Saturday, August 29, 2020

Isn't Everyone Entitled to a Basic Income?

Back in the 1970s, when I was minister of the Unitarian Universalist Church in Meriden, Connecticut, civil unrest was sweeping our country, cities were burning because urban society had become frustrated and restless, black urban youth in particular were unable to find jobs because automation made many low wage jobs in urban areas redundant and manufacturing jobs were moving to where land was abundant and taxes were low, the welfare system was under attack by the conservative politicians of the right as promoting laziness and creating a disincentive to work and giving their money to the undeserving, the unpopular Viet Nam war was raging amidst anti-war protests, and I was foolish and idealistic enough to think that there was a better way. 

It was obvious to me and to others that one of the most disturbing implications of modern society was that workers were becoming less important to industrial development, over time blue collar jobs would be increasingly scarce and become more repetitive and less meaningful, automation would increase and many workers would become redundant, and consequently and inevitably unemployment would increase because fewer workers would be necessary to produce the goods needed by society. [This was long before industries were moving their factories to the under-developed world to save labor costs, thus reducing the need for domestic labor and increasing unemployment.]

Two ideas seemed to flow from this: first, that structural unemployment would become a fixture of modern society to which a better solution than welfare and unemployment insurance would have to be found, and second, income (monetized distribution of goods and services) needed to be separated from wage producing employment.  Providing everyone with a basic income was a radical idea at the time, but I proposed it in a Sunday sermon and a lengthy and vigorous discussion followed.  The issue got some press when the editor of the local paper wrote a front page article on the controversial topic.  The ensuing debate, which continued the discussion at a more heated level in letters to the editor and a call-in talk radio show, went on for some weeks afterward.

That concept, now called universal basic income, is alive and well, has been discussed in policy circles off and on for years, and has been developed and tried in some nations.  The two most often raised objections to giving everyone a guaranteed income are that (a) it disincentivizes work , that without the need to work for an income people would not work, jobs would go unfilled, and economic society would fail; and (b) it is immoral because it gives people something that they have not earned, generates laziness, and creates a society that is unfair because some people work and others do not. 

Both classes of objections are handily vanquished.  The first, that it disincentivizes work, is a factual assertion that has been tested and shown to be false.  While some people may choose not to be engaged in economically productive activity, many others are engaged in humanitarian, artistic or humanistic work.  The pandemic has taught us that people are eager to be productive whether to get back to work or back to the classroom. A guaranteed income eliminates homelessness and food insecurity; they are no longer social welfare problems. 

The philosophic and moral objection is a bit trickier to deal with, particularly for Americans, because our Victorian and Puritan ancestors have instilled in us the idea that work is a moral good and that its opposite, laziness or sloth, is sin.  However true it is that since Adam work has been necessary for our survival as a species, it is a bit of a stretch to the conclusion that work is therefore a moral good. 

The common assumption of society that income should be assigned on the basis of gainful economic employment in the production of goods and services may actually be unhelpful and unwise in our current economic circumstances.  I will oversimplify why that is true for the sake of this discussion and those interested can pursue it in more depth.  In brief our hunter-gathering ancestors were able to domesticate plants and animals, increasing their surplus production sufficiently to support trade, subsidize diversification of occupations to merchants, tool makers, artists of various kinds, soldiers, officials and priests.  Note that the accumulated surplus supported those who were not directly involved in economic production.

The industrial revolution and the accumulating surplus of capital eventually led to our current dilemma which is that there is now a serious imbalance in our economic life caused ultimately by the monetization of labor that can be described on the one hand as the shift in the accumulation of the rewards of labor into the hands of fewer and fewer people (which will ultimately result in the collapse of the economy), and on the other hand, an economic society that does not need everyone working at economically productive jobs to sustain our economy, creating increasing unemployment that unfairly and unreasonably restricts some people from earning a share of that surplus.  That inequitable imbalance has created social problems that society must fix.  If they are not fixed they will result in social instability.

Giving everyone a basic income goes a long way to fixing the problem of structural unemployment in American society.  [There is an additional factor that has to be considered: in the United States health care has most commonly been provided as an employment benefit and that also has to be disconnected from employment and become universally provided.]

This has been a long and not entirely satisfactory introduction both to the concept of universal basic income and to an important article in New Scientist that discusses scientific real world testing of the concept of universal basic income that debunks a basic criticism of universal basic income—that it creates a disincentive to work. 

Finland ran a two-year universal basic income study in 2017 and 2018, during which the government gave 2000 unemployed people aged between 25 and 58 monthly payments with no strings attached.

The payments of €560 per month weren’t means tested and were unconditional, so they weren’t reduced if an individual got a job or later had a pay rise. The study was nationwide and selected recipients weren’t able to opt out, because the test was written into legislation….

The study compared the employment and well-being of basic income recipients against a control group of 173,000 people who were on unemployment benefits.


Click <
HERE> to read the entire article.

The concept of Universal Basic Income needs to be fleshed out by Democratic Progressives into a workable Federal program, as a replacement for unemployment insurance, Social Security, housing subsidies, food stamps, school lunch programs,  welfare payments, and other Federal and State income subsidies, and implemented by the United States as a matter of both social and economic policy.

 

 

Discussion of this topic by readers is specifically encouraged.  Until this concept is understood through widespread discussion and debate it will not have enough sufficient acceptance to have any chance of being enacted into law. 

Saturday, August 8, 2020

The U. S. Is NOT a Christian Nation

 


A few days ago I received one of those annoying emails that circulate around the internet that encouraged the recipient with some urgency to forward it to everyone she knew.  The focus of that email was an ad by the Biden for President campaign directed toward Muslim Americans that encourages them to vote because that is the way change happens and that their vote matters.  The premise of the email, not specifically stated but implied by its urgent tone, is that our Christian nation is being overwhelmed by Muslims and encouraged by Biden to undermine our Christian values.  There is a link to that Biden ad with a breathless plea to watch all of it to see how far our Christian nation has strayed from its roots by catering to foreigners with different values. 

Usually I ignore these chain emails but this one came from a very conservative religious and lovely elderly lady who is a dear friend and she sent it to a lot of people we know in common.  Because of the urgency of the times and the dangerous spread of disinformation from domestic groups and meddling foreign trolls in advance of the election I concluded that I should respond.  Evangelical Christian assertions to the contrary, the fact is that the Founders consciously and intentionally established this nation to be free of and from religion.  They saw religion as divisive and wanted the new nation to be neutral with respect to religion so that each citizen could worship or not in accordance with his/her beliefs. 

The email in question said that every American needs to watch every second of Biden’s political ad and that it would make the hair stand up on your neck.  So I watched it—twice.  I did not see anything scary.  It was directed to Muslim Americans. It quoted from the Koran.  It urged all Americans to vote in accord with their values.  It seemed a normal political ad, similar to ads directed to specific groups to remind them we are in this struggle together for the soul of the nation—labor union members in the Midwest, or the Jewish community in South Florida, or Hispanics in the Southwest—and that their voice matters.

I replied to her, from which I quote some excerpts below, slightly edited:

As you requested I listened to every word.  What he said was that every vote counts and that EVERY AMERICAN whether they are Muslim, or Jew, or Christian, or Black matters and needs to make their voice heard.  He quoted selected peaceful quotations from the Koran, just as Christians quote selectively from the Bible.  He said that Muslim Americans have a right and duty to vote in a democracy.  Every political presidential campaign, including Trump, sends messages to select groups of voters whose votes it is seeking.  There is nothing that was said in that Biden ad that any American who believes in democracy, the right to vote, and a better and more caring world should disagree with.

I am concerned that there is a conscious and deliberate attempt by Trump and his supporters to fan racial hatred and to claim that Americans should not participate in the Black Lives Matter protests against the injustice of treating poor blacks differently than well off whites.  That is the not very hidden theme of Trump’s law and order movement, to limit and criminalize the right of Americans to protest and why it is so important that all Americans protect our civil liberties from the abuses and fascist tendencies of the current Attorney General, who tried to use military style tactics in the streets of Portland to deny protest and turn it into a war zone.

There are two things that seem to be implied by that forwarded email, that there was something wrong and disturbing about the Biden video because it sought to encourage Muslim Americans to vote in our Presidential election, and that the US is a Christian country endangered by Muslims.  The issue of the U.S. as a Christian nation has been argued before and is a matter clear in our history that has been intentionally distorted by Evangelical Protestant Christians since the 1950s who assert that the US was founded as a Christian nation.  It was NOT.  [I taught US history, back quite a few years ago.]

Many of the original 13 colonies were founded by religious groups, Puritans, ana-Baptists, Calvinists, Catholics, Quakers, etc. ALL WITH THE INTENT of getting away from Europe's oppressive church-state religions and insisting on the freedom to worship (or not) as they chose.  The Founding Fathers were clear--in order for the colonies of the new nation to exist peaceably with each other there could be no establishment of religion.  We would be a new nation established in freedom of and from religion, where the nation was neutral and the people were free to worship as they chose.  That is a fundamental premise of democracy.  [Here is an article I wrote on the U.S. as a Christian nation.] Most of the Founders, including Thomas Jefferson in particular, were not Christians, they were Deists.

These are troubling times and the danger of fascist solutions are tempting.  I hate that the Trump people are trying to sow discord and division and promoting racial hatred and White Nationalism under the guise of a narrow view of Christian religion that is amenable to limiting freedom.  Our country deserves better.  We need new national leadership that is committed to democracy, that has the will and the ability to solve our pandemic problems, and to re-establish our place in the world of free nations—not make things progressively worse.  It will take an election in November to achieve this.