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Universal basic income was championed by Martin Luther King Jr., promoted by Silicon Valley citizens as the “social vaccine for the 21st century” and endorsed by 2016 presidential candidate Andrew Yang, but it has never really caught on.
Now it’s time may have come.
On Thursday, California lawmakers approved the nation’s first state-funded guaranteed income program. Once the bill is signed by Gov. Gavin Newsom, cities and counties can apply for funding from a $35 million pool to support current or new pilots that prioritize foster youth who recently left the foster care system and pregnant mothers. The White House has also rolled out a form of guaranteed income in its new expanded Child Tax Credit that is part of the pandemic relief package.
The state program comes on the heels of local efforts in the Bay Area and Stockton. Over the last two years, Oakland, Marin County, San Francisco and Santa Clara County started one- to two-year basic income programs that offer participants between $500 and $1,000 guaranteed dollars every month with no strings attached. Those programs are largely funded by private donations.
The surge in support for guaranteed income is being credited to the wealth and racial inequalities revealed by COVID-19, as job losses hit low-income and minority workers the hardest.
The pandemic “took the blinders off of what it means to live on the margins,” said Los Angeles county supervisor Holly Mitchell, a member of Mayors for Guaranteed Income, a national group that has grown from 11 member cities to over 50 in the last year. “Everyone saw it.”
The Bay Area basic income initiatives are focused on raising artists, mothers or minorities out of poverty. The Santa Clara County program, which helps foster youth, helped lay the groundwork for the statewide program.
“Cities are the laboratories of democracy,” said Sukhi Samra, director of the mayors’ group, who hopes the pilots in the Bay Area and across California will “provide a proof of concept” for federal policies.
The new wave of basic income initiatives is an alternative to government assistance programs that were “very prescriptive about doling out social services,” said state Sen. Dave Cortese, D-San Jose, who started Santa Clara County’s income program for foster youth as a county supervisor. “It really had a mentality of ‘we know what’s best for you weaker, poorer people.'”
Critics of guaranteed income worry that free money, similar to unemployment benefits, will discourage participants from working. “There’s a pretty plausible case to be made that the more generous you make unemployment benefits, the less anxious people are going to be to get back to work,” said Matt Zwolinski, director of the Center for Ethics, Economics and Public Policy at the University of San Diego.
Universal basic income supporters point to Stockton’s 2019 program, the first in the state, which found that full-time employment among participants increased by 12% in the program’s first year. Participants, who received $1,000 monthly from 2019 to 2021, reported greater financial stability month to month. That enabled them to buy the necessary food, pay off unexpected costs, and increase their overall wellbeing.
‘There’s a plausible case to be made that the more generous you make unemployment benefits, the less anxious people are to get back to work.’
Matt Zwolinski, director of the Center for Ethics, Economics and Public Policy at UC San Diego
Zwolinski worries that the pilots’ one to two-year timeframes limit the evidence researchers can pull from the data.
“The pilot programs are worth doing. They provide some level of evidence,” he said, but “there’s always going to be a leap of faith involved in jumping from a pilot program to say a full city-wide program to a full statewide program.”
The City of Oakland’s new program is the largest in the Bay Area, offering $500 monthly to 600 families making below Oakland’s median household income, about $65,000 for a four-person family. San Francisco is offering $1,000 a month for 130 artists and 150 Black and Pacific Islander pregnant women. Similarly, Marin County will be supporting 135 low-income women of color with $1,000 monthly. Santa Clara County’s pilot program provides $1,000 a month to 72 foster youth. The programs either randomly select eligible residents or pull from an applicant pool.
One recipient of Santa Clara’s program was Veronica Vieyra, a recent San Jose State University graduate.
In March 2020, Vieyra was surviving on a $1,100 monthly stipend from an internship with iFoster, an organization supporting foster youth. Kicked out of the dorms as COVID-19 spread across California, her monthly expenses for rent, car insurance, and phone left her with $280 for food and gas. The 25-year-old’s grades plummeted and she fell into a new living routine.
“If I sleep I don’t have so much to worry about,” she remembered thinking. “I actually save money because then I won’t have to eat as much.” Vieyra planned to return to the job at Safeway she worked before college, delaying her graduation.
When Vieyra received her first payment at the end of the summer, “The first thing I felt was like, I’m going to pay my rent.” She paid two months ahead. “I was like, that feels so good.”
With greater free time, Vieyra attended after-hours tutoring for the classes she had failed the year before, graduating with a degree in public health. She hopes to work with foster youth.
“If it wasn’t for the program, I’d probably be going back to Safeway,” she said.
This article is part of the California Divide, a collaboration among newsrooms examining income inequality and economic survival in California.
Sure, take money from those who earn it and give it to those who don’t. What incentive does that give people to go out and earn income?
Artists ??? Go get a job. You can still do your art after you get home from work.
@ Citizen …. the answer to your question is absolutely no incentive to go out and earn an income.
Why you guys so afraid? What if the US treated the poor as well as say the most modern and prosperous European and Asian countries? What if we cared more about keeping guns out of their hands than we did about keeping them from Healthcare (and charging 7K minimum for 2 hours at ER for ANYTHING?). You guys hate on China if you want, but they treat poor people better than the US does. Maybe this is a nice first step to care, with California leading the way?
Providing a modest income boost for those earning or living below the federal poverty line is the sign of a civilized and humanistic society.
A guaranteed $75K per annum income should be sufficient for a single person with incremental increases for those who are married with children.
There is no reason for anyone to be earning or taking home more than $500K per year regardless of their occupation or skillset so this measure would not impact most wage and salary earners.
Make the rich subsidize America and spare the middle and lower classes.
Think of all the unemployed who will flock to California in their RV’s to take advantage of the free goodies. They will park on the streets and not pay a dime in income or property taxes and dump their untreated and unsanitary sewage into storm drains, mooching all the while off taxpayers.
No thank you.
Agree to disagree, Leslie York. We are not talking about stock option lives, are we? It’s just a safety net. I think a sign of a nation “going up” is that there are more people within that society improving their lives. Nowadays, that’s obviously no longer true about the US. Bernie Sanders had this whole speech about the 99%. That’s nothing to be happy about is it?
I also find it highly unfair that Governor Newsom seems to get it from both sides. One side goes, ‘terrible Newsom, look at all these homeless people!’ but then other people go, ‘terrible Newson, trying to do something about the homeless people.’
Inflation – which WILL follow all of this free money – will hurt the poor more than the benefit. Suddenly, there is money for every possible political favor – as though we had a Governor who was trying to buy a reprieve from recall. No one should think that Universal Basic Income will solve the homeless problem. There is no question that once again wealth has floated to the top at the expense of workers. Benefits disappeared, salaries stagnated and the owners took the gains for themselves. That was a huge mistake which must not persist – companies need to restore benefits and increase wages so that more people can care for themselves and their families. Government should NOT be the population’s ATM. That doesn’t mean that it doesn’t provide emergency support services but EVERY half-witted scheme to to provide free homes, food, and support to the ‘under-served’ has run to excess, abuse, and if not perpetuating the problem creating new problems. The country has so much real work to do and businesses are pleading for workers. The best thing we can do is remove impediments but get the nation back up on it’s feet and gainfully employed. And whatever it takes – get those tents off the streets and clean up. If there is so much money all of a sudden, build shelters
> There is no reason for anyone to be earning or taking home more than $500K per year regardless of their occupation or skillset…
Having made over $500K per year in the past, I would just as soon seen most of my upper bracket income taxes go towards subsistence assistance for the poor rather than being allocated towards military expenditures, police funding, non-existent infrastructure improvements and what not.
And why not? Directing money towards the impoverished would improve their quality of life and stimulate the consumer economy as well.
The key of course is to access a far higher tax on those who make considerably more than the average working person to fund such measures. This in turn will eliminate any conflicts based on jealousy or resentment emanating from the lower & middle tier middle class wage earners.
Everybody despises the overly wealthy and rightfully so.
– Everybody despises the overly wealthy and rightfully so.
Nearly everybody…except the wealthy themselves.
The American middle class supports this country via their taxes and also serve as a buffer between the very rich and the very poor.
The founding fathers were very aware of what gave rise to the French Revolution and a little over 100 years later, a similar event took place in Czarist Russia.
The callousness and self-serving nature of the wealthy class has created most of the world’s turmoil and social problems throughout the history of mankind.
And they should be eliminated in America as well…not by violence but by a 75% tax hike to ease poverty and to take the fiscal burden of providing social and health services to the impoverished off the backs of the working middle class.
Why all the hating on the rich? My wife makes big money in tech and works her ass off!
Gosh, you want to make more money then work harder, go to school, get an education!
This country has gone from a society of workers who achieve to a country of victims and whiners!
What is bringing down the country is not the rich but the victimhood mentality, lets point the finger at someone else rather than look in the mirror.
Everyone cannot be equally wealthy no matter how hard one tries.
There is simply not enough wealth to go around to be shared equally.
There will always be the ‘haves and the have nots’ but a more level playing field in terms of income could ease a lot of unnecessary tensions and hardships.
When it comes to money, ‘you can’t take it with you’ and besides how much money does one really NEED to create a perverted concept of a materialistic oriented heaven on Earth?
A lot and that is the problem.
Vanity and greed are mankind’s most prevalent enemies…so good luck holding onto your fancy home while dying along with thoughts of driving a Mercedes to heaven while clinging a Hermes handbag full of cash and high-limit credit cards.
Marie Antoinette and the Romanovs learned the hard way and hopefully we will never encounter such an uprising in America.
@Michael. I hope my comment about the rich wasn’t misinterpreted. We have a great country where hard work has been rewarded and many, many people have earned good lives for generations. The comment about having gone from a country of achievers to a country of victims and whiners is correct. Very unfortunate but correct. And alarming. Wealth is not bad as long as those who control it fairly compensate those who they employ. They will do better as companies if they do that and progressively worse if they don’t. I don’t agree with the wrong thinking pushed by Bernie Sanders, communist, and currently being implemented in DC and Sacramento that we take the wealth from the rich and redistribute it in order to settle scores and fund fantasy (and rather vague) public ‘infrastructure’. It’s good that wealth accrues to those who get up in the morning and make a difference as long as the rest of the ‘team’ gets a fair share.
Good point Hinrich…that would place the likes of Jeff Bezos/Amazon as a major culprit when it comes to the exploitation of workers, personal vanity, and excessive greed.
As the wealthiest person on Earth, what is he doing to make the world a better place?
@philomena – well, he employs 1.4 million people. He went from an idea for selling books to inventing huge parts of the e-commerce supply chain. He gave millions of entrepreneurs a storefront – if you knit sweaters, you can reach a global audience, Amazon provides the web interface, payment processing, etc. it get’s it’s cut for sure (so do malls). AWS provides really good data and web services to many companies. Etc. 2 day delivery – unheard of before Bezos. There are negatives but a lot of positives. He’s like Steve Jobs – just think of all the people who benefitted from Apple and the Empire he built. Not alone, but it probably would not be there today without him. I don’t see Bezos’ colonizing Mars as especially useful but – who knows. The world is a better place because of Bezos and we are lucky that Amazon is an American success story. When some young socialists pull down his statue on some Seattle campus 100 years from now it will be sad because we will have forgotten how much one person contributed to his time and to the rest of us.
Jeff Bezos got even wealthier off the coronavirus.
For countless others, Covid-19 was a curse.
For Bezos, it was a fiscal blessing and he had the gall to low-ball his employees who worked hard during the pandemic.
Jeff Bezos started with nothing.
I don’t despise the overly wealthy, and we’re not overly wealthy. I couldn’t care less what others earn. That’s their business. If you’re comfortable in your own skin, as well as happy with who you are, and where you are in life. That’s all that matters. I do care about the poor.
We make over $500K per year (joint income) and tithe 10% ($50K) annually to our church. This is a requirement in order to remain a member in good standing.
Unfortunately, we do not see this money going to any charitable efforts other than for church remodeling and ministerial salary increases.
The church steering committee would like to upgrade the church kitchen with a Wolf gas range and SubZero refrigerator, and they are currently negotiating a lease on a Lexus SUV for the pastor who currently draws an annual salary of $95K per year + $500.00 bonuses for handling individual weddings and funerals.
It seems the wealthier people are, the less concerned they are about the poor and suffering.
And for someone like Jeff Bezos who is worth over $189B, donating $1M is the equivalent of pennies on the dollar.
Only when someone is willing to give it all away can they truly look themselves in the mirror and consider themselves both humanitarian and spiritual.
We are striving towards that goal ourselves and will be leaving the church shortly to carry out our own donations and spiritual mission.
Poverty should be acknowledged with compassion and assistance.
I don’t consider over $500K per year overly wealthy. Far from it. I don’t think wealth has anything to do with how you feel about the poor. It’s what’s in you heart, and it cuts across all socioeconomic lines.
I don’t care to say how much we tithe, but it’s more than 10%. What our church does with the money , I’m okay with because I understand Biblical stewardship. Our church is very gracious towards charitable giving because we have an awesome pastor, wonderful members and a healthy church.
It is well with my soul…
Whether or not we tithe, whether or not we are wealthy or poor, or make over $500k/year or not, everyone needs to work for their own bread. Anything else is socialism. Emergency assistance is one thing, but ongoing assistance when there is no emergency is self defeating and creates a permanent, resentful underclass. Check England. No.
° ongoing assistance when there is no emergency is self defeating and creates a permanent, resentful underclass.
Public assistance is OK as a supplement, especially if one is willing to take a demeaning minimum wage job that pays nothing.
A permanent resentful underclass becomes more resentful when economic opportunities are witheld due to systemic racism and our menfolk are constantly being brutalized by the police.
BLM
Make your own way. Earn your own bread. Support yourself and support your own family. Stop looking to others and stop blaming others.
Equip yourself with skills that the market will pay for.
> stop blaming others.
CRT (Critical Race Theory) has clearly illustrated that African Americans were deprived of economic opportunities due the pervasive racism of both southern and northern white Gentiles.
This is why many white conservative Republicans (aka closet racists) do not want the subject taught in public schools.
They are hypocrites when it comes to exhorting their Christianity.
Pulling oneself up by the bootstraps is very difficult when the whites have been depriving you of a basic pair of shoes for centuries.
Entertainment and athletics are the only viable way for African Americans to escape the white web of deprivation and not every black person has those gifts.
Full monetary reparations are in order for all descendents of African slaves.
Germany acknowledged its World War II guilt and paid billions of dollars to Holocaust survivors.
America can do the same.
A Jewish supporter of BLM.
BLM is a Marxist organization (its founder Cullors says they are trained Marxists) that openly states it seeks to overturn our economic system and society – using its false narrative of ‘systemic racism.’
Disparities in outcome are not evidence of racism. We have a whole set of anti discrimination laws in education and employment that the Dept..of Justice is ready to enforce. Produce evidence.
– BLM is a Marxist organization (its founder Cullors says they are trained Marxists) that openly states it seeks to overturn our economic system and society – using its false narrative of ‘systemic racism.’
Unless one is an aging John Birch Society member with dementia, Marxism hardly poses a threat anymore.
This kind of paranoia might be understandable (and even acceptable) in places like Orange County, south San Diego County, Contra Costa County, and the Central Valley…but in Palo Alto?
Yikes!
A victim mentality and an oppressive mindset will hinder you for life, and keep you from succeeding. To say that becoming a professional athlete or an entertainer is the only way out is marginalizing African Americans, and it’s absurd. Under that same mentality, we’re all doomed.
Asians and Jews overcame oppression with education, but blacks have to be athletes or entertainers? That’s very discriminatory. There are successful doctors, lawyers, etc. of all races. Try opening your mind.
Tell that to the Cubans, or the N. Koreans, or all the relatives of the Chines or Russians killed by communist/Marxist regimes. Tell it to all the people fleeing from the misery in Venezuela.
Russia is no longer a Communist/Marxist country.
It is a dictatorial democracy (with fixed elections). Kind of like what POTUS45 aspired towards.
With only Cuba, North Korea, Viet Nam, and the PRC remaining as Communist countries, hardly a global threat.
And the PRC and Viet Nam are more along the lines of capitalist-socialist countries. They do a lucrative business with the United States.
Communism is virtually dead and to fear some BLM Marxists is akin to following in the footsteps of Chicken Little.
About 100 million people were killed in the Soviet Union and China thanks to Marxist/socialist/communist regimes. Marxist/Socialialist/Communism continues in Cuba, Venezuela, N.Korea, China, Vietnam and elsewhere. Let’s not forget about Pol Pot in Kampuchea (Cambodia) and how many people were killed there. Marxist/socialism/communism is characterized by state run slavery and state sanctioned killing. Individual citizens have no rights in these statist societies.
The Movement for Black Lives says it is anti capitalist on its website. Ibram X. Kendi, the thought leader behind “Anti-racism,” claims capitalism is racist. BLM global network founder Patrisse Cullors says she and her BLM founders are trained Marxists.
I think the Marxist/socialist/communist threat is very real, and very present, and all Americans should wake up and recognize what it means.
Lest we forget, it was a mob of 800+ WHITE right-wing ‘patriots’ who stormed the Capitol in a futile attempt to overthrow the American government.
It was not a throng of African American ‘Marxists’ promoting the BLM agenda.
It’s been Antifa (Marxist anarchist) and BLM, Marxist, avowedly anti capitalist, riots that led to many lost lives and hundreds of millions of dollars in property damage over the summer of 2020, and just today Antifa attacked police in LA.
Universal basic income is socialist/Marxist. Earn your own income, support your own family. Produce, don’t take.
What Citizen/College Terrace is expounding makes total sense & we live by those guidelines BUT others (for various reasons of their own) cannot and I have have no problem with government assistance programs PROVIDING my current income taxes are not increased to cover such additional expenditures.
The existing tax base can be budgeted to cover income supplements IF excessive foreign aid costs are redirected to assisting people actually residing here in the United States (legal or undocumented) rather than those in other countries.
Citizen’s ‘take care of your own’ perspective should also apply to 3rd world and developed countries where the U.S. is sending financial and/or military aid adding up to billions.
In other words, let them either starve and/or kill each other off in recurrent juntas and channel the available resources towards people HERE many of whom are more worthy and needy.
It seems to me that the biggest problem this planet faces is not COVID-19, nuclear war, or climate change. I think the biggest problem is that most countries are overpopulated. These countries just have too many people, and there are not enough natural resources to go around.
If you combine that with our failed economic system, we’re literally dependant on the hyper-rich to give away all of their money after they die, and they should not have to do this. I don’t claim to have an answer to our failed economic system. But there are also some occupations that we should legalize, because this is 2021 and the numbers of homeless people that our government tells us we have are probably just a tiny tip of the iceberg.
As far as telling people to stop whining and go out and earn money, do you realize that that’s like telling workers with disabilities: “Sorry. Life is tough. If you don’t earn enough to survive on disability, then drop dead?”
Our economic system isn’t failed. The US economic system continues to make its citizens wealthier – check per capita income by nation, and over time. The US, a large country with 335 million people, exceeds expectations and continues to help people climb out of poverty. Poverty rates have been declining over time, even though the US accepts large numbers of poor and poorly educated immigrants, year after year. Despite the rhetoric, this is the case.
Able bodied folks should earn their own income, support themselves and their families and not be a burden on others.
Self-sufficiency and taking responsibility for one’s living expenses is a workable concept providing one has the capability to do so in terms of mental and physical capacities for the task at hand.
That said and as mentioned by a previous poster, this self-sufficiency concept also applies to countries being subsidized by U.S. foreign aid which in turn is being subsidized by American taxpayer dollars.
It’s better using these resources to help take care of our own rather than sending it overseas to a bunch of ingrates.
As AI takes off into advancements beyond our imagination today, UBI will likely be widespread. This very complex economic problem does need a solution, and somehow the key positive drivers of private sector led economic models, forms of blended capitalism, not socialism or communism, would be the best to apply. The success of capitalism raising more people out of poverty is unquestionable. We’ve never had “pure” capitalism in America, it’s always been blended with public policy looking after our economically disadvantaged in various experiments since the late 1700s. Hinrich is right that we’ve seen an undeniable decrease of the middle class since 2000. We witnessed this while working in Silicon Valley for 25 years. The executive suite compensation became more bloated and uneven. Back in 1960s through 1990s corporations like HP were far more egalitarian in spreading the wealth. They set a great example for others. Profit sharing and stock programs were plentiful. Today, across American industries, this is the exception now. We’re looking more like 1890s America than 1990s.
We ought to bring back more profit sharing into corporations. We also need to quickly develop apprenticeship programs so young people can get plugged into good jobs with promise for advancement if the work hard and learn a needed skill. If the UBI for foster youth were linked with them enrolling in apprenticeship programs, then we’d be onto something (nursing would be a good one. We always need nurses. Same for plumbers, electricians, good contractors who know how to fix/build things, etc).
Due to AI, we will be facing the biggest transformation of and challenges to long standing economic models, we’re likely already in the early stage of it. We had better quickly develop the right public policy and economic policy to transition in a smart way that won’t blow up everything good about private enterprise and the extraordinary power of the capitalist wealth creation engine, fairly distributed.
The disabled have the opportunity to apply for SSDi fortunately.
We do have capitalism, which simply means a system of voluntary free exchange with private property rights backed by a system of laws.
Make your own way. Many start with nothing and do incredibly well. We do have an emergency social safety net. But for the able bodied, go get a job and get on your way to supporting yourself and not burdening others.
Every little bit helps especially if one is impoverished.
FDR, LBJ understood this and Joe Biden is carrying on that vision.
Only the Republicans seem to have a problem with social services and economic stimulus for the poor.
Go get a job. If you’re able bodied. If you’re not, there is SSDI and other social safety net programs.
Feel free to give away your own money to the able bodied, but leave the rest of us out of it.
No one who is able bodied and can earn money should plan to depend on assistance and the earnings of others. Work.
It’s mostly attitude. Negative people who expect others to support them rarely do well. @Citizen is completely right. In our country, there is enormous opportunity and a great deal of support for people who roll up their sleeves and know where they are going. Once you get out there, you’ll meet them. We also have a large population – and growing population – of people who are increasingly dependent. These are the same people who push for expanded entitlements, who whine on the web about their victimization, and who vote for communists like Bernie Sanders and company who promise free everything. These same people have very little life experience with actual communist pain and suffering – who think the state paying for (and controlling everything) is fine. To be so dependent is not to have control of your life, which is what earning your own way gives you. It’s not easy but it IS open to everyone. Free money has always lured the gullible but don’t buy it. It ain’t free. Do you remember free tuition at California state schools that isn’t free anymore? Free state parks? Not free anymore. There are lot’s of things like that. And there a lot more things that desperately need resources in California if only we didn’t have such a lousy Governor.