Should the Government Give Everyone $1,000 a Month?

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/12/opinion/yang-universal-basic-income.html

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Channeling the munificent and legally dubious energy of a techno-futurist Oprah, Andrew Yang kicked off Thursday night’s Democratic presidential debate with an announcement that he would randomly select 10 families to receive $1,000 a month for the next year. Mr. Yang, a businessman who is polling just behind Mayor Pete Buttigieg and ahead of far more experienced politicians, has staked his candidacy on the idea of having the government give every American citizen this “Freedom Dividend,” no questions asked, to end poverty, protect workers from the threat of technological disruption and usher in a new era of “human capitalism.”

Listen to Mr. Yang discuss his proposal on The Daily and The Argument ahead of the debates.

The debate: Is a universal basic income the key to a more just, prosperous society or a moral and economic hazard?

Although the unconventional nature of Mr. Yang’s candidacy has lent it something of an eccentric cast, the idea of a guaranteed income has a long history. Thomas Paine, as Jamelle Bouie has written, argued in 1797 that landed property owners dispossessed most people of their “natural inheritance” to the earth and should be taxed to compensate for that loss. The concept of a U.B.I. has since found support from figures as politically diverse as Martin Luther King Jr., Richard Nixon and the famous free-market economist Friedrich von Hayek.

No country has yet implemented a U.B.I. like Mr. Yang’s, but precedents of a kind do exist: Alaska draws on a state-owned investment fund, created by its oil wealth, to cut its residents a check every year ($1,600 in 2018). More robust programs are now being tested in smaller communities across the world, from villages in rural Kenya to Stockton, Calif.

While some U.B.I. plans from the right aim to replace the existing welfare state entirely, Mr. Yang’s would offer an alternative to some current benefits, such as food assistance, while stacking on top of Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. The program would cost roughly $3 trillion a year, according to a working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research, a sum Mr. Yang would finance, in part, with value-added and carbon taxes. As Matt Yglesias points out at Vox, a U.B.I. of this magnitude would bring total government spending up to levels seen in France and Scandinavian social democracies.

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Mr. Yang argues that automation and artificial intelligence will soon throw millions of Americans out of work and that a basic income will be the only way to guarantee them a decent standard of living. “We have five to 10 years before truckers lose their jobs,” Mr. Yang told The Times, “and all hell breaks loose.”

There’s good reason to be skeptical of cataclysmic predictions of humanity’s obsolescence, since automation has been eliminating jobs, and creating new ones, for hundreds of years. As Robert B. Reich writes in The Times, technological disruption may simply produce a future without many good jobs, a crisis whose beginnings we have already begun to see:

Against the shearing forces of economic inequality and dislocation, the country may need a U.B.I. to keep from coming apart. “I’m a capitalist,” Mr. Yang has said, “and I believe that universal basic income is necessary for capitalism to continue.”

Mr. Yang’s plan would both discourage and devalue work, writes Matthew Continetti in National Review. In its current incarnation, the American welfare system uses means-tested benefits that tie receiving financial assistance to looking for a job, a connection the U.B.I. would sever. But he argues it would also undermine the dignity of work itself, a viewpoint that Joe Biden seems to share. Continetti writes:

On a policy level, some progressives and conservatives agree that the U.B.I. is too blunt an instrument for reducing poverty. As the paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research found, a U.B.I. large enough to increase transfers to low-income families would be “enormously expensive.” Megan McArdle writes in Bloomberg:

The University of Pennsylvania economist Ioana Marinescu rejects the idea that a U.B.I. would produce a nation of idlers, since it’s not enough to live on. “It reduces the number of hours individuals work, but not the total number of people classified as employed,” she tells Teen Vogue. Instead, Annie Lowrey, the author of “Give People Money,” argues in The Globe and Mail that a U.B.I. would give workers, particularly low-income ones, more power to structure what their working lives look like.

But Lowrey also notes that part of the policy’s appeal is its potential to change our conception of work and its primacy in our culture:

Because of the racial poverty and income gaps, a U.B.I. would disproportionately benefit African-Americans, which some say proves the need for the policy’s universality. As Christine Emba points out in The Washington Post, whites are less likely to support welfare programs when they’re told that blacks might benefit. Dorian T. Warren argues in The Boston Review that “progressives are in a stronger position arguing for a universal program, knowing that it will in fact benefit African Americans greatly.”

Alyssa Battistoni argues in Dissent that the U.B.I. is an idea without an ideology. While it has radical potential, it also risks serving as a Trojan horse for right-wing economics:

That’s why U.B.I. is so favored by Silicon Valley elites, writes Carmen Petaccio in The New Inquiry: It promises to placate the working class without actually changing the fundamental relations between bosses and workers, the rich and the poor. He writes:

This argument shares similarities with Karl Marx’s opposition to the concept, as Nathan Heller writes for The New Yorker: “A society with a basic income has no pressure to pay employees a good wage, because the bottom constraint, subsistence, has fallen away.”

The idea of a U.B.I. has been debated for centuries and, as an instrument of eliminating poverty, deserves to be taken seriously. But as with any universal economic program, there is no way around the politics of picking where the money comes from and who reaps the greatest benefits: Would it require those who need it least to pay for those who need it most, or would it simply hide existing inequality behind a slick veneer of egalitarianism?

“What’s at issue with U.B.I.,” says Heller, “isn’t actually the movement of money but the privileging of interests — not who is served but who’s best served.” This doesn’t mean that it’s not an idea worth considering, Heller writes. “It means only that it’s not a magic spell.”

Do you have a point of view we missed? Email us at debatable@nytimes.com. Please note your name, age and location in your response, which may be included in the next newsletter.

A forum of writers explore basic income’s regressive and progressive potential. [The Boston Review]

Antti Jauhiainen and Joona-Hermanni Mäkinen write about the flaws of a Finnish U.B.I. trial. [The New York Times]

Judith Shulevitz makes a feminist argument for a U.B.I. [The New York Times]

Annie Lowrey has a Q. and A. about the arguments for and against a U.B.I. [The American Enterprise Institute]

From the archives: A front-page headline from June 23, 1971.

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