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Category: THE SOCIAL DEBATE

  • National basic income could quickly cut Canadian poverty in half: budget watchdog

    Providing Canadians a basic income could cut poverty by almost half in 2022, based on the federal poverty line.

    By Jolson Lim

    A national guaranteed basic income modelled after a pilot program that once existed in Ontario could cut poverty levels nearly in half, according to Canada’s spending watchdog.

    The overall cost of the program would be $85 billion in 2021-22, increasing to $93 billion in its fourth year, although eliminating a wide array of federal and provincial tax credits no longer needed could fund much of the project through new personal income-tax revenues. 

    In its estimate, the parliamentary budget officer (PBO) used parameters in Ontario’s 2017 basic-income pilot project, which was later cancelled by the Ford government.

    A single person would get up to $16,989 a year and a couple would get $24,027. Disabled Canadians would receive a $6,000 top-up. The more someone earns, the less he or she would receive, at a rate of $0.50 for every dollar earned. 

    Providing Canadians a basic income could cut poverty by almost half in 2022, based on the federal poverty line.

    The decrease would be most felt in Manitoba and Quebec, where 60 per cent fewer people would find themselves living below the poverty line.

    In Ontario, poverty would decrease by 49 per cent, close to the national average. In Newfoundland and Labrador, it would fall the least, by 13.5 per cent. 

    Canadians in the lowest income quintile would benefit the most, with disposable household incomes increasing by $4,535, or 17.5 per cent. 

    Meanwhile, the disposable household incomes of Canadians in the third, fourth, and fifth income quintiles would fall by at least $1,371.

    In total, the disposable income of 6.4 million Canadians would go up under a basic income program. However, it would fall for about 16.8 million people, due largely to the loss of tax credits, such as the basic personal amount.

    The increase among the lowest income quintile would be felt most acutely in Manitoba, where disposable incomes would increase by $6,094, or 23.7 per cent.

    Elsewhere, the household disposable incomes of the lowest quintile in Ontario would go up by 20 per cent, or $5,369. In Prince Edward Island, the average disposable income would increase by $2,966, or 11.4 per cent.

    However, the guaranteed basic income’s effect on labour supply would be “small,” the PBO wrote.

    The reduction in hours worked ranges from a high of 1.5 per cent in Nova Scotia to a low of 0.7 per cent in Alberta. Similarly, payroll costs would fall by 1.3 per cent nationally.

    Behavioural changes, such as employees working fewer hours, would increase the program’s costs by more than $3 billion a year, however.

    The idea of a basic income has grown in popularity, especially during the pandemic, which proponents say has exposed major flaws in Canada’s social safety net. 

    The Green Party has endorsed a guaranteed livable income, while the NDP has voiced its support for a basic income pilot in P.E.I.

    At their convention starting Friday, New Democrats will debate a resolution to implement a guaranteed basic income in Canada. 

    At their convention starting on Thursday, the Liberals plan to debate a resolution to conduct a cost-benefit analysis of basic income, and to explore ways to streamline current federal-income support. Members of the Liberal caucus, including some ministers, support a national basic income.

    The Trudeau government has set a goal to cut the 2015 poverty level in half by 2030. Ottawa managed to reduce poverty by 30 per cent in 2019, surpassing its target to cut it by 20 per cent in 2020, according to federal figures.

    Not everyone is on board, though. An expert panel appointed by the B.C. government concluded last January that “moving to a system (with) a basic income for all as its main pillar is not the most just policy option.” It would be too costly, and wouldn’t necessarily help the non-financial problems that cause people to need money in the first place, the report said.

    Instead, the panel says the B.C. government should bring in improvements and targeted actions, including a basic income for certain vulnerable groups.

    The federal deficit is expected to reach $363.4 billion in 2020-21, the PBO said last week.

    View original article here: https://ipolitics.ca/2021/04/07/national-basic-income-could-quickly-cut-poverty-in-half-budget-watchdog/

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  • 24% of unemployed workers have been jobless for over a year

    By Greg Iacurci

    • Nearly 2.4 million Americans were unemployed for at least a year, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which issued its March jobs report on Friday. That represents 24% of all unemployed.
    • The statistics offer a snapshot through the middle of last month, about a year after the Covid pandemic began to upend the labor market.
    • Long-term joblessness is increasing even as the U.S. unemployment rate falls. That’s an unusual dynamic during recessions, economists said.

    Nearly a quarter of all unemployed workers in the U.S. have been out of work for at least a year, a stretch of joblessness dating to the early days of the Covid pandemic.

    The dynamic speaks to persistent — and rising — long-term joblessness even as the national unemployment rate falls.

    That divergence is unusual during downturns and highlights the unequal (or K-shaped) nature of the recovery, economists said.

    Nearly 2.4 million Americans were unemployed 52 weeks or more in March, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

    That’s almost double the number in February and is about 1.6 million more people than in March 2020.

    ‘Breathtaking’

    In all, those long-term unemployed represented 24% of the 9.9 million total jobless workers last month, according to the bureau. (The data are without seasonal adjustments.)

    “I think that number is pretty breathtaking, that nearly a quarter of unemployed workers have been unemployed for over a year,” said Heidi Shierholz, director of policy at the Economic Policy Institute and former chief economist at the Department of Labor from 2014 to 2017.

    “It really shows that even as the economy is recovering, you have a lot of the same people who have been unemployed throughout this whole damn thing,” she added.

    The statistics offer the first glimpse of joblessness a year after officials began issuing lockdown orders to contain the coronavirus and millions of Americans began filing for unemployment benefits.

    And that number is likely an undercount since the department doesn’t consider certain workers, like those who left the labor force entirely due to pandemic health risks or child-care duties. And the share may rise next month, since the current numbers only offer a snapshot through the middle of last month, which doesn’t quite align with the flood of unemployment filings toward late March and into April 2020.

    The bureau doesn’t break out these long-term unemployment numbers by industry.

    But it’s likely that workers among this group are overrepresented in the hardest-hit industries, like leisure and hospitality, Shierholz said. More than 3 million jobs in that sector have yet to return — accounting for more than a third of the total.

    Long-term unemployment

    Long-term unemployment has risen steadily throughout the health crisis and is near a Great Recession peak.

    Economists consider workers to be long-term unemployed after at least six months without work.

    It’s an especially dangerous period for households from a financial perspective. Finding a new job becomes more difficult, workers’ long-term earnings potential is scarred and the odds of losing a job if they find one down the road increase.

    The federal government has stepped in to offer income support by extending and raising weekly unemployment benefits. The $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan, which President Joe Biden signed last month, extends aid through Labor Day and offers a $300 weekly supplement to state benefits.

    However, not all workers qualify for assistance, despite broader eligibility criteria during the pandemic.

    More than 4 million Americans were jobless for six or more months in March — or 43.4% of all unemployed, the Bureau of Labor Statistics said Friday.

    That’s almost on par with the record 45.5% share hit in the aftermath of the Great Recession.

    The share is growing even as the U.S. unemployment rate fell to 6% in March. The U.S. gained 916,000 jobs, the most since the summer.

    In recessions, unemployment and long-term unemployment generally move up and down together, Shierholz said.

    “That is not what’s going on here,” she said. “Right now, they’re going in a totally opposite direction — you have unemployment coming down, and long-term unemployment going up.”

    The number of Americans out of work for at least a year is still about half the peak hit after the Great Recession.

    In April 2010, more than 4.6 million people had been out of work at least 52 weeks, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. It took another 20 months for that number to dip below the 4 million mark.

    However, long-term unemployment may not linger to the same extent this time around, given the pace of vaccinations and the trend of the economic rebound.

    View original article here: https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2021/04/06/24percent-of-unemployed-workers-have-been-jobless-for-over-a-year.html

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  • Consumers are Using Their $1400 Stimulus Checks to Pay Down Debt and Household Bills

    What doxo’s data tells us about how consumers are spending their third $1400 stimulus check.

    doxo’s data shows that once stimulus checks started to appear in people’s accounts, they almost immediately began to use the money to pay household bills. From March 17th to March 21st, we saw a 30% increase in the number of payments as compared to the same period last month. During that time frame, the total amount of payments made were 37% higher as compared to the same period last month.

    Increase in payments when comparing data from 3/17 to 3/21 to the same time period in February 2021:

    Number of paymentsAmount of payments
    Total29.8%37.2%

    Based on the above, combined with publicly available information related to the total amount of stimulus checks and the fact that according to doxo, consumers spend $4.404 Trillion per year on household bills, we estimate that the majority – 62% – of the $1400 stimulus checks are being used to pay household bills.

    Consumers are using the money to pay down debt/money they owe

    doxo’s data also reveals that consumers are using the stimulus money to pay down debt/money they owe, in what appears to be big chunks. The fact that the average payment amount increased even greater than the volume is an indication that many people were catching up on missed or reduced prior payments (something that, when surveyed in October 2020, they indicated they had needed to do: 42% of Americans have skipped paying one or more bills since the COVID-19 pandemic started).

    Bill pay categories (that align to what those consumers indicated they would pay with their stimulus checks) where this is the most obvious include:

    • Credit Cards: we have seen a 29% increase in credit card payments as compared to the same period last month, and a 72% increase in terms of the amount paid
    • Utilities: we have seen a 23% increase in utilities payments as compared to the same period last month, and a 41% increase in terms of the amount paid
    • Cable/Internet: we have seen a 20% increase in cable/internet payments as compared to the same period last month, and a 25% increase in terms of the amount paid
    • Mobile Phone: we have seen a 13% increase in cable/internet payments as compared to the same period last month, and a 16% increase in terms of the amount paid
    • Loans (mortgage, HELOCs, Auto, etc.): we have seen a 12% increase in loan payments as compared to the same period last month, and a 13% increase in terms of the amount paid

    Increase in payments for the categories with the most change when comparing data from 3/17 to 3/21 to the same period in February 2021 :

    Number of paymentsAmount of payments
    Credit Cards 28.5%72.0%
    Utilities23.0%40.7%
    Cable & Internet19.7%25.4%
    Mobile Phone12.7%15.6%
    Loans (auto, mortgage, home equity, etc.)11.5%13.4%

    View original article here: https://www.doxo.com/insights/consumers-are-using-the-majority-of-their-1400-stimulus-checks-for-household-bills/

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  • Report: UK’s Department of Work and Pensions utilized ‘violent bureaucracy’ to reduce the number of people claiming benefits

    Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) admits they inflicted psychological harm on benefit claimants, engaged in unofficial sanctioning targets, and pushed disabled people into work despite the risk to their health, shocking new testimony has revealed.

    By: John Pring 

    The evidence comes from new interviews with 10 civil servants who worked for the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) and its contractors under the coalition government between 2010 and 2015.

    They spoke – on the condition of strict anonymity – to academics from Sheffield Hallam University, who have now shown how the introduction of a more punitive social security system, with harsher benefit sanctions and conditionality, inflicted years of “institutional violence” on claimants between 2010 and 2015.

    The authors, Dr Jamie Redman and Professor Del Roy Fletcher, believe it is the first time that research has explained how DWP workers have been able to commit such harmful acts on benefit claimants in vulnerable and precarious situations.

    The two academics built on the work of the Polish sociologist Zygmunt Bauman, who described how modern bureaucracies can produce psycho-social factors that enable ordinary people to carry out harmful practices.

    They describe how a change in DWP policy through the new Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government elected in May 2010 pressured DWP staff to refer more claimants to have their benefits sanctioned.

    The policy changes also saw the performance of jobcentre staff measured by “off-benefit flows” – the number of claimants who stopped receiving an out-of-work benefit – even if those people had not secured a job.

    This helped lead to a huge increase in sanctioning rates between 2010 and 2013 – reaching more than one million sanctions in 2013 and rising about 345 per cent above their 2001-08 average level.

    For their research, Redman and Fletcher interviewed a JobcentrePlus (JCP) manager; three JCP front-line staff members; one Work Programme front-line worker who had previously worked for JCP; one DWP decision-maker; and four Work Programme front-line staff.

    They were told how “top-down” pressure on staff – through sanctioning tables and off-flow targets that were “legitimised” by the government – acted as a “moral anaesthetic” which “made invisible the needs and interests” of the claimants they were sanctioning.

    This allowed workers to view their caseloads with what Bauman called “ethical indifference”.

    One JCP worker described how staff would often treat claimants with “disrespect” and use psychological harm as a technique to reduce the number of people claiming benefits, “pushing them until they either just cleared off because they couldn’t take the pressure or they got sanctioned”.

    An executive officer in another JobcentrePlus office also said that some staff tried to antagonise claimants in the hope that they would drop their claims.

    While DWP denied at the time that there were any sanctioning targets, the former DWP staff interviewed for the research said there was increasing expectation “from above” to hand out sanctions, which led to the formation of “local target regimes”.

    One JCP executive officer said staff would come into the canteen and say: “Well I’ve got my [sanctions] target for the week.”

    Another worker described how non-English speaking claimants would be persuaded to sign “claimant commitments” that meant they had to provide evidence of their work search activities in English.

    When they were unable to provide this evidence, because their English was not strong enough, they were sanctioned.

    One manager tried to persuade staff to sanction more claimants by telling them: “It’s your money! It’s your taxes that they’re living off! You know, you should be sanctioning them!”

    One of those interviewed said that this kind of “stigmatising” language became increasingly common in formal meetings.

    But these tactics were not restricted to JCP offices.

    Those who worked for outsourced Work Programme providers, who were under financial pressure to find job “outcomes” for claimants, described how managers pressured them to “push” disabled people into work.

    One former Work Programme adviser told the research team: “[I had] a lovely guy who I really felt for who had mental health issues and the day after I had to reluctantly mandate him to something – he attempted suicide.

    “I also had another lady who we pushed into work and it made her that ill she had a fit in her new job and was admitted to hospital.”

    Another Work Programme adviser said that some colleagues seemed to thrive on their ability to inflict harm and “enjoyed the stick”.

    In their paper, Violent Bureaucracy, published last week in Critical Social Policy, Redman and Fletcher describe how the government and media had created and promoted a “hostile” environment for claimants, with the help of frequent “scrounger rhetoric” designed to blame claimants for austerity.

    This laid the groundwork for the introduction of a more punitive welfare-to-work system, with harsher sanctions and conditionality, and allowed the institutional violence of the DWP regime to thrive.

    Their research, they write, “seeks to explain how ordinary people carrying out their daily duties in employment service offices were able to implement cruel and inhumane social security reforms”.

    Redman told Disability News Service (DNS) that he believed the research could also help explain more recent, disturbing interactions between claimants and staff working for DWP and its contractors, including evidence that emerged in January at the inquest into the death of Philippa Day.

    And he pointed to the huge number of claimants who have relied on DWP support during the COVID-19 crisis, mostly through universal credit.

    He warned that historical evidence suggests that punitive reforms tend to thrive in the years after periods of economic crisis, as governments attempt to reduce the number of claimants and push them back into work.

    After DNS asked DWP to respond to the article, a DWP spokesperson said: “This journal article does not reflect the compassionate support offered by our jobcentres day in, day out.

    “Providing the best possible customer service and care is at the heart of what we do.

    “We don’t want to sanction anyone and no one is sanctioned unless they fail to meet their agreed claimant commitment without good reason.”

    Read original article here: https://www.disabilitynewsservice.com/dwp-staff-admit-inflicting-psychological-harm-on-claimants-during-coalition-years/

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  • The Disability Survival Trap

    Moving in with a partner is usually an exciting step in a relationship, one that also brings financial benefits as costs for things like housing are shared.

    But the prospect filled Shawn with dread.

    Shawn has been on provincial disability assistance for many years. As a single person, they receive about $1,183 per month. More than $1,000 of that went to rent a room in a pet-friendly Victoria, B.C. suite where they could have a dog.

    But after a roommate moved out and rent increased in 2018, Shawn could not pay all the rent alone. Moving in with their partner became the only feasible choice.

    But living together could be costly, evidence of what the provincial government calls a “marriage-like relationship.” And that brings serious financial consequences for people on disability assistance like Shawn.

    In B.C., a single person who receives disability assistance can make up to $15,000 per year without affecting their benefits, known as an allowable earnings exemption. Any amount above that is clawed back from disability benefit payments. That rises to $18,000 for a family with two adults where only one is on assistance.

    But the total earnings of both partners in a marriage-like relationship count towards this total, because benefits are allocated by household.

    That means Shawn’s partner’s income could be counted along with any of their own income.

    If the combined income exceeds $18,000, Shawn’s benefits could be cut.

    Shawn’s partner does not receive assistance and works outside the home, but in a high cost-of-living area their income alone could not support the couple.

    Shawn said it leaves them and many others with a stark choice — go ahead and move in with a partner and hide the relationship, or live alone in deep poverty.

    “That form of structural violence, it limits our ability to have relationships,” said Shawn.

    “It criminalizes poverty and disability because we have to make a choice: do we follow the rules and be homeless?”

    Shawn and other people who receive provincial disability assistance say the rules are symptoms of a system that polices their lives and treats them as less deserving and independent than able-bodied British Columbians.

    They note that last week’s increase in assistance rates still leaves them below the poverty line. The $175 increase is less than the $300 a month in COVID-19 emergency aid they had been receiving until Dec. 31.

    Shawn and others say a government expert panel report that recommended against a universal basic income in B.C. killed the possibility of much-needed transformational change for people with disabilities.

    “As marginalized people trying to fit within a system that is failing us the way B.C.’s is, we are not able to advocate for ourselves when we live through as much of the structural violence that is going on within the system, which is quite severe,” said Shawn.

    “And that is one of the big issues that I found with the failure to recommend a universal basic income.”

    Shawn, who’s in their 40s, went ahead and moved in with their partner. But they haven’t reported the change to the province and keep the information secret from most people to prevent their benefits from being cut. The Tyee is using another name and withholding some identifying details to protect their financial security.

    Shawn said it’s exhausting to hide such an important part of their life, but it’s the only way they can afford to live close to specialized care they require for neurological conditions and post-traumatic stress disorder.

    Assistance rates currently allocate $375 for shelter, a budget nearly impossible to match outside of limited subsidized housing.

    In Victoria, the average monthly rent for a one-bedroom apartment is more than $1,600.

    Shawn pays less than half of the rent and shared expenses like groceries while living with their partner, which allows them to afford medications and some small comforts.

    But the arrangement puts pressure on their relationship, both financially and emotionally. A previous relationship ended in large part because they couldn’t get married because Shawn would be at risk of losing assistance benefits.

    “It steals my dignity,” they said. “It puts a block in our relationship, to be honest, and how deep that relationship can go.”

    “I’m not the only one doing this to survive.”

    The Tyee spoke to two others in similar situations who did not want to go on the record for fear of losing income or housing.

    All three agreed that the lack of support — not their conditions or disabilities — makes their lives so difficult.

    Shawn and others The Tyee spoke to also can’t bring up these issues during government consultations or to case workers without risking their incomes.

    Heather McCain, executive director of Creating Accessible Neighbourhoods in Vancouver, said the system makes disabled people and others on income assistance choose between breaking the law or losing their housing and support system. It forces them into hiding.

    For those on income assistance, where rates are much lower and earnings exemptions range from $6,000 to just over $10,000 annually, the risk can be even more necessary.

    “People feel like they have to hide relationships in order to survive,” said McCain, who lives with invisible and visible disabilities.

    It comes down to sub-poverty-level assistance rates, McCain said. The rates are not enough to live on, especially for someone with costly medical needs that often aren’t covered by provincial health plans, they noted. Counselling, medications, physiotherapy and assistive technologies are all essential to a good quality of life, but only a fraction are covered, if at all.

    And allocating benefits based on household income rather than individual earnings forces disabled people to be financially dependent on their partner, or assumes they have family support that many do not.

    “The idea that somebody looks after them is very paternalistic,” said McCain, “in keeping with kind of a charity model of other people looking after disabled people as opposed to disabled people looking after themselves.”

    McCain works with a lot of people who are unable to leave abusive and unhealthy relationships because they have lost access to benefits and need their partner’s income to survive, or because they know they could not afford to live on their benefits alone.

    It’s a dynamic that worsens the disproportionately high rates of intimate partner violence and fraud disabled people face, particularly disabled women. About 60 per cent of them will face some form of violence in their lifetime.

    The only times McCain has seen people able to leave these kinds of situations has been when family or friends could help pay for the costs of moving and living while the person waited for their benefits to be reinstated.

    The risk of being cut off benefits goes beyond lost income, McCain noted. It could also mean losing a place in subsidized housing or programs that provide employment supports and reduced rates for transit passes — essentially losing an entire ecosystem of supports.

    McCain would like people to remain eligible for their subsidized housing and other services for a year or longer after they start working or are no longer eligible for assistance.

    It would help them plan for the future without being punished for working.

    And for those who are unable to work, higher rates would assure quality of life not dependent on their labour, McCain noted.

    Andrew Robb, a staff lawyer with the Disability Alliance of BC’s Law Clinic, said people trying to protect their benefits by proving they aren’t in a marriage-like relationship make up a significant number of the clinic’s cases.

    “The complaint we often hear is, ‘If I weren’t disabled, I could be employed, I would keep income regardless of my spouse, but because I’m disabled, my income is dependent on my spouse,’” said Robb.

    “It makes them think twice about whether they can get into a relationship at all, because it reduces their independence in a way that leaves them fewer choices.”

    The province considers a relationship marriage-like if two people are socially and financially interdependent, Robb explained.

    Evidence of that can be how they share household expenses, whether they share a bedroom or how they present themselves to landlords or family, he said.

    Recently, the province increased the length of time a couple could live together before it would investigate whether a relationship was marriage-like from three to 12 months.

    It was a win for many, Robb said, but tying benefits to an individual’s income rather than a household would have more impact.

    “It takes time to get benefits if you have to restart the process. A person is really most vulnerable when they’re most in need,” said Robb.

    “I can’t condone someone not reporting their relationship to the ministry, but I certainly understand why people feel compelled to make those choices.”

    In an interview, Social Development and Poverty Reduction Minister Nicholas Simons said relationship secrecy is an issue he became aware of more than 30 years ago when he was a financial assistance worker.

    “I did remember hearing about issues like that. And I know that policy has evolved, but I think, mostly for the better,” said Simons, who would not speak to what the ministry was considering to address these issues.

    “I’m going to look into that as well, because that’s really tied very directly to that issue of dependence.”

    Many of those choices about what to disclose have become even more dire for the 137,000 people on disability assistance during the pandemic, which introduced a new level of uncertainty.

    Last week, the province announced it would end the monthly pandemic top-up to benefits. It had provided $300 a month from April until December 2020 and $150 from January to March 2021.

    In its place, Simons announced a permanent increase of $175 per month.

    “This is the largest permanent increase, and the third increase since we formed government in 2017,” he said. “It’s the largest single increase in the history of British Columbia.”

    But even with the increase, an individual with no children like Shawn will receive $1,358, approximately $300 less than the poverty line in Canada, defined by the market basket measure used by Statistics Canada. And it is $661 less than the $2,019 per month Statistics Canada says is the poverty line for a single adult living in a B.C. city of more than 100,000 people.

    The market basket measure compares the cost of a bundle of essential goods and services, like housing and transportation, in a particular community to an individual or household’s income to determine whether or not they live in poverty.

    In Canada, about 13.5 per cent of disabled people live in poverty, just above the national poverty rate of 11 per cent, according to Statistics Canada.

    But the poverty rate nearly triples to 28 per cent for people whose disabilities are severe and prevent them from working.

    About one in five people, or 6.2 million, in the country are disabled.

    The province’s decision to halve the $300 monthly top-up in January triggered a suicidal episode for Shawn. “There was no way of planning my life or my finances when they took away $150.”

    The rates are a slap in the face, says Shawn. The Canada Emergency Response Benefit introduced during the pandemic provided newly unemployed Canadians with $500 a week or $2,167 a month — 60 per cent more than people on disability assistance receive.

    “People on disability assistance have been living in an emergency for years, decades, their entire lives, before this pandemic,” said Shawn.

    “It’s not like their lives have improved during the pandemic. Costs have gone up.”

    When the pandemic hit, Shawn left their part-time job due to stress that made it difficult for them to think clearly or walk. They qualified for the $2,000-per-month CERB, but not the one-time $1,000 provincial supplement, simply because they were on disability assistance.

    “And because I’m not well enough to go back to work, I don’t receive any of the federal programs that came in to replace CERB,” they added.

    CERB was the closest thing to a large-scale basic income Canada has seen in quite some time and has since been transitioned into the country’s pre-existing employment insurance system which requires recipients to search for a job.

    But in its January report to the government on the possibility of a universal basic income in B.C., an academic expert panel opted instead to recommend sweeping reforms to the existing social safety net.

    Among them was a targeted basic income for certain populations, like disabled people, those fleeing domestic violence and youth aging out of care.

    Disability assistance rates should be raised by $500 per month to reach the poverty line, the report recommended, and universal extended health benefits should be provided to all low-income people.

    Shawn was heartened to see the recommendations.

    But the proposed changes don’t go far enough in addressing the structural violence of a disability assistance system that is, in their view, beyond reform and needs to be entirely replaced.

    Problems include the process for deciding who qualifies for benefits in the first place, which often requires medical documentation and other proof that is expensive and time-consuming to procure. It took Shawn nearly a year to obtain the form to even apply for benefits he was eligible to receive.

    Lindsay Tedds, an economist at the University of Calgary who co-authored the basic income panel report, said its recommendations aimed to make disability assistance more flexible and accessible.

    They recommended people with substance use disorders, addiction and mental health challenges be eligible for benefits as well.

    “You’re going to have times in your life where you can work, and not work, and you should be able to move in and out of the system flexibly without being kicked out,” Tedds said in response to a question from The Tyee at an online panel on basic income.

    “You should be able to work without your benefits being clawed back.”

    After the report was released, the Ministry of Social Development and Poverty Reduction said it would take the 65 recommendations into consideration in its planning and preparations for the April budget.

    Simons declined to say which specific recommendations would be incorporated into the coming budget, which is set for April 20.

    “My interest and the interest of my government is to continue to find… ways and strategies that will continue to reduce our poverty rates,” he said.

    But the government’s decision to cancel the $300 COVID-19 increase casts doubt on the province’s commitment to ending poverty for disabled people, said Shawn and others The Tyee spoke to.

    Simons said the province wanted a permanent increase to give people receiving assistance “predictability” as vaccination efforts ramp up and B.C. sets its sights on a post-pandemic reality.

    Simons did not respond directly when asked why the province didn’t increase permanent rates by the same $300 or the panel’s recommended $500 after a crisis he acknowledged has disproportionately affected people on assistance or who are low-income.

    “I would love to be aiming as high as possible to have a positive impact on people living on disability assistance or on income assistance,” he said.

    “And knowing that the challenges that exist and that the recovery needs to be strong and needs to provide resilience, I think a permanent increase was what was necessary.”

    Simons pointed to the B.C. poverty reduction strategy, TogetherBC, which targets a 25-per-cent reduction of overall poverty by 2024 as evidence of the province’s commitment to poverty alleviation.

    But he would not commit to raising assistance rates to the poverty level while in office. “Our TogetherBC strategy sets out our goals and our timelines.”

    McCain and Shawn both want to see meaningful, confidential and truly accessible consultation with the end users of programs.

    And Shawn wants an independent third-party review into the harm done to people by the current system with power to make recommendations that are binding on government.

    People on disability can’t safely critique the system “because it puts us in a position of instability and risk,” they said. “My life would be very different if I got help.”

    Shawn has a bachelor’s degree and has worked in a variety of jobs before their conditions made it impossible to work full time.

    They thought of pursuing further education. But that would have required student loans and the loan funding for housing would be counted as income and could have resulted in a clawback of disability benefits. The risk of taking on loan debt was too great.

    Shawn knows people with disabilities are 3.5 times as likely to consider suicide because of the challenging — but solvable — circumstances they face.

    “I’m a law-abiding person, I’m a person who wants to contribute positively to society,” said Shawn. “It hurts me every day to be put in a position where my survival is based on committing fraud.

    “Am I a bad person for that? The provincial government thinks so.” 

    ______

    To see original article please visit: https://thetyee.ca/News/2021/03/24/BC-Disability-Survival-Trap/

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  • For a better, faster recovery: €1,000 checks for Europeans

    The bloc’s recovery efforts are falling short of those in the US.

    When European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen presented a landmark EU recovery package in response to the coronavirus crisis, it felt like a historic moment.

    The plan was ambitious: €750 billion, financed by jointly issued debt, would give EU countries additional firepower to fuel their economic recovery and help them through the greatest crisis since World War II.

    The package — which totals around 9 percent of EU GDP — is comparable in size to the initial recovery package put together by the United States government, which mobilized a sum equivalent to 10 percent of its GDP.

    The favorable comparisons end there. While the EU is still figuring out how to unlock the agreed-upon money so that it can finally be disbursed, Washington has pulled far ahead.

    U.S. President Joe Biden’s latest stimulus package — the Biden Plan — is the government’s third stimulus bill and it increases federal support to the economy to more than three times the European response.

    To be sure, the disparity in recovery plans can partly be explained by the differences between the two governance models — the U.S. is a federal state, while the EU is a union of independent countries.

    And yet, there is also a sharp difference in the ambition of the U.S. and EU responses, even once you take into account the national measures put in place by European countries on top of EU cash.

    Not only is the U.S. response much bigger. Perhaps more importantly, it reached the real economy much faster.4

    That’s because large portions of its stimulus took the form of direct payments to households, while other measures had an immediate impact on citizens’ income and, as a result, on demand. The $1,400 stimulus check each adult is set to receive under the Biden Plan will be the third such check they will have been able to cash since the start of the pandemic.

    At the European level, meanwhile, not only do direct transfers to citizens appear to be a taboo, the rules are designed in a way that prevents most EU recovery money from being used on the ground now, when it is arguably most needed.

    As a result, the OECD estimates that the recovery measures taken by the U.S. will have a positive impact of 3.8 percent of GDP for the next 12 months, starting from April. The impact of the EU’s recovery fund, by contrast, is estimated to be between 0.5 percent and 1 percent of GDP.

    To make matters worse, projections show that the level of European support to the economy may well turn out to be insufficient. Even if the European Central Bank was fast and bold in its response to the crisis (and even if there is more it can do in the months ahead), monetary policy has its limits. And when it comes to fiscal policy, the EU is coming up short.  

    The EU needs to deploy more resources on the ground right now and not just in the long run. As the vaccine rollout gathers steam and we ease out of lockdowns, we must ensure that companies retain jobs and continue to have customers, particularly once government-supported lay-off schemes cease. That means we need a strong stimulus package that energizes the economy immediately.

    The EU must send a strong signal to national governments that they should continue with support for their economies and make sure EU money reaches its intended destination in a matter of months, not years.

    But there’s an even better way to make sure the recovery funds provide the stimulus that is needed: Use the months it will take to approve the national recovery plans to find a way to pay €1,000 to every unemployed person, elderly person and parent.

    The direct payments won’t be a silver bullet, but they would provide the economy with a much-needed shot in the arm — that is, if the EU is able to overcomes its taboo. And why shouldn’t it? The bloc made history last year with its landmark recovery deal. Surely, it can do so again on this smaller, but just as crucial way.

    _____

    Pedro Marques is a member of the European Parliament in the Group of the Progressive Alliance of Socialists and Democrats and vice-president responsible for a Green New Deal and communication.

    To see original article please visit: https://www.politico.eu/article/faster-coronavirus-economic-recovery-1000-checks-for-europeans/

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  • More evidence that Florida’s unemployment system was designed to fail 

    Former call center workers said that stopping fraud was prioritized over providing benefits.

    Opinion by the Tampa Bay Times Editorial Board

    It’s no secret that Florida’s unemployment system performed disastrously during the height of the pandemic. But now it’s clear this fiasco was a combination of both incompetence and callousness. It reflects a mean-spirited approach under the guise of combating fraud, and it caused needless pain to struggling families and businesses.

    A new report by reporter Lawrence Mower of the Times/Herald Tallahassee bureau chronicled how a state bureaucracy jerked around jobless Floridians by adding months of delays and frustrations for those waiting for benefits.

    Pregnant women, Floridians sick with COVID-19 and those forced home to take care of children were denied benefits because they weren’t “able and available” for work under state law.

    Former call center workers hired to help claimants told the Times/Herald that they were trained to nitpick applications. Jobless Floridians with simple discrepancies on their applications saw their claims locked, delaying payments by weeks or months. Couples who filed claims from the same computer were flagged for fraud. So were those from applicants whose information did not exactly match their driver’s license — such as those who failed to include a middle initial, or who listed an apartment number in the wrong format.

    “If it was a Darryl Johnson Jr. and he put Darryl Johnson II on his application, we weren’t allowed to help them,” said Caitlin Polidoro, who worked at a call center from March until September. She was required to hang up if people offered inconsistent information — even those who had waited up to eight hours on hold to reach a claims representative. “They had only one chance,” Polidoro said.

    The former call center workers said that stopping fraud was prioritized over providing benefits — a practice consistent with the state’s entire approach in operating a miserly benefits system.

    While state officials blamed last year’s woes on the historic surge in unemployment claims, the state had for years championed its anti-fraud efforts. In 2014, it rolled out what it called a “state-of-the-art” software system, which cross-references data sets to identify suspicious patterns. In its first year, “fraudulent claims” shot up more than 600 percent, according to a 2016 agency presentation. The next year, the percentage of unemployed Floridians receiving jobless benefits fell three percentage points to just under 12 percent, the worst in the nation. (Florida has had the second-worst recipiency rate in the country since then.)

    Florida has a legitimate interest in rooting fraud from the system. But fraud is being used as a harassment tool to keep legitimate beneficiaries from receiving the help they deserve.

    An investigation by the state’s chief inspector general earlier this month attributed the 68 percent rejection rate in 2019 to, in part, the “normal functioning of the system’s fraud controls.”

    And even jobless Floridians who overcome the hurdles of the state bureaucracy could wait weeks or months for much-needed assistance. This system doesn’t help those it’s supposed to serve or promote society’s larger interest in maintaining stable home environments.

    Some legislators are calling for a re-evaluation of the strict anti-fraud measures promoted for years by Republican lawmakers and former Gov. Rick Scott. That’s long overdue. State Sen. Jason Pizzo, D-North Miami Beach, also wants a study of how the state’s unemployment website, known as CONNECT, denied benefits to Floridians. The Department of Economic Opportunity said it does not have data on specific reasons people weredenied unemployment. That information is key to measuring CONNECT’s performance and should be readily available.

    There is more to maintaining integrity in the system than merely fighting fraud. The larger obligation is to process legitimate claims in a convenient and timely manner.

    _____

    This article represents the opinion of the Tampa Bay Times Editorial Board. The members of the Editorial Board are Editor of Editorials Graham Brink, Sherri Day, Sebastian Dortch, John Hill, Jim Verhulst and Chairman and CEO Paul Tash.

    To see original article please visit: https://www.tampabay.com/opinion/2021/03/23/more-evidence-that-floridas-unemployment-system-was-designed-to-fail-editorial/

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  • American consumers are the real job creators

    Imagine a new model: a smaller number of American workers using labor-saving methods, who also get high wages out of a much bigger chunk of the corporate surplus, and whose resulting high spending then justifies continued investment in the same businesses.

    By Ryan Cooper

    For many years, rich oligarchs have posed as the engines of the economy — the entrepreneurs whose beneficence and wise decisions create economic prosperity. In a 2019 article for Fox News, Sally Pipes, president of the right-wing Pacific Research Institute, called for Americans to “celebrate America’s job creators” during Labor Day. “Let’s honor the people responsible for that grandeur — namely, the profit-seeking entrepreneurs and business people who make our economy hum,” she wrote.

    This is bunk.

    The real engine of the economy is the dollars in the pocket of the humble average citizen.

    Since the Great Recession, numerous economists and writers (like myself) have argued over and over that fiscal stimulus — for instance, government spending on transfers or infrastructure — can create jobs and increase production for an economy mired in recession. This is undoubtedly true: as we have seen, the gigantic spending in the CARES Act last March did indeed save an economy in free-fall. The similar surge of spending in the American Rescue Package is already having a similar effect. More broadly, lack of sufficient stimulus is why we saw a solid decade of chronic high employment and weak economic growth.

    But there is another side to the story. The above arguments tend to paint a picture of demand moving against an economic capacity that is fixed — with government priming the pump, we get the existing factories and whatnot going at full speed, and restore full employment.

    In reality, as Skanda Amarnath and Alex Williams argue at Employ America, spending also affects overall capacity.

    A factory, for instance, is not some immortal thing — at a minimum, it must be continually maintained because of entropy and ordinary wear and tear on equipment.

    To remain competitive, it must be regularly upgraded with the latest production technologies. But businesses will logically invest in new capacity only if they see a market for the goods and services that capacity would produce. This is especially true with respect to high-tech manufacturing investment, which is very complex and expensive — taking over half a decade to pay off.

    A key point that Amarnath and Williams make is that slack demand afflicted the U.S. economy long before the 2008 recession. We never actually recovered from the dot-com crash in 2001, particularly in high-tech manufacturing — the preceding ’90s tech boom saw a big surge in investment in semiconductor manufacturing and employment, which then stagnated for almost 20 years. It is only surging again now because of the huge boom in sales of computer products, as demand is for the first time far outrunning supply, and businesses are scrambling to take advantage. That’s thanks to newly remote workers needing to work from home, but also thanks to the huge government transfers to individuals in the various pandemic rescue packages.

    Inequality also plays a big role in this story, because rich people disproportionately save their income rather than spending it. It follows that the more unequally income is distributed, the harder it will be to maintain the spending that would justify a healthy rate of investment.

    Deregulation, union busting, and all the numerous Republican tax cuts for the rich funneled income to the top, and hence dragged down the economy relative to where it would have been otherwise.

    Weak demand is also implicated in outsourcing. When businesses have chronically weak sales, they tend to pull in their horns and look to cut costs to preserve their profits, rather than reaching for new markets — often by moving production to lower-wage countries and cutting investment. “The 2000s and 2010s were marked by historically slack supply chains: weak aggregate demand, offshoring, and business model shifts acted in concert to shrink production relative to existing capacity,” Amarnath and Williams write. (Of course, slanted trade deals, financialization, and tax cuts for the rich are also major culprits here too.)

    Finally, all this has knock-on effects on labor productivity. Chinese companies like Foxconn are based on a cheap labor business model — exploiting the low wages in China and other countries to make devices for Apple (and many other companies) using labor-intensive methods at a tiny profit margin, which are then sold to consumers at an eyewatering markup.

    Imagine a different model: a smaller number of American workers building phones using labor-saving methods, who also get high wages out of a much bigger chunk of the corporate surplus, and whose resulting high spending then justifies continued investment in the same businesses.

    Taken together, all this suggests that high incomes among the broad American population are even better than even many lefty commentators advertise. Cash in everyday Americans’ pockets is not only good in in the most basic sense (as people need money to live, of course) — their spending keeps businesses humming, investment high, and the overall economy healthy.

    The latest surge in incomes is largely thanks to the transfers in the pandemic rescue packages. But new ongoing welfare programs — like Democrats making President Biden’s child allowance permanent — would have the same effect. So would reversing the last decades of deregulation and tax cuts for the rich, or sparking a new upsurge in labor organizing, or reforming the international trade system so that the world does not depend on chronic large American trade deficits. Let’s hope the pandemic stimulus binge was just the start of something bigger.

    _____

    To see original article please visit: https://theweek.com/articles/972951/american-consumers-are-real-job-creators

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  • Opinion: This time too much is probably just about right

    Should the massive federal assistance have been more targeted? We should be glad it wasn’t.

    by Robert Shapiro

    Both progressives and conservatives criticized the three major COVID-19 relief laws enacted over the last 12 months for giving away too much of their $4.85 trillion in new spending, tax credits, and sweetheart loans to businesses or city and state governments that don’t need the help. While attracting fewer complaints, the three relief Acts—the CARES Act of March 2020, the Coronavirus Supplemental Appropriations of December 2020, and the American Rescue Plan of March 2021—also provided $858 billion in direct payments to most American households, unconnected to any showing of economic need related to the pandemic.  This has been a bipartisan version of Keynes on steroids, with nearly everyone receiving some form of government help.

    As it happened, most households and businesses would weather the pandemic with little direct economic loss. 

    But under both the Trump and Biden administrations, the government’s efforts around the pandemic have reflected an unspoken but decided view that a smaller, better-targeted approach could risk the economy.

    And that view is almost certainly correct: This time, as an economic matter, too much is probably just about right.

    The pandemic has wreaked personal and economic havoc with people’s lives but in very skewed ways. Some 30 million Americans, or about 9 percent of Americans, have been infected, and nearly 600,000 of them have died. Millions more have suffered real economic setbacks.

    During the second quarter of last year, 45.4 million Americans filed initial claims for unemployment benefits. For these frontline economic casualties of COVID-19 – 30 percent of everyone working — the CARES Act provided $268 billion to add $600 per week to jobless benefits from April through August of 2020.

    That raised the average weekly benefit from $320 to $920, and the two subsequent pandemic relief Acts extended the add-on at $300 per week.

    When Congress passed the CARES Act last March, the economy was in free fall: In the second quarter, GDP would shrink more than 9 percent, or 33 percent at an annual rate. So, on top of the additional jobless benefits, Congress provided $293 billion for direct checks or tax credits of $1,200 for most adults, regardless of their work status, and $600 for most children, on top of $377 billion for businesses under the Payroll Protection Program, up to $500 billion in low-interest loans for large corporations, and $150 billion for state and local governments.

    No one could have known last March that a sizable majority of the country wouldn’t need help. Jobs and incomes began to bounce back last summer; even as COVID-19 continued to spread. While the economy continued to improve through the pandemic’s terrible third wave from October to mid-January of this year, Congress responded with two more mammoth relief measures, one in late December, and then the American Rescue Plan passed this March.

    The two acts provided $310 billion for the $300 per-week add-ons to people’s jobless benefits, even as most of those who had lost their jobs had been rehired.

    They also provided $565 billion in new direct support for 85 percent to 90 percent of all households. That additional assistance came in checks or tax credits of $2,000 for most adults, $3,000 per child, and $3,600 for young children plus $84 billion more in direct support to cover up to $8,000 in childcare expenses.

    Again, the test for receiving these new rounds of assistance was not whether a household suffered pandemic-related losses, but whether its adjusted gross income in 2018 or 2019 was less than $150,000 (for a couple, less than $75,000 for an individual).

    Add it all up, and the three Acts provided a family of two adults with two children earning the median income of $68,703 in 2019, or more than double that amount, government checks or tax credits totaling $14,800 to $16,000—plus another $8,000 for childcare costs.

    The data strongly suggest that the 70 percent of working Americans who did not lose their jobs and almost all retired people did not need anything approaching that much emergency help because they haven’t borne any notable economic costs from the pandemic. The Bureau of Economic Analysis reports that total wage and salary income rose in 2020 despite the spike in unemployment—and that does not count any of the pandemic-related checks, tax credits, and jobless benefits. When we include the benefits under the CARES Act, the total personal income of Americans grew by $1,140 billion in 2020—before the additional assistance passed last December and in March 2021. In 2019, total personal income increased by $700 billion.

    The politics behind this broad-brush generosity are not subtle. The pandemic inflicted stress, anxiety, and demoralizing isolation on almost everyone. With most Americans dispirited and on edge, both parties excluded the most affluent households and opted against picking and choosing those who most needed help among the other 85 to 90 percent of the country.

    Apart from the political benefits, this broad-brushed approach makes real economic sense. It’s mainly about the saving rate. Most Americans responded to the coronavirus pandemic by saving much more of their incomes, in part because so many brick-and-mortar businesses were closed, but mainly in case conditions became even worse.

    The personal savings rate in 2019 had averaged 7.6 percent. By the second quarter of 2020, it soared to 26.0 percent, despite spiking unemployment that briefly depressed total incomes.

    Throughout 2020, Americans on average saved 16.3 percent of their disposable incomes and put aside $1.63 trillion more than they had in 2019. The last time the personal saving rate exceeded 16.3 percent was 1945.

    That’s why we needed such massive and indiscriminate support from the government. Consumer spending rebounded strongly in the third quarter of 2020, and the economy began to recover because the broad-based checks and tax credits from the CARES Act bridged the gaps between incomes, high precautionary savings, and rising consumption. By the fourth quarter, the CARES Act’s bounties were gone, the pandemic was resurging, and the fledgling recovery was at risk. Wage and salary income were rising with employment, but the high saving rate was sharply slowing consumption. Enter two more rounds of checks and tax credits for households and expanded jobless benefits passed in late December 2020 and early March 2021.

    Supporting the economy with large injections of cash linked little (if at all) to actual pandemic-related losses is also evident in the $30.5 billion in new grants for transit systems, the $82.5 billion bailout for certain pension plans, and much of the payroll protection program. Congress also provided more temporary help for low-income Americans who have long needed it, including additional rent assistance, food stamps, and health insurance subsidies.

    It is all part of the same story: The economy will remain fragile until the pandemic is over, and a fragile economy needs measures that give most people more resources to spend as well as save.

    Congress did bar higher-income Americans from its bounty of government checks and tax credits, but the Federal Reserve stepped into that breach. In much the same way that the checks and tax credits prevented economic demand from collapsing, the Fed prevented a possible financial crisis through purchases that an additional $3.4 trillion in credit for financial markets. This flood of new credit has directly supported stock and bond prices, directly benefiting the top 10 percent of Americans that own about 85 percent of those financial assets.

    Thanks to the Fed, the pandemic brought on a new bull market for affluent people, with the S&P 500 recovering all of its early-2020 losses by last August and closing most recently 17 percent above its pre-pandemic high.

    These massive fiscal and monetary interventions are as unprecedented as the sustained public health crisis that dictated them.  Ironically, they accomplished their missions—and attracted the overwhelming public support they needed to pass—by not targeting their enormous resources.  John Maynard Keynes would have expected nothing less, and we all are better off for it.

    _____

    Robert Shapiro is the chairman of Sonecon and a senior fellow at the McDonough School of Business at Georgetown University. He served as undersecretary of commerce for economic affairs under Bill Clinton.

    To see original article please visit: https://washingtonmonthly.com/2021/03/24/the-trillions-in-covid-spending-is-what-the-economy-needed/

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  • Rashida Tlaib has reintroduced her bill for an emergency UBI of $2,000 a month

    The Automatic Boost to Communities (or ABC) Act is cosponsored by U.S. Rep. Pramila Jayapal and is a long shot to say the least.

    By Todd Spangler

    On the heels of Congress’ approval of a $1.9-trillion plan to address the fallout from COVID-19, U.S. Rep. Rashida Tlaib on Tuesday reintroduced legislation that, if passed, would provide monthly payments of $2,000 to every American during the crisis.

    “Our residents shouldn’t have to play a waiting game on the question of their survival,” said Tlaib, D-Detroit.

    “If the last year has shown us anything, it’s that our families are in dire need.”

    The measure, which Tlaib calls the Automatic Boost to Communities (or ABC) Act and is cosponsored by U.S. Rep. Pramila Jayapal, D-Washington State, is a long shot to say the least. Democrats hold only a slim majority in the House, and the Senate, where a 60-vote threshold is needed to pass most bills, is evenly divided at 50-50.

    But the legislation may continue a developing discussion in Congress over the possibility of someday authorizing direct, recurring payments such as those proposed in last year’s presidential campaign by current New York City mayoral candidate Andrew Yang.

    Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Detroit, speaks at a tour at Ford Field to promote the COVID-19 vaccine that will be distributed starting March 24 at Ford Field in Detroit.
    Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Detroit, speaks at a tour at Ford Field to promote the COVID-19 vaccine that will be distributed starting March 24 at Ford Field in Detroit. Mandi Wright, Detroit Free Press.

    On Tuesday, Tlaib said she was encouraged when other Democrats during last year’s debates over COVID-19 relief checks began to discuss the possibility of recurring payments during the pandemic and its aftermath, though they broke down over when they would be triggered and their amount.

    “I would love to have that conversation on what that looks like,” she said.

    Specifically, the ABC Act would call for every American, including noncitizens in the country for at least three months, to receive, through direct bank deposits or prepaid debit cards, $2,000 a month for as long as the pandemic is considered a national emergency. For a year following that, payments of $1,000 would continue each month.

    In order to pay for it — and get around rules regarding how congressional analysts calculate the nation’s debt — the legislation calls for the U.S. Mint to create two trillion-dollar coins that would then be purchased by the Federal Reserve, which helps manage the nation’s money supply. The money would then be moved into the U.S. Treasury to cover the cost of the payments — with more coins being minted if needed.

    Tlaib, who represents a congressional district with one of the highest percentage of impoverished constituents in the nation, said it would help families desperate to find work and pay bills because of the economic slowdown and provide a needed injection of cash to small businesses everywhere.

    The bill also calls for the creation of an Emergency Responder Corps to contact at-risk and vulnerable communities to make sure they get access to the funds.

    The COVID-19 relief bill passed by Congress recently provided checks of $1,400 to many Americans but it phased out as an individual’s or family’s income got higher. And while many progressives may cheer the idea of recurring payments, it’s far from clear that Democrats representing more moderate constituencies would embrace it.

    One argument that has been raised against government injecting cash directly into the economy has been that it could trigger higher levels of inflation. 

    If the government were to simply print money and give it out, that argument goes, prices and wages would increase, lowering the real value of the currency.

    But Tlaib said Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell has said that rampant inflation is not a particular worry with the economy still hurting from the pandemic and the associated slowdowns. Still, Powell’s comments were given around a much-less dramatic proposal than Tlaib’s.

    _____

    To see original article please visit: https://www.freep.com/story/news/local/michigan/2021/03/23/rashida-tlaib-covid-payments/6967951002/

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  • Arts Organizations In Canada’s Largest Cities Call For A Basic Income Guarantee For Artists

    Artists make up just under 1% of the labor force—that’s more than the number of workers in either the auto manufacturing or utilities sectors. But with a median income of $24,300, artists earn a whopping 44% less than the national average.

    By Anya Wassenberg

    The leaders of arts organizations in Canada’s biggest cities have called on the federal government to institute a Basic Income Guarantee for artists. The call was published as an editorial in The Globe and Mail today.

    The letter was signed by Claire Hopkinson, director & CEO of the Toronto Arts Council, Nathalie Maillé, executive director of the Conseil des Arts de Montréal, Carol Phillips, executive director of the Winnipeg Arts Council, Patti Pon, president & CEO of Calgary Arts Development, and Sanjay Shahani, executive director of the Edmonton Arts Council.

    The arts leaders call the measure a crucial part of any sustainable future for arts and culture in Canada. And, as they point out, they represent the majority of Canada’s artists.

    The document details several hard facts about the devastating effect the pandemic has had on the arts sector in Canada this past year.

    • The GDP of the entire arts sector has dropped by 62% in the last year.
    • The number of hours of work clocked in arts, entertainment and recreation sector dropped by 36.6% in 2020.
    • The above figure includes a titanic decrease of 60% for anyone working in the performing arts sector.

    Art, music, film, and other forms of culture and entertainment have been the backbone of pandemic life. Combined with technology, the arts have undeniably helped Canadians weather the long year of isolation and restricted socializing.

    Artists and the arts in general have responded by innovating, pivoting to new paradigms in an ongoing effort to stay in touch with their audiences and continue creation as much as is humanly possible. World-class artists have performed in the streets, streamed from their homes for free, and entertained seniors, healthcare workers and other front-line workers as the pandemic dragged on.

    As the letter points out, that’s just what artists do — even now, when they face not just a pandemic but an environment that was already growing more and more challenging in many other ways.

    Responding to hardship with inspiration is not new for Canada’s artists. But that hardship has a solution — and that solution is long overdue.

    For many years, artists have faced income insecurity caused by their dependence on precarious short-term contracts which do not include benefits, paid sick leave, or employment insurance, things many Canadian workers take for granted.

    More recently, digital platforms have eroded fair compensation levels for artistic work. Furthermore, although the vast majority of our country’s artists live in our cities, the cities themselves compound problems as the cost of living and artist work space is punishingly high. It is a well-documented fact that Canadian workers, including artists, who are from marginalized communities, are disproportionately affected by precarious employment conditions.

    The Writers’ Union of Canada has similarly requested that the federal government implement a Basic Income Guarantee program. Canadian arts organizations are not alone. There are calls from arts organizations in the UK for a guaranteed basic income.

    In the United States, some municipalities have already started to experiment with a guaranteed income for specific targeted groups, including the city of Stockton, CA.

    In its pilot program, which was entirely privately funded, the Stockton Economic Empowerment Demonstration handed out $500USD per month for 24 months to a total of 125 recipients.

    Artists make up a significant niche in the workforce, according to the numbers.

    In 2016, 158,100 Canadians identified as artists, meaning it made up all or the largest part of their working hours. The figure represents just under 1% of the Canadian labour force, or one in 116 Canadian workers.

    That’s more than the number of workers in either the auto manufacturing or utilities sectors. Of those, 22% are singers or musicians, the biggest chunk. But, with a median income of $24,300, artists earn a whopping 44% less than the national average.

    Arts work is work, and along with the artists themselves, the industry also incorporates the venues and their employees. CERB and CRB have kept many people alive this past year, but they were always intended as a temporary measures. The letter calls Basic Income Guarantee “a model for the future”.

    Patti Pon was quoted recently in The Globe and Mail. “How do you not advocate for ensuring a level of income that enables all of us to benefit so significantly, when the arts are as vital in a community as we have seen during the pandemic?” she asks. “If we don’t take advantage of this opportunity, no one’s going to do it for us.”

    _____

    To see original article please visit: https://www.ludwig-van.com/toronto/2021/03/20/scoop-arts-organizations-canadas-largest-cities-call-basic-income-guarantee-artists/

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  • Arts Organizations In Canada’s Largest Cities Call For A Basic Income Guarantee For Artists

    Artists make up just under 1% of the labor force—that’s more than the number of workers in either the auto manufacturing or utilities sectors. But with a median income of $24,300, artists earn a whopping 44% less than the national average.

    By Anya Wassenberg

    The leaders of arts organizations in Canada’s biggest cities have called on the federal government to institute a Basic Income Guarantee for artists. The call was published as an editorial in The Globe and Mail today.

    The letter was signed by Claire Hopkinson, director & CEO of the Toronto Arts Council, Nathalie Maillé, executive director of the Conseil des Arts de Montréal, Carol Phillips, executive director of the Winnipeg Arts Council, Patti Pon, president & CEO of Calgary Arts Development, and Sanjay Shahani, executive director of the Edmonton Arts Council.

    The arts leaders call the measure a crucial part of any sustainable future for arts and culture in Canada. And, as they point out, they represent the majority of Canada’s artists.

    The document details several hard facts about the devastating effect the pandemic has had on the arts sector in Canada this past year.

    • The GDP of the entire arts sector has dropped by 62% in the last year.
    • The number of hours of work clocked in arts, entertainment and recreation sector dropped by 36.6% in 2020.
    • The above figure includes a titanic decrease of 60% for anyone working in the performing arts sector.

    Art, music, film, and other forms of culture and entertainment have been the backbone of pandemic life. Combined with technology, the arts have undeniably helped Canadians weather the long year of isolation and restricted socializing.

    Artists and the arts in general have responded by innovating, pivoting to new paradigms in an ongoing effort to stay in touch with their audiences and continue creation as much as is humanly possible. World-class artists have performed in the streets, streamed from their homes for free, and entertained seniors, healthcare workers and other front-line workers as the pandemic dragged on.

    As the letter points out, that’s just what artists do — even now, when they face not just a pandemic but an environment that was already growing more and more challenging in many other ways.

    Responding to hardship with inspiration is not new for Canada’s artists. But that hardship has a solution — and that solution is long overdue.

    For many years, artists have faced income insecurity caused by their dependence on precarious short-term contracts which do not include benefits, paid sick leave, or employment insurance, things many Canadian workers take for granted.

    More recently, digital platforms have eroded fair compensation levels for artistic work. Furthermore, although the vast majority of our country’s artists live in our cities, the cities themselves compound problems as the cost of living and artist work space is punishingly high. It is a well-documented fact that Canadian workers, including artists, who are from marginalized communities, are disproportionately affected by precarious employment conditions.

    The Writers’ Union of Canada has similarly requested that the federal government implement a Basic Income Guarantee program. Canadian arts organizations are not alone. There are calls from arts organizations in the UK for a guaranteed basic income.

    In the United States, some municipalities have already started to experiment with a guaranteed income for specific targeted groups, including the city of Stockton, CA.

    In its pilot program, which was entirely privately funded, the Stockton Economic Empowerment Demonstration handed out $500USD per month for 24 months to a total of 125 recipients.

    Artists make up a significant niche in the workforce, according to the numbers.

    In 2016, 158,100 Canadians identified as artists, meaning it made up all or the largest part of their working hours. The figure represents just under 1% of the Canadian labour force, or one in 116 Canadian workers.

    That’s more than the number of workers in either the auto manufacturing or utilities sectors. Of those, 22% are singers or musicians, the biggest chunk. But, with a median income of $24,300, artists earn a whopping 44% less than the national average.

    Arts work is work, and along with the artists themselves, the industry also incorporates the venues and their employees. CERB and CRB have kept many people alive this past year, but they were always intended as a temporary measures. The letter calls Basic Income Guarantee “a model for the future”.

    Patti Pon was quoted recently in The Globe and Mail. “How do you not advocate for ensuring a level of income that enables all of us to benefit so significantly, when the arts are as vital in a community as we have seen during the pandemic?” she asks. “If we don’t take advantage of this opportunity, no one’s going to do it for us.”

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    To see original article please visit: https://www.ludwig-van.com/toronto/2021/03/20/scoop-arts-organizations-canadas-largest-cities-call-basic-income-guarantee-artists/

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  • Investors poured record $56.8 billion into stock-market funds as stimulus checks arrived

    ‘Payments may be making their way into mutual funds and ETFs’: Goldman Sachs analysts wrote.

    By William Watts

    Stock-market investors poured a record amount of money into U.S. equity mutual funds and exchange-traded funds in the past week as the Dow Jones Industrial Average topped another milestone and the S&P 500 index also touched a record.

    BofA Global Research on Friday said U.S. equity inflows hit a weekly record of $56.76 billion in the week ending March 17, up sharply from $16.83 billion a week earlier. The Dow DJIA, -0.28% on March 17 closed above the 33,000 for the first time, while the S&P 500 SPX, -0.18% also finished at an all-time high.

    BOFA GLOBAL RESEARCH

    Meanwhile, Goldman Sachs estimated that net flows into global equity funds hit a nominal record of $68 billion in the week ended March 17, which when scaled to the level of mutual-fund equity assets was the largest since December 2014.

    The rise was largely due to bigger net inflows into the U.S. market, which coincided with the initial distribution of stimulus checks of up to $1,400 for qualified U.S. citizens as part of the $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief package signed into law by President Joe Biden earlier this month, said analysts at Goldman Sachs, in a Friday note.

    Through March 17, the Treasury had distributed $242 billion in stimulus checks, or around 60% of the expected total.

    “These payments may be making their way into mutual funds and ETFs, as well as other assets,” the Goldman analysts wrote.

    “All industry categories saw positive net inflows on the week; the largest net purchases as a share of [asssets under management] were of industrials and telecom.

    Surveys have attempted to gauge how much of the stimulus checks were likely to find their way into the market, including via individual stock buys and purchases of other assets, including bitcoin.

    Both the S&P 500 and Dow pulled back from Wednesday’s records, as a continued selloff in the Treasury market pushed the yield on the 10-year U.S. Treasury note TMUBMUSD10Y, 1.650% to a 14-month high above 1.75% on Thursday.

    BofA said government bond fund inflows weakened to just $60 million from $1.18 billion the previous week amid still-elevated volatility in rates, while municipals and mortgages saw inflows of $1.09 billion and $300 million, respectively, not far off the $990 million and $470 million seen a week earlier.

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    To see original article please visit: https://www.marketwatch.com/story/investors-poured-record-56-8-billion-into-stock-market-funds-as-stimulus-checks-arrived-11616177039

    The post Investors poured record $56.8 billion into stock-market funds as stimulus checks arrived appeared first on Basic Income Today.

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  • Opinion: America Needs to Transform Its Relationship To Work

    Pandemic parenting is impossible. American work culture is a big reason why.

    By Anna North

    Erica, an Indiana mom, was working part time last spring as a computer scientist. At the same time, she was taking care of her first-grader, preschooler, and toddler at home, with schools and day care centers in the area shuttered due to the pandemic.

    During one of her work shifts, she was nursing her toddler while trying to read at her desk, “and he swung his leg, and it somehow landed in my tea, and it kicked the teacup over,” she told sociologist Jessica Calarco and her team as part of a study of pandemic parenting. “Tea all over both of us, all over the desk, all over the chair, all over the wall, and then he bit me at the same time.”

    It’s a scene likely all too familiar to the millions of parents still trying to work while caring for children as the Covid-19 pandemic hits the one-year mark. Erica’s husband, an office manager, also worked from home, but his job “is very demanding,” she told Calarco’s team.

    “They talk a lot about flexibility, but at the end of the day, if [his boss] sets a meeting, he sets a meeting. You can’t not go, even during a pandemic.”

    Stories like this — about moms trying to manage everything during a seemingly endless public health crisis — have prompted many necessary conversations about America’s failure to invest in child care and the stubborn gender inequity in many American families.

    But there’s another issue that the pandemic has laid bare perhaps more starkly than ever before: the problem of work.

    Long before Covid-19 hit, Americans were expected to work like they didn’t have families. Some call it the myth of the “ideal worker” — the idea that the perfect employee is someone “unencumbered by any other problem other than your job,” Andrea Rees Davies, associate director of the Stanford Humanities Center and a historian who has worked on gender in the workplace, told Vox.

    That ideal was unrealistic long before the pandemic, for parents and non-parents alike, but add in the demands of taking care of kids with schools and day cares closed, and a bad situation has become unbearable for many — and yet they’re somehow bearing it.

    The result is burnout, with 91 percent of moms reporting more exhaustion than before the pandemic (along with 35 percent of dads), according to a December survey by Calarco.

    While there has been much discourse around burnout, and much evidence of kids popping in on Zoom calls, all this visibility hasn’t necessarily led to employers changing their demands on workers: Americans are actually working more hours per day on average now than when the pandemic began. And experts say it’s not enough for companies to just be okay with kids making an appearance during a meeting— they need to make real changes like hiring more employees and reducing hours so that people actually have time to tend to their lives. Meanwhile, policymakers need to consider reforms from paid family leave to universal basic income that would make it possible for everyone to meet their needs.

    Overall, it’s long past time for the idea of the “ideal worker” to retire.

    For generations, Americans have been expected to work like they didn’t have families

    Work itself has changed a lot in recent decades, as automation transformed factories and the laptop and smartphone made every couch and kitchen table a potential office.

    But American ideas about work and workers haven’t changed as much — they still have their roots in the years after World War II.

    The war had brought an influx of women into the workplace, but when it was over, many were forced out to make room for returning men. With the end of the war came the rise of a type of work reserved almost exclusively for white men, Davies said: corporate jobs in offices where loyalty to a company was rewarded with job security, promotions, and raises.

    This was the time of the growth of suburbs — which often specifically excluded Black families — and of the midcentury ideal of white middle- and upper-middle-class life depicted on Mad Men.

    As Davies put it, “you have this beautiful home, and the white picket fence, and 2.2 kids, and the husband’s on the train to the office.”

    This version of the American dream, however, came at a cost — that husband was supposed to be available to his job from 9 to 5, five days a week, without any child care or other responsibilities, because his wife was handling everything on the home front, Davies explained.

    • Madison Avenue advertising executives work on a project in New York City, circa 1950.
    • A Madison Avenue advertising executive makes a client visit in New York City, circa 1950.
     Ivan Dmitri/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images

    It was also around this time that the 40-hour workweek became part of American labor law. Previously, workweeks in many jobs were much longer — but even though 40 hours was an improvement, it wasn’t based on what actually made sense for people with families or other responsibilities outside work.

    Instead, it was based on the idea that “the worker was a man and that the worker had a woman who was doing the reproductive labor in the home full time,” Kathi Weeks, a feminist political theorist and the author of the book The Problem with Work, told Vox.

    This wasn’t true even at the time, of course — not for people of color, and not for most working-class families. But the fiction of a woman at home taking care of kids and other family members was the only way to make the idea of a 40-hour workweek tenable. “If every worker was imagined to be doing all of this labor of caring for children and the elderly,” Weeks said, policymakers “wouldn’t have imagined that 40 hours a week is a reasonable standard of full time.”

    Untenable as it was, the 40-hour workweek just got longer as time went on. With the advent of technologies like smartphones and email, 9 to 5 became 24/7 — the ideal worker was available “any time, day or night,” Davies said, still with no family obligations or anything to distract from their “single-minded devotion to the employer.”

    Today, the average American works more hours in a year than the average worker in any other similarly wealthy nation.

    Black Beauty modeling agency director Betty Foray talks with members of her staff in New York City, circa 1970.

    And that ideal didn’t change when more women started entering corporate jobs, making families with two working parents more common across the middle class. Workers were still expected to give everything to work and to keep their families largely invisible — which led to high levels of stress, especially among working moms, long before the pandemic began.

    Meanwhile, someone still had to take care of the kids. But care work in America had been devalued long before the men came home from World War II. That history goes back to slavery, when “the original caregivers were enslaved Black women who took care of landowners’ children,” Rakeen Mabud, senior director of research and strategy for Time’s Up, told Vox.

    “That’s the very root of why we think about that kind of labor, and the labor performed by Black women in particular, as undeserving.”

    And even into the 20th and 21st centuries, efforts to create a universal child care system in America — which could also be used to help caregivers make a living wage — have been stymied by the idea that care isn’t or shouldn’t be real, compensated work. For example, in 1971, President Richard Nixon vetoed a bill that would have created a nationwide child care program because he “deemed caregiving labor as something that should be the responsibility of families,” Mabud said.

    The result has been that child care workers — the majority of whom are women, and about 40 percent of whom are women of color — often make poverty-level wages, an average of around $11 an hour. They are also disproportionately likely to lack health insurance, paid sick leave, and other benefits. And yet they often work 10-hour days or even longer to keep up with the demands of parents’ work schedules.

    In essence, child care workers shoulder all the burdens of the ideal worker myth but get none of the benefits.

    That didn’t work before the pandemic. It really doesn’t work now.

    And that was before the pandemic hit. In spring 2020, schools in all 50 states closed their buildings in an effort to stem the spread of the novel coronavirus, and many day care centers shut down as well. For child care workers, this meant layoffs — by July 2020, 258,000 had lost their jobs. And for many working parents, it meant figuring out how to balance the new demands of full-time care and remote school with the old demand that they work as though their kids didn’t exist.

    If you’re a parent, or if you even know one, you know how that’s going. Simply put, “people aren’t managing,” Mabud said.

    Parents who are able to work from home are often in some version of the situation Gina, an Indiana mom, described to Calarco’s team.

    “Somehow I’m not getting any work done, but also [my daughter] is not getting the best mothering she could be getting,” she said.

    “It’s like, wait a second. Where did all that energy go, if it’s not going into work and not going into her? All of a sudden I’m not doing a good job of either.”

    But pushing back on work hours often doesn’t feel like an option, especially during a pandemic and economic crisis during which millions have lost their jobs. In Calarco’s research, if moms did cut back on work hours, it was often so that dads could work more.

    Especially with the “fear of losing a job in the midst of a pandemic,” Calarco said, “many families, especially if dad is already earning more than mom, are going to sacrifice mom’s job to make sure that dad is able to lock himself in his bedroom all day and work without disruption.”

    That tells us something about the gender pay gap and the fact that moms still do the majority of child care in American families. But it also tells us something about employers — that working without disruption is still something they expect, a year into a pandemic, and families are simply supposed to figure out a way to make it happen.

    That expectation is taking a psychological toll, with 41 percent of parents in Calarco’s December survey reporting increases in depression since the pandemic started, and 43 percent reporting increased anxiety.

    And in heterosexual, two-parent families, moms are typically bearing the brunt of the family demands ushered in by the pandemic, with 80 percent of mothers of kids under 12 saying they handled the majority of homeschooling in one April survey.

    But not every parent has the ability to work from home and manage homeschooling. For parents working in-person during the pandemic, work comes with the fear of bringing Covid-19 home to children and other loved ones.

    “Now that we’ve got showers at work, I at least can shower before I come home and pick up [my daughter],” Jillian, an ICU nurse in Indiana, told Calarco’s team. “Because before, it was like, ‘I don’t want to really pick you up here right now.’”

    Due to school closures, parents took on the role of educators during the pandemic.

    And while some in-person workers have been able to get child care, either using programs for essential workers or relying on family or friends, others have had to quit or scale back at work, sometimes jeopardizing their families’ finances. For example, in a survey conducted in the fall of 2020 by Time’s Up, Color of Change, and other groups, 52 percent of Latina women and 44 percent of Black women said that their care responsibilities would limit the amount of paid work they were able to do for the remainder of 2020. Meanwhile, 34 percent of white women and 26 percent of white men said the same.

    There have been some efforts to help parents. For example, federal Covid-19 relief legislation in March 2020 provided 10 weeks of paid leave to parents affected by school or day care closures. But there were huge loopholes, allowing small as well as large businesses to get around the requirements and leaving millions of people without paid time off.

    And workers of color were especially likely to be denied access to leave: In the Time’s Up survey, 28 percent of Black workers said their requests for paid sick or family leave during the pandemic had been denied, compared with 9 percent of white workers.

    In the absence of paid leave, some workplaces — especially those where employees could work remotely — offered flexibility, letting workers complete their tasks outside normal work hours so they could take care of kids. But in practice, that “often means pushing work to 10 pm to midnight or to 4-6 am,” cutting into parents’ time for sleep, exercise, or just doing things they enjoy, Calarco said. “Flexibility right now is helpful, but it’s not necessarily enough on its own.”

    The country needs to transform its relationship to work

    What is needed, many say, is a full reimagining of the way America views work and workers.

    The first and most basic step is paid leave. The pandemic has shown what should have been clear all along: that giving workers time off when they are sick or need to care for loved ones is not just a public good but a “moral imperative,” as Mabud puts it.

    “What we choose to invest in as a society tells a lot about who and what we value collectively,” she explained, “and when you’re telling someone, you have to come into work when you’re sick, we’re also saying that we don’t think your sickness actually matters that much.”

    Another critical piece is building a national child care infrastructure that not only makes care affordable, but ensures that care workers get good wages and benefits. Investing in such a system would help not just care workers, but also many low-wage working parents — many of them women of color — who struggle to pay for care today, when day care can often cost more than college tuition. “We think about demand and supply of care as two separate things,” Mabud said, but “they’re one and the same.”

    A child care and restaurant worker holds her daughter after speaking at a rally for immigrants working essential jobs without citizenship in Boston, on March 10.

    “My ability to go to work is dependent on my ability to make sure that I can take care of these other responsibilities,” she explained. “We all are better off when the people providing care are paid well.”

    Beyond these policy reforms, there’s also a larger need to question the role work plays — and the space it takes up — in American lives. “We have to really start talking about shorter hours,” Weeks said. The work of caring for a family “is just massive and it was already impossible to combine with full-time work” well before the pandemic began.

    Another way to rethink the volume of work Americans do is by pressuring companies to simply hire more people. Rather than asking parents, for example, to get their work done between 10 pm and midnight, employers could hire additional staff so that “some workers can take on more or take on less depending on what’s going on with them in their lives,” Calarco said.

    “Our culture has been moving increasingly toward overwork for the past few decades,” she explained. “This is a moment where we need to be rethinking that.”

    And beyond rethinking individual jobs, many have called for a universal basic income so that wage work isn’t the only way for people to meet their needs. “I think it’s the only rational option once you realize that wage work as a system of income allocation is not working,” Weeks said. “There’s just not enough work, and not enough work at living wages, to go around.”

    It’s an idea that’s gained traction in the US and around the world during the pandemic, with San Francisco starting a pilot program and Germany and Austria experimenting with the idea as well. The concept raises important questions around “what is work, what should be considered work, and how do we value the things that are currently not considered work in our collective well-being,” Mabud said.

    Indeed, the pandemic as a whole has sparked new conversations about the role of wage work in American lives. The very idea of “essential workers” has provided an opening to talk about the true purpose of work. Does the country truly need, for example, all the various products that people have risked their health and safety to produce and deliver in the past year?

    “We rarely talk about, what are you producing at work, is that valuable?” Weeks said. “This whole notion of ‘essential’ and ‘inessential’ workers is an opening to ask some difficult questions about what we’re toiling away our lives in order to accomplish.”

    These kinds of deep questions haven’t necessarily reached a lot of American workplaces. Too many workers still find themselves in the same situation as Erica and her husband, with meetings that keep marching on, pandemic or no. But the crisis of the past year may finally have provided an opening, no matter how small, for change.

    The pandemic “reveals all the cracks in the system,” Mabud said. “It shows us that we are all dependent on each other.”

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    To see original article please visit: https://www.vox.com/22321909/covid-19-pandemic-school-work-parents-remote

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  • Free Laundromats or Universal Basic Income?

    Opinion by Tarek Fatah

    The sight of the homeless sleeping on sidewalks in below-freezing temperatures is not an uncommon sight for those of us who call the downtown core of Canada’s major cities our home. However, a new category of the poor is emerging in our neighbourhoods.

    Imagine having to choose between milk for your children and getting your clothes cleaned at the laundromat. This is not a theoretical scenario; it is a fact of life.

    In January, Nancy Seto, owner-operator of the Yummi Cafe Laundromat in Toronto noticed a regular customer who had done his washing but was not drying them.

    When she asked the customer why he wasn’t drying his large pile of clothes, the man told her he had to choose between using the dryer and buying milk for his kids. “I felt so bad that I offered to cover the cost,” Seto told CBC Toronto.

    Since that incident, Seto and her husband have opened up their laundromat inviting people hiding in poverty to wash and dry their clothes for free. No questions asked.

    The pandemic has caused great damage to the world economy, devastating the dignity and self-respect of millions who have lost their jobs or have become redundant in the new economy that is rising from the ashes of a world we once knew.

    Individual charity and kindness of citizens towards strangers may be noble deeds, but compassion alone never offered a solution to the challenges of a society divided by wealth. Ask Mother Teresa.

    Only state intervention — be it in education, healthcare or social services – can level the playing field and accord some degree of dignity to the less fortunate.

    Yes, I use the word “less fortunate” because not everyone is able to inherit some of the trillions that are being inherited by the children of the baby-boomer generation — wealth from their parents for work they never did.

    Thankfully, there is a way out and there are people willing to act to create a more equitable society.

    Their plan is to introduce the concept of a Universal Basic Income (UBI) at the upcoming federal Liberal convention in April.

    The initiative was first put into motion by MP Julie Dzerowicz, who in February introduced Private Members Bill C-273 — An Act to establish a national strategy for a guaranteed basic income.

    Introducing her bill, Dzerowicz disclosed, some ministers in Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s cabinet were “very supportive” of her initiative. According to a Huffington Post story:

    “The realities of work are changing faster than ever, Dzerowicz said, adding an observation that more workers are shifting to the gig economy, making temporary short-term work increasingly common. Future job security is also being threatened by automation and artificial intelligence.”

    As Canadian Press reports: “The idea of creating a universal basic income is being pushed by Liberal MPs and grassroots party members, young and old, from east to west — and is among the top priority issues chosen for debate at the governing party’s April 9-10 convention.”

    To those who say UBI is a left-wing conspiracy, allow me to list those who have backed the concept:

    1.  Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg. Musk suggests it will become necessary as automation eliminates jobs, while the Facebook CEO sees it as a way to give people a safety net to support entrepreneurship

    2. 100 Canadian CEOs, who in 2018 urged Premier Doug Ford to rescue Ontario’s basic income project.

    3. The United Church of Canada believes, “A [basic income] program would help provide an adequate living level for everyone and address the persistent inequities within our country.”

    4. Pope Francis, who wrote after the coronavirus pandemic, “This may be the time to consider a universal basic wage.

    5. The Anglican Church of Canada.

    With the NDP already committed to UBI, a Liberal initiative in this direction may very well end the hopes of Conservative leader Erin O’Toole and mean another term for Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

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    To see original article please visit: https://torontosun.com/opinion/columnists/fatah-free-laundromats-or-universal-basic-income/wcm/fd98ce78-db27-4dca-a7a4-aaa01c3aa533/

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  • Opinion: Post-Covid Britain needs a new social guarantee

    Ensuring everyone has decent public services and a guaranteed income could transform the UK after the pandemic

    Opinion by Anna Coote and Neal Lawson

    As Britain’s economy and society gradually reopen, we face big questions about what should come next. The chancellor has promised tax rises and spending cuts. Without a radical response, increases in poverty, unemployment and inequality will be inevitable outcomes of the Covid crisis.

    What’s needed now is a social guarantee that enshrines every person’s right to life’s essentials.

    Most people will agree what these essentials are: education, healthcare, a decent home, care, food, clean air and water, energy, transport and (these days) access to the internet.

    To ensure everyone has these essentials, people must have a fair living income and access to public services that meet their needs.

    We expect to pay for some necessities ourselves. Food is an obvious example, so everyone must have enough money to afford a nutritious diet. There are other essentials that most of us couldn’t afford on our own. Think of education, healthcare, childcare and adult social care. Here, we ensure everyone has access by sharing responsibility, pooling resources and acting together.

    Without providing these services collectively through public institutions, we would need vast amounts of cash to meet all of our needs.

    Some people in policy circles have spent too long arguing whether “universal basic income” (UBI) or “universal basic services” (UBS) ought to be our preferred goal. But in fact we need both. Without public services, many people wouldn’t be able to afford to pay for their healthcare or education, and without a guaranteed income floor below which nobody can fall, far too many people would be condemned to poverty.

    It’s best to think of these things as two sides of a coin.

    On one side, we want to make sure that everyone has a secure and sufficient income. This would minimise the humiliation of claiming benefits, and reflect the reality that peoples’ income levels vary dramatically according to their different jobs, needs and conditions.

    This calls for generous cash payments available according to need, through a system that is open-hearted and empowering, not hostile or begrudging.

    On the other side of the coin are the services that are essential to live a good life, which people don’t pay for directly. These are worth much more to people on low incomes, so they help to reduce inequalities. They’ve been gravely undermined by a decade of austerity and will be in even greater danger if the vast costs of Covid-19 are used to justify more spending cuts. So they need defending, extending and transforming.

    It’s not a matter of which option is preferable, but rather how each of them is realised in practice, and how they fit together and support each other.

    A guaranteed income floor (one version of UBI) can be combined with more and better public services to provide secure foundations for everyone to flourish.

    For that to work, the income floor must be set at a level that is sufficient, without absorbing public funds needed to maintain and improve services.

    There’s no “magic bullet” for solving problems such as deepening poverty, widening inequalities, rising unemployment and the threats of future pandemics and climate breakdown. But we can make a decent start if we enhance public services and integrate them with a basic income as part of a new social guarantee. This guarantee would give everyone the right to a secure and sufficient income and to the services that meet their needs, regardless of their ability to pay.

    It wouldn’t be a top-down, uniform model.

    Services would be delivered through a wide range of organisations, from local councils and social enterprises to co-ops and charities. But all providers would be bound by the same set of principles and an obligation to serve the public interest.

    People who use services, and public service workers, would be fully involved in planning and delivering them. Meanwhile, the main role of the state would be to ensure everyone has equal access to these things, to set and enforce standards, collect and distribute funds and coordinate different services to get the best results for those who need them.

    This is a radical programme, but it’s also a pragmatic one. It can be implemented in stages, and questions such as which services people need most and what level of income is sufficient can be worked out democratically. Most importantly, a system that integrates cash and in-kind benefits will have transformative impacts. For one thing, it’s highly redistributive.

    It would build a sense of shared responsibility and solidarity, because everyone contributes and everyone benefits. It would generate relatively secure public-sector employment at all skill levels, and would encourage the efficient use of public resources.

    And because this social guarantee involves shared responsibility and collective action, rather than purely market-based transactions, it would be more able to support a concerted approach to climate action and ecological sustainability. So it’s time for progressives to throw their weight behind a social guarantee that combines income and services. A post-Covid society demands this level of vision, ambition and collaborative endeavour.

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    Anna Coote is principal fellow at the New Economics Foundation and co-author with Andrew Percy of The Case for Universal Basic Services(Polity Books, 2020). Neal Lawson, director of Compass, set up the Basic Income Conversation

    To see original article please visit: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/mar/11/post-covid-britain-new-social-guarantee-universal-basic-income-pandemic

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  • Canadian MPs, grassroots to push for universal basic income at Liberal party convention

    By Joan Bryden, The Canadian Press

    OTTAWA — The idea of creating a universal basic income is being pushed by Liberal MPs and grassroots party members, young and old, from east to west — despite Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s apparent lack of enthusiasm.

    It is among the top priority issues chosen for debate at the governing party’s April 9-10 convention following an online policy process in which the party says more than 6,000 registered Liberals took part.

    When Liberal MPs first proposed a universal basic income last fall as their foremost policy priority for the convention, Trudeau didn’t slam the door.

    But he did indicate a costly overhaul of the country’s social safety net wasn’t at the top his to-do list in the middle of a pandemic that had already sent the federal deficit soaring into the stratosphere.

    “Obviously COVID has exposed weaknesses in our country where vulnerable people are continuing to slip through the cracks,” he said at the time.

    “We will have conversations about next steps as well but our focus is very much on what we need to do to control COVID-19.”

    Insiders say Trudeau’s view has not changed since then.

    But a resolution, sponsored by the Liberal caucus, the party’s seniors commission and its Ontario and British Columbia wings, suggests a universal basic income would be a logical successor to the $2,000-per-month emergency aid benefits the government rolled out to help millions of Canadians stay afloat during the pandemic.

    It argues that a guaranteed basic income would allow the government to merge existing support programs and reduce administrative costs, while simplifying benefit applications for people in need, providing them with income security and reducing the stigma attached to collecting welfare.

    “Economic stability is key to equality of opportunity and dignity,” the resolution argues.

    Another similar resolution from the party’s youth commission contends that a basic income would lift millions out of poverty and give workers “leverage to say no to exploitative wages and poor working conditions.”

    Despite the apparent widespread support for the idea, there were some dissenters during the online policy process which produced the 42 resolutions to be debated and put to a vote at the convention.

    “Basic income is a simple and attractive idea, but when you take a close look it turns out to be costly and ineffective,” said one participant.

    “This is a destructive inflationary policy, based upon fallacious assumptions, and idealistic notions. This is not a Liberal policy, it is disastrous communistic vote grabbing,” said another.

    Others worried that it would encourage people to stay home rather than seek work.

    Some economists have raised similar concerns. And the parliamentary budget officer has pegged the net cost of a universal basic income program at $44 billion annually, even after repealing other social supports.

    Among the priority resolutions is another, sponsored by the Liberal caucus, seniors commission and B.C. and Nova Scotia wings of the party, calling for enforceable national standards for long-term care homes, which have borne the brunt of deaths from COVID-19.

    That too generated some conflicting opinions during the policy process.

    Some participants suggested that Ottawa shouldn’t try to force national standards on provinces and territories, which have exclusive jurisdiction over the delivery of health care.

    But others were adamant.  “If they don’t agree to standards, then no funding,” said one.

    “Time to stop playing this game with provinces … Nothing else will move the needle.”

    Still others said the focus should be on ensuring elderly Canadians have adequate home care so they don’t need to end up in long-term care.

    Other resolutions include calls for ending subsidies for fossil fuels, incentives for development of renewable energy sources and funding to retrain and relocate workers displaced by the transition to a green economy.

    The convention itself will be an entirely virtual event due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

    _____

    To see original article please visit: https://www.660citynews.com/2021/03/13/liberal-mps-grassroots-to-push-for-universal-basic-income-at-party-convention/

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  • Cash Is Turning Out to Be the Most Effective Welfare

    For too long people in need have been stereotyped as lazy and dependent. Cash payments give them the breathing room to chart a better life course.

    Opinion by Noah Smith

    Biden’s $1.9 trillion Covid-19 relief bill has passed the Senate, clearing the way for it to become law. Much of the legislation is dedicated to handing out cash to individual Americans. This is a sign post for a tectonic shift that’s underway in U.S. policy thinking toward unconditional money transfers as the optimal way to help people in need.

    When I was a kid in the 1980s and 1990s, everyone was talking about “a hand up, not a handout.” This was the mantra of workfare—the idea of using government programs to incentivize labor and self-betterment.

    In 1996, President Bill Clinton signed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act, which turned the old Aid to Families with Dependent Children welfare program into a state-administered block grant with work requirements. Meanwhile, the flagship next-generation welfare programs touted by economists and so-called “third way” reformers were the Earned Income Tax Credit and the Child Tax Credit, which only give people money if they also manage to earn some income for themselves.

    A quarter century later, America is reevaluating this approach. One reason is that workfare just didn’t seem to be that effective. Mothers were the main group who were supposed to be pushed toward work by welfare reform and the EITC-style programs.

    But more than two decades later, the prime-age employment-to-population ratio for women is basically the same as in 1996:

    Not Working Out So Well

    Job-focused welfare reform hasn’t done much to improve women’s participation in the workforce.

    Source: Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis

    In a recent paper, economist Henrik Kleven reviewed the evidence that EITC encourages work, and found it was pretty shaky. It seems that the old saw that welfare recipients choose to live off of government benefits instead of getting a job was never particularly accurate, and instead the number of people who work is mainly limited by the available job opportunities.

    In fact, evidence is starting to pile up in favor of cash transfers. A 2018 literature review by Ioana Marinescu finds that various unconditional transfer programs tend to boost incomes, as well as health and education. And despite the widespread belief that welfare benefits encourage people not to work, that outcome appears small. For programs that give out cash unconditionally — like the payouts from the Alaska Permanent Fund, which distributes natural resource revenues to the people of Alaska — the reduction in employment is negligible.

    In fact, some new evidence shows that unconditional cash handouts might even encourage work. In a recent experiment, some philanthropists randomly selected 125 residents of poor neighborhoods in the city of Stockton, California, to receive $500 a month in cash. Instead of working less, the people who got the cash actually worked more!

    This result dovetails with a new understanding of how poverty keeps people down. The old theory that poverty is caused by a culture of dependency just doesn’t seem to hold water. Instead, poor people seem to be weighed down by a whole host of small risks and hassles. Those day-to-day difficulties make it very hard for poor people to better their situations; to go to school to become a nurse instead of a cashier, to move to a better neighborhood, to look for a better job. Instead of working on their futures, poor people are trapped by the need to pay the bills of the moment. 

    In this theory, cash helps boost people out of poverty by helping them fend off daily troubles; by greasing the wheels of life and giving them a cushion against risks. Helping them afford the essentials provides more breathing room to think about the next step in life.

    Interviews with the Stockton residents who received the $500 a month spent it almost entirely on necessities like food and utilities. In interviews, they reported feeling more confident, engaged and entrepreneurial — which fits with the observation that they were more likely to go get full-time jobs. It also fits with the substantial body of evidence that a strong social safety net encourages people to start more businesses.Opinion. Data. More Data.Get the most important Bloomberg Opinion pieces in one email.EmailSign UpBy submitting my information, I agree to the Privacy Policy and Terms of Service and to receive offers and promotions from Bloomberg.

    In other words, a handout, more often than not, is actually a hand up. This realization is fueling a growing consensus that cash benefits are the way forward for the U.S. Popular books and political campaigns are starting to advocate universal basic incomes. Think tanks like the Washington Center for Equitable Growth, with strong ties to the Biden administration, are advocating more cash benefits as the first line of defense against poverty.

    And the Biden administration is listening. The new Covid relief bill — poised to be the administration’s first major legislative success — has no less than five major cash-transfer programs.

    These include $1,400 checks to Americans making up to $75,000, an additional $300 a week in unemployment benefits through Sept. 6, and assistance for rent and health care.

    But most importantly, the bill includes a child allowance of $250 to $300 a month per child (depending on age). That adds up to $6,000 a year for a family with two kids older than age 6 — a very substantial boost to income. And it comes with no work requirements. If the benefit becomes permanent after this year, as many expect, it will transform the U.S. welfare system.

    That’s a good thing.

    For too long, low-income Americans have been forced to scrabble constantly just to stay afloat, denied cash by politicians who stereotype them as lazy and dependent.

    The new child allowance will give them the breathing room they need to work for a better tomorrow. And it will serve as a test run for even more unconditional cash programs, like a universal basic income. When it comes to boosting people out of poverty, it seems that cash really is king.

    _____

    Noah Smith is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. He was an assistant professor of finance at Stony Brook University, and he blogs at Noahpinion.

    To see original article please visit: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-03-09/covid-relief-cash-may-be-the-welfare-of-the-future

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  • UBI Gains a Friend in High Places

    He is best known for his work on a Stockton pilot project that provided $500 a month to a small group of low-income residents.

    By Carla Marinucci

    OAKLAND, Calif. — Gov. Gavin Newsom has tapped former Stockton Mayor Michael Tubbs, nationally known for his work on universal basic income, to become an adviser on income inequality, child poverty and California’s economic recovery from Covid-19.

    Tubbs, 30, is best known for his work on a Stockton pilot project that provided $500 a month to a small group of low-income residents, a concept that became part of the national political conversation and was promoted by Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang. A rising Democratic star, Tubbs suffered a surprising loss in his November bid for a third term.

    He told POLITICO that he will become Newsom’s “special adviser on economic mobility and opportunity” beginning Tuesday, with a special emphasis on the Central Valley, where unemployment and poverty rates have been among the highest in the state.

    The position is unpaid.

    “California is the fifth largest economy in the world, and one of the most diverse places in the world,” Tubbs said. “And the governor and I are in agreement that economic gains and opportunity have to be broadly shared.’’

    Tubbs was a Stockton success story, growing up in the disadvantaged south side of town before going to Stanford University. He was elected mayor of Stockton at age 22, becoming one of the youngest elected officials in the country. His advocacy on income equality issues and UBI efforts made him the focus of the HBO documentary, “Stockton on My Mind.”

    The decision by Tubbs to become a high-profile ambassador and actor in Newsom’s administration comes as the governor is facing the growing specter of a recall, with proponents claiming they’ve already collected more than the 1.5 million valid signatures they need to qualify the election by a March 17 deadline.

    In an upset last November, Tubbs was defeated in the wake of fierce criticism from a local blog, police and firefighter opposition and criticism from residents who said he had not done enough to solve the city’s homelessness and crime problems.

    Tubbs said he was wooed for a Biden administration job — and that he accepted it — before deciding instead to stay in California and focus on helping his home state rebound from the pandemic.

    Asked whether his move was related to the recall, Tubbs said, “Most people in this country and in the state understand the recall is utter nonsense. I really view my role as providing extra willpower and extra firepower to the governor’s initiatives that are already ongoing.”

    Tubbs’ announcement comes on the heels of a newly-released study which showed the universal basic income experiment he launched in Stockton — giving randomly selected residents $500 per month for two years with no strings attached — “measurably improved participants’ job prospects, financial stability and overall well-being,” NPR reported.

    Among the key findings of the report by independent researchers were that the Stockton Economic Empowerment Demonstration (SEED) cash infusions slashed month-to-month income fluctuations that households face and boosted the full-time employment of recipients by 12 percentage points. The program also appeared to address key mental health issues related to poverty, including measurable feelings of anxiety and depression, the study suggested.

    _____

    To see original article please visit: https://www.politico.com/news/2021/03/11/michael-tubbs-gavin-newsom-economic-adviser-475375

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  • 2020 Revealed That UBI Cannot Wait Any Longer: A Video Essay

    The words in this video essay were authored by writer and UBI advocate Scott Santens. Video by Build The Floor.

    _____

    To view original video on YouTube, please visit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J7I7NtfskVU

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  • In South Korea, Universal Basic Income is Having a Pandemic Moment

    “Without UBI, I believe many feel the very capitalist system itself is in crisis,” says Govorner Lee Jae-myung.

    By William Gallo, Lee Juhyun

    SEOUL, SOUTH KOREA – As a recent college graduate, Lee Geon-hyung found himself in the same situation facing countless other young South Koreans.  

    “There was only part-time work in this job market. And the job that I had at the time just didn’t provide enough income,” says Lee.  

    Despite having a business degree, Lee worked as an office assistant at a semiconductor manufacturer. The company had just cut his pay, leaving him struggling to afford basic expenses in Suwon, a city on the southern outskirts of Seoul.

    “At a certain age, no one wants to ask your parents for help,” Lee says.  

    His story is common.

    A stunning 27% of South Koreans aged 15-29 are either unemployed or under-employed, according to government data.  

    But on Lee’s 24th birthday, things got a little easier. That’s when he became eligible to receive a quarterly check from the government for about $220.  

    It’s part of a bold economic project in South Korea’s most populous province, which is finding more and more ways to give cash to its residents.

    Besides giving regular checks to 24-year-olds, Gyeonggi Province has also sent cash to all its residents during the coronavirus pandemic — on top of the stimulus payments the central government has given South Koreans.  

    Those kinds of direct cash payments are becoming more popular globally, especially during the pandemic, as governments try to stimulate their economies and assist those unable to work.  

    The trend is encouraging to supporters of universal basic income, or UBI, who say all citizens should receive a regular amount of money from the government.  

    Gyeonggi Province Governor Lee Jae-myung speaks during an interview with Reuters in Suwon, South Korea, December 16, 2020…
    FILE – Gyeonggi Province Governor Lee Jae-myung speaks during an interview with Reuters in Suwon, South Korea, Dec. 16, 2020.

    For decades, UBI was dismissed as a fringe economic idea — “just a theory in the textbooks,” according to Gyeonggi Governor Lee Jae-myung, the driving force behind his province’s UBI project.  

    “But I think this belief is now gaining momentum,” he told VOA in a recent interview.  

    UBI explained 

    Lee is a longtime proponent of UBI.

    He frequently mentions the “fourth industrial revolution,” which refers to how automation and other technologies are reshaping the way humans manufacture products and interact with each other.  

    No longer is it necessary to visit a bank, shopping mall, movie theater, or restaurant. For many, even physically going to a workplace is a thing of the past. 

    A part of park is taped off with a sign which reads "Access restrictions to prevent the spread of COVID-19" for the social…
    FILE – A part of park is taped off with a sign which reads “Access restrictions to prevent the spread of COVID-19” for the social distancing measures and a precaution against the coronavirus at a park in Seoul, Dec. 23, 2020.

    The pandemic has dramatically accelerated that dynamic, with social distancing measures ensuring as many tasks as possible are conducted digitally, without human interaction. In South Korea, one of the world’s most technologically advanced societies, it’s referred to as the “untact” environment.  

    “Since the pandemic began, we’ve seen the digital untact environment that was created, and how you don’t need as much human labor to produce things anymore,” says Governor Lee. “Without UBI, I believe many feel the very capitalist system itself is in crisis.”  

    To help prevent what they predict is a coming jobs apocalypse, UBI supporters say governments should provide a living wage to all citizens, regardless of their income level or job status.

    Not only would it protect jobs and reduce poverty, they argue, it would also stimulate the economy.  

    A surprisingly wide range of figures have supported some form of guaranteed income — from political philosopher Thomas Paine and civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. to Silicon Valley executives, such as tech magnate Elon Musk and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. 

    Dozens of countries have adopted limited forms of UBI, including Finland, Kenya, Iran, and even the U.S. state of Alaska, which gives a yearly payment to citizens thanks to a state-owned investment fund financed by oil revenues.  

    Local currency 

    In Gyeonggi, universal basic income takes the form of a local currency, meaning the money is deposited into an account and must be spent at registered local businesses within a certain amount of time.  

    “Setting an expiration date on the funds has a huge impact,” says Lee Chung-hwan, who operates a traditional outdoor market in Suwon. 

    People wearing face masks walk through a market in Seoul, South Korea, Thursday, March 4, 2021. South Korea's central bank says…
    People wearing face masks walk through a market in Seoul, South Korea, March 4, 2021.

    On a recent brisk weekday morning, the market was vibrant, with many shoppers using their local currency cards to buy fresh cuts of beef or bags of kimchi, Korea’s ubiquitous side dish. 

    “The relief funds have been a huge help to our market,” says Lee. “We have people coming here who would ordinarily never shop at a local market.”  

    “And they also buy more,” he adds.  

    Yu Chang-geun, who runs a Suwon coffee shop, says more customers use the local currency than a regular credit or debit card. 

    “It helps a lot, especially for small and medium sized businesses,” he adds.  

    Criticism 

    But UBI has plenty of critics. They say the idea amounts to populism that would strain existing welfare programs. 

    “What proponents of basic income overlook is that individuals need money and public services. And the state must provide those services. But they’ll collapse if UBI is adopted,” says Woo Seok-jin, economic professor at Seoul’s Myongji University. 

    Woo endorses more targeted government assistance programs. He argues that de-linking employment and income is far too drastic. 

    “Pre-empting future risks is good, but changing the system because of a future that hasn’t even arrived yet is just not realistic,” he says.  

    Many economists also reject the premise that technological advancements will lead to catastrophic job loss.  

    “Yes, technology eliminates jobs, but it also creates jobs,” says Alejandra Grindal, who researches global economic trends at Ned Davis Research, an investment strategy organization. 

    Perhaps the biggest argument against universal basic income is that the theory is largely untested. Many of the global experiments discussed as UBI in reality have amounted to more targeted forms of government assistance.

    Even in South Korea, the so-called UBI programs for now are meant to address the very specific problems of youth unemployment and the coronavirus pandemic.

    Neither plan amounts to a “basic income,” if that is defined as a living wage. 

    That uncertainty could lead to many unintended consequences. For instance, employers might pay employees less because they know they will be subsidized by the government, Grindal says. 

    “A lot of interesting things could happen along the way that weren’t intended,” she adds. 

    Political impact 

    Whether or not his policies are true UBI, the initiative seems to be helping Governor Lee’s political prospects. 

    The trim, silver-haired 56-year-old has soaring approval ratings. He is widely expected to soon announce a run for the presidency in 2022. Several recent opinion polls show him as the frontrunner, easily beating other candidates in his left-leaning Democratic Party.  

    He’s been compared to former U.S. President Donald Trump and Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders — comments he says are only partly justified.  

    “I do believe that in a new era, we need a new order and new policies,” says Lee, who believes UBI could gradually be expanded to the national level.  

    Lee’s office doesn’t shy away from the transformational aspects of his proposals. 
     
    Outside the provincial government building, an advertisement depicts a cartoon superhero with the motto “New Gyeonggi, Fair Gyeonggi” emblazoned across his chest. He soars through the air, one arm punching the sky, the other delivering a cash handout card. 

    “Boost local businesses with the Gyeonggi local voucher,” the sign reads. Nearby, multi-colored banners wave from a row of streetlights, announcing: “All Gyeonggi Residents Receive 100,000 won.”  

    Lee did not tell VOA whether he will run for president. Instead, he insists he’s only trying to find big solutions to big problems.  

    “When the situation changes, we have to find new ways to move forward,” he says. “And I believe politicians need to be the ones to find new ways.”  

    _____

    To see original article please visit: https://www.voanews.com/east-asia-pacific/south-korea-universal-basic-income-having-pandemic-moment

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  • Workers with college degrees and specialized training once felt relatively safe from automation. They aren’t.

    The Robots Are Coming for Phil in Accounting.

    By Helen Lyons

    The robots are coming. Not to kill you with lasers, or beat you in chess, or even to ferry you around town in a driverless Uber.

    These robots are here to merge purchase orders into columns J and K of next quarter’s revenue forecast, and transfer customer data from the invoicing software to the Oracle database. They are unassuming software programs with names like “Auxiliobits — DataTable To Json String,” and they are becoming the star employees at many American companies.

    Some of these tools are simple apps, downloaded from online stores and installed by corporate I.T. departments, that do the dull-but-critical tasks that someone named Phil in Accounting used to do: reconciling bank statements, approving expense reports, reviewing tax forms.

    Others are expensive, custom-built software packages, armed with more sophisticated types of artificial intelligence, that are capable of doing the kinds of cognitive work that once required teams of highly-paid humans.

    White-collar workers, armed with college degrees and specialized training, once felt relatively safe from automation.

    But recent advances in A.I. and machine learning have created algorithms capable of outperforming doctors, lawyers and bankers at certain parts of their jobs.

    And as bots learn to do higher-value tasks, they are climbing the corporate ladder.

    The trend — quietly building for years, but accelerating to warp speed since the pandemic — goes by the sleepy moniker “robotic process automation.” And it is transforming workplaces at a pace that few outsiders appreciate. Nearly 8 in 10 corporate executives surveyed by Deloitte last year said they had implemented some form of R.P.A. Another 16 percent said they planned to do so within three years.

    Most of this automation is being done by companies you’ve probably never heard of. UiPath, the largest stand-alone automation firm, is valued at $35 billion — roughly the size of eBay — and is slated to go public later this year. Other companies like Automation Anywhere and Blue Prism, which have Fortune 500 companies like Coca-Cola and Walgreens Boots Alliance as clients, are also enjoying breakneck growth, and tech giants like Microsoft have recently introduced their own automation products to get in on the action.

    Executives generally spin these bots as being good for everyone, “streamlining operations” while “liberating workers” from mundane and repetitive tasks.

    But they are also liberating plenty of people from their jobs. Independent experts say that major corporate R.P.A. initiatives have been followed by rounds of layoffs, and that cutting costs, not improving workplace conditions, is usually the driving factor behind the decision to automate.

    Craig Le Clair, an analyst with Forrester Research who studies the corporate automation market, said that for executives, much of the appeal of R.P.A. bots is that they are cheap, easy to use and compatible with their existing back-end systems. He said that companies often rely on them to juice short-term profits, rather than embarking on more expensive tech upgrades that might take years to pay for themselves.

    “It’s not a moonshot project like a lot of A.I., so companies are doing it like crazy,” Mr. Le Clair said. “With R.P.A., you can build a bot that costs $10,000 a year and take out two to four humans.”

    Covid-19 has led some companies to turn to automation to deal with growing demand, closed offices, or budget constraints. But for other companies, the pandemic has provided cover for executives to implement ambitious automation plans they dreamed up long ago.

    “Automation is more politically acceptable now,” said Raul Vega, the chief executive of Auxis, a firm that helps companies automate their operations.

    Before the pandemic, Mr. Vega said, some executives turned down offers to automate their call centers, or shrink their finance departments, because they worried about scaring their remaining workers or provoking a backlash like the one that followed the outsourcing boom of the 1990s, when C.E.O.s became villains for sending jobs to Bangalore and Shenzhen.

    But those concerns matter less now, with millions of people already out of work and many businesses struggling to stay afloat.

    Now, Mr. Vega said, “they don’t really care, they’re just going to do what’s right for their business.”

    Sales of automation software are expected to rise by 20 percent this year, after increasing by 12 percent last year, according to the research firm Gartner.

    And the consulting firm McKinsey, which predicted before the pandemic that 37 million U.S. workers would be displaced by automation by 2030, recently increased its projection to 45 million.

    Holly Uhl, a technology manager at State Auto, oversees an automation project named “robotic process automation.”
    Holly Uhl, a technology manager at State Auto, oversees an automation project named “robotic process automation.” Credit: Maddie McGarvey for The New York Times

    Not all bots are the job-destroying kind. Holly Uhl, a technology manager at State Auto Insurance Companies, said that her firm has used automation to do 173,000 hours’ worth of work in areas like underwriting and human resources without laying anyone off.

    “People are concerned that there’s a possibility of losing their jobs, or not having anything to do,” she said.

    “But once we have a bot in the area, and people see how automation is applied, they’re truly thrilled that they don’t have to do that work anymore.”

    As bots become capable of complex decision-making, rather than doing single repetitive tasks, their disruptive potential is growing.

    Recent studies by researchers at Stanford University and the Brookings Institution compared the text of job listings with the wording of A.I.-related patents, looking for phrases like “make prediction” and “generate recommendation” that appeared in both.

    They found that the groups with the highest exposure to A.I. were better-paid, better-educated workers in technical and supervisory roles, with men, white and Asian-American workers, and midcareer professionals being some of the most endangered.

    Workers with bachelor’s or graduate degrees were nearly four times as exposed to A.I. risk as those with just a high school degree, the researchers found, and residents of high-tech cities like Seattle and Salt Lake City were more vulnerable than workers in smaller, more rural communities.

    “A lot of professional work combines some element of routine information processing with an element of judgment and discretion,” said David Autor, an economist at M.I.T. who studies the labor effects of automation.

    “That’s where software has always fallen short. But with A.I., that type of work is much more in the kill path.”

    Many of those vulnerable workers don’t see this coming, in part because the effects of white-collar automation are often couched in jargon and euphemism. On their websites, R.P.A. firms promote glowing testimonials from their customers, often glossing over the parts that involve actual humans.

    “Sprint Automates 50 Business Processes In Just Six Months.” (Possible translation: Sprint replaced 300 people in the billing department.)

    “Dai-ichi Life Insurance Saves 132,000 Hours Annually” (Bye-bye, claims adjusters.)

    “600% Productivity Gain for Credit Reporting Giant with R.P.A.” (Don’t let the door hit you, data analysts.)

    Jason Kingdon, the chief executive of the R.P.A. firm Blue Prism, speaks in the softened vernacular of displacement too. He refers to his company’s bots as “digital workers,” and he explained that the economic shock of the pandemic had “massively raised awareness” among executives about the variety of work that no longer requires human involvement.

    “We think any business process can be automated,” he said.

    Mr. Kingdon tells business leaders that between half and two-thirds of all the tasks currently being done at their companies can be done by machines. Ultimately, he sees a future in which humans will collaborate side-by-side with teams of digital employees, with plenty of work for everyone, although he conceded that the robots have certain natural advantages.

    “A digital worker,” he said, “can be scaled in a vastly more flexible way.”

    Self-checkout machines don’t help customers, they simply allow store owners to staff slightly fewer employees on a shift.
    Self-checkout machines don’t help customers, they simply allow store owners to staff slightly fewer employees on a shift. Credit: Andrew Spear for The New York Times

    Humans have feared losing our jobs to machines for millennia. (In 350 BCE, Aristotle worried that self-playing harps would make musicians obsolete.)

    And yet, automation has never created mass unemployment, in part because technology has always generated new jobs to replace the ones it destroyed.

    During the 19th and 20th centuries, some lamplighters and blacksmiths became obsolete, but more people were able to make a living as electricians and car dealers. And today’s A.I. optimists argue that while new technology may displace some workers, it will spur economic growth and create better, more fulfilling jobs, just as it has in the past.

    But that is no guarantee, and there is growing evidence that this time may be different.

    In a series of recent studies, Daron Acemoglu of M.I.T. and Pascual Restrepo of Boston University, two well-respected economists who have researched the history of automation, found that for most of the 20th century, the optimistic take on automation prevailed — on average, in industries that implemented automation, new tasks were created faster than old ones were destroyed.

    Since the late 1980s, they found, the equation had flipped — tasks have been disappearing to automation faster than new ones are appearing.

    This shift may be related to the popularity of what they call “so-so automation” — technology that is just barely good enough to replace human workers, but not good enough to create new jobs or make companies significantly more productive.

    A common example of so-so automation is the grocery store self-checkout machine. These machines don’t cause customers to buy more groceries, or help them shop significantly faster — they simply allow store owners to staff slightly fewer employees on a shift. This simple, substitutive kind of automation, Mr. Acemoglu and Mr. Restrepo wrote, threatens not just individual workers, but the economy as a whole.

    “The real danger for labor,” they wrote, “may come not from highly productive but from ‘so-so’ automation technologies that are just productive enough to be adopted and cause displacement.”

    Only the most devoted Luddites would argue against automating any job, no matter how menial or dangerous. But not all automation is created equal, and much of the automation being done in white-collar workplaces today is the kind that may not help workers over the long run.

    During past eras of technological change, governments and labor unions have stepped in to fight for automation-prone workers, or support them while they trained for new jobs. But this time, there is less in the way of help. Congress has rejected calls to fund federal worker retraining programs for years, and while some of the money in the $1.9 trillion Covid-19 relief bill Democrats hope to pass this week will go to laid-off and furloughed workers, none of it is specifically earmarked for job training programs that could help displaced workers get back on their feet.

    Another key difference is that in the past, automation arrived gradually, factory machine by factory machine. But today’s white-collar automation is so sudden — and often, so deliberately obscured by management — that few workers have time to prepare.

    “The rate of progression of this technology is faster than any previous automation,” said Mr. Le Clair, the Forrester analyst, who thinks we are closer to the beginning than the end of the corporate A.I. boom.

    “We haven’t hit the exponential point of this stuff yet,” he added. “And when we do, it’s going to be dramatic.”

    The corporate world’s automation fever isn’t purely about getting rid of workers. Executives have shareholders and boards to satisfy, and competitors to keep up with. And some automation does, in fact, lift all boats, making workers’ jobs better and more interesting while allowing companies to do more with less.

    But as A.I. enters the corporate world, it is forcing workers at all levels to adapt, and focus on developing the kinds of distinctly human skills that machines can’t easily replicate.

    Ellen Wengert, a former data processor at an Australian insurance firm, learned this lesson four years ago, when she arrived at work one day to find a bot-builder sitting in her seat.

    The man, coincidentally an old classmate of hers, worked for a consulting firm that specialized in R.P.A. He explained that he’d been hired to automate her job, which mostly involved moving customer data from one database to another. He then asked her to, essentially, train her own replacement — teaching him how to do the steps involved in her job so that he, in turn, could program a bot to do the same thing.

    Ms. Wengert wasn’t exactly surprised. She’d known that her job was straightforward and repetitive, making it low-hanging fruit for automation. But she was annoyed that her managers seemed so eager to hand it over to a machine.

    “They were desperate to create this sense of excitement around automation,” she said.

    “Most of my colleagues got on board with that pretty readily, but I found it really jarring, to be feigning excitement about us all potentially losing our jobs.”

    For Ms. Wengert, 27, the experience was a wake-up call. She had a college degree and was early in her career. But some of her colleagues had been happily doing the same job for years, and she worried that they would fall through the cracks.

    “Even though these aren’t glamorous jobs, there are a lot of people doing them,” she said.

    She left the insurance company after her contract ended. And she now works as a second-grade teacher — a job she says she sought out, in part, because it seemed harder to automate.

    _____

    Kevin Roose, a technology columnist at The Times, is the author of the new book “Futureproof: 9 Rules for Humans in the Age of Automation,” from which this essay is adapted.

    To see original article please visit: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/06/business/the-robots-are-coming-for-phil-in-accounting.html

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  • Conservative Party President Calls for Universal Basic Income in Belgium

    By Helen Lyons

    Working towards a universal basic income is urgent, says Georges-Louis Bouchez, president of the conservative Mouvement Reformateur party (MR).

    Bouchez spoke about the idea of a guaranteed €1,000 monthly income for Belgians that would replace all other social services, calling it an opportunity for people to “take control of their lives,” in an interview with De Tijd.

    It isn’t the first time the MR president has brought up the idea. He wrote about universal basic income (UBI) in his book, where he also said, “My generation is the first in contemporary history to consider that its future will be worse than that of the one that precedes it.”

    By using UBI to replace other social services, Bouchez says it will be affordable without having to increase taxes.

    “If the existing social security benefits and [other] benefits are replaced by a basic income, you already have about 70% of the funding. You also achieve efficiency gains,” he says.

    But people are divided over whether or not a UBI will discourage people from working. Belgian economist Koen Schoors wrote an editorial alleging that it will reduce labour participation at a time when we need more of it than ever to pay for ageing costs and coronavirus pandemic-related expenses.

    Bouchez disagrees, saying that people will still be encouraged to work because they’ll earn more money if employed. He also points out that there are already people who do not work and instead earn money through existing unemployment benefits.

    “In Belgium, you have people who are unemployed for life, who receive unemployment benefits of €800 to €1,000 per month, without having worked one day,” he says.

    “You see people in unemployment for three generations. I am convinced that social security, as it is now organised, does not allow people to take their lives into their own hands. A basic income can liberate people.”

    Mouvement Reformateur is a French-speaking political party in Belgium that was also the party of previous prime ministers Charles Michel and Sophie Wilmès.

    _____

    To see original article please visit: https://www.brusselstimes.com/news/belgium-all-news/158323/georges-louis-bouchez-conservative-party-president-calls-for-universal-basic-income/

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  • Senate Passes $3,000 Child Tax Credit for 2021

    The American Rescue Plan would temporarily expand the child tax credit for 2021: allowing 17-year-old children to qualify, increasing the credit to $3,000 per child removing the $2,500 earnings floor, making the credit fully refundable and allowing half of the credit to be paid in advance through periodic payments from July 2021 to December 2021.

    By Joy Taylor

    An expanded child tax credit for 2021 is about to become law. After some procedural wrangling, the Senate narrowly approved President Biden’s stimulus package to help tackle the coronavirus pandemic and stimulate the economy. Because the Senate made some changes to the House-crafted bill, titled the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 (“American Rescue Plan”), the House will have to revote on the revised bill before sending it to Biden’s desk for his signature. We expect that will happen next week.

    One provision in the American Rescue Plan would, for one year, expand the child tax credit and make it fully refundable.

    Presently, the child tax credit is worth $2,000 per kid under the age of 17 whom you claim as a dependent and who has a Social Security number. To qualify, the child must be related to you and generally live with you for at least six months during the year. The credit begins to phase out if your adjusted gross income (AGI) is above $400,000 on a joint return, or over $200,000 on a single or head-of-household return. Up to $1,400 of the child credit is refundable for some lower-income individuals with children, but these people must also have earned income of at least $2,500 to get a refund.

    The American Rescue Plan would temporarily expand the child tax credit for 2021. First, the plan would allow 17-year-old children to qualify. Second, it would increase the credit to $3,000 per child ($3,600 per child under age 6) for many families. Third, it would remove the $2,500 earnings floor. Fourth, it would make the credit fully refundable. And fifth, it would allow half of the credit to be paid in advance by having the IRS send periodic payments to families from July 2021 to December 2021.

    Phase-Out for Wealthier Parents

    Not all families with children would get the higher child credit.

    The enhanced tax break would begin to phase out at AGIs of $75,000 on single returns, $112,500 on head-of-household returns and $150,000 on joint returns.

    Under the proposal, the IRS would look to the 2020 return to determine eligibility for the credit. If a 2020 return has not yet been filed, the IRS would look to 2019 returns. Families who aren’t eligible for the higher child credit would claim the regular credit of $2,000 per child, less the amount of any monthly payments they got, provided their AGI is below the current thresholds of $400,000 on joint returns and $200,000 on other returns.

    Periodic Payments in 2021

    Regarding the advance payments, the plan calls for the IRS to send out a check (mainly in the form of direct deposits) periodically from July through December to families. These periodic payments would account for half of the family’s 2021 child tax credit. For example, if monthly payments were made, this would result in payments of up to $250 per child ($300 per child under age 6) for six months and would be a nice windfall for many families. Take a family of five with three children ages 12, 7 and 5. Assuming the family qualifies for the higher child credit and doesn’t opt out of the advance payments, they could get $800 per month from the IRS from July through December, for a total of $4,800. They would then claim the additional $4,800 in child tax credits when they file their 2021 return next year.

    (Use our 2021 Child Tax Credit Calculator to see how much you would get per month under the current plan.)

    Democratic lawmakers want the IRS to start making the payments to eligible Americans in July, giving the agency just a few months’ lead time to set up its computer systems to handle such a massive, but temporary, new payment program.

    The American Rescue Plan also calls for the IRS to develop an online portal so that individuals could update their income, marital status and the number of qualifying children. People who want to opt out of the advance payments and instead take the full child credit on their 2021 return could do so through the portal.

    Some Overpayments Would Not Have to Be Paid Back

    With advanced payments of the child tax credit, there will sure to be instances in which families receive more in advanced child tax credit payments from the IRS than they are otherwise entitled to. And the American Rescue Plan contemplates this by providing a safe harbor for lower- and moderate-income taxpayers.

    Families with 2021 adjusted gross income below $40,000 on a single return, $50,000 on a head-of-household return and $60,000 on a joint return would not have to repay any credit overpayments that they get. On the other hand, families with 2021 adjusted gross incomes of at least $80,000 on a single return, $100,000 on a head-of-household return and $120,000 on a joint return would need to repay the entire amount of any overpayment when they file their 2021 tax return next year. And families with 2021 adjusted gross incomes between these thresholds would need to repay a portion of the overpayment.

    Is the IRS Up for the Challenge?

    Many tax experts and some lawmakers question whether the IRS, with its out-of-date computer systems, shrunken work force and its myriad of other duties, would be fully able to deliver periodic child credit payments, especially if the expanded child tax credit and advance payments are eventually made permanent, which could very well happen. Some Senate and House Democrats are already talking about making this permanent, touting the potential impact that a fully refundable, expanded child tax credit would have on reducing child poverty.

    Setting up a new program to deliver regular payments to taxpayers who must meet complex eligibility requirements to qualify for the child credit will be a challenge for an agency that is not used to sending out periodic payments.

    The IRS would need more funding for such a big undertaking. The House bill authorizes an additional $400 million for the IRS to take on the additional work, but some experts question whether this is enough. The IRS says that to facilitate advanced payments of the credit, it would have to build a system to compute and recompute payments as taxpayers provide new information. Such a system must also be able to issue and track payments, as well as to reconcile all payments sent out to each taxpayer during the year with the taxpayer’s credit taken on the tax return. The agency would also need to develop a program that would flag returns that don’t accurately include all advance payments received during the year.

    Another issue that the IRS will have to deal with is how to minimize the potential for fraud when it comes to refundable child tax credits. For example, the IRS estimates that in 2019 it improperly paid $7.2 billion in such refundable credits.

    _____

    To see original article please visit: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/senate-passes-3-000-child-173400185.html

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  • Moderate Democrats Strip Stimulus Checks From 12 Million Voters for No Reason

    Opinion by Eric Levitz

    For weeks, a handful of moderate Democrats in the Senate have been fighting to prevent $1,400 COVID-relief checks from reaching their own upper-middle-class constituents. It has never been all that clear to the public — or, by all appearances, to the senators themselves — why they wanted to restrict eligibility for these relief payments so badly. It is not as though Joe Manchin or Jeanne Shaheen are opposed to welfare for the affluent in all forms. To the contrary, Shaheen has lambasted Republicans for restricting the state-and-local-income (SALT) deduction, a tax subsidy that primarily benefits well-off homeowners.

    Nor could the moderates’ opposition be chalked up to (superstitious) fears of high deficits:

    Every Democratic senator has already tacitly agreed to support a $1.9 trillion stimulus package, and eligibility restrictions under discussion were always too minor to significantly impact the legislation’s bottom line.

    Nor could moderates claim to have the public on their side; the relief checks were overwhelmingly popular in their initially proposed form. And on this issue, one can’t attribute the moderates’ resistance to fealty to corporate interests; large retailers love stimulus checks.

    Nevertheless, despite the fact that Senate moderates had no coherent political or substantive argument for their position, the Democratic leadership caved to their demand Wednesday. As the Washington Post reports:

    Under the plan passed by the House, individuals earning up to $75,000 per year and couples making up to $150,000 per year would qualify for the full $1,400 stimulus payment. The size of the payments then begins to scale down before zeroing out for individuals making $100,000 per year and couples making $200,000.

    Under the changes agreed to by Biden and Senate Democratic leadership, individuals earning $75,000 per year and couples earning $150,000 would still receive the full $1,400-per-person benefit. However, the benefit would disappear for individuals earning more than $80,000 annually and couples earning more than $160,000.

    That means singles making between $80,000 and $100,000 and couples earning between $160,000 and $200,000 would be newly excluded from a partial benefit under the revised structure Biden agreed to.

    Here are the two big downsides to this measure:

    • It means that 12 million fewer adults and 5 million fewer kids will receive relief checks from the bill. Whereas 91 percent of U.S. households would have received a check under the previous proposal, now only 86 percent will. That’s not a huge difference. But these days, elections are often won in the margins. And Joe Biden’s Electoral College win in 2020 was contingent on the support of affluent, longtime Republicans who decided to cross the aisle.

    Now, a bunch of these voters will end up receiving less in direct cash assistance from Joe Biden than they did from Donald Trump.

    • Since Democrats chose to narrow eligibility by accelerating the phase down in the value of the checks, they effectively engineered a confiscatory marginal tax rate for a small band of workers: A single taxpayer who earned $80,000 in 2020 will effectively pay a 70 percent tax rate on their last $5,000 of income. And since Americans have the option to claim a relief check on the basis of their 2021 incomes, Democrats have now actually given some workers a strong incentive to work fewer hours, so as to avoid a radically higher tax rate. That isn’t a huge concern for progressives. But “discouraging work” is typically the sort of thing moderate Democrats don’t want fiscal policy to do. Meanwhile, those who took on extra hours last year — assuming that they would not pay a 70 percent rate on income above $75,000 — are not happy!

    So, what do Democrats gain at the cost of denying checks to 12 million potential 2022 voters? How much money did Joe Manchin “save” the U.S. Treasury?

    According to a Democratic who spoke with the Washington Post’s Jeff Stein: $12 billion.

    Which is to say, it makes the relief package 0.63 percent cheaper.

    Slate’s Jordan Weissmann reports that the move is partially motivated by the byzantine rules of the budget-reconciliation process, which imposes a cap on how much money each committee is allowed to spend. One reason the Democratic leadership decided to cave to moderates on checks was that they wanted to make sure that the Senate Finance Committee’s appropriations remain under its assigned limit once the Congressional Budget Office scores the bill. Twelve billion dollars isn’t much in the context of the entire bill, but could be enough to keep the Finance Committee’s section under its ceiling.

    But this still doesn’t constitute a rational basis for creating a 70 percent tax rate on income above $75,000 — while giving 12 million voters a reason to resent your party.

    The Finance Committee has jurisdiction over the $350 billion pool of fiscal aid to state and local governments. That is more than six times larger than the revenue shortfall these governments are expected to collectively face this fiscal year. There are sound reasons for providing state and local governments with more fiscal space than they require to meet existing obligations; in many parts of the country, municipal governments have been hollowed out in recent decades. But from a political and substantive perspective, shaving $12 billion off a pile of money that many red states are probably going to spend on tax cuts makes more sense than canceling relief checks to a significant minority of the Democratic base.

    Moderates must stop putting their fringe obsessions ahead of the Democratic Party’s best interests. Now is not the time to put centrist ideological purity above political pragmatism.

    _____

    To see original article please visit: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2021/03/1400-stimulus-checks-eligibility-democrats-covid-relief-bill.html

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  • Eleven Senate Democrats Urge Biden to Include Recurring Monthly Checks in the Next Recovery Package

    Ten senators want to make direct payments and unemployment insurance extensions automatic until the economy recovers.

    By Kevin Robillard

    Ten Democratic senators are pushing President Joe Biden to make direct payments and the extension of boosted unemployment insurance benefits automatic until the economy fully recovers from the coronavirus pandemic, aiming to take the fate of the recovery out of the hand of politicians and avoiding a key mistake of the Democratic plan to recover from the financial collapse of 2008. 

    Led by Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), the senators are pushing Biden and the rest of the Democratic Party to include what are called “automatic stabilizers” in his Build Back Better plan, which is expected to be written this spring and summer and aims to jump-start the economic recovery.

    The stabilizers would automatically extend enhanced unemployment benefits and issue direct payments to American families until key economic indicators ― say, GDP growth, the unemployment rate or job growth ― reach predetermined levels. 

    The idea is to ensure aid to Americans continues until the economy recovers, regardless of changes in the political mood of the country or the legislative calendar. 

    Automatic stabilizers, like those in the Wyden plan, are important for moving relief to people who need it without giant political fights that drag on for months, holding the relief hostage.

    Natalie Foster, co-chair of the Economic Security Project

    “This crisis is far from over, and families deserve certainty that they can put food on the table and keep a roof over their heads,” the senators wrote in a letter to Biden released Tuesday morning. “Families should not be at the mercy of constantly-shifting legislative timelines and ad hoc solutions.” 

    The 10 senators who signed the letter include the chairs of three major committees: Wyden, the chair of the Senate Finance Committee; Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), who leads the Budget Committee; and Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio), the chair of the Senate Banking Committee. Other signatories include five veteran progressives ― Elizabeth Warren and Ed Markey of Massachusetts, Cory Booker of New Jersey, Kirsten Gillibrand of New York and Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin ― alongside newly installed Sen. Alex Padilla of California and the more moderate Sen. Michael Bennet of Colorado. 

    Senate Finance Committee Chairman Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), right, bumps elbows Thursday with Xavier Becerra, nominee for secretary
    Senate Finance Committee Chairman Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), right, bumps elbows Thursday with Xavier Becerra, nominee for secretary of health and human services, after Becerra’s confirmation hearing.

    Wyden has argued in the past that stabilizers are necessary to avoid a repeat of the laggard recovery from the 2008 financial crisis.

    Then, Wyden argues, Democrats assumed they would be able to pass additional stimulus and economic relief measures after the passage of the Recovery Act early in President Barack Obama’s first term. Instead, Congress became consumed by other problems, public opinion turned against additional stimulus measures and Republicans worked to block additional relief, leading to repeated political showdowns over extending unemployment benefits. 

    “Automatic stabilizers, like those in the Wyden plan, are important for moving relief to people who need it without giant political fights that drag on for months, holding the relief hostage.

    “Automatic stabilizers are good policy and good government ― agencies can actually plan for a few months down the road,” said Natalie Foster, the co-chair of the Economic Security Project.

    The letter does not specify how large the recurring payments should be or in what ways unemployment insurance would be boosted. Democrats are set to pass a relief bill with generous boosts to unemployment insurance ― continuing an additional $400 a week in payments until this summer ― and $1,400 payments for most American adults and children. 

    Automatic stabilizers have broad support among congressional Democrats. Both the Congressional Progressive Caucus and the moderate New Democrats endorsed the concept last year, and two key Biden administration figures ― National Economic Council Director Brian Deese and Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen ― have also signaled their support. 

    Adam Green, the co-founder of the Progressive Change Institute, said his group will push additional senators to sign on to the letter. 

    “President Biden could expect broad support throughout the Democratic Caucus if he includes recurring benefits in his Build Back Better long-term economic recovery plan ― and every senator would be smart to join Sen. Wyden and others in signaling their support now,” Green said. 

    Still, hurdles remain: House Democrats hoped to include stabilizers in COVID-19 relief legislation they considered last year but abandoned the plan after it was clear the Congressional Budget Office would estimate the cost of the stabilizers in the trillions of dollars. Even though it was unlikely the full amounts would be spent, the high top-line number scared off some moderate members, forcing the party to abandon the idea.

    _____

    To see original article please visit: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/democratic-senators-coronavirus-relief-package-automatic-stabilizers_n_603dc896c5b617a7e410475f

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  • Basic income could prevent people from choosing medically-assisted death in response to the downstream effects of poverty

    If medically assisted death becomes more accessible for Canadians, we have a moral obligation to make living well — through housing, mental health supports — accessible too.

    Opinion by Naheed Dosani

    At the start of the year, the Canadian Senate made it a priority to discuss Bill C-7 on Medical Assistance in Dying (MAID), which proposes to make MAID more accessible for people, even if they don’t have a limited prognosis.

    I was asked to testify — to share my perspective as a palliative care physician who provides street-based care for people with serious illnesses who also experience structural vulnerabilities like homelessness, poverty, and systemic racism.

    Why is this perspective integral to the discussion about Bill C-7?

    I work in a world where it is possible to successfully arrange for MAID in two weeks in an organized and efficient fashion.

    Yet, it takes years to get the people I care for into housing, months to get them income supports, and weeks to get mental health and harm reduction treatment essential to a good quality of life.

    I find this morally distressing.

    If we are making it easier for people to get MAID, we also have a moral obligation to ensure that people don’t pursue MAID because they want to escape a society that doesn’t adequately support their needs.

    I think of the people I have cared for over the years, like “Bob,” a man in his 50s with multiple sclerosis and complex wounds. He was referred to our palliative care team for management of complex pain. Despite optimizing his pain and providing expert wound care, he pursued MAID. Why? Because his progressive disease and its complications on his mental health led to an alcohol use disorder, which led to him losing his housing, which led to him losing his family and, ultimately, being alone.

    Conversely, I have witnessed how treating the social determinants of health for the people I care for, can make a tremendous difference as to whether-or-not someone pursues MAID. “Mary,” a woman in her 30s, is an example. She was on the streets living with untreated HIV, dealing with a substance use disorder and no health care team to meet her needs. Mary wanted to die through MAID. However, after addressing her emotional and physical pain, supporting her with housing, income, harm reduction services and providing the kind of psychosocial supports that all Canadians deserve, she changed her mind because she now has a better quality of life.

    When discussing Bill C-7 & MAID, it is crucial to recognize that all people across Canada do not access palliative care equally.

    Further, people who experience structural vulnerabilities like poverty, homelessness and systemic racism face even more barriers to accessing palliative care.

    Although it has historically suffered from an identity crisis because of its association with death, palliative care addresses a person’s suffering throughout serious illness — regardless of prognosis.

    It considers the whole person — their physical, psychological, social, spiritual, and practical needs. It is an active treatment that focuses on living and can prolong life in some cases.

    For several years, experts across Canada have expressed the need to implement a palliative approach to care, as outlined in The Way Forward, and How to improve Palliative Care in Canada. These reports highlight several high-quality and cost-effective approaches to help Canadians with life-threatening illnesses live as fully as possible. Aside from the 2018 release of the Health Canada Framework on Palliative Care in Canada, few recommendations have been fully implemented.

    While we have a long way to go to improve access to palliative care services for most Canadians, we have an even longer way to go for those who experience barriers to palliative care due to marginalization.

    In 2014, I joined a research team led by Dr. Kelli Stajduhar at the University of Victoria to answer the question: What are the barriers that people on the margins of our society experience in accessing palliative care?

    The research study and the report that followed called ‘Too Little Too Late’ tells a damning story.

    Through 300 hours of observational research, our team followed 25 homeless and vulnerably housed people with life-limiting disease, their support persons and service providers.

    What did we find?

    That dying participants bore the brunt of all the commonly experienced injustices lived routinely by people who are structurally vulnerable. That palliative care is harder to access when you are marginalized.

    For those who live on the streets:

    ● The need to survive prevails over discussions about palliative care.

    ● Death is 2.3-4x more likely, so palliative care is harder to access and initiate.

    ● Amidst the overdose death crisis, access to palliative care through a trauma-informed harm reduction lens, is difficult to find.

    To make palliative care more equitably accessible, we must scale up programs that support people who experience marginalization. We now have many promising practices, including mobile services, harm reduction approaches and trauma-informed care models in cities like Victoria, Edmonton, Calgary and Toronto, that work. Regarding MAID, we need to ask ourselves if we have conducted enough research to reflect the experiences of those who live on the margins. I fear we don’t know enough about these perspectives.

    I also worry that Bill C-7 will have a disproportionate impact on working-class disabled people, people who experience homelessness, poverty, and structural marginalization — people who cannot afford their basic needs like food and shelter and medication.

    Without investments to end the structures that create these situations, MAID may not be a fair choice for everyone.

    With 35,000 Canadians experiencing homelessness every night, it should be reasonable to expect that the same energy put into passing MAID will also be put into addressing the upstream factors that lead to poor health like a national housing strategy, improving harm reduction services, implementing basic income strategies and pharmacare.

    We must do better. It’s a matter of quality of life and death.

    _____

    Dr. Naheed Dosani is a palliative care physician and health justice advocate who serves as a lecturer at the University of Toronto and an assistant clinical professor at McMaster University. Follow him on Twitter @NaheedD.

    To see original article please visit: https://www.thestar.com/opinion/contributors/2021/02/11/if-medically-assisted-death-becomes-more-accessible-for-canadians-we-have-a-moral-obligation-to-make-living-well-through-housing-mental-health-supports-accessible-too.html

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  • Some families could get more than $14,000 in new Covid relief. It’s looking more and more like universal basic income

    By Lorie Konish

    KEY POINTS

    • A new coronavirus relief bill is in the works and it could mean a big payday for some families.
    • New $1,400 stimulus checks plus a more generous child tax credit could give a family of four earning under $150,000 more than $14,000.
    • The initiatives show that the country is opening up to the idea of universal basic income, one political analyst says. The question is: How long will it last?

    As Congress works to finalize its latest coronavirus relief bill, some American families are poised to receive a financial windfall.

    Between new $1,400 stimulus checks and an enhanced child tax credit, that could add up to more than $14,000 for some families.

    “All of the focus has been on the $1,400 when, in reality, for a family of four, they should be focused on the $14,000,” said Ed Mills, Washington policy analyst at Raymond James.

    Mills wrote about the potential income boost this week.

    The new stimulus checks would provide $1,400 per person, including child and adult dependents.

    Like the previous direct payments, they would be based on certain income thresholds. So married couples who file jointly with up to $150,000 in income would be eligible for the full amount.

    For a family of four with under $150,000 in income, that would amount to $5,600 in new stimulus check money on top of the $2,400 they received in January ($600 per person), for $8,000 total.

    Provided the bill moves as scheduled, that deposit could come in late March, according to Mills.

    Then, the expanded child tax credit could provide an additional $6,000 to $7,200 per family.

    Currently, families receive $2,000 per child under 17, so long as their income is under $200,000 for individuals or $400,000 per married couple.

    The new proposal calls for raising those sums to $3,600 per child up to age 6, and $3,000 for those ages 6 to 17, for married couples with under $150,000 in income.

    The new plan would also enable families to receive the child tax credit payments monthly. Starting in July, they could receive up to $300 per month for children up to age 6 and $250 per month for children 6 through 17.

    Altogether, that would add up to more than $14,000 for a family of four. This excludes enhanced federal unemployment benefits, if they qualify. The new coronavirus package aims to provide an additional $400 per week to jobless workers. That’s compared to the $600 per week Congress authorized a year ago, and the extra $300 per week that expires in March.

    The additional financial help is aimed at helping individuals and families get through the Covid-19 pandemic.

    But it is also reconfiguring the social safety net, according to Mills.

    “A test of universal basic income has arrived in the United States,” he wrote this week.

    Universal basic income gives people a stipend to live on. The concept began getting more attention in 2019 when Andrew Yang, then a Democratic candidate for president, called for sending people $1,000 per month.

    The proposal brought universal basic income into the mainstream conversation and away from the fringe.

    “There was a clear constituency there for this,” Mills said.

    Then, when the Covid-19 pandemic set in, providing additional income through stimulus checks, unemployment insurance and now the child tax credit became one of the tools that were used.

    “In the financial crisis, Democrats felt as if they ultimately did too little,” Mills said. “Here they’ve decided they want to err on the side of doing too much.”

    That’s not necessarily true of Republicans, who questioned the extra unemployment benefits, which represented the first part of an experiment with universal basic income last March, Mills said.In the financial crisis, Democrats felt as if they ultimately did too little … Here they’ve decided they want to err on the side of doing too much.”

    The party’s stance was complicated by support from former President Donald Trump, a Republican, for providing families with additional income through jobless benefits and stimulus checks.

    “I do expect to see going forward Congressional Republicans having a more traditional Republican view on some of these programs and being less supportive,” Mills said.

    One exception is Utah Republican Sen. Mitt Romney’s child tax credit proposal, which also calls for providing families with monthly income.

    Now that the experiments have been put in place, one looming question is how long the financial support will last.

    “What we see in D.C. is that, once the toolkit has been expanded, once a federal benefit has been established, it’s very difficult to walk that back,” Mills said.

    One provision most likely to get extended could be the child tax credit, according to Mills. Democrats’ current plan would expand that for just one year.

    “This has all the workings of trying to be a test run for something more permanent,” Mills said. 

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    To see original article please visit: https://www.cnbc.com/2021/02/25/how-some-families-could-get-more-than-14000-in-new-covid-relief.html

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  • Canadian Green Party leader urges feds to consider universal basic income beyond pandemic

    The Green Party is proposing a basic income model that would give every Canadian a basic revenue source that could cover necessities such as clothing, food and housing.

    By Yasmine Ghania

    Green Party leader Annamie Paul is calling on the federal government to launch discussions on creating a national guaranteed livable income.

    “A guaranteed livable income is almost inevitably going to have to be part of the solution if we’re going to ensure that everyone has a social safety net beneath them,” Paul said at a roundtable discussion Monday with Independent Sen. Kim Pate and co-founder of Revenu de base Québec Jonathan Brun.

    Paul says the pandemic has shed light on the high number of people who would have been struggling to make ends meet — had it not been for emergency benefits.

    There have been almost 10 million Canada Recovery Benefit (CRB) applications since its launch in late September, costing the government $9.88 billion, according to the Canada Revenue Agency, plus millions more applications from its predecessor, the Canada Emergency Response Benefit (CERB), as well as other benefits.

    So far, the government has indicated it isn’t itching for a basic income program.

    “It’s not something that we see a path to moving forward with right now,” Prime Minister Justin Trudeau told a virtual town hall last December.

    Data suggests employment gains made in the fall have been wiped, with the unemployment rate rising to 9.4 per cent — its highest rate since last summer, according to Statistics Canada.

    As the pandemic rages on, Trudeau announced last week that the CRB and the Canada Recovery Caregiving Benefit will be extended by 12 weeks and that Canadians will be able to claim an additional 24 weeks of employment insurance.

    The beefed-up benefits are a “sigh of relief” for Paul, but still not enough. “Now is the time to begin to talk about what is going to replace it,” Paul said.

    For Pate, a basic income is necessary since not everyone is actually eligible for the pandemic supports, leaving some people to still fall through the cracks.

    “They (the federal government) missed about one in seven or one in 10 Canadians,” Pate said. “As well, people who did apply for it but may have been on social assistance or on disability now find themselves being dumped off the system.”

    The Green Party is proposing a basic income model that would give every Canadian a basic revenue source that could cover necessities such as clothing, food and housing.

    Brun says the government should look at basic income as an “investment” that will churn out benefits in the long run.

    “There’s no doubt there will be economic activity, cost savings in terms of criminal justice, health care and other issues,” Brun said.

    Pressure for a basic income program has been mounting for several months. Last April, more than 50 senators signed a letter asking the CERB be turned into a guaranteed basic income program.

    P.E.I. lawmakers are currently eyeing a pilot on the Island, with three senators representing P.E.I. sending a letter to the prime minister and P.E.I. Premier Dennis King last month calling for a pilot project, as well as for the program to be expanded to the entire country in the future.

    Ontario began a pilot program in 2017, however it was scrapped early when Doug Ford’s Progressive Conservative Party came into power. Meanwhile, B.C. has said it “would welcome” consultations with the federal government on the matter.

    However, not everyone agrees with this solution. A panel of economists appointed by the B.C. government found that basic income for all Canadians cannot tackle the deeper systematic issues that cause people to be in financial hardship.

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    To see original article please visit: https://www.thestar.com/news/canada/2021/02/23/green-party-leader-urges-feds-to-consider-universal-basic-income-as-safety-net-beyond-pandemic.html

    The post Canadian Green Party leader urges feds to consider universal basic income beyond pandemic appeared first on Basic Income Today.

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  • Worrying about money can have a lasting impact on our mental health

    For so many people, financial insecurity is a constant in their lives, curtailing their life chances and causing chronic stress. As I have argued before, universal basic income could be one way to lift people out of this situation, especially during these days of COVID-19.

    By Matthew Smith Ph.D.

    I have recently been leading a Scottish Universities Insight Institute project to explore universal basic income’s potential to improve mental health. You can learn more about the project here. We’ve run some workshops where we’ve encouraged our participants to talk about how financial insecurity has impacted their mental health. Some of the stories are incredibly powerful and I hope to share them with you soon. But the experience also spurred me to think about times in my life when financial insecurity or other types of insecurity have had an impact on me.

    I didn’t grow up in poverty. But there was a period during my childhood when my dad left a steady job to start a new career, which relied on commission. This was during the mid-1980s, when the economy in Alberta, where I grew up, wasn’t so good. While my dad waited for his new career to take off (which it eventually did), there was a period of a few years where my parents had very little money and had to spend all their savings (including the pension from the steady job my dad had left) in order to stay afloat.  

    My folks did a pretty good job of hiding this from me and my younger sister. But there were signs. 

    For example, I remember always having patches on my jeans. Not just one or two, but up to six on each pair of jeans—patches layered over patches, usually on the knees. I thought this was pretty cool at the time. Looking back, however, I realize that patches were a lot cheaper than a new pair of jeans.

    Probably the most obvious example of our financial problems came in the spring of 1984, when my beloved Edmonton Oilers made it to the Stanley Cup Finals against the dreaded New York Islanders. The week before the series started, one of my sister’s friends was over and accidentally bumped into the back of our television. It fell to the floor and the screen smashed into a million pieces. I begged and begged for a new television so that I could watch the playoffs, but we simply didn’t have the money. I listened to the series on the radio, until the final game when I convinced my parents to let me go over to a neighbor’s to watch (we won, in case you didn’t know!).

    There was another hockey-related clue, too. In western Canada, everyone plays hockey. Even the “nerdy” kids that I hung out with played until they were 11 or 12. Everyone, that is, except me. It was simply too expensive to get me kitted out in pads and skates and drive me around the province. I don’t regret much about my childhood, but I can’t lie that I still wished I’d had the chance to play Canada’s game.  

    And then there were the arguments my parents had. They didn’t happen often, but when they did, they were always about money. Still married after 50 years, I doubt they have had a serious argument since the mid-80s, when our financial situation was so perilous. 

    So, what impact did all this have on my mental health? Not too much, I am glad to say. 

    But it did make me very averse to financial risk, to the point that—when I had the opportunity to change my career by coming to the U.K. and undertaking a Ph.D., I was unwilling to do so if it meant taking on any kind of debt. 

    Luckily I received a studentship and haven’t looked back. But whenever we have had to negotiate our immigrant status here in the U.K., that deep feeling of dread—of everything potentially falling out from under you─returns with a vengeance. It’s not a nice feeling.

    And yet, for so many people, financial insecurity isn’t just a few years in their childhood that they don’t really remember. 

    It is a constant in their lives, curtailing their life chances and causing chronic stress. As I have argued before, universal basic income could be one way to lift people out of this situation, especially during these days of COVID-19.

    At the very least, we should be more honest about the role financial insecurity plays in affecting our mental health.

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    Matthew Smith, Ph.D. is a lecturer Wellcome Trust Research Fellow at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow.

    To see original article please visit: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/short-history-mental-health/202102/stories-financial-insecurity-and-mental-health

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