WHEN I TOLD my oldest son I was writing about universal basic income (UBI), he said, “All I know is that the Silicon Valley guys are pushing it, so it must be bad.” And he had a point. UBI has entered U.S. political debate most prominently as Silicon Valley’s favorite solution to a problem mostly of its own creation—massive permanent job loss due to artificial intelligence and robotics.
Under a universal basic income policy, all U.S. citizens would receive from the government a regular, permanent payment of, say, $1,000 per month, regardless of their other income or employment status. It wouldn’t get rid of the grotesque income inequality in the U.S. In fact, it wouldn’t even guarantee each person a decent standard of living. But it would get everyone up to the official poverty level.
Tech industry UBI proponents include Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Tesla founder Elon Musk, and Amazon kingpin Jeff Bezos. But the idea is most identified with former Silicon Valley entrepreneur Andrew Yang, who made it the defining issue of his long-shot campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination.
Still, UBI is an idea much older and bigger than any of its shadier supporters. While the term “universal basic income” is of fairly recent coinage, the idea that every human deserves some share of the earth’s bounty is an old one. In 1797, one of America’s founding philosophes, Thomas Paine, wrote that “the earth, in its natural uncultivated state was, and ever would have continued to be, the common property of the human race.” But, Paine continued, “the system of landed property ... has absorbed the property of all those whom it dispossessed, without providing, as ought to have been done, an indemnification for that loss.”
Paine proposed a single payment at the attainment of adulthood as compensation for the loss of our natural right to the earth. Paine was echoing the ideas of some of the earliest Christian teachers, including St. Ambrose (340-397 C.E.), who wrote: “God has ordered all things ... so that there should be food in common to all, and that the earth should be the common possession of all. Nature, therefore, has produced a common right for all, but greed has made it a right for a few.”
So universal basic income is not just the latest Silicon Valley fad. It’s rooted in an understanding of the origins of wealth and of our obligations to each other that is consistent with both our democratic and religious traditions.
But that still leaves plenty of room for debate about whether UBI is the right solution for America’s most pressing social and economic woes.
How Would UBI Work?
ECONOMIC DEBATE OVER the past 50 years has offered a variety of UBI-type proposals, from Richard Nixon’s negative income tax to the social wealth dividend proposed by some contemporary democratic socialists. The best-known and most-debated current UBI plan is the one proposed by the Yang campaign. This version of UBI rests on three pillars:
First, it is “universal.” Everyone gets it, without conditions—from Warren Buffett down to the apparently able-bodied guy with the “Please Help” sign at the exit ramp. That, of course, raises the first blizzard of objections. Why give money to rich people who don’t need it or purportedly irresponsible people who might waste it?
Paying for UBI would almost certainly involve new taxes on the wealthy, so Warren Buffett wouldn’t be keeping his $1,000 per month. As to the fear of aiding the “undeserving poor,” it’s true that historically most of the meager social benefits offered in the U.S. are means-tested (for those with the very lowest incomes) and conditional upon some form of good behavior (hours worked, clean drug tests, etc.). This has helped create a culture that stigmatizes public benefits as “welfare” and brands beneficiaries as, if not sinful, at least defective.
As a result, these means-tested benefits, such as TANF, SNAP, Head Start, and Medicaid, can help breed ugly social divisions. Many Americans have incomes just above these programs’ qualifying levels, struggle miserably from paycheck to paycheck, and receive no public assistance at all. That’s a recipe for the kind of resentment that allows demagogic politicians to turn different groups of lower-income people against each other.
On the other hand, universal benefits, such as Social Security and unemployment insurance, or proposed ones such as UBI, single-payer health care, or tuition-free public higher education, build social solidarity, a sense that we are all in this American thing together, putting in what we can and getting back what we need.
Next, a UBI is “basic.” As most advocates envision it, UBI would provide enough money to keep a person alive and sheltered, but not enough to discourage someone from taking a job. Where UBI pilot programs have been implemented, people didn’t quit their jobs or refuse job offers, although some of them did reduce paid work hours to have more time for school or family.
And finally, UBI is “income.” It would have to be regular, dependable, and permanent money in the bank, something Congress couldn’t repeal the first time it wanted to avoid raising taxes.
Why Now?
THE ARGUMENT FOR UBI is founded on an understanding of what’s happened in our economy over the past half-century, and where we are headed next. According to the Economic Policy Institute, since the 1970s—due to globalization, automation, and shrinking unions—the incomes of ordinary working people in the U.S. have been stagnant. For men with only a high school education, they have actually been going down.
According to prominent UBI proponents, this is a fact of life unlikely to change. This summer, I read three recent books about UBI (Basic Income, by Guy Standing, Give People Money, by Annie Lowrey, and The War on Normal People, by Andrew Yang). All three of them frankly assumed that the changes wrought by globalization were inevitable. Capital will go where labor costs are lowest. Economic rewards will continue to flow to the managerial-professional elite and, they say, there is nothing we can do about this except ameliorate the damage with UBI.
The new thing UBI advocates see coming is a massive, unprecedented wave of automation. The Andrew Yang for President website claims: “In the next 12 years, 1 out of 3 American workers are at risk of losing their jobs to new technologies.” In the post-robot world, many of these replaced workers will never equal their current earnings. If anything, UBI advocates expect wages will continue to go down as more and more people are competing for the few remaining robot-proof jobs.
So if you assume that corporate priorities (i.e. globalization, automation, and union-busting) will continue to drive America’s economic policies, UBI makes sense as a way to limit the human toll.
“UBI receives support from economists on the right and left,” according to Enoch Hill, an assistant professor of economics at Wheaton College. This, he told me, is because “it’s an efficient way to address the plight of the poor. Under the current social safety net, for instance, the loss of unemployment benefits can make it undesirable for an unemployed person to take a low-paying job. UBI doesn’t distort the incentive structure the way that means-tested or conditional benefits can. It also could encourage innovation by allowing people to take a lower paying job that involved following a particular passion.”
Economist Charles Clark, a professor at St. John’s University, pointed out that two giants of economics in the 20th century, Milton Friedman on the right and John Kenneth Galbraith on the left, both supported some sort of universal basic income. To the objection that we can’t afford UBI, Clark says, “We were told we couldn’t afford Social Security either, and once we had it, it was obvious that we could.”
Hill also finds biblical support for UBI. “The Year of Jubilee in the Old Testament,” he said, “balances personal responsibility with the reality of generational poverty or societal injustices. So does UBI.”
‘The Next Right Thing’?
SO, UPON CLOSER examination, UBI could very well be what its proponents claim—a commonsense way to make sure that no one falls through society’s cracks. It would write “the least of these” into the social contract, and it’s something we probably should have someday. But, sorry Mr. Yang, that still doesn’t make it the next right thing to be done in the U.S. today. Even if one is sold on UBI in theory, there are still plenty of good reasons to be skeptical about it in practice.
For one thing, a universal basic income would inevitably lessen the pressure on employers to raise wages. Despite our much-vaunted “recovery” from the Great Recession, American workers still, on the whole, haven’t gotten a significant raise. The top U.S. corporations are sitting on enormous piles of cash, and those piles are now growing even faster as a result of the Trump corporate tax cut. However, corporations are mostly using those reserves not to raise pay for long-neglected workers, but for stock buybacks that have the effect of raising share value and thus enriching wealthy investors, including top corporate executives who get much of their pay in the form of stock options. UBI provides no incentive for companies to direct some of their wealth to their workers.
Mainstream economists profess to be mystified that wages haven’t gone up more despite recent record-low unemployment rates. But they are ignoring the obvious. In 1954, 34.8 percent of U.S. workers belonged to a union. In 1983, it was 20.1 percent, and today it’s only 10.5 percent. In the last half of the 20th century, economic gains for average Americans flowed from the power of organized labor forcing employers to share profits rather than hoard them. UBI in an economy without unions can only worsen the imbalance of power between employers and workers that is the root cause of our growing economic inequality.
Jane McAlevey has worked in and written about the labor movement for the past 20 years. She recently wrote in The Nation: “The proposals being debated today—placing workers on corporate boards, raising the minimum wage, establishing a universal basic income ... aren’t bad ideas. But they are a distraction from what workers need most: power.”
For better or worse, our dominant civil religion is the one founded by Ben Franklin with pithy proverbs such as “Diligence is the mother of good luck.” The Europeans who came to America aimed to replace the inherited aristocracy of the Old World with an earned aristocracy of hard work. The bias in favor of work has deep Christian roots as well. As Pope Francis wrote in Laudato Si, “Work is ... part of the meaning of life on this earth, a path to growth, human development, and personal fulfilment.”
Of course, work doesn’t have to mean slaving for a boss or building a business. Most Americans could probably be persuaded that other forms of work—such as homemaking, childrearing, caring for the elderly, nurturance of a community through civic and charitable action—serve the common good and should be compensated by society. But the idea that people should be given a stipend with no strings attached will be perceived by most working Americans as an insult to themselves and their striving ancestors.
Besides, there is no reason to take on this mission impossible when the goals of a UBI can be reached with a public job guarantee and a living wage.
It’s All About Jobs—And a Living Wage
THE MOST PROMISING direction for a nationwide job guarantee is suggested by the Green New Deal. If we want to pass on a livable earth to future generations, we have to get to zero carbon emissions by 2050. To do this, we will have to increase taxes on the rich to fund massive public investments in clean energy, upgraded infrastructure, and sustainable agriculture. These projects could generate millions of productive and meaningful blue-collar jobs for displaced factory workers and coal miners, and for people in inner cities and rural America who have left the workforce. Couple a Green New Deal with an equivalent investment in public education, child-care, and child-rearing, and you’re probably getting close to fulfilling a public job guarantee already.
As for a living wage, moving the minimum to $15 per hour is a crucial first step. A recent MIT study placed the average income required for an adequate U.S. standard of living at more than $60,000 per year for a family of four. That would roughly equal the earnings of two adults working fulltime at $15 per hour. This would at least guarantee a decent life for every two-parent household.
Of course, most jobs should pay more than minimum wage, and families with small children shouldn’t need two fulltime jobs to survive. But raising the minimum wage, indexing it to inflation, and taking measures to encourage union organizing would exert upward pressure on wages across the economy.
Compared to the one-step fix of the UBI, these other measures may seem incredibly complex and even politically impossible, but that’s only because we’re brainwashed by 40 years of corporate propaganda about what we can’t do and can’t afford. During Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, our government did put millions of people to work, rein in finance capital, spur the rapid growth of industrial unionism, and implement an array of universal social benefits.
No doubt, moving toward a Green New Deal with a job guarantee and a living wage for every American will require a massive upheaval in U.S. politics. It will require intense organizing and grassroots mobilization of ordinary people. However, in the process we might find that we’ve not only tackled economic inequality and climate change, we have also rebuilt the ties of solidarity and interdependence in what is now a tragically divided society.
From the birth of the labor and populist movements to the Poor People’s Campaign and beyond, this is how progress toward social justice has always been made in America. It takes ordinary people coming together, face-to-face, across all their cultural divisions, to work for big changes that will serve their common interests and shared values.
When all that’s done, if we still need a UBI, then we can talk.
Danny Duncan Collum, author of the novel White Boy, teaches writing at Kentucky State University in Frankfort.
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