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CQ Researcher

Universal Basic Income

Report

Author: Sarah Glazer

Pub. Date: 2017

Product: CQ Researcher

DOI: https://doi.org/10.4135/cqresrre20170908

Topics: Economic Analyses, Forecasts, and Statistics, Business and Economics, Economic Development,

Data and Statistics, Employment and Labor, Retirement, Pensions, and Social Security, Unemployment

and Employment Programs, Unions and Labor-Management Relations, Deficit, Federal Debt, and Balanced

Budget, Government Budget and Taxes, General International Relations, International Relations

Access Date: September 28, 2023

Publishing Company: CQ Press

City: Thousand Oaks

© 2017 CQ Press All Rights Reserved.

Introduction

The prospect of automation replacing workers has helped to revive an old idea: a government check covering

basic expenses paid to everyone. Silicon Valley proponents say a guaranteed income — or universal basic

income (UBI) — could be crucial in a future with less work to go around. The idea has won enthusiasts among

libertarian conservatives who see it as a less bureaucratic alternative to welfare, and liberals who say it could

combat inequality and wage stagnation. But UBI supporters on the right and left differ over whether to pay for

it by diverting money spent on existing welfare programs or raising taxes. Others dismiss the idea outright,

saying it would bust the budget and breed laziness. Still, trial efforts are underway in California, Finland and

Canada to investigate whether free cash encourages idleness or, alternatively, boosts education and health

— benefits found in 1970s-era American and Canadian experiments and among Alaskans and Native Ameri-

cans sharing community wealth.

Samantha Watson, a single mother and nursing student in Parsonsfield, Maine, has re-

ceived benefits from the nation's primary welfare program for low-income families, Tempo-

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rary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF). Unlike TANF, which requires recipients to prove

they are poor enough to qualify, the universal basic income envisioned by some propo-

nents would provide all citizens with a fixed stipend, regardless of income.

(Cover: Getty Images/Portland Express Herald/Brianna Soukup)

Overview

Scott Santens, a freelance writer in New Orleans, is living a life some social reformers only dream about.

Since last year he has been receiving $1,000 a month, no strings attached, from over 300 contributors via the

crowdfunding website Patreon, which supports artists, musicians and bloggers.

“I'm able to focus on what I most want to do,” Santens says, which is writing and advocating for an uncon-

ditional basic income, like the one he receives, for everyone. That financial freedom, he says, is possible

because of the knowledge that he won't go hungry or homeless if no work comes his way.

As a longtime freelancer who started in Web design, the 40-year-old says, “I feel like I've been living the

’future of work’ for my entire adult life,” referring to the trend of people increasingly relying on part-time, short-

term jobs with no benefits. “I don't have health care, I don't have unemployment insurance; I'm doing what I

can to earn money each month. That's really the direction we're headed — alternative forms of work where

people don't have these classical jobs for 40 hours a week.”

The idea of a universal basic income (UBI) is gaining renewed attention from governments and Silicon Valley's

tech industry, with experiments planned or ongoing in California, Canada, Finland, the Netherlands, Spain

and Kenya. With advocates on both the right and left, support for a UBI springs from concerns that increasing

automation and the growing gig economy could leave a huge number of Americans without permanent jobs,

as well as worries about growing income inequality, stagnating wages and rising welfare costs.

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Facebook co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg told the Harvard graduating class on May

25 that a universal basic income (UBI) should be explored “to make sure everyone has a

cushion to try new ideas.” Some Silicon Valley leaders advocate a UBI as a spur to entre-

preneurship and as a solution to job instability, which they expect growing automation to

exacerbate.

(Getty Images/Paul Marotta)

Others oppose the whole concept, saying it would cost too much and encourage idleness. And even support-

ers say a UBI is unlikely to be implemented anytime soon, in part because proponents disagree on how to

pay for it.

The idea of a universal basic income is not new. Republican President Richard M. Nixon proposed a guar-

anteed income in the 1970s, but the idea died in Congress. Two long-standing unconditional cash payment

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programs already exist in the United States, although neither is sufficient to cover living expenses. For the

past 35 years, every Alaskan has received an annual dividend, ranging in recent years from about $1,000

to $2,000, derived from the state's oil revenues. And since 1997, every member of the Eastern Band of the

Cherokee Nation has gotten a yearly cash dividend, ranging from $4,000 to $6,000, as their share of the

tribe's casino profits.1

Ideally, according to proponents, a UBI is a periodic cash payment covering essential needs, paid to every-

one, rich or poor, without any conditions attached. Advocates usually propose pegging it at or above the U.S.

poverty level of about $12,000 a year for each individual.2

A variation that guarantees a minimum income, known as the negative income tax, was tested in government-

run experiments in the United States and Canada in the 1970s. Under this approach, low-income individuals

receive payments totaling the difference between their income and a basic income established for the exper-

iment. Benefits are phased out as earned income rises.

Studies predicting that robots, artificial intelligence and new technologies — such as self-driving cars — will

soon eliminate jobs involving cognition and judgment have intensified worries over the impact of automation

on workers. A widely cited Oxford University study estimated that automation could replace 47 percent of

U.S. jobs, although other analyses put the proportion far lower.3 For instance, the Organisation for Economic

Co-operation and Development (OECD), an economic research organization in Paris made up of 35 member

countries, predicted that automation might replace only 9 percent of U.S. jobs, and the McKinsey Global In-

stitute think tank, looking at the question globally, put the figure at less than 5 percent.4

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Even without robots, the rapid growth of the so-called gig economy — based on temporary or part-time, non-

traditional jobs that typically provide no benefits — is raising similar concerns.5 Already, 40 percent of Amer-

ican workers are engaged in such “contingent” jobs, including standard part-time jobs and alternative work

arrangements, according to the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO).6 Some Silicon Valley leaders

advocate a basic income as a solution to such job instability, which they expect growing automation to exacer-

bate, and as a spur to entrepreneurship. Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg told the Harvard graduating

class in May that a UBI should be explored “to make sure everyone has a cushion to try new ideas.”7

Some in the tech industry think a free check could provide an unprecedented degree of creative and entrepre-

neurial freedom. Sam Altman, president of Y Combinator, a Mountain View, Calif., company that helps tech

startups, is planning to test how people would use their time by giving $1,000 a month, no strings attached,

to up to 3,000 individuals, starting next year.

“Fifty years from now … it will seem ridiculous that we used fear of not being able to eat as a way to motivate

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people,” Altman said.8

Silicon Valley's interest is “one part optimism and one part guilt,” for the jobs being eliminated by new tech-

nology and automation, says Natalie Foster, co-founder along with Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes of the

Economic Security Project, a $10 million, two-year initiative to explore the feasibility of a universal basic in-

come.

Former labor leader Andy Stern, who built the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) into the nation's

second largest union before retiring from the union presidency in 2010, says a UBI could return to workers

some of the bargaining power lost as labor unions have declined. And some libertarians are pushing for a

basic income as an alternative to current welfare programs. Welfare degrades “the traditions of work, thrift

and neighborliness,” according to Charles Murray, a libertarian political scientist at the conservative American

Enterprise Institute (AEI) think tank in Washington.9

Despite the unusual coalition of liberal and conservative supporters of a basic income, doubts remain that a

UBI could ever be adopted, partly because advocates differ widely on how to fund it and whether it should

replace all, some or no existing welfare programs. Others, also on both the right and left, oppose it outright.

Some opponents say a UBI would bust the federal budget. A UBI financed entirely by tax increases “would re-

quire the American people to accept a level of taxation that vastly exceeds anything in U.S. history,” according

to Robert Greenstein, president of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a liberal anti-poverty think tank

in Washington.10 Paying every American $10,000 a year would cost more than $3 trillion — three-quarters of

the entire federal budget and equal to all current federal tax revenue, according to the center.

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Providing a limited sum to all Americans, rich and poor, would likely increase political pressure to reduce cur-

rent levels of welfare assistance and eliminate Social Security and other bedrock social programs, Greenstein

has warned.

Pavlina Tcherneva, an economist at Bard College, in Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y., says UBI money would be

better spent on a guaranteed-job program, which could be reduced as unemployment falls. A UBI providing

everyone a living wage would cost 20–35 percent of GDP, she says, but a program guaranteeing the unem-

ployed a job would cost only 2–4 percent.

In addition, joblessness “affects one's psyche and well-being,” she says, citing research linking stretches of

unemployment to ill health.

Others say a UBI would encourage laziness. “We already know that unemployment benefits discourage peo-

ple from working,” wrote Daniel Mitchell, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank in Wash-

ington that promotes a free-market ideology. “Why would anyone think we'll get better results if we give gen-

erous handouts to everyone?”11

However, a recent review of research on what people do with unconditional cash payouts — such as the

Alaska and Cherokee dividends — found that, on average, recipients reduce the number of hours they work

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only slightly, if at all. The extra income also leads to improvements in education and health, according to the

review, released by the Roosevelt Institute, a liberal think tank in New York City.12

Michael Bohmeyer, an entrepreneur in Berlin, is conducting an experiment to explore

whether a universal basic income (UBI) would be workable. In 2014 he founded Mein Grun-

deinkommen (My Basic Income), funded by crowd sourcing, which raffles off a one-year ba-

sic income of 1,000 euros a month to random individuals. A majority of residents of the

28-nation European Union would support a referendum calling for a UBI. Countries such as

Finland and the Netherlands already are studying some form of UBI.

(AFP/Getty Images/Steffi Loos)

Given such improvements in well-being, “If people choose to work a little less, then it's not clear you should

judge a decrease in work as a bad thing,” says Ioana Marinescu, an economist at the University of Pennsyl-

vania and author of the review.

Foster concedes that the idea of a universal basic income is “far off politically.” Interim steps might get more

political traction, she says, such as imposing a carbon tax on industrial polluters and returning the revenue to

citizens, an idea favored by some environmentalists and some conservatives.

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The conservative Niskanen Center think tank in Washington has proposed a universal annual federal benefit

of $2,000 per child.13 As a step toward that goal, the center supports an expanded child tax credit proposed

by Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla. And Rep. Ro Khanna, a California Democrat who represents Silicon Valley, has

suggested doubling the existing Earned Income Tax Credit, which reduces the amount of tax owed by low-

and moderate-income workers. Workers whose credits exceed their tax liability receive a refund for the differ-

ence.14

As the nature of work changes radically, both work and welfare will need to be overhauled, say UBI propo-

nents. “Ultimately we have to rewrite the social contract for the 21st century for the way people work today,”

says Foster.

As government officials, legislators, scholars and advocates for the poor consider evolving U.S. economic

and social trends, here are some of the questions being debated:

Is a universal basic income with no conditions a good idea?

The most radical feature of a universal basic income as envisioned by some proponents would be the ab-

sence of conditions on recipients. In contrast, most welfare programs today are “means-tested,” requiring

recipients to prove they are poor enough to qualify. And in-kind welfare, such as food stamps, can be ex-

changed only for specific types of groceries.15

Such conditions are paternalistic and invasive, UBI advocates say. Already, some welfare recipients trade

food stamps for rent, indicating that current restrictions do not provide what people need, says Diane Pagen,

a New York City social worker and co-founder of Basic Income Action, a national organization that advocates

for a UBI. “I have thousands of stories where people could have solved their problem if someone [in the wel-

fare system] had just handed them money,” she says.

Under the nation's primary welfare program for low-income families, Temporary Assistance for Needy Fam-

ilies (TANF), states can spend their federal funds to promote a range of other goals such as encouraging

marriage, instead of providing cash assistance.16 “Poor people cannot eat these services,” Pagen has ob-

jected.17

That trend has been increasing since Congress rewrote the nation's welfare law in 1996, turning it into a block

grant program in which states had more freedom in how they spend their TANF funds. Since then, the per-

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centage of TANF funds distributed as cash assistance has dropped from 70 percent in 1997 to less than a

quarter in 2015.18

In defense of imposing conditions on welfare recipients, AEI resident scholar Michael Strain wrote: “We need

a little paternalism. If we take money from John to give to Matthew … then we owe it to John” to make sure

the money is spent on food and shelter, “not on Matthew's alcohol and gambling.”19

Former President Barack Obama said that the rise of technology and artificial intelligence

has made consideration of a universal basic income inevitable. “Whether a universal in-

come 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,” Obama told Wired magazine.

(Getty Images/Charlotte Observer/David T. Foster)

However, research on how members of the Eastern Band of the Cherokee Nation spend their casino divi-

dends showed teen substance abuse and drug dealing declining among recipient families.20 “You don't need

to resort to those things” if you have economic security, researcher Marinescu says.

Some anti-poverty advocates say a UBI would increase both poverty and inequality by using welfare funds

now spent on the poorest two-fifths of the population to provide cash to people of all income levels. The pay-

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ments would have to be smaller than current welfare benefits, according to Greenstein, of the Center on Bud-

get and Policy Priorities, if spread so widely.21

Komal Sri-Kumar, a senior fellow at the Milken Institute, a nonpartisan economic think tank in Santa Monica,

Calif., has argued that a UBI could help alleviate stagnating low-income wages. And if everyone received a

government check, it would reduce the “shame at receiving handouts,” he wrote.22

That hypothesis was supported by a basic-income experiment known as MINCOME, conducted in Dauphin,

a rural town in Canada's Manitoba Province, in the 1970s, according to a recent analysis of recipient surveys

conducted at the time. The government automatically supplemented residents' income when it fell below a

certain level, which happened periodically in a farming town subject to crop failures. Participants reported their

income by mail monthly, without being subjected to “invasive and degrading caseworker discretion,” writes

David Calnitsky, a sociologist at the University of Manitoba.23

Only 6 percent of MINCOME participants said they would accept welfare, which most viewed negatively. One

resident thought welfare was for people “too lazy to work” but viewed MINCOME as a stopgap for when he

was “short of money.” Participation in MINCOME “did not produce social stigma,” Calnitsky concludes, the-

orizing that occurred because the program was offered to all without distinguishing between the “deserving”

and “undeserving” poor.24

Oren Cass, a senior fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute think tank in New York City, rejects the

whole UBI concept. “A UBI that reduces the perceived importance of work while putting cash in [young peo-

ple's] pockets can only reduce the likelihood of their making the daily trek to low-wage jobs” — the first rung

on the ladder to upward mobility, he wrote.25

The current conditions attached to government aid are rooted in widely shared American values about who

deserves help, critics of an unconditional UBI maintain. “We had a problem of children who didn't have enough

food to eat, so we started food stamps,” says Strain. “We had elderly Americans dying in tenement houses,

so we started Social Security.”

Once lawmakers face large numbers of constituents with such problems, he predicts, “It wouldn't take long

for a universal basic income to turn into our current safety net.”

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Would a universal basic income improve quality of life?

When the United States and Canada conducted the first guaranteed income experiments in the 1970s, politi-

cians wanted to know if a basic stipend could be structured to encourage more welfare recipients to work.

The experiments paid stipends only to low-income individuals and families, so the payments were not the

population-wide, universal basic income favored by many advocates today.

Conventional wisdom held that welfare recipients were reluctant to take jobs because for every dollar they

earned the government would reduce their welfare benefits by the same amount. To reduce that work disin-

centive, both governments created a variation of the so-called negative income tax, generally deducting only

50 cents in benefits for every dollar earned. Benefits would be phased out once a recipient's income reached

a specific level.26 However, when the initial results of the largest portion of the U.S. experiment — in Seattle

and Denver — were reported in the 1970s, congressional lawmakers were dismayed to learn that recipients

apparently had worked less — not more.

Yet recent analyses of those results showed that recipients did not stop working in droves but simply reduced

the number of hours they worked. And more recently, researchers have found that the extra income and free-

dom to work fewer hours may have improved recipient families' quality of life.

In the U.S. experiments, which provided a family of four up to $25,900 a year in today's dollars, households

reduced their work hours by about 13 percent across the programs in four states — New Jersey, Pennsylva-

nia, Iowa, North Carolina — and in Seattle, Denver and Gary, Ind.27 But male heads of households reduced

their work hours by only about 7 percent. The biggest reductions (17 percent) occurred among wives and

single mothers. Teens also delayed entering the workforce and stayed in high school longer.28

Similarly, in the Canadian experiment in Dauphin, many women used the stipend to take longer maternity

leaves, which “was also happening in the United States,” says Evelyn Forget, a University of Manitoba econ-

omist whose influential 2011 analysis concluded the extra income improved quality of life in Dauphin. While it

had been common for teenage boys from low-income families in Dauphin to drop out of high school to work,

during the experiment they were more likely to graduate, Forget found. Families invested in their sons' edu-

cation “to prepare for better lives going forward,” she says.

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A recent Roosevelt Institute study examining the 1970s experiments and the cash dividends paid to Alaskans

and Cherokee tribal members concluded that the programs either had no impact on the number of hours

recipients worked or resulted in only a moderate decrease. In Alaska, the study found, about 2 percent of

recipients shifted to part-time work.

Overall, there was “a significant increase in other quality-of-life benefits,” such as improved mental and phys-

ical health, increased education, better parenting and reduced criminal activity.29

Likewise, casino revenue payments to Cherokees improved mental health among tribal members, according

to the study. The additional income for the poorest households led to an extra year of schooling.

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And for the children of negative income tax recipients in the United States and Canada, school attendance,

grades and test scores typically were higher than for similar families, especially among younger and poorer

children. Child nutrition also improved in two rural states where residents received the extra income.30

While the early Canadian and U.S. experiments involved only low-income individuals and families, Bard econ-

omist Tcherneva warns that a truly universal stipend could spur “very disruptive” inflation. For example, if large

numbers of workers were to quit their low-paid McDonald's job in response to more money in their pockets,

McDonald's would have to raise wages to attract workers and raise hamburger prices to cover the higher la-

bor costs. “Now their burger is three times more expensive, and the value of their basic income is eroded,”

she says.

Michael Howard, co-editor of the journal Basic Income Studies and a professor of philosophy at the University

of Maine, counters that a guaranteed basic income would remunerate those who do a large amount of unpaid,

socially valuable work, such as childcare and elder care. “Basic income is a way to address that without sur-

veillance from the welfare state,” says Howard.

But Philip Harvey, a professor of law and economics at Rutgers Law School in Camden, N.J., co-author of

America's Misunderstood Welfare State, and an advocate of a job guarantee, says paid parental leave and a

benefit check for every child would be more effective in allowing women to stay home with their children.

Many question what life would be like if it were no longer centered around paid work. But some UBI advocates

say the stipend they're proposing, typically $1,000 a month, would only help cover essential needs and not

be enough to provide a comfortable life.

American society is already shifting away from older generations' “work-centric” worldview, says former labor

union leader Stern, now a senior fellow with the Economic Security Project, which funds research on UBI ap-

proaches. Younger people, who are having a hard time finding a stable job, “are not as impressed with the

value of work,” he says. “They work so they can do other things.”

Middle-class parents already provide a form of basic income to their grown children — subsidizing their rent

or covering emergency expenses, Stern points out. But poor people don't have that opportunity. “Having a

regular monthly check … allows a woman in an abusive relationship to walk away,” he says. And it “allows

workers to walk away from a bad job.”

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Some advocates of a basic income, such as Stern, also point out that the tax code is rife with deductions that

disproportionately benefit higher earners. Some of those loopholes could be plugged to finance a UBI.31

Can governments afford a universal basic income?

Estimates vary enormously on how much a UBI would cost, depending on how much recipients would receive,

how it would be funded and — often — the ideological viewpoints of the proponents.

“A lot people on the left see UBI as an add-on to existing welfare programs; they don't want to cut any existing

programs; they want to raise taxes. Folks on the libertarian, conservative end, say, ’Cash out existing pro-

grams and replace them,’” observes Michael Tanner, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute. Like many libertari-

ans, Tanner says he could not support a UBI that required raising taxes.

At the far right end of the political spectrum, AEI scholar Murray proposes eliminating all federal and state

welfare and social insurance programs, including Social Security and Medicare, as well as federal transfers

— or subsidies — to “favored groups” such as farmers. That would save more than $2 trillion a year, he says,

which he would then divide equally among all U.S. citizens ages 21 and up. That would provide enough to

pay every adult an annual guaranteed income of $13,000, he calculates.32 If such a UBI program had begun

in 2014, it would have cost $212 billion a year less than existing income redistribution programs, Murray con-

cludes.33

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Shianne Bowlang and her mother wait for groceries at a food bank in Welch, W. Va., on May

20. Some advocates for the needy say the nation's poorest would be worse off with a uni-

versal basic income (UBI) than under current safety net programs. The Center on Budget

and Policy Priorities says that replacing food stamps, TANF, the earned income tax credit

and Social Security with a UBI would plunge the poor deeper into poverty.

(Getty Images/Spencer Platt)

Many liberals dismiss Murray's proposal as impractical, largely because of the enormous popularity of Social

Security. The scheme is more attractive to conservative libertarians, who share his view that, given all the mil-

lions spent on anti-poverty programs and the millions who are still in poverty, “Only a government can spend

so much money so ineffectually.”34

Sharing some of the same frustrations, former labor leader Stern has proposed eliminating some of the same

welfare programs as has Murray. However, he would pay all 18- to 64-year-olds $12,000 a year while retain-

ing Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid but scrapping food stamps, housing assistance and the Earned

Income Tax Credit.35 To help pay for his program, costing up to $2.5 trillion per year, Stern proposes intro-

ducing new taxes, including a tax on financial transactions.36

Recently, basic income proponents have been eying other revenue sources that could help pay for a UBI,

such as a carbon tax on air polluters, with some of the proceeds going to residents as rebates.37 Such a tax

could provide a rebate of about $160 a month — or $1,920 a year — for a family of four by 2032, according

to a new study cited by an environmentalist-labor coalition pushing for a carbon tax in Washington, D.C.38

Although that amount would not cover essentials, it could help lower the cost of a basic income, say propo-

nents. Boosting taxes on high-income Americans could help raise the rest, they say.39

Many experts doubt that even wealthy countries could afford a basic income. A recent OECD report found that

in most rich countries, converting existing cash welfare programs to a universal income for everyone under

65 and leaving Social Security in place would only provide a stipend below the poverty level. Poverty rates

would grow, the authors concluded, particularly among the unemployed and single parents, who now receive

more in welfare than a UBI would provide.40

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Some U.S. advocates for the poor agree that the very poorest would be worse off under a UBI than under

current welfare programs. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities estimates that more than 42 percent of

Americans are lifted out of poverty by food stamps, TANF, the Earned Income Tax Credit and Social Securi-

ty.41 Replacing all or most of those safety-net programs would plunge the poor deeper into poverty, according

to Greenstein, the center's president.

Alternatively, raising the basic income to the same level provided by most national welfare payments would

require substantial tax increases, according to economist James Browne, who co-authored the OECD report.

“The prospect of having to very significantly increase taxes would make it difficult for a government to intro-

duce,” he says.

In an editorial, the free-market Economist magazine condemned the UBI idea as “fantastically costly.” The

United States could afford to pay a basic income of $10,000 a year, the editorial said, only if it raised taxes to

the same level as Germany's — equal to 35 percent of GDP instead of the current U.S. level of 26 percent —

and replaced all existing welfare programs and Social Security. In addition, the editorial said, if wealthy coun-

tries adopted such a UBI, they would have to either close their borders to immigrants or create a second-class

citizenry excluded from the benefits.42

“It just doesn't work,” said Jason Furman, former chief economic adviser to President Barack Obama and now

a professor at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. “You would need to double the current income tax

to make it work.”43

Tanner, who calls himself a “sympathetic skeptic” when it comes to a UBI, says he hasn't figured out how it

could be financed without raising taxes. For example, Tanner says Murray's basic income would pay for it-

self, but only because Murray would gradually tax back the stipend as a person's earned income rose above

$30,000. By the time a recipient's outside earnings reached $60,000, the basic income would be slashed in

half under Murray's approach.44

“If you do that you begin to create work disincentives,” much like existing welfare programs, Tanner says. A

2013 Cato Institute study found that in 35 states a mother with two children participating in seven common

welfare programs could receive more than what she would earn from a minimum-wage job.45

“Right now we do a reasonable job of taking care of material poverty but a poor job of making people masters

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of their own lives,” says Tanner. “A UBI could potentially do both of those, but the devil is in the details.”

Background

Founding Ideas

English radical Thomas Paine, who emigrated to America in 1774 and ardently supported the American Rev-

olution, argued in a 1797 pamphlet, “Agrarian Justice,” that each U.S. citizen should receive a basic financial

stake upon reaching age 21 and an old-age pension upon reaching 50. Arguing that the Earth was “the com-

mon property of the human race,” Paine proposed that every owner of cultivated lands be charged rent, which

would fund the stipends and compensate citizens for the loss of their “natural inheritance.”46

Although his proposal was never adopted, it has inspired advocates of a basic income for more than 200

years.

In 1848, German philosopher Karl Marx, in his Manifesto of the Communist Party, advocated the redistribution

of wealth, an idea that would later become a tenet of communist governments and influence socialist move-

ments worldwide.

To undermine support for socialism and build workers' support for the German empire, Chancellor Otto von

Bismarck between 1883 and 1889 set up the first comprehensive system of compulsory workers' insurance,

covering illness and old age. His approach helped lay the theoretical basis for programs, such as Social Se-

curity in the United States, typically funded by contributions from workers.47

By the 1920s, worries about accelerating technology led British engineer C. H. Douglas to propose a gov-

ernment-paid “social credit” to make up the difference between wages and the rising cost of goods. But such

notions, tied to national wealth, would play little part in the rise of social security, the minimum wage and wel-

fare programs in Europe and the United States, which were generally tied to work.48

As Europe was recovering from World War I, the idea of a basic income gained popularity among some Eu-

ropean philosophers and politicians. In 1918 British philosopher Bertrand Russell wrote in Roads to Freedom

that human beings have a fundamental right to a basic income “sufficient for necessaries … whether they

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work or not.”49

That same year, British Quaker political leader and Labor Party member Dennis Milner argued for a weekly

“state bonus” to end widespread poverty in postwar Britain. Economist James Meade endorsed Milner's idea,

saying publicly owned assets should finance a “social dividend.”50

In the United States, the basic income idea gained currency during the Depression in the 1930s, especially

among citizens impatient with Democratic President Franklin D. Roosevelt's (1933–45) failure to end the De-

pression in his first 100 days in office. In 1934, Louisiana's populist Democratic Sen. Huey Long proposed a

Share Our Wealth program, to tax the rich and give every “deserving family” a stake equaling “one third of the

average wealth” — enough to own a comfortable home, car and radio — coupled with a guaranteed annual

income.51

Long's program was soon overshadowed by Roosevelt's New Deal programs, which Roosevelt privately ad-

mitted to an adviser was his attempt to “steal Long's thunder.”52 In 1935, FDR proposed his Second New

Deal, including Social Security pensions for the aged, although it excluded domestic and farm workers, among

the poorest working Americans.53 Included in the Second New Deal was Aid to Dependent Children, which

provided minimum income assistance to fatherless families with children. It was renamed in 1962 Aid to Fam-

ilies with Dependent Children (AFDC) and in 1996 became Temporary Assistance to Needy Families. The

1996 welfare reform act, which imposed work requirements and a five-year lifetime limit on benefits, remains

the principal welfare program for poor families today.54

In 1938, Congress enacted the first minimum hourly wage, set at 25 cents, under the Fair Labor Standards

Act. It also required overtime pay for hours worked over a set number of weekly hours.55

War on Poverty

In the 1960s, poverty was still pervasive in the United States, even though the nation had emerged from

World War II as the world's richest country and was experiencing generally high employment and economic

growth.56

In 1964, Democratic President Lyndon B. Johnson proposed his Great Society programs, also known as the

War on Poverty. One was the food stamp program, now known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Pro-

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gram (SNAP), which provides food vouchers for low-income people.57

But even liberals were skeptical that Johnson's programs could eradicate poverty. In 1964, more than 1,000

economists signed a document urging Congress to adopt a system of income guarantees — “a decent basic

income,” in the words of signatory and Harvard economist John Kenneth Galbraith.58

In his 1967 book Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. deliv-

ered a withering critique of welfare. Instead of a patchwork of programs aimed at individual needs like housing

or hunger, “the solution to poverty is to abolish it directly by a now widely discussed measure: the guaranteed

income,” the civil rights leader wrote.59

Conservatives also disliked welfare programs, but for different reasons. Welfare rolls were rising rapidly de-

spite high employment, as were rates of fathers deserting children and out-of-wedlock births. The female-

headed family had become “the symbol of welfare dependency,” according to Harvard sociologist Daniel P.

Moynihan, who as an adviser to Republican President Nixon championed a guaranteed national income.60

Some conservatives said the AFDC program had a built-in work disincentive: For every dollar earned, a wel-

fare recipient lost a dollar in benefits. Originally designed for widowed mothers, the program could withdraw

assistance if a father was in the household, which critics said encouraged desertion, divorce and unwed moth-

erhood.61

As an alternative, conservative economist Milton Friedman had proposed a negative income tax in his 1962

book, Capitalism and Freedom, which Moynihan called a “spanking good idea.” The tax would give poor peo-

ple the cash difference between what they earned and the income necessary for a decent standard of living.

Friedman's approach “would give less as earnings increased but never to the point of canceling all advantage

of increased earnings,” Moynihan explained.62

A presidential commission had recommended a guaranteed income funded by a version of Friedman's neg-

ative income tax in 1969. That same year, Nixon proposed a basic federal payment of $1,600 for a family of

four (about $10,881 in today's dollars) as an improvement over services from a bureaucracy. “The best judge

of each family's priorities is that family itself,” Nixon said.63

Although passed by the House in 1970, Nixon's Family Assistance Plan died in the Senate, due to “an unlikely

combination of liberals and conservatives,” says Leslie Lenkowsky, a professor emeritus of public affairs and

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philanthropic studies at Indiana University, Bloomington, who helped staff hearings for Moynihan when he

was a Democratic senator from New York (1977–2001). Conservatives opposed Nixon's plan as too costly

and a disincentive for work, according to Lenkowsky. Moynihan blamed the defeat equally, if not more so, on

liberals “who wanted more, not less than it provided.”64

The idea was taken up again during the 1972 presidential campaign, when unsuccessful Democratic nominee

George McGovern, a U.S. senator from South Dakota, proposed a $1,000 “demogrant” devised by economist

James Tobin.

Early Experiments

Between 1968 and 1980, the federal government tested the impact of providing a guaranteed monthly income

to low-income families in experiments in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Iowa, North Carolina and in Gary, Ind.;

Seattle and Denver. The largest, conducted in Seattle and Denver, became the center of attention when Con-

gress again debated a version of a basic income in 1977–78.

In 1977, Democratic President Jimmy Carter proposed an anti-poverty scheme — the Program for Better

Jobs and Income — that included a jobs program and a form of the negative income tax. The administration

requested a basic annual payment of $4,200 ($16,449 in today's dollars) for a family of four, with each dollar

earned reducing the benefit by 50 cents. The payments would be eliminated when outside income reached

$8,400.65

Moynihan, by then a senator holding hearings on Carter's proposal, turned against the idea, citing results

from the Seattle and Denver experiments that appeared to show recipients working less and divorcing more

often.66 In a letter to the conservative National Review, Moynihan wrote: “But were we wrong about a guaran-

teed Income! Seemingly it is calamitous. It increases family dissolution by some 70 percent, decreases work,

etc.”67

Headlines such as “Income Plan Linked to Less Work,” and “Guaranteed Income Against Work Ethic” ap-

peared in newspapers after the hearings. Carl Rowan, a Washington Star columnist and a former official in

the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, was among the few journalists who said it might be acceptable for

people working in bad jobs to work less.68

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Over the past decade, however, researchers re-examining the evidence from those experiments have pointed

out that most of the cutback in working hours occurred among wives, single mothers or teen family members

— not heads of households. Primary earners reduced their work hours by only about 7 percent, on average,

while wives cut theirs by 27 percent and single mothers by 15 to 30 percent. Younger earners cut their work

hours and some stayed in school longer. Some analysts said earlier findings of increased divorce rates were

erroneous.69

Other scholars have suggested that some recipients, fearing they could lose welfare benefits, may not have

reported all of their earnings, according to researcher Marinescu, so they may have been working more hours

than was reported.

The Carter administration's plan fared no better than Nixon's. It passed the House in 1979 but died in the

Senate. The government jobs proposed by Carter raised the cost of the program and led to opposition from

conservatives worried about both costs and work disincentives.

Just as the U.S. experiments were winding down, similar experiments were starting in Canada. However, the

data from those experiments was not analyzed until 2011, when economist Forget published her findings that

the Dauphin experiment had led to higher graduation rates, more women staying home and reduced hospi-

talizations.

After Carter's failure, discussion of a guaranteed income died in the U.S. political arena. Politicians preferred

benefits tied to work, such as the Earned Income Tax Credit, which had been enacted in 1975 and which

subsidized the income of low-wage workers, supplying about $3,400 for a family with one child today.

However, the payments to two communities that shared the wealth of unexpected windfalls — Alaskans and

the North Carolina Cherokees — are often cited as a form of universal basic income.

In 1976, as the Trans-Alaska pipeline project neared completion, Alaskan voters passed an amendment to

the state constitution mandating that at least 25 percent of the money earned from the state's oil revenues,

including income from mineral leases and royalties, be placed into a permanent fund, so the state could share

its oil profits with future generations. Since 1982, the state has distributed annual dividends, ranging in recent

years from about $1,000 to a peak of $2,072 per person in 2015, to all permanent residents, including chil-

dren.70 However, that dividend has been imperiled as the price of oil has fallen in recent years.

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In 1996, North Carolina's Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians opened its first casino and began sharing profits

with tribal members — an annual dividend of up to $6,000 per person. Within five years, the dividend had

halved the number of Cherokees living below poverty. Researchers also attributed other benefits to the div-

idend: a decline in crime, rising high school graduation rates and a lower likelihood of children and teens

suffering from drug or alcohol abuse.71

Chronology

18th–19th Centuries

Proposals emerge for a form of universal basic income (UBI).

1900s–1930s

Philosophers and politicians propose various types of basic income to combat poverty.

1797

Thomas Paine proposes giving every citizen 15 pounds at age 21, funded by a land tax.

1883

Germany establishes first social insurance program.

1918

In Britain, philosopher Bertrand Russell says people have a right to basic income

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1960s–1970s

A guaranteed minimum income is proposed to fight poverty.

whether they work or not; Quaker leader Dennis Milner proposes a weekly “state bonus”

and economist James Meade suggests financing it with public assets.

1934

Populist U.S. Sen. Huey Long, D-La., proposes taxing the rich to give each “deserving”

family a guaranteed income.

1935

President Franklin D. Roosevelt proposes Social Security for seniors.

1938

U.S. enacts first minimum wage.

1962

Conservative economist Milton Friedman proposes a negative income tax — a supple-

mental income for those earning below a certain amount.

1964

Democratic President Lyndon B. Johnson creates food stamp program.

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1967

Civil rights activist Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. supports guaranteed income as an alter-

native to welfare.

1968

Federal government tests a negative income tax, with pilot programs in four states, Seat-

tle, Denver and Gary, Ind.

1969

Republican President Richard M. Nixon proposes guaranteed income.

1970

U.S. House passes Nixon plan, but Senate rejects it.

1972

Democratic presidential candidate George McGovern proposes a guaranteed minimum

income.

1974

Canadian government tests guaranteed income in Dauphin, Manitoba.

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1980s–2000s

Alaska, Cherokees establish basic income-style payments to residents and tribal members;

new studies revive interest in basic guaranteed income.

1975

Congress passes Earned Income Tax Credit to supplement working people's income.

1977

Democratic President Jimmy Carter proposes guaranteed income.

1978

Experiments in Denver and Seattle find recipients of a negative income tax work less

and divorce more often, spurring objections to Carter's plan.

1979

House passes Carter's revised minimum income plan, but it dies in Senate.

1982

Alaska begins sending each resident an annual dividend from oil revenues.

1996

Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians begins sharing casino profits with tribal members in

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an annual payment; research finds health, education benefits.

2011

New research finds Canada's 1970s basic income in Dauphin improved health, educa-

tion.

2016

Swiss voters reject UBI in referendum…. Washington state rejects carbon tax-rebate

ballot initiative…. Gov. Bill Walker, R-Alaska, slashes state dividend by half amid falling

oil prices.

2017

Finland and Ontario, Canada, begin two-year basic income experiments…. California

business incubator Y Combinator starts pre-pilot UBI project…. Washington, D.C., and

five states propose a carbon emissions tax and using the revenues to help finance a

UBI.

2018

Y Combinator scheduled to begin UBI experiment in two states.

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Current Situation

New Interest

While no nation has implemented an unconditional UBI, the idea is gaining international attention. Several

governments and nonprofit groups are studying the concept, usually through small-scale pilot projects as pos-

sible precursors to legislative action.

However, in a recent expression of negative sentiment, Swiss voters last year overwhelmingly rejected an

initiative that would have required the government to move toward an unconditional monthly UBI of about

$2,500. The Swiss government had opposed the move as “ruinously expensive and morally corrosive,” The

Economist reported, because officials believed it would encourage recipients to stop working.72

In the United States, some UBI advocates view several legislative proposals to provide rebates or tax credits

to Americans as an interim step to a UBI. Foremost among those is a proposal to expand the child tax credit,

which currently is pegged at up to $1,000 for each child under 17.73 An expanded credit could become part

of a tax reform package being discussed on Capitol Hill.

Sam Hammond, a poverty and welfare analyst for the Niskanen Center, says a bipartisan coalition is forming

to lobby for an increase in the child tax credit, proposed by Sen. Rubio. Rubio has recommended boosting

the credit from $1,000 to $2,500 per child and making it refundable, meaning that workers earning an income

too low to pay taxes could still receive the credit in the form of a refund from the federal government. Rubio

met with President Trump's daughter Ivanka in June, which led to a White House statement of support for the

idea.74

Hammond had co-authored a paper last year proposing a monthly universal “guaranteed minimum income for

kids,” a child allowance similar to those offered in Canada and Europe.75 But expanding the child tax credit

looks more politically feasible, he says, and could be an interim step to a universal child allowance.

Hammond cites Canada's experience with a child allowance. Canada pays a family with two children under

age 6 $12,800 a year ($10,000 in U.S. dollars) — the equivalent of a basic income.76 “It's dramatically cut

child poverty,” says Hammond. “You can't point to any other country where you're sending households this

amount of cash unconditionally with no work requirement.”

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However, the average Canadian family now spends 42.5 percent of its income on federal, provincial and local

taxes — up more than 2,000 percent since 1961 and more than the average amount spent on basic neces-

sities such as housing, food and clothing combined, according to a study released in August by the Fraser

Institute, a Canadian think tank.77

It is uncertain whether an expanded child tax credit will be included in a tax reform proposal expected to be

drafted by congressional leaders and the White House this fall, and, if so, at what level. It will be a “tug of

war” between expanding the child tax credit and lowering corporate tax rates, as Trump has vowed to do,

Hammond says.

Another potential stepping-stone to universal basic income is Rep. Khanna's proposal — a response to slow

wage growth — to double the Earned Income Tax Credit, to $12,000 for families with three or more children.78

“We would give a 20 percent raise to the bottom 20 percent of the income distribution to compensate them

for the stagnancy of wages since 1979,” he told The Atlantic.79

Hammond, who helped draft Khanna's plan, concedes it has zero chance of passage. With an estimated cost

of more than $1.3 trillion over 10 years, he calls it a “thought experiment.” But if Congress is contemplating

Trump's tax reform proposal of up to $6 trillion in tax cuts as estimated by the Congressional Budget Of-

fice, he asks, “why not use one-sixth of that to bring people's wages back to what they would be with robust

growth?”80

A group of conservatives, called the Climate Leadership Council, which includes Cabinet members from the

Reagan, Bush and Nixon administrations, has proposed taxing oil refineries and coal mines for their carbon

dioxide emissions and distributing the proceeds — $2,000 for a family of four — to all Americans. The pro-

posal should appeal to President Trump, they said, because it's “pro-growth” and “pro-working class” and an

alternative to some pollution regulations.81

However, the White House announced in April that it was not considering a carbon tax as part of tax reform.82

But the carbon tax has enough bipartisan support that it could be discussed in the future, says Jason Albritton,

director of climate and energy policy for The Nature Conservancy, a founding member of the Climate Leader-

ship Council.

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State and Local Efforts

Most discussion over a potential carbon-tax rebate is occurring at the local and state level, but so far proposed

carbon-tax rebates do not approach the levels that UBI advocates generally propose.

For example, a coalition of environmentalists and labor union representatives supports a carbon-tax rebate

proposal they hope will be introduced in the Council of the District of Columbia this fall, but the tax would

generate only a $160 monthly rebate for the average family of four and $277 for a low-income family of four

by 2032, according to a recent analysis.83

“We're hoping to send the maximum share of that revenue back to D.C. residents,” says Camila Thorndike,

carbon pricing coordinator for Chesapeake Climate Action Network, a regional nonprofit that works on climate

and energy issues in the District, Maryland and Virginia. Low-income users would receive a higher payment

because “energy constitutes a greater fraction of their budget,” says Thorndike. Some of the revenues, ac-

cording to Thorndike, would also go to small businesses and be used for building environmentally friendly

infrastructure.

In November, Washington state voters rejected the nation's first carbon tax state ballot initiative, which would

have raised $2 billion, with proceeds going to rebates for residents, businesses and a tax break for manufac-

turers. However, many environmental advocates opposed the initiative, preferring that the revenue be spent

on green infrastructure projects. Social-justice advocates also wanted the money spent in communities most

affected by pollution.84

That tussle over how to spend carbon tax revenues is a “perennial” issue when such measures are debated,

according to The Nature Conservancy's Albritton. Legislators in five states — Connecticut, Massachusetts,

Rhode Island, Vermont and Washington — recently introduced proposals to tax carbon, but none has been

enacted.85

In May, Hawaii became the first state to commission a study of a universal basic income, among other ap-

proaches, to tackle globalization and automation.86

Facebook co-founder Zuckerberg recently praised Alaska's 35-year record of sending oil revenue dividends

to residents as a “bipartisan idea” and a potential UBI model.87 But last year, facing declining oil prices, Gov.

Bill Walker slashed the individual dividends to $1,022, half the previous level.88 This year, the Republican-led

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Alaska Senate beat back efforts by the Democratic majority in the House to restore the dividend to historic

levels and introduce a state income tax to help fill the state's coffers. The final budget set the 2017 dividend

at $1,100 — half of its historical formula.89

Nevertheless, support for the dividend “is very, very high,” says Foster, of the Economic Security Project, cit-

ing a recent poll showing that 60 percent of Alaskans prefer initiating an income or sales tax — Alaska has

neither — to halving the dividend.90

Modern Experiments

Versions of a universal basic income are being tested over the next few years in small-scale experiments in

Finland, the Canadian province of Ontario, Spain and the Netherlands and in a much larger pilot in Kenya.91

In the United States, the only experiment underway is privately funded. Altman, at Y Combinator, the Silicon

Valley tech incubator, has begun a small experiment to give up to 50 individuals a monthly basic income of

$1,000 per month, along with a control group, to guide a larger experiment he plans next year.

“I'm fairly confident that at some point in the future, as technology continues to eliminate traditional jobs and

massive new wealth gets created, we're going to see some version of this [UBI] at a national scale,” Altman

has said.92 “We hope basic income promotes freedom, and we want to see how people experience that free-

dom.”93

Starting early next year, Y Combinator Research, the company's nonprofit research arm, plans to begin a

pilot study on the effects of a $1,000 unconditional monthly stipend provided to up to 3,000 people over three

to five years in two states yet to be named, according to Elizabeth Rhodes, research director for the basic

income pilot.

In the largest basic income experiment to date, GiveDirectly, a charity in New York City, will test cash pay-

ments to 200 villages in Kenya as an alternative to in-kind foreign aid, starting this month.94

To those who question whether results from a study in a developing country like Kenya could be relevant in

the United States, GiveDirectly chief financial officer Joe Huston says the questions being studied, such as

— “Will people stop working? Can humans be trusted to spend money or will they buy tobacco and alcohol?”

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— have universal application because they relate to human nature.

In India, where a small experiment in 2010 debunked the idea that a basic income would be wasted on alcohol

and tobacco, the government's chief economic adviser, Arvind Subramanian, has proposed giving all adult In-

dians $113 a year to cut poverty from 22 percent to 0.5 percent. In a recent editorial, The Economist endorsed

the idea as an improvement over India's “inefficient and corrupt” welfare programs that put beneficiaries “at

the mercy of venal officials.”95

Short Features

Testing Basic Income in Canada — Again

New effort expected to produce similar results to '70s-era trial.

In the 1970s, the small prairie farm town of Dauphin, Canada, became the site of an almost forgotten ex-

periment to guarantee all inhabitants a minimum income that would keep them from falling into poverty.

During the years the program was in effect (1974–1979), about 20 percent of the town's residents received

the basic-income stipend, equivalent to 60 percent of Canada's poverty threshold at the time.1

The government-funded experiment, known as MINCOME, has recently drawn renewed attention, with On-

tario running experiments with a basic income beginning this fall. Lawmakers in British Columbia and Que-

bec also have expressed interest but those provinces have no definite plans to initiate a similar project.

Initially funded by the liberal government of Pierre Trudeau, the Dauphin pilot was widely viewed as a pre-

lude to the establishment of a government-guaranteed basic income. But by 1979, a conservative govern-

ment was in power, and MINCOME was shut down. No analysis of the experiment was done in the years

immediately following the end of the project.2

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In the mid-1970s, the Canadian government gave a basic income stipend to residents in

Dauphin, a small farm town.

(CQ Researcher Staff)

However, almost 30 years later, University of Manitoba economist Evelyn Forget delved into 1,800 dusty

boxes of data and obsolete tapes left over from the experiment, as well as local hospital records. In an in-

fluential analysis published in 2011, she found that hospitalizations dropped significantly while the program

was in effect, especially for mental health problems, accidents and injuries.3

“The mental health findings are pointing toward tensions that accompany low income and that make your

life that much harder,” she says.

Within families receiving the stipends, Forget found, women reduced the number of hours they worked,

mainly using the extra income to stay home longer with newborns before going back to work, while male

heads of households reduced their work hours only minimally. Doreen Henderson, now 70, who partici-

pated in the experiment, stayed home with her two kids and helped grow a lot of the family's food while

her husband worked as a janitor. “They should have kept it,” she said of the minimum income program. “It

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made a real difference.”4

Teenage boys also reduced their work hours dramatically or delayed entering the labor force, raising high

school graduation rates. During the experiment, an 11th-grader from a low-income family was more likely

to have friends continuing on to 12th grade than before the experiment began, an important peer influence

in deciding whether to stay in school, Forget has written.5

The positive results Forget uncovered have been influential in reviving interest in trying out a basic income

in Canada, according to Canadian advocates. Ontario is initiating an experiment that will send a basic in-

come to 4,000 low-income residents in three regions of the province starting this fall.6 The stipend will be

higher than it was in the 1970s: about 75 percent of Canada's poverty threshold.

Like the earlier experiment, benefits will phase out as a recipient's earnings rise. For each dollar earned,

benefits will drop by 50 cents — the equivalent of being “taxed back” at 50 percent. That could pose a dis-

incentive to working, but without that feature the program would “cost a lot of money,” Forget says.

To make the experiment politically feasible in Canada, Forget says, the stipend will go only to those in the

lower-income brackets. By contrast, leading proponents of a universal basic income say it should go to

everyone regardless of income.

“I can't imagine a universal basic income taking hold in Canada where everyone, rich and poor, would

receive the same amount of money,” she says. Forget predicts the latest experiment will have the same

impact on families as the Dauphin project did in the 1970s, “but in different ways.”

For instance, she says, “We'll see fewer people showing up at their doctor's office complaining of depres-

sion or anxiety — as we did in the '70s.” But since today's mental health treatment relies heavily on psy-

chotropic medications, it will likely show up in fewer prescriptions, she says. And because most school-age

children today finish high school, the extra income might lead instead to higher community college atten-

dance. For those already in the work force, it might lead them to seek training to qualify for a different job,

she adds.

However, Forget cautions, “We won't answer the big questions about political acceptability among people

who might see their taxes increase” or who worry recipients will quit their jobs. “I think we'll see a very small

effect, if any,” on people significantly reducing their work hours, she says. “But that's something you have

to show people over and over again before it convinces anybody.”

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Ontario provincial elections are scheduled for June 2018. Many political observers predict the province's

current Liberal government, which initiated the experiments, will not survive the three-year pilot program.

Sid Frankel, associate professor of social work at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, questions

whether participating families will make a long-term investment in something such as education knowing

the pilot program is sponsored “by a not-very-popular government that might not be around at the end of

the trial.”

Moreover, the Canadian government seems lukewarm about the concept. The federal government is plan-

ning to roll out a new poverty-reduction strategy this fall, but “the whole idea of a basic income has been

completely absent from any of the federal government consultation documents,” according to Frankel.

Yet basic income may be just the tonic needed for Ontario cities hit hard by the loss of jobs, according to

Rob Rainer, chairman of the Ontario Basic Income Network, a basic-income advocacy group in Ottawa. For

instance, residents of Thunder Bay, one of the cities chosen for the experiment, have suffered devastating

job losses because of the decline of the local forestry industry.

It will be interesting to see, he says, whether “even a modest influx” of income for those jobless residents

“can act as an economic stimulus in some fashion.”

—

• Sarah Glazer

1.

David Calnitsky, “More Normal than Welfare: The Mincome Experiment, Stigma, and Community Experi-

ence,” Canadian Sociological Association, 2016, http://tinyurl.com/y8sjw4tn.

2.

Sarah Gardner, “On the Canadian prairie, a basic income experiment,” “Marketplace,” NPR, Dec. 20, 2016,

https://tinyurl.com/ycokedza.

3.

Evelyn L. Forget, “The Town with No Poverty,” University of Manitoba, February 2011, https://tinyurl.com/

ov4zukq.

4.

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Whitney, Mallett,“The Town Where Everyone Got Free Money,” Motherboard, Feb. 4, 2015,

http://tinyurl.com/ycckglxu.

5.

Forget, op. cit.

6.

“Ontario's Basic Income Pilot,” Canada Ministry of Community and Social Services, April 24, 2017,

https://tinyurl.com/ycyq3kyg.

Finland Tests Basic Income for the Unemployed

Critics call it a “publicity stunt” to get people to accept low-wage jobs.

Finland's northern city of Oulu was once a busy hub for mobile phone developer Nokia. Yet the company's

decline in the face of fierce competition in recent years put thousands of software engineers out of work,

halving local Nokia jobs.

That makes Oulu fertile ground for start-ups looking for talent among former Nokia workers. But hiring them

can be difficult. One Oulu entrepreneur said he offered a part-time job to an ex-Nokia employee for 2,000

euros (about $2,240) a month, but the prospective hire already received more than that in unemployment

benefits.

“It's more profitable for him to just wait at home for some ideal job,” said the entrepreneur, Asmo Saloran-

ta.7

Under Finland's generous welfare state, going back to work part-time can mean losing not only unemploy-

ment benefits but other assistance as well, such as housing subsidies and grants for study. Thus, jobless

Finns say it is often not worth it to take a part-time job because it will not pay significantly more than bene-

fits they will lose by taking the job.8

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A homeless woman seeks help in Helsinki, Finland. To encourage unemployed Finns to

work, the government in January began a two-year experiment, paying a monthly stipend

of 560 euros ($657) to 2,000 randomly selected jobless citizens.

(AFP/Getty Images/Olivier Morin)

The solution may be for the government to pay jobless people a basic stipend whether they work or not,

which some see as a limited test of the universal basic income (UBI) concept.

To test the hypothesis that such an approach would encourage more unemployed citizens to work, the

Finnish government in January began paying a monthly stipend of 560 euros ($657) to 2,000 randomly

selected jobless Finns, promising them that during the two-year experiment they will not forfeit monthly

benefits, even if they start working at a new job.9

Olli Kärkkäinen, an economist with the Nordea bank in Helsinki, said the experiment is unrealistic because

it does not include higher taxes that would have to be levied if everyone in Finland were to receive a month-

ly check under a pure UBI. “There are no losers in this experiment,” he said. “The results are bound to be

positive.10

Government officials also hope the monthly check, which they're calling a “basic income” will encourage

people “to take extra risk and build their own business,” according to Markus Kanerva, a government ad-

viser who helped design the experiment. Already, some participants have told the Finnish press they will

use the cushion to do that or to take part-time work.11

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International interest in Finland's pilot is intense. Although it applies only to jobless citizens and thus is not

quite universal, it has been hailed by some UBI advocates as the largest nationwide test of the approach

in a wealthy country.

So far, most opposition to the concept has come from taxpayers concerned that a guaranteed income

would raise their taxes, and from labor unions. Unions say the concept is too expensive, but some propo-

nents say Finnish unions, who play a major role in wage negotiations and control large union unemploy-

ment funds, really fear losing bargaining power.12

Seventy percent of Finnish citizens like the idea of a basic income, but that drops to 35 percent once they

learn that their already high taxes could rise even higher to pay for it, according to polls cited by Kanerva.

The experiment also has drawn harsh criticism from Finns who say it should apply to everyone, not just the

unemployed. Otto Lehto, former chairman of Finland's Basic Income Network, an advocacy group, calls

the experiment a “half-hearted” and “badly mangled” effort by a coalition government dominated by con-

servatives.

By limiting the experiment just to the unemployed, critics say, the trial is too narrow to test advocates' theory

that free money would liberate everyone — including workers in low-paying jobs — to engage in charity,

stay home to care for children, find a better job or create their own business.

Antti Jauhiainen and Joona-Hermanni Mäkinen, co-directors of the liberal Parecon Finland economic think

tank, called the project “a “publicity stunt” by Finland's austerity-minded government to get jobless people

“to accept low-paying and low-productivity jobs.”13

Preliminary results from the experiment should be available early next year, according to Kanerva, but final

results are expected to coincide with 2019 parliamentary elections, which Finland's fragile coalition govern-

ment is unlikely to survive, according to some observers.

“In all likelihood it will be a different coalition, and then basic income could be off the map,” says Jurgen De

Wispelaere, who helped design the experiment and is now a policy research fellow at the Institute of Policy

Research, at the University of Bath in England. Many people in the Finnish government “are very worried

about the unconditional side of basic income,” such as the lack of work requirements, he says.

But the point of the experiment is to find out if giving out free money has the pernicious effects some people

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fear, such as creating a nation of loafers on the dole.

“Everyone who disagrees does it for political, ideological or moral reasons but not because of any evi-

dence,” says Wispelaere, “because we don't have any evidence.”

—

• Sarah Glazer

7.

Peter S. Goodman, “Free Cash in Finland. Must be Jobless,” The New York Times, Dec. 17, 2016,

https://tinyurl.com/y8ggsway.

8.

“Worldhacks: Does universal basic income work?” BBC, Aug. 8, 2017, http://tinyurl.com/y7o9cpmc.

9.

“Basic Income Experiment: 2017–2018,” Kela, http://tinyurl.com/ybgo5rn5. “How basic income affect the

other social security benefits,” Kela, http://tinyurl.com/yd9fzv3m.

10.

Sarah Gardner, “Finland to test a basic income for the unemployed,” “Marketplace,” NPR, Dec. 12, 2016,

http://tinyurl.com/ybymh8d7.

11.

“Six months on: Feedback on Finland's basic income trial,” Yle, July 26, 2017, https://tinyurl.com/y7ben-

mzw.

12.

Raine Tiessalo, “Universal basic income ’useless,’ says Finland's biggest union,” The Independent, Feb. 9,

2017, https://tinyurl.com/he3lr23.

13.

Antti Jauhiainen and Joona-Hermanni Mäkinen, “Why Finland's Basic Income Experiment Isn't Working,”

The New York Times, July 20, 2017, https://tinyurl.com/ya8g2kda.

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Pro/Con

Should the United States adopt a universal basic income?

Pro

Karl Widerquist

Associate Professor of Political Philosophy, Georgetown University, School of Foreign Service —

Qatar; Founding Editor, Basic Income Studies. Written for CQ Researcher, September 2017

The United States should adopt a universal basic income (UBI) because it's wrong for anyone to come

between people and the resources they need to survive, or to put conditions on access to those resources.

And that is what we do. We threaten almost every worker with poverty, destitution and extreme economic

uncertainty because we think it's a good way to motivate them to work. But we can motivate people with

positive rewards, such as good pay and working conditions.

People don't need bosses to work. People can hunt, gather, fish, farm, build their own shelter and start their

own business or cooperative enterprise without a boss. People only need bosses because they control re-

sources. There is nothing wrong with working for someone else, as long as you do so voluntarily, but there

is something wrong with working for someone else solely because the law makes it impossible for you to

work for yourself.

A UBI system would let everyone — not just a controlling elite — benefit from scarce natural resources,

which we all need to survive and that were here long before any of us. Under a UBI system, we would all

pay taxes for the resources we own and receive a UBI as compensation for the resources that others own.

The UBI must be high enough to meet people's basic needs so no one has to take a job under threat of

deprivation. That way, a UBI creates a voluntary-participation economy instead of the current forced-par-

ticipation economy.

We like to think the poor are lazy if they do not take jobs, but we never ask ourselves if employers who do

not offer better jobs are cheap. If we have to threaten people with homelessness to get them to take the

jobs we offer, maybe we who endorse a forced-participation economy are the cheap ones.

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And maybe our cheapness is self-defeating for all but the wealthy. Average workers have not gotten a sig-

nificant increase in pay since the 1970s — even though our economy has grown enormously since then.

Automation has made it possible for every American to work less and consume more, but the benefit of

that growth has gone almost entirely to the wealthiest 1 percent. A UBI can give all workers the power to

command better wages and working conditions. It's not just for the poor — it's for everyone who works for

a living. And it's long overdue.

Con

Pavlina Tcherneva

Associate Professor of Economics and Director of the Economics Program, Bard College. Written for

CQ Researcher, September, 2017

In 2005, Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan schooled Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., on Social Security.

Solvency, he said, was not the problem, since “there's nothing to prevent the federal government from cre-

ating as much money as it wants and paying it to somebody. The question is, how [to] assure that the real

assets are created which those benefits are employed to purchase?”

This is the problem with the UBI. Mailing checks is easy. Guaranteeing that every recipient can acquire

the real goods and services needed for a basic living standard is not. The market already fails to provide

affordable health care, education or housing to many income-earning individuals.

The problem is not the payment but the inequitable production process, which the UBI further undermines.

While recipients can purchase part of the nation's GDP, they are not expected or required to contribute to

its production. This ability to opt out of one's job (whether it is “good” or “bad”) is considered a key “benefit”

of the policy.

The solution to “bad” jobs, of course, is to guarantee access to “good” jobs — which my alternative pro-

posal, the Job Guarantee (JG), does. It offers a voluntary job opportunity to the unemployed to work in

the public or nonprofit sectors, helping fill the care or environmental needs gaps. It stabilizes the economy,

raises incomes at the bottom and reduces the large social costs of joblessness.

A UBI above poverty or at a living-wage level would cost 20–35 percent of GDP. The JG would cost 2–4

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percent. A permanent UBI has no counter-cyclical stabilization feature, while the JG expands in recessions

and shrinks in expansions, eliminating involuntary unemployment.

UBI experiments show that recipients still desire scarce jobs, a problem the JG solves by guaranteeing

a decent job to anyone who wants one. UBI is a giant voucher program — a firm subsidy that removes

employers' incentive to pay above-poverty wages while accelerating the “Uberization” of work. The JG, by

contrast, obliges firms to match or exceed the JG wage-benefit package. Worse, UBI is often advocated as

a replacement for crucial government programs. Why provide Social Security, Medicare or public education

if people can buy them with their UBI?

In sum, UBI is a Trojan horse and a false promise. Sending everyone a check is trivial. It takes work to

ensure a decent standard of living for all. For that, we'd do much better with a Job Guarantee.

Outlook

Basic Bootstraps

Concern that automation will displace humans from their jobs in coming years has given the UBI idea new

currency, especially in Silicon Valley.

“The beautiful thing about a universal basic income is it solves a lot of problems at the same time” — au-

tomation, economic uncertainty created by gig economy jobs, poverty, low wages and the need to remunerate

child and elder care, says Stern, of the Economic Security Project.

But it is still unclear how many jobs artificial intelligence will actually replace. Previous industrial revolutions,

such as the advent of automated looms in the 19th century, raised similar fears but ended up creating more

jobs than they displaced. And when ATMs first appeared 50 years ago, rather than eliminating bank teller

jobs as feared, the ATMs saved banks enough money to open more branches. The number of teller jobs has

increased faster since 2000 than other jobs in the labor market.96

While the concept of a basic income is drawing some enthusiasts from both liberal and conservative quarters,

their fundamental differences about which welfare programs should be eliminated to fund it are likely to be

exacerbated when it comes to designing an actual program.

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“There's a bit of a myth that basic income is really simple to implement,” says Jurgen De Wispelaere, a policy

research fellow at the Institute for Policy Research at the University of Bath in England who has advised

governments in Finland and elsewhere on how to design UBI pilot programs. “The moment you get into the

nitty-gritty of design and implementation you have to deal with a huge amount of issues,” he says, because

the program must interact with other programs such as welfare and Social Security.

In addition, no one knows how a UBI would affect the foundations of society. While proponents cite improve-

ments in the quality of life, The Economist recently suggested tensions may develop “between those who

continue to work and pay taxes and those opting out” of the workforce. Those tensions could rip a society

apart, the magazine editorialized.97

In many ways the UBI debate is experiencing growing pains as it moves from a “utopian project in the clouds,”

to a serious policy, De Wispelaere says. Yet, while he criticizes some of the more unrealistic visions of UBI,

a cash payment can eliminate “the stigmatizing, undignified ways we treat people” in the welfare system, he

argues.

Countries testing a basic income, such as Finland and Canada, already have much more generous social

insurance programs than the United States. So it is unclear how much the United States, with its tradition of

self-sufficiency and individualism, can learn from those experiments. But advocates like De Wispelaere say

Americans have the same need as other countries for a basic guaranteed income to prevent a descent into

poverty.

“Americans like to talk about how people should pull themselves up by their bootstraps,” he says. “Basic in-

come is your bootstraps.”

Bibliography

Books

Moynihan, Daniel P., The Politics of a Guaranteed Income: The Nixon Administration and the Family Assis-

tance Plan, Vintage Books, 1973. The late Moynihan, the White House adviser behind President Richard M.

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Nixon's proposed guaranteed income and later a Democratic senator from New York (1976–1995), discusses

why he believed the proposal failed in Congress in 1970.

Murray, Charles, In Our Hands: A Plan to Replace the Welfare State, AEI Press, 2016. A libertarian scholar at

the conservative American Enterprise Institute says the United States can afford to pay every American adult

$13,000 a year if it scraps all existing welfare programs, including Social Security and Medicare.

Stern, Andy, Raising the Floor: How a Universal Basic Income Can Renew our Economy and Rebuild the

American Dream, Public Affairs, 2016. A former labor union leader argues that replacing some government

programs with a universal basic income is the best response to a globalizing gig economy.

Van Parijs, Philippe, and YannickVanderborght, Basic Income: A Radical Proposal for a Free Society and a

Sane Economy, Harvard University Press, 2017. Belgian political philosopher (Van Parijs) and political scien-

tist (Vanderborght), both professors at the University of Louvain, Belgium, say a basic income for all would

permit “real freedom to flourish.”

Articles

“Universal Basic Income: Sighing for Paradise to Come,”The Economist, June4,2016, https://tinyurl.com/

ya5tb85b. A universal basic income would be costly, and many worry it could lead to “a general disengage-

ment from work,” says The Economist magazine.

Goodman, Peter S., “Free Cash in Finland. Must be Jobless,”The New York Times, Dec.17,2016,

https://tinyurl.com/y8ggsway. A reporter describes the economic and political trends that led Finland to test a

basic income for its unemployed.

Lowrey, Annie, “Ro Khanna Wants to Give Working-Class Households $1 Trillion,”The Atlantic, April28,2017,

https://tinyurl.com/y7d6uxfo. A Democratic California congressman describes his proposal to double the

Earned Income Tax Credit for low-income working people, which some herald as a move toward a universal

basic income.

Morris, David Z., “Universal Basic Income Could Grow the U.S. Economy by an Extra 12.5 percent,”Fortune,

Sept.3,2017, http://tinyurl.com/y7wrka2d. A contributing writer says the claim that a guaranteed income could

accelerate U.S. economic growth, published in August by the liberal Roosevelt Institute, would be rejected by

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conservative economists, who think rising taxes and increased government debt to pay for it would slow the

economy.

Pagen, Diane, “America's Grenfell,”New York Daily News, July8,2017, https://tinyurl.com/ybpgxxxr. A New

York City social worker and co-founder of the Basic Income Action advocacy group says a basic income would

be a better way to help poor people than America's failing welfare system.

Strain, Michael R., “Universal basic income won't make America great again, either,”The Washington Post,

April4,2016, http://tinyurl.com/yamfcdqd. The director of economic policy studies at the conservative Ameri-

can Enterprise Institute argues a universal basic income that gives the same amount of money to both the

disabled and those more capable would be unfair.

Reports and Studies

“Basic income as a policy option: Can it add up?”Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development,

May2017, https://tinyurl.com/ycc82tqm. An organization representing 35 member countries, including the

United States, finds that an unconditional payment to everyone would require large tax increases or cuts in

welfare benefits, increasing poverty rates in some countries.

Forget, Evelyn L., “The Town with No Poverty,”University of Manitoba, February2011, https://tinyurl.com/

ov4zukq. This influential analysis by a University of Manitoba economist of a long-forgotten experiment in

Canada found that a guaranteed income led to a higher high-school graduation rate and fewer hospitaliza-

tions.

Marinescu, Ioana, “No Strings Attached: The Behavioral Effects of U.S. Unconditional Cash Transfer Pro-

grams,”Roosevelt Institute, May2017, https://tinyurl.com/y6wekz2j. A University of Pennsylvania economist

finds improvements in health and education — but only a minimal reduction in work hours — among recipients

of cash stipends in Alaska, the Cherokee tribe and U.S. government experiments in the 1970s.

Tanner, Michael, “The Pros and Cons of a Guaranteed National Income,”Cato Institute, May12,2017,

https://tinyurl.com/ycrv7aae. A senior fellow at the free-market think tank weighs the benefits and drawbacks

of a guaranteed income, including the costs and the effects on work incentive.

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The Next Step

Carbon Tax

Kim, Queena, “As Our Jobs Are Automated, Some Say We'll Need A Guaranteed Basic Income,”NPR,

Sept.24,2016, https://tinyurl.com/zq7lgqp. Due to rising concerns about automation replacing workers, some

reformers propose levying carbon emission taxes to pay for a universal basic income (UBI).

Levitan, Dave, “Republicans Offer to Tax Carbon Emissions,”Scientific American, Feb.8,2017,

https://tinyurl.com/z55oe2j. Republicans released a plan this year to institute a carbon tax and use the rev-

enues to send quarterly checks to every U.S. household.

Paletta, Damian and MaxEhrenfreund, “White House disavows two controversial tax ideas hours after officials

say they're under consideration,”The Washington Post, April4,2017, http://tinyurl.com/y9eooazc. The Trump

administration struck down a value-added tax and a carbon tax proposal that would have gone toward reduc-

ing top tax rates on individual and corporate income.

Child Tax Credit

Ellis, Ryan, “Top Marginal Tax Rates, Child Tax Credits, And Tax Reform In The Trump Era,”Forbes, Ju-

ly10,2017, https://tinyurl.com/y7j6ebmx. Ivanka Trump and Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., seek common ground

on a higher child tax credit, which some UBI advocates see as an interim step to a universal basic income,

says a Forbes contributor.

Jagoda, Naomi, “Rubio hosting events to build support for child tax credit proposal,”The Hill, Aug.11,2017,

https://tinyurl.com/yadds582. Republican Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida has begun hosting tax reform roundta-

bles to discuss his proposal to boost the child tax credit from $1,000 for each child under age 17 to $2,500.

Maag, Elaine, “Simplifying And Targeting Tax Subsidies For Child Care,”Forbes, March23,2017,

https://tinyurl.com/ycpdmpkq. A Forbes contributor proposes reducing restrictions on the child and dependent

care tax credit to better support low-income families.

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Earned Income Tax Credit

Fichtner, Jason, and IndivarDutta-Gupta, “Reforming the earned income tax credit could be a bipartisan vic-

tory for Trump,”The Hill, April8,2017, https://tinyurl.com/y7uvgpnb. Two researchers say that to raise wages,

liberals and conservatives alike would support raising the Earned Income Tax Credit.

Yamachika, Tom, “On the new earned income tax credit, the devil is in the details,”Maui News, July26,2017,

https://tinyurl.com/y8b2h3fn. Democratic Gov. David Ige of Hawaii signed a bill establishing a state Earned

Income Tax Credit, entitling lower-income families to claim a monthly tax refund.

UBI Experiments

Alini, Erica, “What you need to know about Ontario's basic income plan,”Global News, April24,2017,

https://tinyurl.com/n5kve9p. Ontario enacted a basic income plan this spring, allotting a guaranteed minimum

income to those living below the poverty line, regardless of whether they are employed.

Harkinson, Josh, “Hawaii Considers Radical Idea to Make Life in Paradise a Little Easier,”Mother Jones,

June15,2017, https://tinyurl.com/yaw8mz5w. Hawaii has directed state agencies to study a guaranteed in-

come, making it the first state to consider offering residents “basic financial security.”

Weller, Chris, “Finland's basic income experiment is already lowering stress levels — and it's only 4 months

old,”Business Insider, May10,2017, https://tinyurl.com/ycrb4ejo. Four months after Finland undertook a two-

year experiment guaranteeing residents a basic income of $600 a month, 2,000 recipients have reported low-

er stress and anxiety levels.

Contacts

American Enterprise Institute, 1789 Massachusetts Ave., N.W.WashingtonDC20036;202-862-5800;

http://www.aei.org A nonpartisan public policy think tank that skews conservative, with some scholars sup-

porting a universal income and some criticizing it.

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Basic Income Earth Network, http://basicincome.org An international nonprofit network of basic-income ad-

vocates that organizes an international conference and publishes the online newsletter Basic Income News

(http://basicincome.org/news).

Cato Institute, 1000 Massachusetts Ave., N.W.WashingtonDC20001;202-842-0200; http://www.cato.org Lib-

ertarian think tank dedicated to individual liberty and limited government that has issued discussion papers

on universal basic income.

Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, 820 First St. N.E., Suite 510WashingtonDC20002;202-408-1080;

http://www.cbpp.org Nonpartisan think tank that advocates progressive policies to reduce poverty and in-

equality and has criticized the universal basic income concept.

Economic Security Project, http://economicsecurityproject.org. A two-year fund that supports research and

experimentation with unconditional cash stipends; created by, among others, Facebook co-founder Chris

Hughes.

Roosevelt Institute, 570 Lexington Ave., 5th FloorNew YorkNY10022;212-444-9130; http://rooseveltinsti-

tute.org Nonprofit think tank and partner to the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum that

focuses on economic and social policy and has published research on basic income.

U.S. Basic Income Guarantee Network, http://www.usbig.net/index.php. Informal network promoting discus-

sion of a basic income guarantee in the United States; organizes an annual conference and discussion pa-

pers.

Footnotes

1. Ioana Marinescu, “No Strings Attached: The Behavioral Effects of U.S. Unconditional Cash Transfer Pro-

grams,” Roosevelt Institute, May 11, 2017, https://tinyurl.com/y94u8msa.

2. The 2017 poverty guideline for a single person household is $12,060. See “Federal Poverty Guidelines,”

FamiliesUSA, February 2017, https://tinyurl.com/ppxkgkz.

3. Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael A. Osborne, “The Future of Employment: How Susceptible Are Jobs to

Computerisation,” Oxford Martin School, University of Oxford, Sept. 17, 2013, https://tinyurl.com/oj67kae.

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4. Melanie Arntz, Terry Gregory and Ulrich Zierahn, “The Risk of Automation for Jobs in OECD Countries,”

Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, June 16, 2016, https://tinyurl.com/y7s5wgnw.

James Manyika et al., “Harnessing automation for a future that works,” McKinsey Global Institute, January

2017, https://tinyurl.com/hzn5l7c.

5. For background, see Eugene L. Meyer, “The Gig Economy,” CQ Researcher, March 18, 2016, pp. 265–288.

6. Natalie Foster et al., “Portable Benefits Resource Guide,” Aspen Institute, 2016, p. 5, https://tinyurl.com/

y7f58u68. Also see “Contingent Workforce: Size, Characteristics, Earnings, and Benefits,” Government Ac-

countability Office, April 20, 2015, https://tinyurl.com/jq3sta2.

7. Patrick Gillespie, “Mark Zuckerberg supports universal basic income. What is it?,” CNN Money, May 26,

2017, https://tinyurl.com/y9j2lyoj.

8. Sam Altman, “Basic Income,” Y Combinator, Jan. 27, 2016, https://tinyurl.com/z7na9xk.

9. Charles Murray, In Our Hand: A Plan to Replace the Welfare State (2016), p. 2.

10. Robert Greenstein, “Commentary: Universal Basic Income May Sound Attractive But, If It Occurred,

Would Likelier Increase Poverty Than Reduce It,” Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, May 31, 2016,

https://tinyurl.com/y6uwv9ob.

11. Daniel Mitchell, “Universal Basic Income Experiment in Finland Not Looking Good,” CNS News, Aug. 1,

2017, https://tinyurl.com/yaek73m3.

12. Marinescu, op. cit.

13. Samuel Hammond and Robert Orr, “Niskanen Report: Toward a universal child benefit,” Niskanen Center,

Oct. 25, 2016, https://tinyurl.com/y9ro4tuk.

14. Josh Harkinson, “Can this Berniecrat Congressman Win Silicon Valley over to his Progressive Agenda?”

Mother Jones, June 29, 2017, https://tinyurl.com/y92b3fgn.

15. “Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, Eligible Food Items,” USDA, https://tinyurl.com/jktdzos.

16. “About TANF,” Office of Family Assistance, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, June

28, 2017, http://tinyurl.com/ybdzd8yf. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, AFDC and TANF

Overview, https://tinyurl.com/ya68gwof.

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17. Diane Pagen, “America's Grenfell,” New York Daily News, July 8, 2017, https://tinyurl.com/ybpgxxxr.

18. “State TANF Spending in FY 2015: Fact Sheet,” Office of Family Assistance, Department of Health and

Human Services, Aug. 15, 2016, https://tinyurl.com/y8epuqpf.

19. Michael R. Strain, “Universal Basic Income Won't Make America Great Again, Either,” The Washington

Post, April 4, 2016, https://tinyurl.com/yc9dqjww.

20. Marinescu, op. cit., pp. 5, 16.

21. Greenstein, op. cit.

22. Komal Sri-Kumar and Masood Sohaili, “An Economic Case for Universal Basic Income,” The Milken Insti-

tute Review, Aug. 4, 2017, p. 43, https://tinyurl.com/ybo2qwhv.

23. David Calnitsky, “More Normal than Welfare: The Mincome Experiment, Stigma, and Community Experi-

ence,” Canadian Sociological Association, 2016, https://tinyurl.com/y8sjw4tn.

24.Ibid.

25. Oren Cass, “Why a Universal Basic Income Is a Terrible Idea,” National Review, June 15, 2016,

https://tinyurl.com/y83v97un.

26. Marinescu, op. cit.

27. Evelyn L. Forget, “The Town with No Poverty,” University of Manitoba, February 2011, https://tinyurl.com/

yczgpruf.

28. Michael Tanner, “The Pros and Cons of a Guaranteed National Income,” Cato Institute, May 12, 2015, p.

21, http://tinyurl.com/ycxys9n6. Also see Forget, op. cit.

29. Marinescu, op. cit., p. 5.

30.Ibid.

31. Andy Stern, Raising the Floor: How a Universal Basic Income Can Renew our Economy and Rebuild the

American Dream (2016), p. 212.

32. Murray, op. cit., p. 11.

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33.Ibid.

34.Ibid., p. 1.

35. Stern, op. cit.

36.Ibid., pp. 212–214.

37. Scott Santens, “How to Reform Welfare and Taxes to Provide Every Citizen with a Basic Income,” Eco-

nomic Security Project, June 5, 2017, https://tinyurl.com/ybofaapw.

38. “DC Carbon Fee-and-Rebate Policy,” The Center for Climate Strategies, 2017, https://tinyurl.com/ya-

jl5g53.

39. Scott Santens, “The Cost of Universal Basic Income Is the Net Transfer Amount, Not the Gross Price

Tag,” ScottSantens.com blog, July 7, 2017, https://tinyurl.com/yd6ztgfu.

40. “Basic income as a policy option: Can it add up?” Policy Brief on the Future of Work, Organisation for

Economic Co-operation and Development, May 2017, https://tinyurl.com/y9fk78d7.

41. Greenstein, op. cit.

42. “Basically Flawed,” The Economist, June 4, 2016, https://tinyurl.com/ycgayv27.

43. Trent Gillies, “Money for Nothing,” CNBC, July 30, 2017, https://tinyurl.com/y7nw6vj9.

44. Murray, op. cit., p. 8.

45. Tanner, op. cit., p. 11.

46. Stern, op. cit., p. 172.

47. “Universal Basic Incomes: Sighing for Paradise to Come,” op. cit. Also see Philippe Van Parijs, “Why

Surfers Should be Fed: The Liberal Case for an Unconditional Basic Income,” Philosophy and Public Affairs,

Spring 1991, pp. 65–67, https://tinyurl.com/y7h5hewj.

48. “Universal Basic Incomes: Sighing for Paradise to Come,” ibid.

49. Stern, op. cit., p. 173.

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50.Ibid.

51. “Huey Long — Every Man a King,” PBS, https://tinyurl.com/hff9hqg.

52. Edwin Amenta, Kathleen Dunleavy and Mary Bernstein, “Stolen Thunder: Huey Long's ’Share Our Wealth’

Political Mediation, and the Second New Deal,” American Sociological Review, October 1994, pp. 678–702,

https://tinyurl.com/ya2qm9wa.

53. Larry DeWitt, “The Decision to Exclude Agricultural and Domestic Workers from the 1935 Social Security

Act,” Social Security Bulletin, 2010, https://tinyurl.com/jocovwl.

54. Parijs, op. cit., p. 67.

55. “What is the history of the minimum wage?” Center for Poverty Research, University of California, Davis,

https://tinyurl.com/yargtj28.

56. Daniel P. Moynihan, The Politics of a Guaranteed Income (1973), p. 29.

57. Parijs, op. cit., p. 67.

58. Stern, op. cit., pp. 174–175.

59.Ibid., p. 175. Also See Martin Luther King Jr., “Where We Are Going?” LoveEarth Network,

https://tinyurl.com/y8n38b6k.

60. Moynihan, op. cit. Welfare spending rose sixfold between 1960 and 1970.

61. Shoshana Grossbard-Shechtman, ed., Marriage and the Economy: Theory and Evidence from Advanced

Industrial Societies (2003), p. 77.

62. Moynihan, op. cit., p. 50.

63.Ibid., p. 223; For today's dollars calculation, see: https://tinyurl.com/y7f3x4qo. See also Livia Gershon,

“When ’Welfare Reform’ Meant Expanding Benefits,” Jstor Daily, July 12, 2017, https://tinyurl.com/yb9nm69v.

64. Moynihan, op. cit., p. 15.

65. “Moynihan Says Recent Studies Raise Doubts about ’Negative Income Tax’ Proposals,” The New York

Times, Nov. 16, 1978, https://tinyurl.com/y77s5cum. For conversion to 2017 dollars, see CPI inflation calcu-

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lator at https://tinyurl.com/k64mxte.

66.Ibid.

67. Karl Widerquist, “A Failure to Communicate,” Journal of Socio-Economics, January 2005, pp. 49–81,

https://tinyurl.com/ybn9rsve.

68.Ibid.

69. Forget, op. cit.; also see Tanner, op. cit.

70. Historical Timeline, Alaska Department of Revenue, https://tinyurl.com/y8cnh4vg.

71. Marinescu, op. cit.

72. R.A., “Universal Basic Incomes,” The Economist, June 6, 2016, https://tinyurl.com/jyc5oy5.

73. The credit is available to single parents earning up $75,000 yearly, married filing jointly earning up

to $110,000 and married filing separately up to $55,000. See Child Tax Credit, Internal Revenue Service,

https://tinyurl.com/y95m2gm3.

74. Nikki Schwab and Frances Chambers, “Ivanka Returns to Capitol Hill to Talk Workforce Issues with Re-

publican Lawmakers,” The Daily Mail, June 22, 2017, https://tinyurl.com/ycaqxt6s.

75. Hammond and Orr, op. cit.

76.Ibid.

77. Erica Alini, “Average Canadians pay 42.5% of their income in taxes,” Global News, Aug. 24, 2017,

https://tinyurl.com/y8fv3p8l. Also see “Taxes vs. the Necessities of Life,” Fraser Institute, August 2017,

https://tinyurl.com/yd47nofp.

78. Annie Lowrey, “Ro Khanna Wants to Give Working-Class Households $1 Trillion,” The Atlantic, April 28,

2017, https://tinyurl.com/y7d6uxfo.

79.Ibid.

80. Graham Lanktree, “Trump's Proposed Tax Plan Could Cost the Government $6 Trillion,” Newsweek, April

26, 2017, https://tinyurl.com/jvz8x5e.

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81. Martin S. Feldstein, Ted Halstead and N. Gregory Mankiw, “A Conservative Case for Climate Action,” The

New York Times, Feb. 8, 2017, https://tinyurl.com/y8yw5wu3. Also see “The Four Pillars of our Carbon Divi-

dends Plan,” Climate Leadership Council, https://tinyurl.com/ycxyuxt7.

82. Damian Paletta and Max Ehrenfreund, “White House disavows two controversial tax ideas hours after of-

ficials say they're under consideration,” The Washington Post, April 4, 2017, https://tinyurl.com/y9eooazc.

83. “DC Carbon Fee-and-Rebate Policy,” op. cit.

84. Marianne Lavelle, “Washington State voters reject nation's first carbon tax,” Inside Climate News, Nov. 9,

2016, https://tinyurl.com/ovpfpbo.

85. Chelsea Harvey, “Defying Trump, these state leaders are trying to impose their own carbon taxes,” The

Washington Post, May 12, 2017, https://tinyurl.com/y9mftqmk.

86. Dan Galeon, “Hawaii just became the first U.S. state to pass a bill supporting basic income,” Business

Insider, June 15, 2017, https://tinyurl.com/y7zac88w.

87. Maya Kosoff, “Mark Zuckerberg suggests the Government should give everyone free cash,” Vanity Fair,

July 6, 2017, https://tinyurl.com/y85789km.

88. Kate McFarland, “Alaska, U.S.: Amount of 2016 Permanent Fund Dividend divided to be $1022,” Basic

Income News, Sept. 29, 2016, https://tinyurl.com/ydybor5u.

89. Nathaniel Herz, “Alaska Gov. Walker Signs Budget, leaves dividends at amount set by lawmakers,”

Alaska Dispatch News, June 30, 2017, https://tinyurl.com/y94hj5z7. Also see, “Budget standoff continues as

House votes to double Permanent Fund dividends,” Alaska Dispatch News, June 15, 2017, https://tinyurl.com/

y79p82cg.

90. “Survey of the Alaska Voters on the PFD, Executive Summary,” Harstad Strategic Research, June 26,

2017, p. 6, https://tinyurl.com/y86l3o89.

91. See Kate McFarland, “Barcelona, Spain, Design of Minimum Income Experiment Finalized,” Basic Income

News, Aug. 12, 2017, https://tinyurl.com/y8htfzox. Also see Tracy Brown Hamilton, “The Netherlands' Upcom-

ing Money-for-Nothing Experiment,” The Atlantic, June 21, 2016, https://tinyurl.com/yc5panhj.

92. Altman, op. cit.

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93. Sam Altman, “Moving Forward on Basic Income,” Y Combinator, May 31, 2016, https://tinyurl.com/

yatdsk56.

94. Nurith Aizenman, “How to Fix Poverty: Why Not Just Give People Money?” NPR, Aug. 7, 2017,

https://tinyurl.com/y8v8s8bh. Also See, GiveDirectly, https://tinyurl.com/zlud7rn.

95. “India debates the case for a universal basic income,” The Economist, Feb. 4, 2017, https://tinyurl.com/

hmsoazw. Also see, Guy Standing, “Unconditional Basic Income: Two Pilot Studies in Madhya Pradesh,”

https://tinyurl.com/ych2tg6t.

96. John Detrixhe, “Lesson from the Cupcake ATM: Better to be a baker than a seller,” Quartz, July 4, 2017,

https://tinyurl.com/y7rn6sb9.

97. “Basically Flawed,” op. cit.

About the Author

Sarah Glazer is a London-based freelancer who contributes regularly to CQ Researcher. Her articles on

health, education and social-policy issues also have appeared in The New York Times and The Washington

Post. Her recent CQ Researcher reports include “Privacy and the Internet” and “Decriminalizing Prostitution.”

She graduated from the University of Chicago with a B.A. in American history.

https://doi.org/10.4135/cqresrre20170908

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