It's Time For Universal Basic Income

 When I was a young boy during the 1940s and early 1950s our indoor recreation on Sunday afternoons particularly during inclement weather typically consisted of playing board games and listening to radio dramas of the Golden Age of radio. Most often the game we played was Monopoly. The premise of the game, which I am sure many older readers will recall, is disarmingly simple: to buy and sell property until you manage to bankrupt all the other players or one player has all the money and the game collapses on itself. 

By age 10 I learned that there were two ways to play the game, either the way intended by the rules to achieve the end game or to manage the game so that it went on indefinitely by loaning money to other players and selling them business entities cheaply. Which strategy I pursued depended on whom I was playing with. 

I am struck by how little I understood then about the obvious implications and lessons of Capitalism built into the game and how economic factors accelerated winners and losers as the game was played so as to increase the economic distance between the players. The game is a good metaphor for our current economic situation with its radically inequitable distribution of wealth and income and its rapid acceleration of the extremes between mega-billionaires and extreme poverty. To cite just one example (although the press is filled with instances), just three individuals—Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates and Warren Buffett—own more wealth than the bottom 165,000,000 people in the U.S. combined. 

This radical economic disparity has been increasing for decades. Go back in time to the 1970s when I was the young minister of the First Universalist Church in Meriden, Connecticut, a time when civil unrest was sweeping the nation, cities were burning because black urban society had become frustrated and restless, youth could not find jobs because automation had made many low wage jobs in urban areas redundant and manufacturing jobs were moving out of urban areas to where land was abundant and taxes were low, the welfare system was under attack by right wing politicians as promoting a disincentive to work and rewarding the undeserving, 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 a modern technological society was that workers would become less important to industrial development, blue collar jobs would become increasingly scarce and more repetitive, automation would increase and many more 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 moved their factories to the less-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 generating 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 European nations.  The two most frequent 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 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 tested¹ 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, and thus the need for welfare, and it frees up people to engage in a wide variety of productive albeit non-income producing activities. 

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 therefore 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 many 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 a 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, the creation of an economic society that does not need everyone working at economically productive jobs to sustain our economy, creating an unemployment problem that unfairly and unreasonably restricts some people from acquiring a share of that surplus.  That inequitable imbalance has created social problems that society must fix.  If they are not fixed the imbalance will result in calamitous social instability and upheaval. 

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 so health care has to be disconnected from employment and become universally distributed in some such approach as “Medicare For All.” 

There are a number of ways the concept of Universal Basic Income could be implemented, probably by some variant of an income tax credit with advance payments, but the concept 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. 

It will take a lot of social education and discussion until it acquires sufficient public acceptance to have any chance of being enacted into law.  If and when implemented universal basic income will go a long way toward solving our  national problem of economic injustice.

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This article is a substantially-revised version of  Isn't Everyone Entitled to a Basic Income? published here August 29, 2020

1 An important article in New Scientist  discusses a scientific real world test of the concept of universal basic income that debunks the criticism 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. 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.