Questions about Job Guarantee

There’s often a good deal of head-butting, sometimes quite acrimonious, between the Job Guarantee proponents and the Universal Basic Income proponents.  In some ways it comes from a fundamental disconnect about how we should lift people out of poverty; UBI says “Give everyone funds!”, and JG says “Give everyone jobs!”.

For me, I feel that the “Give everyone jobs!” approach buys deeply into the lie that personal value and self worth come from having paid employment, and it excludes large portions of the population from that “safety net”.  I also feel that, as a primary social safety net, it would come a little too close to our existing welfare work requirements- becoming much like a modern, polished up version of Victorian workhouses.

For the record, I am not against the idea of a voluntary, equitable Job Guarantee program, but I have serious questions that I would like to see addressed by the JG people. (I have asked these JG questions before, and never really gotten any clear answers other than variations on “No it wouldn’t!”)

1) How will you ensure that the jobs made available to people aren’t just the ‘undesireable’ jobs that no one else will take?

2) How will you prevent or alleviate the social stigma that is likely to come with jobs that people are given through JG?

These first two are related. Our society already has built-in classism surrounding the type of jobs people have. Society stratifies jobs into “skilled” and “unskilled” labor, a derogatory division based on education level, not actual skills used.  We look down on the burger flippers, the garbage truck drivers, the grocery baggers and the gas station attendants as being Less Than.  We see them as less deserving of a living wage, less deserving of basic respect, less than someone who “can get a real job”. People say things like “Flipping burgers is a job, not a career.” and “Anyone could do that job, why should they get paid more?”

It gets worse if you are on any sort of public assistance- people feel free to judge your clothing, your food, your home, even your “extras”, no matter how you got them- and not only judge, but publicly call out and shame you. Buy a nice steak for a special occasion with food stamps, and you’re likely to go viral as an example of The Underserving Poor; “My tax dollars! Those People! Just a drain on Hard Working Americans!” Our society tacitly demands that poor people look and act the “correct” way, so we can feel smugly superior to them, all while patting ourselves on the back for not being them.

So what happens when we have a Job Guarantee program?  What happens when the government is handing jobs to people? How do we prevent “They had to get a job from JG, they can’t get a real job.” or “This is a JG job, how dare they ask for a higher wage!” or “I wouldn’t give them a promotion, they got this job through JG.”, when this mentality is already happening?

3) How will you make sure that people are getting jobs that are commensurate with their education and experience levels?

The job market is already saturated with people who are overqualified for their jobs. There are PhDs working at McDonald’s and the local grocery store. There are people who got the degree, did everything “right” according to our societies rules about Getting a Real Job… and still aren’t making a living wage.

Will a JG program guarantee someone a job that is relevant and meaningful to them, that makes best use of their skills and knowledge… or will it be working on the beggars can’t be choosers premise, and you’ll be expected to take whatever job is available to you? If the premise is paid employment = happiness how does that hold up if someone who’s got a skill… ends up constantly digging ditches or picking up trash on the freeway? Do we roll back around to the social stigma? “Just be grateful we gave you a job!”

4) How will you make sure that there are jobs available to be “guaranteed”, while still supporting innovation?

Where are the jobs that are being guaranteed coming from? I’ve heard FDR-type public infrastructure projects, but what happens when those projects run out? Going back to #3, what happens when your project needs cement pourers, and the people in line at the JG office are all programmers?  How do you keep a steady stream of living wage jobs going? How do you ensure purposeful work, rather than (to quote a book with a badly implemented societal JG) “Wiping the bottoms of the incontinent at both ends of life.”

And then, how do you keep that steady stream of jobs going, without stifling innovation and automation? We already have people fighting against things like self-checkout at grocery stores and restaurants, because it “Takes away jobs!” There’s already gloom-and-doom articles about automation- all couched in terms of the number of jobs lost, not in terms of the amount of human labor saved.  Automation should be something we look forward to, because it means less work for a human being- but we’re SO wrapped up in the mentality that human worth and happiness comes from paid employment, that the idea of less things for humans to labor at terrifies people.

5) What will you do to make sure that Job Guarantee programs are truly voluntary, for those people who want to have paid employment, rather than mandatory for social service access and survival?

JG people react very badly to the implication that it would be any sort of forced labor situation.  They will protest that it will be voluntary,  no one will be forced to get a job through JG, people will have a choice… but when your choice is “Take a job through JG” or “Poverty and Suffering”, then it isn’t much of a choice.  We already have this in our society;  in order to survive, people are required to take whatever paid employment presents itself  -no matter how physically, mentally and/or emotionally damaging that job might be.  In order to access social supports, people have to prove they are looking for work (even though the documentation requirements are outdated and unrealistic), and they must take whichever job is offered to them first -and then their financial benefits are cut off before they receive a paycheck, often exacerbating the debt effects of poverty.

How much worse could that become under a Job Guarantee based system? Would people be required to participate in JG to access food stamps, housing, etc? What happens to people not in the JG program? (For a really dystopian view of a stratified society with JG, read Silverberg’s “The Time Hoppers”) Which brings us to the next question…

6) What will you be doing to support the people who are not covered by paid-employment based social initiatives like Job Guarantee and Minimum Wage?

Because our society is paid-employment-centric, seeing paid employment as the primary source of human purpose and value, poverty-reduction initiatives usually focus on employment.  Job Guarantee wants everyone to have a job. Minimum Wage wants everyone to have a living wage.  These things are worthy, effective goals… but they leave out huge segments of the population; all those people who, for whatever reason, aren’t engaged in paid employment.

This is already a huge issue in the way our society treats the disabled and elderly; disabled people have to prove that they can’t labor to get benefits, and then are actively restricted in their assets.  The elderly are dependent on Social Security, which only applies to those people who had paid employment previously. And they are also restricted in their access to supports, being legally required to make themselves poor through “spend down” before they can have things like home care paid for.

And then we have the people who are doing things, but aren’t engaged in standard wage-work.  Freelance artists and writers (who often have to fight for their income), contract workers, anyone doing the ‘gig economy’, stay at home caregivers of the elderly and disabled,  stay at home parents, volunteers, unpaid interns, students… the list goes on and on.

All of these people are excluded from the benefits of a Job Guarantee or Minimum Wage initiative.  In fact, without other comprehensive social supports, JG and MinWage programs are actively discriminatory- treating the non-employed as less worthy of social and financial stability than the employed. I think this is the major point of divergence between Job Guarantee and Basic Income- UBI believes that everyone is deserving of a stable financial baseline, regardless of their current, former, or future status as a laborer.

7) Why do you feel Job Guarantee should be a societal goal? 

What is it that makes Job Guarantee important to you? Why do you feel Paid Employment For All is part of the answer to growing wealth inequality, automation and job loss? Do you feel that adult humans can only be happy and productive with paid employment? What message does that send to people not engaged in paid employment?

Stability first, THEN employment

I am all for the idea of a Job Guarantee program replacing our existing Unemployment offices. A place that people who want paid employment can go and get comprehensive job search support & job training. Someplace employers can go to find qualified employees. Someplace that supports and uplifts the people looking for work.

But I am 110% against the idea of participation in Job Guarantee being necessary to survive.  There’s too many ways a system like that hurts rather than helps people.  And you can insist that it’s “voluntary” and no one’s being “forced”… but someone doesn’t have to be manhandled and chained to be forced into exploitative labor – all it takes is the societal belief that you have to be employed, or you’re not worth anything.  We already have that, Job Guarantee could make it much worse.

This is why I support Basic Income before things like Job Guarantee and Minimum Wage. Build the solid foundation first  -one that supports everyone-  then look at supporting the employed.

UBI for Individual Choice and Freedom

When we talk about Basic Income, what some people don’t realize is that we’re talking about a per person income, not a per household income.  This confusion is understandable, because right now, the USA’s welfare system is entirely based on households as a single entity; how many in your household? What’s the total household income? Who in the household is a dependant, rather than a potential wage earner?

It reduces the chosen interdependency of families and households, to a government-regulated and controlled unit. Your access to financial support, housing, even food, is tied to your household remaining within the strict framework they have defined for you. Choices that defy that framework -like a teen getting a part time job, or someone leaving the home, or needing to take time of work for health reasons- put the financial stability and structure of the whole household at risk.

Sidebar:
Many people don’t realize that “getting a job” can actually be detrimental overall for someone on welfare. When you gain paid employment while on welfare, your benefits are reduced or cut off from the moment you are employed. There’s no buffer period or overlap. Meaning that families who pay their bills when they get their welfare check at the beginning of the month, now find themselves without income until the first paycheck comes in- often causing debt to increase, aggravating the poverty situation. The same with medical coverage- lose your state-based coverage because you got a job, and hope no one gets six in the 3-9 months before employer coverage kicks in.

With person-centered Basic Income, however, we acknowledge two major things:

• That households come in many different configurations and dynamics, and that people come and go from households.
• That a person’s right to a stable financial baseline is not based on who they live with, or what their relationship is to those people.

These two things are vital for personal independence. No one should ever feel like their right to freedom from suffering is tied to another person, or people. This is especially important when people find themselves in households that are unhealthy, or supportive. Look at the statistics on domestic violence- financial dependency is one of the ways abusers control their victims. With a Basic Income tied to them, victims have more freedom to escape. Look at the statistics on LGBTQ teens-far to many of them are becoming homeless because of families that reject them- with a Basic Income, starting a new life is possible. Or, for a recent example- the college athlete who suddenly found her finances cut off and her education at risk, because her parents saw a picture of her with her girlfriend. She had to resort to crowdfunding to survive, which caused her to almost lose her scholarship. It was only because of the public outcry that the NCAA relented. This sort of manipulation is unacceptable and Basic Income, distributed to individuals, helps people resist and recover.

Individual Basic Income gives people more freedom to chose when, how and with whom, they live. It allows us to expand our idea of what a “household” is. It give people the freedom to make decisions that they couldn’t, if their financial status was solely tied to other people, or a job. Someone could move to another area to do job hunting, without fear of poverty while looking. Someone could take time off for health reasons, without fearing the loss of employment income. Someone could choose to do volunteer work, or sign up to do disaster relief work, or take time off for a hobby, without someone else going “I don’t think you should do that!”

People can make their own choices- because they have their own stability, something based on the fact that they are an individual member of society with their own value and worth as a human being. Not their paid employment status, not their status as someone’s parent, child, spouse or significant other, not whether they’re in school or not.

Imagine what that sort of understanding would do for you…if you knew that no matter where you were, or what you were doing, you could rely on $1000/month to keep you going. It’s not going to fix everything, but you’ll never be utterly bereft.

UBI for the Disabled

Did you know that, in the USA, the primary benchmark for government disability is ‘can you get a job’? Not what your disability is, not how it truly impacts you or your family, not if you have good days and bad days, but “Could you have paid employment? Why not? Prove it!”.

And they mean any paid employment, anywhere. If you used to be a trapeze artist, and a spinal injury means you can’t do the thing you trained your whole life for… but you can sit at desk now, well, then, you’ll have to sit at a desk job, because you’re not really disabled. Even if some days you can only sit for an hour at a time, or you get erratic migraines, or you can’t control when you have flashbacks to falling.

All the system cares about is the usefulness of your body and mind as a resource for others. All it wants to know is if you can participate in Paid Employment, so they don’t have to support you in any way.  And, by the way, disability services doesn’t just mean a monthly check. For many of the disabled, it can mean housing, personal care support & staff, and medical services. But ALL of those things go away, if you aren’t eligible for disability.

Now, many people I know who are disabled do want some sort of paid employment- but they are stuck in a catch 22; if they get paid employment, and then make over X amount, or have $2000 in savings, they lose their disability benefits. And that paid employment, if they find something that can accommodate their disability, is very often not enough to cover all the things they were receiving as a benefit.

What the message underlying “Yes, I would love to be able to have a job!” is, is “I would like financial security, and to be engaged in activities I enjoy, to the limits of my disability, without regularly running the risk of damaging that financial security.”

Enter Universal Basic Income.  A well-run UBI would allow us to provide that financial stability, AND eliminate our discriminatory, exclusionary ‘finance-based eligibility’ disability services system we have now. We could provide vital supports to the disabled based on their disability needs- not on “Oh, I guess we have to feed and house you because you can’t get paid employment.”

It would allow the disabled to participate in society in the way they choose, to the level they chose; If they want to own a small cottage industry, and work when their disability allows them too, they can.  If they want to have a part-time job at an employer who allows them flexibility and accommodations, they can; all without putting their disability support services at risk.

It would allow us to better accept special needs youth into society, because we wouldn’t need to focus on ‘get a job’ as the goal of adult integration. We could see them as people, with their own dreams and choices -not as a disposable, abstract part of the labor pool, which is what we literally train our disabled youth to be, right now.

And, fundamentally, it would provide the disabled with dignity, worth and pride by making them part of the whole; not an excluded class of people, living on the begrudgingly disbursed largesse they have to jump through hoops to get and keep.

 

Crypto Isn’t UBI. Yet.

ETA: There have been some small changes made to this article since first published- typos fixed, a sentence or two rewritten to be more articulate, and some information about Mannabase added.

There’s been several articles and news bits out there about different cryptocurrency organizations offering a “Universal Basic Income” if you sign up with them.  And while the idea of cryptocurrency certainly has a future as a functional currency, and that functional currency could be used for a UBI, we aren’t there yet. There’s a few key reasons why:

Cryptocurrency isn’t legal tender.

For something to be a truly effective universal basic income, you have to be able pay for basic things with it; like your rent, or utilities or food.  Right now, there’s no cryptocurrency that does that. Yes, there’s a few specialized companies (usually technology-based) that accept Bitcoin or other cryptocurrency, but they are few, and none of them provide the fundamentals of living, which is what a UBI is supposed to cover.

Now, the counter argument to that is that you can convert your crypto into legal tender, but that doesn’t support it being a UBI, either.  You can’t go to any bank or ATM and access your money- you have to go through specific gateways (always online) and go through a detailed process to get your bits and bytes converted into actual money you can use.

As an example, I have had a premium Second Life account for years. As a reward, Linden Labs gives me a weekly stipend of 300 Lindens- the Second Life currency. These Lindens were one of the original digital currencies; one of the progenitors of Bitcon and the rest. I can buy things within the system and I can spend real world dollars to buy more Lindens, or I can sell my Lindens on the Linden Exchange for real world dollars. Lindens only ever exist as a virtual thing; I can never walk around with a pocket full of Lindens.

But here’s the deal; the value of the Lindens (just like other cryptocurrencies) is based on the amount of trading that is happening on the LindX.  One day my hoard of Lindens might be worth $100, the next it might only be worth $75, the next it might be $140. To get the best value out of my Lindens, I have to pay attention to the market.  Which brings me to the second issue with crypto as UBI…

Cryptocurrency isn’t stable.

When someone hands me $100 US dollars, and I tuck it into my bank account or under my mattress or into a jar…when I open up that jar a month later, I will still have $100.  Yes, the amount I can stretch that $100 may go up or down, but the amount of legal tender I have doesn’t change.

That’s not how cryptocurrency works. The value of your digital money does up or down based on how many people are buying and selling; just like Lindens, or the stock market. It is all speculative and reactive, a free-floating free market wonderland.

This makes it specifically bad for a UBI; people talk about UBI as a stable financial floor, a fundamentally uplifting foundation… but how can you provide a stable foundation, if the level of the floor keeps changing based on the whims of a market you have no real say in? When the person receiving the UBI can’t count on it having the same value when they go to cash out, as you said it had when you handed it to them? That’s the exact opposite of “stable financial baseline“.  Given that Twitter and Google are both on the verge of banning cryptocurrency advertisements, that’s not going to help the value of cryptocurrencies, at all.

Cryptocurrency isn’t regulated.

For many of the cryptocurrency enthusiasts, this is one of the selling points; that there’s no government meddling in their financial exchanges. And that’s fine… except when you’re talking about providing a basic income to everyone for necessities. How is money coming into the system? Who’s deciding what the UBI distribution amount is, and why? Who’s making sure that people are getting the full legal tender value of their UBI? Who’s making sure no one is stealing bits and bytes? Or, like the latest news, who’s making sure those bits and bytes aren’t loaded with illegal things like kiddie porn?

Right now, cryptocurrency looks a whole lot like the tulpenmanie of the 1600s, or the South Sea Bubble of the 1700s.  Someone has created a thing (electronic money), gotten people to buy into and invest in the thing, used that to drum up more excitement for the thing…until there’s more people wanting the thing than there is ever going to be thing, and it all implodes in one big financial mess. And, like the Wall Street crash of 2008, the people who get hurt the most are the normal, everyday people who invested their savings and were depending on that income to survive.

What we call UBI matters.

For something to be a true Universal Basic Income, it needs to meet some key requirements:

• It has to be universal. It needs to be accessible to everyone, regardless of access to the internet. Even though internet banking is ubiquitous now, it’s still possible to conduct basic financial transactions without ever using an ATM card or hopping online.
• It needs to be stable and not subject to random market fluctuation.  There’s no point in calling for a stable financial baseline, if it isn’t going be a baseline in a functional legal currency. The rapid fluctuation of an exchange is different than basing something on GDP/GNP.
• It needs to be legal tender for all debts public and private.  Requiring that you convert from your special money to legal tender is an accessibility barrier, and limits the usefulness of the currency you are distributing as a basic income.

It’s Not UBI

When some company says “We’re giving out cryptocurrency as a UBI!” they need to be able to answer some fundamental questions:

• Can you access your funds without the internet?
• Is there a buy-in? Does someone have to put real money into your system to get anything in return?
• Can this be used as legal tender for paying for the basic necessities of living?
• If not, how does a recipient convert your currency to legal tender that they can use? Are there fees involved in conversion?
• How do you guarantee that the basic income you give them remains stable and consistent- that $100 stays $100?
• Who is maintaining and regulating your currency?

Let’s look at Mannabase as an example, since they are the biggest newsmakers right now. According to their website:

Mannabase is an online platform for the world’s first
Universal Basic Income cryptocurrency.

So, how does their platform stack up to our UBI requirements?

Well, it fails the first one, right off. It’s not truly universal, because it requires access to the internet, and signing up for their program. They don’t appear to be means testing, but they also don’t say up front if you have to invest real money to be involved.  If you have to put money in to get money out, it’s not really accessible to everyone, is it? Edited to Add: Evidently Mannabase claims to have about 10 years worth of money stored up to distribute, and you get your manna ‘for free, because it’s UBI’ without needing to put money into the system.

It’s not legal tender, and you’re limited to converting it though their exchanges, so there’s barriers to accessing your funds, and it can’t be used to buy gas, or pay rent, or stock your pantry. You have to be in their system to benefit, like a club. There’s nothing up front about any conversion fees.

It fails the stability test, because it says right there on the website that the “price is set by the free market on online exchanges”– meaning people are playing with the value of the money, and your “basic income” will change based on those forces. There are some things that should never be dictated by the whims of the free market. Healthcare is one of them, a stable basic income is another.

They also say that “Automated distributions send manna to all participants on a regular ongoing basis.” and that “…you have a basic human right to share in the money supply.”  Not the nationwide legal tender money supply, just the money supply that they’ve created, that fluctuates based on how much people are speculating with that money.

The people maintaining, controlling & regulating the funds, are the managers of this NPO. This means the future of your basic income is in the hands of about 20 people, and whomever else is playing the exchange. You only get your “UBI” as long as people are playing the game.

There has to be some member provided money coming in; that may be in the “whitepaper” you have to give your name and email to them to receive. Otherwise they’re going to have tons of people signing up, and not enough money coming in, and suddenly your ‘automated distribution of manna’ works out to a few bucks a month… better leave it in the market so it’ll go up… oh look, a crash, and now you’ve got nada.

What you have in Mannabase is a group of people who’ve created a charitable NPO, who are converting real dollars to ‘manna’, buying and selling that manna back and forth (plus legal money influxes from a different NPO), and then regularly sending out manna to members.  They’ve created their own money supply, and then are distributing portions of it to people in the loop, and occasionally giving money to charity. In a way, they’ve created a little micro-nation, and say they’re going to give some of their country’s money to all the citizens of their country, just for being there.

It’s not a bad system, but it just isn’t a UBI, no matter how much they want to call it that. It’s a profit sharing scheme that is going to be a draw for people who are already on the cryptocurrency/blockchain bandwagon. It’s not going to matter to the people who are in survival level jobs, or the disabled, or anyone who doesn’t have the time, energy and resources to play cryptocurrency roulette.

It might be a good pilot program for how a crypto-based UBI could work, if there was a single legal tender cryptocurrency, and if the basic income payout was guaranteed to be a stable, living expenses-based amount. But until we have that universality and stability, anything like this is just a closed-system experiment.

The end result is that the these blossoming crypto-account programs aren’t UBI, and calling them UBI is muddying the waters and confusing the efforts to build a real, based in legal currency & administered to everyone citizen’s social dividend.

What Basic Income Isn’t

If you are advocating for an income cap on who gets $$, you’re not talking about basic income. 

If you advocate for a $$ payment, but only if people go out and get a paid job, you’re not talking about basic income. 

If you’re saying that only people over or under a certain age should get any $$, you’re not talking about basic income.

If getting $$ is based on any sort of screening, testing, assessment or other ‘proof of’ procedure, you’re not talking about basic income. 

If you are tying getting $$ into Social Security paid, then you’re not talking about basic income.

A true UBI goes to everyone, no questions asked, ever.  If that money represents a net increase in their yearly income or not,  that can be tied into the tax code- people with higher incomes would pay more taxes, and their monthly BI wouldn’t really give them more money. Of course someone in the top 1% doesn’t need a UBI, and their increased taxes can & should help pay for the distribution.

But if we start capping who we initially send the money out to in the first place, then we start creating artificial barriers, we start gatekeeping about who ‘deserves’ the money or not. We make it very easy to say “Well, maybe we should drop that cap down to…$40K a year…” And suddenly people have less resources.  It’s more of the HAVES telling the HAVE NOTS what they do and don’t deserve.

This is very different than saying “Everyone gets X% of the GDP, and then pay taxes on their income over that allotment.” Yes, the math is complicated, and yes there’s a lot of specific details to work out; but adding in income limits and means screening and proof of need testing just adds layers of bureaucracy we’re trying to eliminate. 

 

The Work Trap

Think about how we talk about work.

A “work ethic”, “hard work”, “real work”, the “working class”.

When people say ‘work’, what they often really mean is “paid employment”. 

Our culture has fetishized paid employment.  We’ve held it up as the Only True Adult Task; encouraged people to give their lives and souls to their paid employment, glorified giving up sleep and food and socialization.  Companies are proud of someone sub-contracting out their vehicle while their body is trying to give birth. Companies are advertising living off of caffeine and sleep deprivation to earn a commission as life goals. Employees are proud of working on their PhD while on maternity leave, or answering dozens of emails and taking conference calls while on vacation, or putting 80 hours of “crunch time” in to get a product out the door.  That’s celebrated as a “strong work ethic”, rather than overwork or employer abuse.

We’ve made paid employment the be-all and end-all of adult existence, forcing people to see their identity and worth to society only in terms of their integration & participation in the labor pool. We believe, as a society, that the only way to have self respect and dignity is by having paid employment. We denigrate and demean anyone who isn’t a part of that labor pool. We tie social benefits to having paid employment. We even deny people access to their earned benefits if they leave the labor pool “too soon”.

This paid-employment-focused mindset is not only detrimental to people who are in the labor pool, by reducing them down to a resource to be used up; but it is amazingly discriminatory and it devalues all the other things we do in our lives that are work.

Work Is Anything That Takes Time, Energy & Focus To Do

Work is not just the things we do that we get paid for.  Work is when we put our body, heart & mind into completing a task. Work is when we focus on getting something done.  Raising children is work. Preparing meals is work. Pursuing a hobby is work. Volunteering is work. There are literally millions of things human beings can be doing that is work but not paid employment.

 

This graphic of the Ikiagi concept very clearly shows that there’s more to life than paid employment; and it shows that you can have ‘delight and fullness’ without paid employment- it does, however, still buy into the “getting paid is necessary for wholeness” paradigm; when what is really needed is financial stability.

Universal Basic Income Unchains Financial Stability From Paid Employment

There are people who are not part of the labor pool, for whatever reason. The elderly, the young, the disabled, the homeless, stay at home parents, caregivers of family members, the people who choose work that is not paid employment.

These people are doing things, and they are doing things that are work. Even if they “just” go to bingo club once a week, or they have a hobby, or they are doing the laundry. These things matter. These people have value and dignity and self-respect, even without paid employment. But our society treats them as if they are leeches, hangers-on, people without rights.  We actively exclude them from societal benefits, or we create huge obstacle courses they must navigate to prove they are worthy of societal benefits. And then when they have those benefits, we create barriers and pitfalls and limitations to them keeping those benefits.

This is where basic income comes in.  When we provide a realistic, stable financial foundation to everyone, regardless of paid employment status, we shift the social emphasis from “paid employment = worth” to “human=worth”.  We still provide ample resources for people who want to peruse paid employment, but we don’t set them up on a pedestal as real citizens or people who have earned rights and benefits. You earn your benefits by being alive.

Basic Income says to the people without paid employment “You have a place in our society, too. You have worth and dignity as a human being, and we believe you have the right to live in stability.”

Some detractors of Basic Income say that it will create dependency and slavery to the government. That is what is happening with our so-called safety nets now. You have to prove yourself to the government to get benefits. You have to continue to prove yourself to keep benefits. You are told when and how and why you can use those benefits. You will lose those benefits the moment you step out of the framework. Basic Income eliminates all that.

Basic Income is about trust and respect. We respect you as a member of our society, and we trust you to make your own choices. We don’t need to means test you, or scour through your finances, or judge what you buy when.  When everyone gets the same level of benefit, then no one needs to be judged, shamed or excluded.

 

Patreon mess supports the need for a UBI

Recently the creative subscription service Patreon announced that they were changing their fee structure- instead of creators paying a single calculated fee out of their total received pledges for the month, patrons would be charged a per-pledge fee.  It was necessary, they said, to cover the increasing cost of card processing & such.

Now, on the surface, this doesn’t seem that horrifying, many services charge the buyer/backer the financial transaction fees.  But when people dug deeper, they found that the proposed fee structure, and the fact that it was per individual pledge, meant that people who pledged small amounts (in the $1-$5 range) to many creators (rather than larger amounts to one of two creators) were going to take a large financial hit. Almost 35% increase in their monthly costs.  And Patreon wasn’t giving creators the option to keep the costs coming out of their pockets, instead of their backers.

The outcry from creators & backers, was immediate, vocal, and dramatic.  No one thought this was a good idea, and because many of the $1-$5 backers are on limited budgets, they suddenly found themselves having to decide who they wanted to support.  Creators reported that they were basically hemorrhaging low level backers- loosing hundreds and hundreds of dollars of expected income in a few hours.

What does this have to do with Basic Income? Think about it- many of those creators rely on Patreon for a large chunk of (if not all) of their stable monthly income. Many of them have some high level backers, and hundreds of  $1-$5 backers.  And one decision by the corporation in charge of the service suddenly threw people’s budgets and livelihoods into doubt.  People were afraid of not being able to make rent payments, not being able to buy needed medicines, having to hit the food bank.  The move was fundamentally devastating, and equal, in many ways, to suddenly being laid off.

If we had a Basic Income, a citizen’s stipend, then there’s a few things that would have happened differently:

• Patrons who back at lower levels, would be less likely to have their monthly budgets impacted by such a change, and less likely to drop pledges.
• Creators wouldn’t have found their monthly income suddenly threatened.
• People would have more financial flexibility to back creative projects- meaning those $1 pledges that cause Patreon such consternation become less of a backbone of Creator income.
• Creators would have less of a need to produce-for-pledges to make ends meet, so they could focus on larger or more detailed projects.

Now, the good news is that Patreon heard the outcry, and has walked back their decision to change the fees. They say that they sill need to deal with the increased processing charges, so there’s still big question marks in the air, but the sense of impending doom has lifted.  The bad news is that many Creators still lost backers, which means lost income. Not all of those backers will jump right back on board; they may wait and see what happens, or they may not see the news that the fees aren’t changing, or they may have moved on. Creators will need to actively re-engage and solicit backers to regain what they’ve lost.  So even though Patreon isn’t going forward with the train wreck they created, their user base, the Creators, are still going to be dealing with the cleanup.

Quit putting it off, the time is now.

I keep seeing this argument about Basic Income:

Its a good idea, but society just isn’t ready for it. Maybe next decade/century….

 

If we wait for some magical, alchemical moment when society is ‘ready’ for basic income (and health care, and education), we’ll be waiting until the heat death of the universe.

Imagine if Martin Luther King had said “Weeellll, society just isn’t ready for civil rights… we’ll wait another century or so.”  

Imagine if Susan B. Anthony or Sojourner Truth had said “You know, our country just isn’t ready for women voters, we can put it off until the time is right. 

Great social change isn’t something you can wait for the perfect moment to quietly slip it into practice- it takes building momentum, gaining and raising your voice, and being willing to push against the people who say it’s too soon, too disruptive, too radical, to different.

Basic Income is our right as dues (tax) paying members of society.  It is time.

Why Basic Income needs to be UNIVERSAL.

I’ve seen people say they like the idea of basic income, but there should be an income cap, or some sort of “well, rich people don’t need it…” limit.

No.

Basic income must be given, universally, to all individual citizens regardless of age, marital status, household size, ability, race, religion, etc etc etc.

Why? Because as soon as you start getting into “Well, these people need the money, and these people don’t…” as a criteria for receiving a social benefit, you hit the entirely too familiar merry-go-round of saying that some people are more deserving of ‘help’ than others. You get to where saying what that upper limit of income and assets ceiling is a mutable, adjustable thing, subject to the whims of politicians.

You get the the Haves, being able to say what the Have Nots can and can’t do, can and can’t have, what hoops they must just through to prove their worth. You get value judgements. You get claims of people ‘leeching’ the system. You get enforced poverty, like we have now.

Basic Income belongs to everyone, even the people you think don’t ‘deserve‘ it- for whatever reason.

Despite what some people say- Basic Income is not a ‘handout’. It is a social contract benefit- just like having access to municipal water systems, or being on the electrical grid and sewer system, or driving on publicly maintained roads. Just because it involves cash instead of product, doesn’t make it a “handout”.

Everyone benefits from those programs, even the rich (trust me, they all have bathrooms that flush into the same sewage system as the rest of us…). We pay our taxes into the public trust, as part of their membership dues of civilization, so we can have things like roads and water and electricity.

Ideally, the people who make more money, are paying more in membership dues, because they are capable of sharing more of the load of providing the benefits of civilization to society; we don’t say “Ooooo, you make too much money, you can’t drive these roads.” or “Sorry, you’re over the income limit, you’re going to have to install your own sewage system.” or even “Well, you have enough money to buy books, so you can’t have a library card.”

So why would we do that with Basic Income? If we are really invested in the idea of BI as a social foundation, as something that is our right as human beings in a mature society, then we have to stop expressing it as just another type of welfare for the poor, or a safety net for the unemployed-by-robots.

Help End Domestic Violence- with Basic Income

First, I’d like you all to go view this TED talk from Leslie Morgan Steiner on Domestic Violence- especially pay attention to some of the statistics- 1 in 3 American women are abused. 70% of domestic violence murders happen after she’s ended the relationship. 85% of domestic abusers are men.

Financial control and dependency is one of the key chains that domestic abusers use to keep their victims enchained. EIther by denying their victim access to employment, or controlling any finances that come into the home, and cdictating when and how their victims can spend money. They put time and effort into making sure their victims don’t have access to a vital component of independence- money.

How is a victim supposed to “just leave”, if she can’t pay for a place to stay? If she can’t buy food? If she can’t get a train ticket out of town? Abuser isolate their victims emotionally, as well, so “Can I borrow a few hundred dollars so I can get out?” “Can I sleep on your couch?” isn’t something they even know they can ask, let alone still have a social circle they would feel safe asking. It’s worse if there are children involved- she might be willing to go homeless for a week, a month, more for herself, but she won’t be able to do that to her kids, she’s more likely to endure more abuse, deflecting it away from her kids, so they they have a roof over their heads.

And yes, we have a ‘welfare’ system, but that takes time and resources to access, and is very often a demeaning, grueling process; you can’t just walk in and say “Hi, my husband beat me, can you please help me completely rebuild my life? I need food and shelter now and I’ll need a job and a new bank account and possibly relocated to another city so he doesn’t murder me.”

Basic Income is one of the social changes we can make to help prevent and reduce domestic violence.  Because a basic income is tied to YOU, as an individual human being. It’s not based on your income (actual or potential), it’s not tied to proving you’re ‘needy enough’, it’s not tied to your address or your household size or number of dependents. It’s about YOU.

This means that, even if someone’s monthly basic income payment has been deposited into a bank account that an abuser has control over- the victim can still leave, because that money would follow her– not the household.  Because UBI is administered by a single agency, instead of being all over the place, redirecting the payments could be as easy as a phone call. It could be set up so that domestic violence shelters and support services could help facilitate that transition, so that someone who’s dealing with having just left abuse doesn’t have to juggle that, too.

Housing becomes easier to get- because there’s a guaranteed income. Food becomes easier. New clothes. New job. New transportation. All these things we, as people who live with roofs over our head, and food in our bellies, and a car to get to and from our jobs, completely take for granted. Things that, when you are fleeing abuse, might cease to exist. Most people escaping abuse don’t pack All The Things,  they escape with the bare minimums.

Knowing you have a guaranteed income- no matter where you are- that no one else can control, is a first step to freedom.