowledged that UBI was a political nonstarter. Some traction can be found in the tech sector, as Professor Michael Lewis and I noted in our introduction to the special symposium on UBI in the Autumn 2016 issue of the Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare. I also included UBI as a policy option in the closing chapter of U.S. Social Welfare Reform. On occasion, I also continue to assign related readings for my social welfare policy classes.
Richard K. Caputo is professor of social policy and research at Yeshiva University’s Wurzweiler School of Social Work in New York City. This retrospective is adapted from a chapter in his forthcoming academic memoir, Connecting the Dots: An Intellectual Autobiography of a Social Work Academician.
At the end of 2016, the year in which BIEN celebrated the 30th anniversary of its birth, all Life Members were invited to reflect on their own personal journeys with the organization. See other contributions to the feature edition here.
