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Category: THE SOCIAL DEBATE

  • How We Can Make Martin Luther King Jr.’s Dream of Ending Poverty A Reality

    By: MICHAEL TUBBS

    I grew up in the shadows of a Dr. Martin Luther King Boulevard in Stockton, Calif. My neighborhood was shaped by great people, but terrible policies: It had more liquor stores than grocery stores, schools that were underfunded, and the biggest government investment was in policing rather than in opportunity.

    Years later, when I became mayor of my hometown in 2017, I walked into City Hall every day by crossing that same Dr. Martin Luther King Boulevard. And while I did all in my power to provide opportunity and dignity to every person living in Stockton, I was met with opposition from naysayers who applaud Dr. King’s dream in theory on days like today but who act in ways counter on others, voting against building affordable housing, making college free and accessible for our students, reversing decades of redlining, and providing second chances to formerly incarcerated people.

    On this Dr. Martin Luther King Day, I’m struck by this irony—of celebrating his life and legacy without real action; of platitudes delivered without real purpose; and of talking about Dr. King’s dream without waking up and doing the work of making it a reality.

    The reality we grapple with today is the result of nearly 50 years of sleeping on Dr. King’s dream. His dream married both economic and racial justice yet unfettered capitalism continues to leave far too many folks behind. While poverty does not discriminate, it does disproportionately impact Black people, and we have a black and white racial wealth gap that’s nearly the same today as it was at the time of the March on Washington in 1963. The unemployment rate remains stagnant for Black Americans and even increased for Black women in Dec. 2022. Black homeownership rates continue to fall, and fewer than half of Black adults say they have the recommended three months emergency fund.

    It’s past time we bring Dr. King’s economic dream to life, not by naming streets after him in the most marginalized parts of our communities, but by ending poverty and establishing a guaranteed income.

    Guaranteed income is a monthly cash payment given directly to individuals. It is unconditional, with no strings attached and no work requirements. In 1967, Dr. King called for a guaranteed income as the simplest and most effective solution to poverty, noting that its myriad of benefits included “a host of positive psychological changes inevitably will result from widespread economic security.” Dr. King continues to explain, “The dignity of the individual will flourish when the decisions concerning his life are in his own hands, when he has the assurance that his income is stable and certain, and when he knows that he has the means to seek self-improvement.”

    In 2017, I announced the nation’s first guaranteed income pilot, the Stockton Economic Empowerment Demonstration. 50 years after King’s call for a guaranteed income, many posited that the idea was too radical and nothing more than a dream. A pandemic and recession later, public perception has shifted and we are closer to a guaranteed income than we have ever been. The organization I founded, Mayors for a Guaranteed Income, is now more than 100 mayors strong and has launched dozens of pilots across the country. All together, these pilots will deliver more than $210 million in guaranteed income to Americans of every creed.

    Mayors for a Guaranteed Income just released data from 20 mayor-led pilots, showing that guaranteed income provides the freedom and flexibility Americans need to afford their basic needs, climb up the economic ladder, and pursue their dreams. Recipients spend over 80% of the extra cash on paying for the cost of everyday items—food, household goods, medical supplies, transportation, and housing. Less than 1% of spending went to tobacco or alcohol.

    In Dr. King’s hometown of Atlanta, Ga., for instance, Deontrez relies on guaranteed income to pay for his daughter’s diapers and now earns more money because he could afford to take his Commercial Driver’s License test. Monica, a previously unhoused single mom in Tacoma, Wash. is using her guaranteed income to provide her daughter with safe housing and keep up with car payments.

    As inflation continues to hit low-income Americans hardest, guaranteed income is an effective tool to offset rising costs for those who can least afford it. Many recipients have incomes at or near the poverty line, but don’t qualify for traditional social safety net programs. So they fall through the cracks. The average income for all participants in our pilots is barely 14 thousand, just above the federal poverty line for individuals.

    In 2021, we even saw the federal government offer a guaranteed income to nearly every parent in America through the expanded Child Tax Credit. The program led to a historic drop in child poverty, in record time. Congress, however, failed to codify this expansion, and millions of children who had a glimpse of financial security were thrust back into the nightmarish reality—a parent who is working two to three jobs but still not affording to keep the lights on or put food on the table.

    We know the answer to Langston Hughes’s question, “What Happens to a Dream Deferred?” We saw it in the storming of the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021; we see it in the stripping of a woman’s right to bodily autonomy; we see it voter disenfranchisement and in the pervasive poverty and wealth inequality. On this day, we have the opportunity to wake up and make Dr. King’s dream of a community for all of us a reality. We have the ability and, moreover, the responsibility to create policies rooted in love and an understanding of the dignity of every single person. As Dr. King said, “God never intended for one group of people to live in superfluous inordinate wealth, while others live in abject deadening poverty.”

    This post was originally published on Basic Income Today.

  • New minimum income guarantee will help American military families

    By: Karen Jowers

    A new allowance, designed to be a safety net for lower-income active duty military families, is set to take effect Jan. 1. It will help these families make ends meet, and addresses hunger and food insecurity.

    Based on DoD rules implementing the congressionally -mandated Basic Needs Allowance, Pentagon officials estimates that about 300 active duty families may be eligible. Air Force officials’ initial screening of airmen and guardians found that 36 of their service members are potentially eligible. Officials anticipate that those eligible will be junior enlisted members with larger families.

    Active duty members with families are eligible if their gross household income is less than 130% of the federal poverty guidelines for their location and the number of people in the household. The allowance will fill the gap between their income and the poverty guidelines, which are set the by Department of Health and Human Services.

    Officials in the service branches are in various stages of developing their procedures, and are screening service members for eligibility. They’ll notify these service members about how to apply. Total income includes spouse income and other sources.

    A new allowance, designed to be a safety net for lower-income active duty military families, is set to take effect Jan. 1. It will help these families make ends meet, and addresses hunger and food insecurity.

    Based on DoD rules implementing the congressionally -mandated Basic Needs Allowance, Pentagon officials estimates that about 300 active duty families may be eligible. Air Force officials’ initial screening of airmen and guardians found that 36 of their service members are potentially eligible. Officials anticipate that those eligible will be junior enlisted members with larger families.

    Active duty members with families are eligible if their gross household income is less than 130% of the federal poverty guidelines for their location and the number of people in the household. The allowance will fill the gap between their income and the poverty guidelines, which are set the by Department of Health and Human Services.

    Officials in the service branches are in various stages of developing their procedures, and are screening service members for eligibility. They’ll notify these service members about how to apply. Total income includes spouse income and other sources.

    In negotiations for the 2023 defense policy bill, House and Senate lawmakers agreed to make more families eligible for the new Basic Needs Allowance by raising the income cap to 150% of federal poverty guidelines, up from the 130% set by the 2022 law establishing the allowance. DoD officials estimate that 2,400 families might be eligible under those 150% limits, depending on other household income. DoD would be required to change its calculations for the eligibility no later than Jan. 1, 2024, but it could be done earlier.

    The bill also gives DoD leeway to expand income eligibility to 200% of the federal poverty guidelines in certain circumstances.

    The housing allowance is counted as income, except for service members living in areas designated by DoD as being high cost areas. Advocates contend the housing allowance shouldn’t be counted as income, because it bumps too many families from qualifying for the new stipend.

    This post was originally published on Basic Income Today.

  • Only one-in-five hungry Canadians use food banks — what’s broken?

    By: Stefan Labbé

    They were meant to be temporary, a quick fix for people who had fallen on hard times after the 1981 economic recession. 

    But by Christmas 1986, B.C. was home to upwards of 50 food banks, more than any other province. Even then, the head of the Greater Vancouver Food Bank (GVFB) — the province’s largest — was fighting to avoid becoming a permanent institution. 

    “We never imagined that we’d be doing this much or that it would go on this long,” Sylvia Russell, then executive director of the GVFB, told The Montreal Gazette in 1985. “It was to be a temporary thing. Now we’re headed for our fourth winter.”

    A year later, Russell told The Windsor Star she thought the provincial government “would revise its thinking, with the recession starting, about the need for public assistance.”

    What had started in December 1982 as “an idea and six cans of leftover soup” had already evolved into a moral dilemma — feed desperate people now and risk upholding a broken system, or stand by and do nothing.

    Four decades later, food banks have only grown, proliferating as an estimated 5.8 million Canadians face food shortages.

    “We’ve never seen it like this,” said Cynthia Boulter, the current chief operating officer for the GVFB.

    Figures collected by Food Banks Canada in March 2022 showed the number of visits to B.C.’s food banks had already risen 25 per cent over the previous year, higher than Canada’s national average of 15 per cent.

    Between the summers of 2021 and 2022, the GVFB handed out more than 3.6 million kilograms of food, the most on record for a single year. And since then, things have only been ramping up. 

    In the lead-up to Christmas, Boulter said the number of people visiting food banks for the first time skyrocketed. Data obtained from GVFB shows new client visits climbed to nearly a thousand in November alone. That’s 43 per cent higher than the monthly average from the previous fiscal year and the busiest month on record.

    The demand for food banks comes as grocery prices continue to climb and Canadians face yet another cost-of-living crisis. Even as the cost of gas dipped last month, inflation is driving up the price of food at record levels. Over the past year, edible fats and oils had climbed 26 per cent, while coffee, tea and cereal products had jumped almost 17 per cent, according to the latest numbers from Statistics Canada.

    To reach people, Boulter says the organization will be working with over 140 community groups by early 2023, providing food as well as fridge and freezer capacity so they can serve hungry people across the metro region and beyond.

    But while some people might get temporary relief from such programs, many say the model is failing. 

    Data shows food banks not fixing chronic hunger

    Long-term data on how many people are going hungry in Canada is patchy at best. 

    That’s because Statistics Canada has only been measuring food insecurity since 2005. Before that, food bank usage was the main way the country kept tabs on hunger.

    Research has shown most hungry Canadians never use food banks, even as a last resort. By 2016, roughly 100,000 people accessed food banks in B.C. out of over 500,000 people who lived in food-insecure households. 

    “There’s 100 different reasons” people avoid food banks, says Jennifer Black, a University of British Columbia professor who has spent years investigating the institution’s rise in Canada. 

    “Most people will do almost anything to not have to go. They’ll borrow money from friends. They’ll sacrifice things. They’ll sell things. They’ll go into debt.”

    The data shows some interesting patterns for those who use food banks. 

    Analyzing 25 years of data from the Greater Vancouver Food Bank, Black found that between 1992 and 2017, at least 116,963 individuals made over two million visits to the GVFB. Episodic and chronic users made up only nine per cent of the food bank population, but they accounted for 65 per cent of all food bank visits. 

    Her conclusion: “a substantial proportion of food bank resources are providing ongoing food supports beyond what can be considered an acute or emergency context.”

    “It’s like if you went to the emergency room, and you said, ‘I broke my leg,’  and they’re like, ‘Here’s a Band-aid,” she told Glacier Media. 

    In recent years, food banks like the GVFB have worked hard to reduce the stigma around accessing their services while trying to double as an outlet for food deemed unsellable by grocery stores. Food banks have also been among the leading voices calling for an overhaul of government social safety nets.

    Even though an estimated 80 per cent of hungry Canadians don’t access a food bank, much of the language food banks use to appeal to donors pivots around the idea that donations will tackle hunger, says Valerie Tarasuk, a professor at the University of Toronto’s Department of Nutritional Sciences, and head of PROOF, a research group investigating food insecurity in Canada. 

    “That is a myth,” Tarasuk said. “There isn’t anything that I think anybody can document that says that [food banks] tackle this problem. The fact that we’re 40-plus years in, and the problem is bigger than it’s ever been.”

    Hunger can’t be seen in isolation

    Part of the myth around food banks, says Tarasuk, is seeing hunger as an isolated problem. In reality, families cut back on food to afford to keep the heat on, fill their prescriptions or pay rent.

    In B.C., 70 per cent of people who accessed a food bank last fiscal year were renters, and according to Statistics Canada, the province’s rent prices increased by 7.2 per cent over the past year, the most in the country after Prince Edward Island.

    “We talked about this as if it’s a food problem, and the solution is food,” said Tarasuk. “But food is just part of the household budget. It’s it doesn’t get managed in isolation. And for that very reason, it can’t be resolved in isolation.”

    Not getting enough to eat echoes across every part of life. A healthy brain uses roughly 20 per cent of the body’s energy. A student who can’t feed that brain will starve it, leading to everything from depression and anxiety to withdrawal and behavioural problems, research has shown.

    That’s a problem at places like the University of British Columbia, where a student food bank reported in April a nearly 500 per cent increase in visits between 2020 and 2022. 

    A third of people who accessed food banks in Canada last year were children. For them, hunger can set them up for a lifetime of challenges. One study tracking nearly 15,500 Canadian children over 16 years found hunger was independently predictive of teenagers dropping out of high school. Repeated reports of child hunger over time were predictive of early childbearing.

    People’s physical health can also be put at risk. Not having enough food has been linked to higher rates of emergency room visits due to accidents, self-harm and violence. Falls on stairs, poisoning and overexertion were also found to be more likely among the food insecure, according to a 2021 Canadian study. 

    Pandemic reveals another path

    In upending life as we knew it, the COVID-19 pandemic — and governments’ responses to it — offered a window into how public policy appears to have had some quietly profound effects on hunger in Canada.

    Data from the GVFB shows the distribution of food during the first six months of the pandemic plummeted. Experts say the same thing happened at food banks across the country. Part of it was due to people avoiding crowds. But a bigger reason people stayed away, Boulter and Tarasuk said, was because people received pandemic financial support through programs like the Canada Emergency Response Benefit, or CERB. 

    When government pandemic benefits ended, the demand for food banks came rushing back. And as inflation spiralled, the problem only got worse, said Boulter. Between 2019 and 2022, visits to food banks have climbed by 35 per cent across the country, according to Food Banks Canada. 

    By October 2022, one poll reported that more than half of British Columbians said it’s getting harder to feed themselves.

    “We experienced a dip in attendance before things ramped up again,” Boulter said.

    Many food banks have been leading advocates pushing governments to enact policies that would spell their extinction. But Boulter’s experience through the pandemic left her with first-hand evidence — the problem wasn’t a lack of food, she said, but the failure of a government safety net to protect the country’s most vulnerable. 

    Many economists blame broad public spending as one of the drivers of the current inflation crisis. Still, agreed Boulter and four experts interviewed for this story, providing a permanent basic income would largely eliminate the need for food banks.

    “If that happened, we might all be out of jobs. But we’d be happy,” Boulter said. 

    Small spending boosts shown to reduce hunger

    A universal basic income is not the only tool governments have to reduce hunger in Canada.

    The PROOF research group has found that broad increases in minimum wage, increasing income through welfare programs and lowering income tax rates for their poorest citizens were among the most effective policy levers provincial governments have for reducing hunger.

    At the federal level, public old-age pensions have shown an income floor halves the risk of food insecurity once low-income single adults become eligible at 65 years old. The Canada Child Benefit, meanwhile, has been shown to drop the prevalence of severe food insecurity by a third. Bolster those basic social services, and rising hunger rates could be halted and perhaps reversed, research has shown.

    “We could just start with those on social assistance, those with children and those on senior assistance,” said Will Valley, a UBC associate professor and academic director of the school’s Land, Food, & Community program.

    “In food systems, there are no silver bullets. But this one is pretty close.”

    Despite the data showing food banks are not serving most Canadians facing hunger, governments continue to give money to such organizations. 

    A 2021 charitable tax return from Food Banks British Columbia showed governments provided $3.12 million to the organization, nearly 20 per cent of its revenue. At $36 million, almost 39 per cent of Food Bank Canada’s total revenue came from government sources, tax returns show.

    Breaking the myth

    Five days before Christmas this year, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau visited a food bank in Montreal, writing on social media, “they’re making a real difference.”

    Politicians visiting food banks during the holidays and holding them up as a solution is nothing new. By relying on corporate and individual donations, food banks have come to hold “a lot of power in our collected imaginations,” said Valley.

    Part of that power comes from deep religious and humanitarian imperatives to feed hungry people, something that tends to peak around the holiday season in countries like Canada, says Graham Riches, a professor emeritus of social work at UBC, who has written several books on food banks.

    “Canadians are a compassionate, caring group,” added Tarabuk. “But the problem is that it’s completely misplaced… it doesn’t change the problem, and the problem is big.”

    Riches says events like CBC Vancouver’s annual food bank donation drive, which raised nearly $3 million in 2021 and almost $2.6 million so far this year, have also helped normalize food banks.

    “[CBC] is public media. When it endorses food banks in the way that it does, it actually feeds into this whole argument that if you give to food banks, you’re going to be solving world hunger when there’s no evidence to support this at all,” said Riches.

    “In fact, it just maintains a very unequal system of social welfare.”

    But by putting so much effort into raising money for food banks, critics say they have offered governments political cover to ignore the real problem affecting many long-term clients — persistent poverty.

    “What’s evident and clear is we’ve painted ourselves into a corner,” Valley said. 

    However, Boulter pushed back against claims that food banks are acting as a crutch for government inaction. Until governments can figure out a better solution, she said their clients tell them food banks provide a vital lifeline to get through hard times. 

    The GVFB does not allow the press to interview its clients, but its data suggests many use the food bank as a stop-gap during tough transition periods. Last fiscal year, 29 per cent of GVFB users had relocated internationally, and 18 per cent were experiencing student poverty.

    A breaking point?

    As demand has increased, the GVFB has faced shortages in volunteers and storage space. Boulter says its leadership is starting to discuss how much further it can expand before it reaches a breaking point.

    At the same time, she says the province’s largest food bank is increasingly expanding its footprint across B.C., delivering food to the Interior and up and down the east coast of Vancouver Island. 

    In November 2021, the group distributed over 6,350 kilograms of fresh food and toilet paper by helicopter to the Fraser Valley after floods decimated the region. 

    When asked how she sees the GVFB evolving to confront hunger in the coming decades — when floods and wildfires are expected to worsen — Boulter says the group is so busy with current demand that it hasn’t had time to look beyond a three-year window. 

    But others are worried an increased reliance on food charities comes at a crucial moment, as climate change threatens to destabilize agriculture and the food systems it supports.

    “We’ve been in a period of stability,” said Valley. “2021 gave us a little glimpse of what we can see in the future. Two highways go out, and suddenly we have our transportation networks cut out.” 

    “These sorts of things are going to happen again. Now is the time to plan.” 

    Extreme food measures should be on the table, says expert

    Riches, who is now in talks with the community of Qualicum Beach, where he lives, says governments are only slowly becoming aware of a potential food crisis. 

    “We’ve got food banks; we’ve got this sort of emergency service organization,” he said. “But really, the question is much broader than that.”

    Wheat, for example, is the most-consumed crop in the world and most often eaten in more affluent countries. One recent study found that rising temperatures are responsible for a long-term reduction in crop growth rates in many European countries. Others have found that even a one-degree Celsius increase in temperature could reduce global wheat productivity by up to 6.4 per cent.

    Such downturns in crop production could seriously impact Canada, a major wheat producer, but many Canadians also rely on the import of fresh food for much of the year.

    “We’re at the 11th hour,” Kent Mullinix, director of Kwantlen Polytechnic University’s Institute for Sustainable Food Systems, told Glacier Media earlier this year. “We have been so remiss in curtailing (greenhouse gas) emissions; it is inevitable that many of these major food production areas worldwide, including California, will face significant collapse.

    “California might not even be able to rely on California.”

    Mullinix has been a leading advocate for lowering barriers so a new generation of sustainable farmers can boost B.C.’s ability to feed itself. Boulter says the GVFB, like many across the province, is increasingly working with local farmers to use surplus crops before they go to waste.

    Local production still has a long way to go. Even in places like Vancouver Island, where regional food networks have blossomed in recent years, less than 10 per cent of the region’s food is produced locally compared to 85 per cent 50 years ago, according to the Capital Region Food and Agriculture Initiatives Roundtable.

    Riches says B.C. and federal governments need to start planning for the worst, should food production dry up or costs continue to spiral. One option he says governments need to start planning for is food rationing, similar to what was deployed during the Second World War.

    “It’s not something that you just pull off the shelf; it actually has to be done before,” Riches said.

    Valley cautions some policymakers are already falling for a misguided diagnosis of the problem. By getting too caught up in how climate change will affect food supply, they are missing a crisis already affecting millions of Canadians a year, he said.

    “Predictable rainfall patterns, political stability, transportation networks — climate change is going to disrupt all that,” said Valley. “But it’s not just about growing more food.

    “We have one dominant way of getting food in our society, and that’s buying it. Those who don’t have cash don’t have food.”

    This post was originally published on Basic Income Today.

  • Introducing the universal basic income grant in South Africa

    See original article here.

    The majority of South Africans are unable to afford daily bread, basic sanitation, decent housing and the resources to seek and find work, and they are disempowered from participating in the economy. With more than half the population living on less than R1 335 per month, many cannot afford to meet their food needs — while 10% of the population owns 90% of the wealth. The inequalities in South Are are a ticking time bomb, and if South Africans keep starving at this rate, it is likely that they will one day eat the rich. 

    A recent study from the Applied Development Research Solutions (ADRS) led by Chief Economic Modeler and Director Dr Ashgar Adelzadeh revealed what many already know: that the tax burden has significantly benefited the country’s wealthy class at the expense of the majority. The taxable income of affluent individuals has declined since 1995 instead of increasing at the rate of inflation to help the government increase its revenue in order to meet the basic needs and services of all its citizens. 

    An individual with a taxable income of R100 000 used to pay tax at an effective rate of 33.8% in 1995; they paid tax at 19.8% in 2011 and 18% in 2022, on what the Alternative Information & Development Centre (AIDC) calls “the corporate income tax race to the bottom”. 

    The redistribution of wealth will not take place for as long as the rich do not pay their due to the state, in order for the state to have enough revenue to maintain conditions that enable all citizens to participate in the nation’s economic, civic and social activities. 

    Instead of cutting budgets on key departments such as health, education and sanitation, the government must  adopt a fair way of increasing tax revenue and investing that income towards improving the lives of its people, not to deteriorate the quality of life by cutting down on key governmental spending.

    Minister of Social Development Lindiwe Zulu was on the panel on the introduction of the universal basic income grant organised by Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung South Africa in collaboration with the Mail & Guardian and the AIDC. She sat alongside Princess Majola from the Assembly of the Unemployed, and Dominic Brown from the AIDC, in a dialogue facilitated by Zikhona Ntshona. The minister said that the rich must be grateful for the peace, security and stability that exists amid stark inequalities, and that they must see their contribution towards a universal basic income as a way of maintaining peace for the injustice of inequality. 

    “I don’t believe this country cannot afford to feed its people. This country has enough. This country’s problem is the difference between the rich and the poor, and we can afford to implement this basic income grant,” said Zulu.

    Zikhona Ntshona noted that as a journalist reporting on the devastation of the pandemic she has seen first-hand how the temporary Social Relief of Distress grant of R350 can help a family and the access it can give them, especially to children and women. 

    “Young people were able to expand their local businesses selling sweets and scones, others were able to start businesses from scratch, like a group of ladies who started selling vetkoeks. Young people have also used that money to print CVs, to go to internet cafés and to do other things to help them get jobs. The grant has also given many women the dignity of being able to buy themselves sanitary towels.”

    Majola lamented that for a mother of two, she would need to buy food for her children first with the R350 before she could buy herself sanitary towels, and even then, the cheapest meal she could afford is mere chicken dust, which isn’t very nutritious. Another complained that the R350 couldn’t even afford them a loaf for each day of the day. “Living in South Africa is becoming a nightmare,” said Majola. 

    The nightmare was revealed in reports by the Door of Hope’s Children Mission, stating that more than 141 children were abandoned during the lockdown because mothers just couldn’t afford to feed them. “Women are fighting for paid labour, which is also GBV,” said Majola, who went on to say, “let us not be a charity case. Let us not be given scraps.”

    In speaking about where the resources can be found for financing a basic income grant, Brown argued for an increase in the tax-to-GDP ratio. Besides restoring effective personal income tax rates to early 2000 levels, which could raise an extra R160 billion each years, Brown highlighted the important need to introduce a progressive net wealth tax of between 3% and 7% on the top 1%.

    The R350 grant is a stepping stone and a test sample of the universal basic income that would not have the means test, said Zulu. “I went back to the committee that started the policy paper on the universal basic income grant, and it was a tough one to go through. We took it to parliament, the public and the president. The president said this is not a question to be asked; it is about the modalities for how we get to implement it.

    “Our government was able to come up with this money out of nowhere. It was extended for the second and third time. We can implement this basic income grant, but let this not just be a fight for the department of social development alone,” said Zulu, who noted that the need for the basic income grant became more urgent and apparent as a result of the pandemic. It was only during the pandemic that the minister discovered that there was a policy paper in the pipeline for the grant. 

    It came up from several members in the audience whether the universal basic income grant would indeed be universal, or if people would have to be subjected to means tests in order to qualify, as was done with the temporary Social Relief of Distress grant, where individuals earning more than R664 or earning other grants would not qualify.

    “We need to move towards the universal basic income grant because it would help people have a safety net,” added Brown. “Let us give us the basic income grant to everyone, from the unemployed to Johann Rupert,” said Brown. “Let us make sure that people are not denied because of insane thresholds,” he added. 

    His sentiment was echoed by the Deputy Director General for Comprehensive Social Security at the Department of Social Development, Brenda Sibeko. 

    “We want to remove the means test. The current legislation does make provisions for a basic income grant. The social assistance act must be amended to add the basic income grant. It will take time before parliament agrees and treasure allocates the budget. The R350 is used to set the systems up. The people who support the acts are often without the means to travel to parliament or to attend public hearings. Make your voice heard and help us push this through to become legislation,” said Sibeko.

    A universal basic income will enhance the economy by enabling more money to circulate among people, and it will empower the people to create or find meaningful work instead of worrying about water, food and hygiene and other basic services that prevent them from contributing towards the economy.

    According to AIDC, a progressive net wealth tax of between 3% and 7% on the top 1% of the richest people in the country could raise more than R143 billion in revenue each year, which would cover most of the cost for a universal basic income grant. “It seems to me that it is not a matter of whether or not the government has the money to implement, it is a question of the integrity of our government and its willingness to allocate funds to make it happen,” said Brown.

    The Financial Intelligence Centre estimates that South Africa loses between $15 billion and $25 billion   annually due to illicit financial flows.

    “Forty percent of our budget is lost to corruption. This means without adding a cent, the government can increase its output by 30-40%,” said former treasury chief procurement officer Kenneth Brown. “We could be building more roads and more schools without even adding more money to the current budget,” he added.

    One of the biggest arguments against the universal basic income grant, which was raised by a young entrepreneur in the audience, is that the grant might be creating a country of beggars. 

    “Don’t tell me about dependency syndrome. The people without jobs didn’t call for it, and they didn’t cause it. This is everyone’s problem,” said Zulu sternly, who went on to add that the private sector was still missing from this conversation because they are one of the first to say that we cannot afford it.

    “We cannot afford to have the poorest of the poor among us, we cannot afford to have women starving because they have to share what little they have,” said Zulu.

    The department is proposing to start the universal basic income grant with a minimum of R663, which is the minimum amount for food security. 

    With the willingness from government that was demonstrated by Zulu and with many citizens like the Assembly of the Unemployed making their voice heard in advocating for this policy, South Africa can introduce a universal basic income grant which will go a long way toward alleviating poverty.

    This post was originally published on Basic Income Today.

  • We Are Not Prepared for the Coming Surge of Babies

    By Melissa Jeltsen

    See original post here.

    A typical pregnancy lasts about 40 weeks. Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court decision that created a constitutional right to abortion, was reversed less than six months ago. This means the U.S. is currently at a unique inflection point in the history of reproductive rights: early enough to see the immediate effects of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization—closed clinics, a rapidly shifting map of abortion access—but too soon to measure the rise in babies born to mothers who did not wish to have them. Many of these babies will be born in states that already have the worst maternal- and child-health outcomes in the nation. Although the existence of these children is the goal of the anti-abortion movement, America is unprepared to adequately care for them and the people who give birth to them.

    Much depends on how many states institute abortion bans and whether the bans are upheld in court, Caitlin Knowles Myers, an economics professor at Middlebury College, told me. (As of this writing, 13 states have near-total abortion bans, and more than 65 clinics have stopped providing abortions. A recent report by the Society of Family Planning found that legal abortions decreased 6 percent nationwide in the two months following the Dobbs decision.) But if the 24 states predicted to outlaw or severely restrict abortion do so, Myers estimates, there will be approximately 50,000 additional births nationwide.

    According to her projections, about 42 percent of U.S. women of reproductive age will experience a change in distance to the closest abortion clinic. About three-quarters of people forced to travel farther to an abortion provider will find a way to do so, despite the distance. But a quarter will not. Of those, some will self-induce an abortion, some will miscarry, and some will go on to give birth.

    When you consider that there were more than 3.6 million births in the U.S. in 2021, an increase of 50,000 births, or 1.4 percent, may not seem that significant. But these births won’t be equally distributed among the population; they’re likely to be concentrated among the poorest of the poor, in states where the social safety net is frayed to begin with.

    “This is really an inequality story about who ends up trapped by distance and poverty, and who doesn’t,” Myers told me.

    Many Republican governors in states where abortion has been banned have acknowledged that a baby boom is on the horizon, and that people obstructed from obtaining a wanted abortion will need additional help. “We absolutely must come together like never before to support women and teens facing unexpected or unwanted pregnancies,” Governor Brad Little of Idaho said in a statement. Some have framed the need to improve services for pregnant women and children as an important part of an anti-abortion agenda. But as of now, the actual plans in place to do so are staggeringly thin.

    In Ohio, where a six-week abortion ban is stalled pending a court battle, Governor Mike DeWine has proposed eliminating the tax on diapers and baby supplies, and expanding Medicaid eligibility for pregnant women and children by raising the income limit to up to 300 percent of the federal poverty level. In Mississippi, Governor Tate Reeves has implemented a new tax credit for contributions to crisis pregnancy centers. In Texas, the health department has launched a new website to connect expecting parents to local resources. But these piecemeal solutions are insufficient; they fail to grapple with the severity of the situation for pregnant people and their children.

    It’s not hard to prophesize the outcomes for those too constrained by their circumstances to leave their home state for an abortion. Previous research has shown that women who want to terminate a pregnancy but are turned away end up worse off financially than women who receive a wanted abortion. They are more likely to rely on public assistance, struggle to pay for basic living expenses, take on debt, and face eviction. This instability isn’t fleeting. For four years after being turned away, they will remain, on average, poorer than those who were able to obtain an abortion.

    Money, of course, is only part of the equation. Pregnancy puts tremendous physical stress on a person’s body: People are estimated to be 14 times more likely to die during or after giving birth than from complications from an abortion. 

    And the U.S already has striking racial disparities in maternal-mortality rates, with Black women nearly three times more likely to die from pregnancy-related causes than their white counterparts, according to the CDC.

    A similar disparity is seen in infant-mortality rates. And, compounding matters, many of the states that have banned abortion—such as Alabama, Arkansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Oklahoma, Tennessee, and Texas—also happen to be among the states where mothers and newborns fare the worst. If you look at the six states with the highest maternal-mortality rates in the nation according to the CDC, for example, all of them have outlawed abortion in the past few months. The same goes for the six states with the highest infant-mortality rates.

    A prime example is Arkansas, which is ranked the “most pro-life state in the U.S.” by Americans United for Life, a group that opposes abortion. Minutes after Roe was overturned, Arkansas outlawed abortion in all circumstances except to save the life of the pregnant woman. As a result, the state is expected to see a 3 percent increase in births, or an average of 1,000 extra births a year, according to Myers’s research.

    Arkansas already has the highest maternal-mortality rate in the U.S., nearly double the national average. If no one in Arkansas were able to receive abortions, the maternal-mortality rate would be expected to spike an additional 7 percent, according to research from the University of Colorado at Boulder. “We already have a limited number of ob-gyns,” says Lori Williams, the board chair of the National Abortion Federation and the former clinical director at Little Rock Family Planning Services, an abortion clinic that has since closed. “We already have a limited number of places for these patients to deliver and physicians to care for them. And now we’ve intensified the problem without a preplanned solution.” Arkansas is not an outlier here: According to a new report from the March of Dimes, about 35 percent of U.S. counties, mostly clustered in the Midwest and the South, are “maternity care deserts,” which means they do not have a hospital that provides obstetric care, a birth center, or any obstetric providers.

    Asa Hutchinson, Arkansas’s Republican governor, has acknowledged the challenge ahead. “A state that aspires to be pro-life must protect the most vulnerable at every stage of life,” he said in an address in August. He has pledged to expand some of the services that pregnant women and new mothers can receive through Medicaid and to increase payments to foster parents, and he announced a new phone line, 1-855-ARK-MOMS, to direct pregnant people to resources in their area. But a hotline connecting pregnant people to resources is only valuable if the resources are available—and if prohibitive policies don’t stand in the way of parents qualifying to receive them in the first place. And Arkansas’s track record on social services is not encouraging.

    Arkansas has the second-highest food-insecurity rate in the country—but as Laura Kellams, the Northwest Arkansas director of Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families, explained to me, restrictive Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program policies make qualifying for food stamps hard for those in need. 

    A dismal four out of every 100 families in poverty have access to the state’s cash-assistance program, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families.

    According to a recent ProPublica investigation into how states spend federal welfare funds, Arkansas—along with Texas, Mississippi, and Nebraska—denied about 90 percent of applicants in 2020. Arkansas is ranked among the worst states for child well-being, according to an analysis from the 2022 “Kids Count Data Book.

    ”It has the highest rate of teen births in the country, according to the CDC, roughly tied with Mississippi, and does not require sex education to be taught in schools.

    One thing states can do if they want to address high maternal-mortality rates is extend Medicaid coverage for women to a full year after they give birth. Currently, federal law requires states to provide pregnancy-related Medicaid coverage for two months postpartum. However, states have the option to apply to extend coverage to 12 months, through a provision in the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021. Some states that have banned abortion, such as Alabama and Kentucky, have taken steps to expand coverage in the name of improving women’s health. But 14 states that are expected to or have already banned abortion have not. Earlier this year, Republican legislators in Mississippi, which ranks sixth-worst in the nation in maternal mortality and the worst in infant mortality, defeated an attempt to expand coverage for postpartum women. (Mississippi state health officials have predicted an extra 5,000 births a year due to the overturning of Roe.)

    Andrea Miller, the president of the National Institute for Reproductive Health, told me that she is not optimistic that states historically opposed to abortion will now embrace policies benefiting pregnant women and children. “They have had decades and decades to do things about that, and have taken few, if any, steps,” she said, adding that any increase in births will inevitably put pressure on overtaxed health-care and social-service systems. “We are not seeing anything that dramatically changes that.”

    Anti-abortion politicians have said that the next phase of the movement is to support pregnant women and families, which raises the question: What would it mean to truly do so? If we dare to dream big, a map for the country’s post-Roe future could include investment in not only comprehensive health-care and mental-health services for pregnant and postpartum people, but also a living wage, paid family leave, subsidized child care, and affordable housing. On the preventive side, we could focus on comprehensive sex education in schools and access to contraceptives.

    But months after the end of Roe, there’s little evidence that many politicians have a genuine interest in the types of policies that would make a pronounced difference in the lives of pregnant women and children.

    Websites and hotlines are no match for the problems the U.S. now faces. We know what’s coming: More babies will be born into poverty. Some women will die. More will be thrust deeper into financial insecurity. The social safety nets that do exist will likely be pushed to their breaking point. If we accept that there will be about 50,000 more births, that means we have 50,000 more chances to invest in pregnant women and support their newborns. Unless states that have banned abortion proactively strengthen the social safety net, the future prospects of these post-Roe children and their moms are unsteady at best. If this moment is a test for the anti-abortion movement, then it has not yet passed.

    This post was originally published on Basic Income Today.

  • We Are Not Prepared for the Coming Surge of Babies

    By: Melissa Jeltsen

    A typical pregnancy lasts about 40 weeks. Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court decision that created a constitutional right to abortion, was reversed less than six months ago. This means the U.S. is currently at a unique inflection point in the history of reproductive rights: early enough to see the immediate effects of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization—closed clinics, a rapidly shifting map of abortion access—but too soon to measure the rise in babies born to mothers who did not wish to have them. Many of these babies will be born in states that already have the worst maternal- and child-health outcomes in the nation. Although the existence of these children is the goal of the anti-abortion movement, America is unprepared to adequately care for them and the people who give birth to them.

    Much depends on how many states institute abortion bans and whether the bans are upheld in court, Caitlin Knowles Myers, an economics professor at Middlebury College, told me. (As of this writing, 13 states have near-total abortion bans, and more than 65 clinics have stopped providing abortions. A recent report by the Society of Family Planning found that legal abortions decreased 6 percent nationwide in the two months following the Dobbs decision.) But if the 24 states predicted to outlaw or severely restrict abortion do so, Myers estimates, there will be approximately 50,000 additional births nationwide.

    According to her projections, about 42 percent of U.S. women of reproductive age will experience a change in distance to the closest abortion clinic. About three-quarters of people forced to travel farther to an abortion provider will find a way to do so, despite the distance. But a quarter will not. Of those, some will self-induce an abortion, some will miscarry, and some will go on to give birth. When you consider that there were more than 3.6 million births in the U.S. in 2021, an increase of 50,000 births, or 1.4 percent, may not seem that significant. But these births won’t be equally distributed among the population; they’re likely to be concentrated among the poorest of the poor, in states where the social safety net is frayed to begin with. “This is really an inequality story about who ends up trapped by distance and poverty, and who doesn’t,” Myers told me.

    Many Republican governors in states where abortion has been banned have acknowledged that a baby boom is on the horizon, and that people obstructed from obtaining a wanted abortion will need additional help. “We absolutely must come together like never before to support women and teens facing unexpected or unwanted pregnancies,” Governor Brad Little of Idaho said in a statement. Some have framed the need to improve services for pregnant women and children as an important part of an anti-abortion agenda. But as of now, the actual plans in place to do so are staggeringly thin.

    In Ohio, where a six-week abortion ban is stalled pending a court battle, Governor Mike DeWine has proposed eliminating the tax on diapers and baby supplies, and expanding Medicaid eligibility for pregnant women and children by raising the income limit to up to 300 percent of the federal poverty level. In Mississippi, Governor Tate Reeves has implemented a new tax credit for contributions to crisis pregnancy centers. In Texas, the health department has launched a new website to connect expecting parents to local resources. But these piecemeal solutions are insufficient; they fail to grapple with the severity of the situation for pregnant people and their children.

    It’s not hard to prophesize the outcomes for those too constrained by their circumstances to leave their home state for an abortion. Previous research has shown that women who want to terminate a pregnancy but are turned away end up worse off financially than women who receive a wanted abortion. They are more likely to rely on public assistance, struggle to pay for basic living expenses, take on debt, and face eviction. This instability isn’t fleeting. For four years after being turned away, they will remain, on average, poorer than those who were able to obtain an abortion.

    Money, of course, is only part of the equation. Pregnancy puts tremendous physical stress on a person’s body: People are estimated to be 14 times more likely to die during or after giving birth than from complications from an abortion. And the U.S already has striking racial disparities in maternal-mortality rates, with Black women nearly three times more likely to die from pregnancy-related causes than their white counterparts, according to the CDC. A similar disparity is seen in infant-mortality rates. And, compounding matters, many of the states that have banned abortion—such as Alabama, Arkansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Oklahoma, Tennessee, and Texas—also happen to be among the states where mothers and newborns fare the worst. If you look at the six states with the highest maternal-mortality rates in the nation according to the CDC, for example, all of them have outlawed abortion in the past few months. The same goes for the six states with the highest infant-mortality rates.

    A prime example is Arkansas, which is ranked the “most pro-life state in the U.S.” by Americans United for Life, a group that opposes abortion. Minutes after Roe was overturned, Arkansas outlawed abortion in all circumstances except to save the life of the pregnant woman. As a result, the state is expected to see a 3 percent increase in births, or an average of 1,000 extra births a year, according to Myers’s research.

    Arkansas already has the highest maternal-mortality rate in the U.S., nearly double the national average. If no one in Arkansas were able to receive abortions, the maternal-mortality rate would be expected to spike an additional 7 percent, according to research from the University of Colorado at Boulder. “We already have a limited number of ob-gyns,” says Lori Williams, the board chair of the National Abortion Federation and the former clinical director at Little Rock Family Planning Services, an abortion clinic that has since closed. “We already have a limited number of places for these patients to deliver and physicians to care for them. And now we’ve intensified the problem without a preplanned solution.” Arkansas is not an outlier here: According to a new report from the March of Dimes, about 35 percent of U.S. counties, mostly clustered in the Midwest and the South, are “maternity care deserts,” which means they do not have a hospital that provides obstetric care, a birth center, or any obstetric providers.

    Asa Hutchinson, Arkansas’s Republican governor, has acknowledged the challenge ahead. “A state that aspires to be pro-life must protect the most vulnerable at every stage of life,” he said in an address in August. He has pledged to expand some of the services that pregnant women and new mothers can receive through Medicaid and to increase payments to foster parents, and he announced a new phone line, 1-855-ARK-MOMS, to direct pregnant people to resources in their area. But a hotline connecting pregnant people to resources is only valuable if the resources are available—and if prohibitive policies don’t stand in the way of parents qualifying to receive them in the first place. And Arkansas’s track record on social services is not encouraging.

    Arkansas has the second-highest food-insecurity rate in the country—but as Laura Kellams, the Northwest Arkansas director of Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families, explained to me, restrictive Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program policies make qualifying for food stamps hard for those in need. A dismal four out of every 100 families in poverty have access to the state’s cash-assistance program, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families. According to a recent ProPublica investigation into how states spend federal welfare funds, Arkansas—along with Texas, Mississippi, and Nebraska—denied about 90 percent of applicants in 2020. Arkansas is ranked among the worst states for child well-being, according to an analysis from the 2022 “Kids Count Data Book.” It has the highest rate of teen births in the country, according to the CDC, roughly tied with Mississippi, and does not require sex education to be taught in schools.

    One thing states can do if they want to address high maternal-mortality rates is extend Medicaid coverage for women to a full year after they give birth. Currently, federal law requires states to provide pregnancy-related Medicaid coverage for two months postpartum. However, states have the option to apply to extend coverage to 12 months, through a provision in the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021. Some states that have banned abortion, such as Alabama and Kentucky, have taken steps to expand coverage in the name of improving women’s health. But 14 states that are expected to or have already banned abortion have not. Earlier this year, Republican legislators in Mississippi, which ranks sixth-worst in the nation in maternal mortality and the worst in infant mortality, defeated an attempt to expand coverage for postpartum women. (Mississippi state health officials have predicted an extra 5,000 births a year due to the overturning of Roe.)

    Andrea Miller, the president of the National Institute for Reproductive Health, told me that she is not optimistic that states historically opposed to abortion will now embrace policies benefiting pregnant women and children. “They have had decades and decades to do things about that, and have taken few, if any, steps,” she said, adding that any increase in births will inevitably put pressure on overtaxed health-care and social-service systems. “We are not seeing anything that dramatically changes that.”

    Anti-abortion politicians have said that the next phase of the movement is to support pregnant women and families, which raises the question: What would it mean to truly do so? If we dare to dream big, a map for the country’s post-Roe future could include investment in not only comprehensive health-care and mental-health services for pregnant and postpartum people, but also a living wage, paid family leave, subsidized child care, and affordable housing. On the preventive side, we could focus on comprehensive sex education in schools and access to contraceptives.

    But months after the end of Roe, there’s little evidence that many politicians have a genuine interest in the types of policies that would make a pronounced difference in the lives of pregnant women and children. Websites and hotlines are no match for the problems the U.S. now faces. We know what’s coming: More babies will be born into poverty. Some women will die. More will be thrust deeper into financial insecurity. The social safety nets that do exist will likely be pushed to their breaking point. If we accept that there will be about 50,000 more births, that means we have 50,000 more chances to invest in pregnant women and support their newborns. Unless states that have banned abortion proactively strengthen the social safety net, the future prospects of these post-Roe children and their moms are unsteady at best. If this moment is a test for the anti-abortion movement, then it has not yet passed.

    This post was originally published on Basic Income Today.

  • An all-party committee is tackling the question of whether basic income could work in Newfoundland and Labrador

    By: Malone Mullin 

    An all-party committee is tackling the question of whether a basic income program could work in Newfoundland and Labrador, and it expects to make its recommendations as early as next summer.

    Social Development Minister John Abbott said the group of politicians invited a national basic income advocate to offer advice to the committee Monday afternoon.

    Abbott said the committee — comprising Abbott, Labour Minister Bernard Davis, Liberal MHA Sherry Gambin-Walsh, PC MHA Craig Pardy, and interim NDP Leader Jim Dinn — is examining a wide range of possible basic income models.

    “I think it reflects the sense — and potentially consensus across the country — that the time has come now to look at these issues in a broad way,” Abbott said in an interview Monday afternoon.

    “Families are struggling.… Some of our programs aren’t really meeting their needs. It needs a new approach. “

    Basic income can take various forms, but the underlying principle remains the same: that each resident of a specific jurisdiction unconditionally receives a minimum amount of money each year to live on.

    Some models ensure every person, no matter their financial standing, receives the benefit. Those who earn more than a set threshold pay it back in addition to their usual taxes.

    Other models, like one piloted in Ontario in 2017, issue the benefit only to those with low income. But unlike most social assistance programs, the basic income benefit tops up earnings, rather than disappearing dollar for dollar once the recipient begins making money.

    Targeted basic income would offer a supplement cheque only to specific groups, and already exists countrywide, Abbott said, pointing to federal programs such as the Canada child benefit and guaranteed income supplement for seniors.

    “That’s been a success story,” Abbott said. 

    “We have the child benefit and that certainly helped bring families out of out of poverty. So what other measures do we need … to really pull people out of poverty, make sure that they have financial security, which we know would lead to better health and well-being?

    “We’re trying to make sure we get the policy design right, and then come up with the programs to go with it.”

    A universal basic income, meanwhile, would apply to all residents. Abbott says a program like that would require federal help to get off the ground and would cost “hundreds of millions” initially.

    ‘On the right track’

    Basic income proposals in Newfoundland and Labrador have gained steam over the last two years, beginning with an NDP-led motion to strike the committee.

    In 2020, federal NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh voiced his support for Newfoundland and Labrador’s interest in the program.

    The province is already dipping its toes in the water, announcing last month it would introduce a targeted basic income program for youths exiting care. The program provides participants more than $600 a month and costs the province $3 million annually.

    “Some of the things that the Newfoundland and Labrador government have already done are on the right track, like moving towards making things more unconditional, fewer rules,” said Sheila Regehr, co-chair of the Basic Income Canada Network.

    Regehr spoke to the committee Monday, offering insight on movement across Canada toward basic income policies. 

    “They recognize, I think, there are tweaks they can make,” Regehr said.

    Abbott said the basic income program for youths exiting care would serve as a test run for future potential programs and help craft policy.

    “We’ll adjust the parameters of the program as we as we move forward, as we learn, and we’ll be evaluating the design impact that it is having,” Abbott said.

    “We’ve titled it the basic income approach, and so that’s I think for us to start on this road. It could be a long road, could be a short road — we don’t know.”

    This post was originally published on Basic Income Today.

  • Expert panel advocates ‘gradual phasing-in’ of basic income grant

    By: Naledi Sikhakhane

    ‘We will fight, we will soldier on even to the extent that we will ensure that we bring upon the introduction of the basic income grant, we are close to it, we are making steady progress towards it.’ — Social Development Acting Director-General Linton Mchunu.

    The Department of Social Development (DSD) and partners on Tuesday released a report into the appropriateness and feasibility of a system of basic income support for South Africa.

    The Expert Panel on Basic Income Support Supplementary Modelling report was produced under the supervision of the International Labour Organization (ILO) for the DSD and the South African government. It is a supplementary report looking at possible models and building on the first one released in 2021, in which the BIS Expert Panel examined the social and economic implications of a basic income support (BIS) grant.

    Acting Director-General of the DSD Linton Mchunu said the report answered some crucial questions on basic income support, such as where the money would come from, whether it would help or hinder the economy, and the feasibility of such support.

    Mchunu also seemed to point a finger at the National Treasury for challenges in implementing the Social Relief of Distress (SRD) grant and ironing out bumps in its provision.

    He said: “The reason why we’re having the difficulties we’re having now with the R350 grant… we’re currently paying about eight million people — yet in the first iteration we were paying about 11.5 million — because we introduced the means testing, and you know why? We were told that if we don’t introduce the means test, we will not receive the money.

    “So, we grappled with finding a balancing act… it’s a difficult thing but, as the Department of Social Development, I want to say we will never deviate from this fight. We go into meetings and say we need a sense of certainty in the long term, can we extend the grant to the next three to five years while we sort out the policy side of this? And we’re told, no, you will only get one [year].”

    Challenges in reaching the intended recipients

    Mchunu said the DSD was restricted by red tape, which delayed processes and left millions in limbo. 

    Panel chair Professor Alex van den Heever said the report looked at the R350 SRD grant as a more permanent model because there was already data around this to analyse, while there wasn’t any for a basic income grant (BIG).

    The idea is for a “gradual phasing for the progressive enhancement of the SRD benefit over time with the objective, together with the overall social assistance framework, of eliminating poverty at the upper-bound poverty line, UBPL [the average non-food-related spending that’s added to the poverty line created by economists and often used by DSD in creating means tests for grants],” said Van den Heever.

    The analysis concluded that a gradual phasing-in of a basic income grant would curb the “economic and fiscal risks” and impacts on the tax system.  An entry-level version of the grant, basic income support, should be considered with the starting benefit value set at the lower-bound poverty line (the average spending on essential non-food items by households whose food expenditure is below, but close to the food poverty line). 

    Van den Heever is the chairperson of Social Security Systems Administration and Management Studies at the Wits School of Governance. The panel of experts was made up of specialists in microsimulation, modelling in the field of social protection, computable general economic modelling and public finance. The deliberations also involved staff from the Social Security division of the DSD and the ILO regional office based in South Africa.

    The modelling results show that “depending upon how it is financed, the SRD grant can be introduced in a manner that is fiscally and economically sustainable while at the same having a material impact on poverty and income inequality if implemented at the level of 13.1 million beneficiaries,” the report states.

    The report posits four different simulations for how the grant will work and which simulations have the most positive outcomes during analysis. 

    The first simulation of the Social Relief of Distress grant spending of R50-billion is financed primarily using an increase in Value-Added Tax (VAT) in the early years of the simulation. 

    The second option is financing it entirely through an increase in the  principal, interest and taxes (PIT) of the top three deciles (a decile is 10%) of high-earning South Africans.

    The third simulation involves a wage subsidy, where R50-billion is financed entirely through PIT increases on the top 10% of earners and allocated to the bottom four occupational groups (domestic workers, elementary workers, operators and skilled agricultural workers).

    The fourth option is to collect R50-billion along with a wage subsidy that will cost 50% of the cost of the grant (R25-billion) and finance both entirely through PIT.

    “A wage subsidy targeted at the four lowest-income occupational categories shows promise for improving economic output but is less effective in addressing poverty and inequality in comparison to the SRD grant. When the interventions are combined, however, there are potential gains for economic output, poverty [reduction] and [decreasing] inequality,” Van den Heever said. 

    “Replicating the modelled wage subsidy with an equivalent programme in practice, however, may prove difficult. While more work is needed to better identify an effective government-subsidised employment intervention, such approaches are not substitutes for income protection. They are instead complementary, as they have distinct, although related, social objects,” the report read.  

    Accepting the report, Brenda Sibeko, the deputy director-general of Comprehensive Social Security, acknowledged the challenges grant recipients have had in accessing grants and said that the DSD and civil society were working tirelessly to secure an income for the impoverished.

    “As so many have said, the BIG is an idea whose time has come,” said Sibeko

    This post was originally published on Basic Income Today.

  • Web3 investor Li Jin thinks a Universal Creative Income can help bolster the ‘passion economy’

    By: YASMIN GAGNE

    Li Jin was one of the first Venture Capitalists to take online creators seriously and back them. In 2020, she left her post at Andreessen Horowitz to start her own fund, Atelier Ventures, which then merged with Variant where she is a general partner. Jin, who writes a substack and has spoken a lot about worker rights in the creative industry is known for her pro-labor stance: one of her ideas is a “Universal Creative Income” similar to a Universal Basic Income for creators. On Wednesday, she spoke to Fast Company about her work, her investment strategy, and why she has staked her future on Web3.

    Fast Company: You left Andreessen Horowitz to focus solely on investing in the creator economy. Tell me about your career journey.

    Li Jin:  I left Andreessen Horowitz to focus on investing in the passion economy and the future of work. I distinguished that from the creator economy because I think the passion economy is much broader. When I was working at Andreessen Horowitz, I was covering marketplaces and social networks and all types of consumer categories. One particular thesis area that I began to focus a lot on towards the tail end of my time there a theme was the Passion Economy, which dealt with how online platforms could open up more opportunity for people to monetize their skills and expertise. I believed that that would be a major trend in how people accessed income on the internet. 

    FC: One you had that thesis, when did you decide to leave Andreessen Horowtiz?

    Jin: In early 2020 when the world was melting down and we were entering all of these covid lockdowns when, when work was going remote and a lot of people were unfortunately, um, experiencing job loss, I decided to leave and raise a small fund to invest in the passion economy. That moment coincided with this broader period of turmoil that changed what work represented to people. I very felt that there was going to be a turning point in how a lot of the population accessed income. They would shift towards flexible platforms that allowed them greater autonomy. Instead of having one single source of income, they would create a portfolio of different sources of income for themselves. In general, they would follow this new playbook of earning on the internet based on the loyalty they developed with a customer base or an audience base on different social platforms. 

    FC: What kind of platforms fit this thesis?

    Jin: I invested in a bunch of platforms that fit the thesis, including companies like Substack and Patreon. I also began to invest in Web3 companies as well, like Mirror, which is a crowd funding and publishing platform that’s built on Crypto rails. I invested in an NFT marketplace called Foundation. I invested in Syndicate, which is enabling people to form on-chain investment clubs. 

    FC: How did you come up with your thesis on Universal Creative Income?

    Jin: A huge part of the passion economy is moving towards online work where people can be their own bosses. On the internet, people can be micro-entrepreneurs. The creator economy is a subset of the passion economy. It is this distinct segment within the passion economy where people are building their own brands, building their own base of fans and audiences, and then monetizing that fanbase which generates their income.I have spent a lot of time studying the creator economy, talking to creators, investing in creator products, tools, and platforms. That’s where this idea of universal creative income comes in. 

    FC: So what would that involve?

    Jin: The creator economy follows this extreme power law curve where a very small sliver of creators were able to make a living. We always hear about people who are extremely famous and have a huge audience and are able to parlay that into different sources of income for themselves based on brand advertising or merch or whatever it might be. But the reality on the ground is really different. Most creators exist in this state of precarity and are barely earning anything. Very few creators are able to be full-time creators, and the vast majority of creators were just kind of scraping by earning a little bit of income here and there. 

    FC: Is this a solution to make being a creator a viable career path?

    Jin: Yes. I became interested in this idea of ‘How do we build the creator middle class?’ One of the recommendations I had is a Universal Creative Income. A lof ot platforms including Facebook and TikTok were coming out with creator funds as a way to pay creators from their own balance sheet as a way to incentivize and retain the top creators on those platforms. These creator funds were huge– sometimes  billions of dollars. I felt puzzled by how a lot of them were run because it was clear to me that they were spending on the most successful creators who already had a ton of views. The creator funds were paying them rather than paying emerging creators. If the goal is to be able to broaden this as a career path to many more individuals, then a Universal Creative Income could be used to fund emerging creators. They could subsidize creators’ initial starts on these platforms and help them become full-time content creators.

    FC: Do you think there is room labor activism in the passion economy?

    Jin: A hundred years ago, we had a single employer that we earned all of our income from. With the internet, that’s different. People are earning income from gig platforms or creator platforms. So what labor looks like is really different now. Gig workers and content creators are reckoning with a lot of the same issues that workers have reckoned with centuries ago during previous labor movements. They deal with the fact that their livelihoods depend on the actions and decisions of platforms and algorithms that they don’t have any ability to influence. They also have to work under policies or products that they find suboptimal or dissatisfactory, and they might have negative experiences in their workplace. I am interested in how the relationship between the platform worker and the platforms plays out in the future. 

    FC: What can labor activism look like?

    Jin: Some internet-based workers are influencing platforms through a modern form of collective action. It looks different than historical labor movements and unions. It’s definitely not as organized. It’s more diffuse. People are taking actions collectively and banding together with other gig workers or other creators to try and influence the policies of these platforms. 

    FC: Can you give us some examples?

    Jin: About a year ago, a bunch of Twitch streamers decided to start this movement to take a day off of Twitch to push back on the platform and campaign against the harassment of marginalized creators. It was actually called a Day Off Twitch and became a trending hashtag on Twitter. And as a result of this day off Twitch, platform viewership dropped by like 10 or 15% that day. Another example is, uh, a couple of years ago, someDoorDash drivers banded together, in this movement called Decline Now, after they noticed that there was a loophole in the algorithm for how drivers got paid. The loophole was that if they declined any delivery that didn’t pay at least $7, it would then be given to the next dasher for a slightly higher price. They realized that they could actually collectively earn more by banding together and, and declining all these deliveries. 

    FC: How effective are those tactics?

    Jin: These examples are marginal and not as effective as previous, historical efforts to organize and negotiate with employers has been because of the decentralized nature of these workers. I ultimately came to the conclusion that all of these decentralized collective action movements would ultimately not be as impactful as changing who actually owns these platforms and networks themselves.

    FC: Related to that, you’ve staked your career on Web3. Why is that?

    Jin: Over time I became convinced that Web3 was the future of how we enabled my vision of the passion economy. I decided to go all in on Web three last year and join Variant as the third general partner. Our mission is to fund the user-owned web to accelerate a future in which users of internet products become owners of them. We call this the ownership economy. Our belief is that the next generation of winning products and services are going to be the ones that actually turn their users into owners. Crypto and tokens makes that vision possible. You can think of tokens as this internet native or digital native property right system. Tokens allow for value to be distributed to users any, anywhere, um, programmatically, instantaneously. One application of tokens is to actually reward users for their participation in different networks or different projects. 

    We exist in a world in which there’s increasing wealth inequality and income inequality, a world in which I think a lot of people are sensing that these centralized web2 platforms have disproportionate leverage over various facets of their lives. I think that vision of a user owned web is actually more important than ever before. 

    FC: Recently, the sector has seen a lot of controversy– I’m thinking of event’s like FTX’s bankruptcy. Are you concerned?

    Jin: Recent events have been disheartening, but we don’t feel like it’s representative of the industry as a whole. In any nascent area of technology, there are always scams and frauds that happen as people take advantage of users. We can’t let this instant color the perception of the great work that incredible mission driven founders are actually working on towards that vision of the user out web. 

    This post was originally published on Basic Income Today.

  • Food banks fear rising demand will outpace supply, decades after they were deemed temporary

    By: Kate Bueckert 

    See original post here.

    Food banks aren’t supposed to exist in 2022.

    They were started in Canada about 40 years ago as a temporary response to the recession in the 1980s.

    So it’s disheartening to Carolyn Stewart, executive director of Feed Ontario, that food banks are not only still needed, but demand is growing at an incredible rate.

    “I think what it really shows for us is that it’s increasingly more difficult … to escape poverty today than it was 40 years ago,” she said.

    “But on top of that, that the changes and disinvestments that we’ve made in social assistance programs and housing, and that today’s quality of employment, are just making it increasingly inaccessible for people to have a standard quality of living here in Ontario.”

    How far does a dollar go?

    One dollar “is not stretching as far” right now, she said.

    “People are doing their very best, but it’s virtually impossible to afford everything, and so people are having to turn to food banks for help. And as much as food banks are the first people to say they wish we didn’t have to exist and we would gladly close our doors if the need was not there, the need just continues to grow.”

    Carolyn Stewart, executive director of Feed Ontario, says this year’s Hunger Report shows demand for food banks continues to rise, not just from pandemic recovery or inflation. (Feed Ontario)

    Feed Ontario, an organization made up of 1,200 partner food banks, released its most recent Hunger Report on Monday, and it doesn’t mince words about the growing need in this province.

    Between April 1, 2021, and March 31, 2022, more than 587,000 people in Ontario accessed a food bank, with more than 4.3 million visits.

    “This marks a 15 per cent increase and 42 per cent increase respectively over the last two years and the sixth consecutive year that food bank use has risen,” the report says.

    “While it was initially hoped that rapidly escalating food bank use was the result of an acute set of circumstances related to the COVID-19 pandemic, more than three years later, food bank use has only continued to increase.”

    Concerns that need will outpace supply

    The Hunger Report notes that in the first nine months of 2022, the number of people accessing food banks increased 24 per cent over the same time period in 2021.

    Of those, one in three people was seeking help from the local food bank for the first time.

    It’s worrisome, Stewart said, because the rising costs are also having an impact on donations. Shelves once stocked for two or three months now are depleted within two or three weeks.

    “There is concern out there that the demand will outpace capacity,” Stewart said. “And then what?”

    That concern is echoed in the report: “While food banks are working hard to meet this growing demand, their resources are finite and there is concern that the need could outpace the capacity of the provincial food bank network.”

    It’s something the Windsor-Essex area is seeing.

    June Muir, chief executive officer of UHC Hub of Opportunities, helps oversee 15 food banks in the Windsor-Essex area, and at one location in Windsor, volunteers hand out food hampers.

    “People line up and walk up for those food hampers, and sometimes we run out and it’s just heartbreaking to see people leave and not have food to leave with,” she said.

    “What I see happening in our community are things I have never seen before, all while we’re struggling as food banks to keep food on our shelves.”

    ‘Going through food at a double rate’

    Ro Mullen is executive director of the Inner City Home in Sudbury, which serves 1,200 households on average each month and is one of 44 agencies under the Sudbury Food Bank umbrella.

    “We’re going through food at a double rate to what we were used to, and so there are many times that we run out of particular items,” she said.

    Mullen said they’ve been able to continue to feed those in need thanks to the generosity of people in the city.

    “We just ran out of pasta sauce unexpectedly. We thought we had enough to go through the week, but we didn’t. So we called Sudbury Food Bank and said, ‘Hey, can you help us out?’ And they gave us two boxes of pasta sauce just like that,” she said.

    “We put out an ad on Facebook saying that we needed school snacks, and fresh fruit and vegetables earlier in the week, and we’ve had several people just show up with a bag of carrots or a bag of apples, and so the community’s been really fantastic.”

    The problems: Pandemic, inflation, policies

    The Feed Ontario Hunger Report isn’t surprising for those who work or volunteer with food banks. In October, Food Banks Canada released a similar report that showed a record number of people used food banks across the country in the past year.

    While the global pandemic and rising inflation have an “undeniable role” in the increased use of food banks, the Feed Ontario Hunger Report says there are other longstanding issues. 

    It says provincial government policies play a role in thousands of Ontarians needing to use food banks. 

    Some of those issues include:

    • Minimum wage, which is $15.50 as of October, but “still falls significantly below a living wage.”
    • Changes through the government’s Making Ontario Open For Business Act that cancelled paid sick days for people and eliminated a worker’s right to refuse last-minute or unscheduled work.
    • “Insufficient” financial support provided for people who need Ontario Works and the Ontario Disability Support Program. It noted two out of three people who use food banks are social assistance recipients.
    • High cost of rent, often a fixed expense and non-negotiable, means people will pay for housing and have little left over for other necessities, like food, the report says. This goes hand in hand with a lack of investment in social housing, which often have long wait lists.
    • Labour market changes in Ontario, including the rise in precarious employment and the gig economy.

    “What is most concerning about this particular moment in time is the deepening cracks in our economic foundation that make it more difficult than ever for the lowest-income households to weather a new storm and the potential for it to leave lasting scars on our province,” the report said.

    ‘They just can’t make it’

    The report said it’s no longer good enough to have just a full-time job to pay all the bills.

    Dan Erwin is with Partners for Mission in Kingston, which has operated since 1984 and provides food hampers. He said people with jobs are also turning to them for food.

    “We’re seeing new faces. They’re working. They’re trying to get through, but they just can’t make it,” Erwin said.

    “Inflation’s impacting everyone. Prior to 2020 and COVID-19, there were many who were struggling but they were getting by. And now, when you add a couple of years of heavy inflation, now they’re kind of under water.”

    He said he doesn’t know what 2023 will bring, but the possibilities are on his mind.

    “I’m trying to find a crystal ball because I was completely out to lunch for this year. We did really good planning on food costs because of some great advice from Food Banks Canada and Feed Ontario … but I totally missed on our demand. I never anticipated we’d be over 18 per cent at this point,” he said.

    Erin Kewaquom co-ordinates the food bank in Saugeen First Nation, a small reserve on the shores of Lake Huron. Before the pandemic, they would see between 80 and 100 clients each month. That’s risen to 130 people per month.

    Kewaquom said they’re able to meet the demand right now because of donations through the community, funding from the band office and other grants. 

    The food bank buys perishables — such as milk, cheese, bread, and fruit and vegetables — from a nearby grocery store. But Kewaquom said they’ve noticed they’re spending up to $600 every two weeks now, up from $450 a few months ago. 

    The rising cost of food and other items “does have a huge impact on how much we can buy.”

    She knows Christmas can be a tough time for many in the community, but it’s the months after the holidays that can be bleak.

    “In January and February, because I know Christmas is a very tight time for budgets for families, we do allow two accesses [to the food bank] per month just to help offset all the costs,” she said.

    Chris Peacock, executive director of the Sharing Place Food Centre in Orillia, said they’ve seen a significant increase of new faces. Last month, 140 new people sought help. That’s up from the usual 30 to 40 new people a month the centre has seen previously.

    He said it’s often “people that did not know that they were going to be in the position that they are … all of sudden they realize, ‘Wow, I can’t afford food,’ and they’re in a very difficult position.”

    Rent vs. food

    Three years ago, Kimberly Mitchell and her husband lived in the Toronto suburb of North York, but they weren’t able to afford rent and their other bills, so they had to move. She told CBC Toronto they had to rely on shelters, food banks and church food programs to survive.

    “If you’ve ever had a feeling of hunger, it’s a deep pain,” Mitchell said. “It’s not a comfortable feeling.”

    They now live in Toronto and make ends meet with the help of the Ontario Disability Support Program and food banks.

    “We wouldn’t be able to live day to day if we didn’t have the assistance from the food bank,” she said.

    Similar stories are being heard at other food banks.

    On Friday, The Food Bank of Waterloo Region released its community impact report. It said between July 1, 2021, and June 30, 2022, one in 14 households required emergency food assistance. That’s up from one in 20 in the same time period a year earlier.

    Kim Wilhelm, the food bank’s interim executive director, said the report paints a grim picture of just how many people in the community are food insecure.

    “The cost of living has never been higher and that is forcing people to choose between paying rent or a mortgage, putting gas in their car to get to work, or putting food on the table,” Wilhelm said in a release.

    The Hamilton Food Share said the city has the second highest per-capita food bank access in the province. In the group’s own hunger report, it found 62 per cent of people who took a survey indicated they were able to pay rent because they could use the food bank.

    The report asked, “Would you be at risk of losing your housing if you needed to purchase the food received from the food bank?” Almost half — 46 per cent — said yes.

    What can be done

    The Hunger Report outlines four areas needing improvement:

    • Quality of work.
    • Social assistance.
    • Social housing.
    • Put people at the centre of policy and program design.

    “We believe that the government agrees with our vision of a hunger-free Ontario and so we hope that they are interested in learning more,” Stewart said.

    “We also want everyone in the community to learn more about food insecurity — why their neighbours are going hungry and what they can do to help make change,” she added.

    “We encourage them to go speak to their local representatives, whether that be city councillors, mayors, MPPs … and let them know that this is an important issue.”

    Allison Hill at the Thunder Bay Food Banks said in her city, the organization that started “as a stopgap measure” has become part of the “fabric of our community.”

    She said it raises the question: Why?

    “What is wrong in our society and the public policy that food banks are not only necessary, but growing, the need is growing every year? I would love to see us go out of business,” Hill said.

    “The Thunder Bay Food Bank is so appreciative of the community support that we get and we couldn’t do it without the community support, but we really hope that someday the government and public policy and systems are in place that we won’t be needed.”

    This post was originally published on Basic Income Today.

  • New Republican Bill in Texas Aims to Forbid UBI Pilots

    By: Will DuPree

    AUSTIN (KXAN) — Austin could become the last Texas city to enact a guaranteed income program if a bill filed Monday becomes law.

    Texas Rep.-elect Ellen Troxclair, a Republican who will represent House District 19, filed three pieces of legislation so far, including House Bill 553. That proposal reads, “Notwithstanding any other law, a political subdivision may not adopt or enforce an ordinance, order, or other measure providing for a universal basic income.”

    This proposal calls for essentially banning others from taking up something similar to what Austin City Council did in May with $1.1 million in taxpayer dollars. The city agreed to provide $1,000 per month to 85 families or individuals for a year, and the first payments went out already. Troxclair said she does not believe it’s the best way to spend taxpayer money.

    “Programs like this, which give participants up to $12,000 a year without any kind of participation in the labor market, that money comes from taxpayers,” she said.

    “That money comes from somebody else who is already struggling to make their ends meet and to pay their rent.”

    The proposed legislation follows a historical pattern of actions taken by the city leading to backlash at the Texas Capitol, which outgoing Council Member Kathie Tovo has seen firsthand.

    “I understand we’ve been in this kind of position before with the state,” Tovo said Tuesday, “but I think this particular conversation is really unfortunate because it has the potential to remove resources, really critical resources, from Texas families who need them.”

    During the last legislative session in 2021, state lawmakers went after Austin by enacting bills about funding for law enforcement and homelessness.

    Gov. Greg Abbott signed into law a statewide homeless camping ban, which prevents people experiencing homelessness from camping anywhere in public. This came about because Austin city leaders voted in 2019 to repeal previous city bans on camping, sitting and lying in public spaces. A voter referendum pushed by the political group Save Austin Now eventually reinstated those rules.

    A legislative mandate also led Austin City Council to approve a record budget this year for the Austin Police Department. A 2021 state law sought to penalize Texas cities if they’re found to have reduced their law enforcement budget. This came in response to the city reallocating $150 million from Austin police to other departments following the racial injustice protests downtown in 2020.

    Looking back even further, state courts reversed the plastic bag ban passed in 2013.

    Sherri Greenberg, a professor at UT Austin’s LBJ School of Public Affairs, said this trend is not solely unique to Texas.

    “We have seen this nationwide with this increasing situation where you see state legislators coming in and superseding local ordinances,” Greenberg said.

    Only two days into the pre-filing period for the new legislative session, almost a thousand bills are already entered into consideration. With no indications about what future proposals will bring, Tovo shared some advice to the Austin council members who succeed her on the dais.

    “Stand strong and do what you believe is right for Austin residents,” she said. “If and when there is backlash at the state level, be prepared to go down to the legislature and explain the position and, if need be, fight for it because we were elected to represent Austinites and to do what’s best for Austin families.”

    The new legislative session begins on Jan. 10.

    This post was originally published on Basic Income Today.

  • Can a universal basic income solve America’s baby bust?

    By: Zaid Jilani

    Andrew Yang loves it. Elon Musk does, too. So do Alaskans.

    Now babies may become its biggest fans.

    It is the universal basic income: the concept of giving everyone a flat government payment every year.

    A study recently published in the journal Social Forces looked at Alaska’s universal basic income: the Permanent Fund Dividend. Since 1982, the state of Alaska has used oil royalties to make investments and finance the fund.

    The study found that these payments, once they reach a certain level, increase Alaska’s birth rate.

    This is a new benefit in the debate over universal basic income at a time when Americans are having fewer children. Lower birth dates can slow economic growth. In 2020, the country’s fertility rate hit a record low. Births rose only slightly in 2021 after declining for seven years.

    NewsNation interviewed Kiara Wyndham-Douds, a sociologist at Washington University in St. Louis who co-authored the study. The interview has been edited and paraphrased for length and clarity.

    NewsNation: How did a universal basic income change how many Alaskans had children?

    Wyndham-Douds: What we found essentially is that there is an increase in fertility one and two years after receiving a payment. The effect of giving people an average payment would have essentially increased the birthrate from 80 births per 1,000 people, women age 15 to 44, to 86.5. So that’s a pretty substantial increase.

    NewsNation: How meaningful is that for the population of Alaska?

    Wyndham-Douds: I think a useful framing would be to see it as an approximate 8% increase in the birth rate. That figure is using the 2010 demographic composition of Alaska, but 8% is certainly a meaningful increase when thinking about fertility.

    NewsNation: How meaningful would it be if this program was put in place nationwide? What impact would it have?

    Wyndham-Douds: We can’t say for sure based on our data and analysis how large an effect we’d see for the U.S. population as a whole. But the Alaska case suggests that a similar cash transfer program could increase birth rates through increasing reproductive autonomy (healthcare access, contraception and costs of childcare) if the barriers to reproductive autonomy in the full population are similar to those in Alaska.

    NewsNation: Was it the same for all Alaskans no matter how much money they made?

    Wyndham-Douds: The effects were largest for population groups that are socioeconomically disadvantaged. So we find that the increases are greatest for unmarried people, people without a high school education, and Alaska Native people.

    NewsNation: So everyone has more children when they get a universal basic income?

    Wyndham-Douds: We can’t actually say for sure that at the end of the day Alaskans are having in total more children than they otherwise would have. But what we can say for sure is the transfers at least accelerate entrance into parenthood if not eventually increase the total number of births that people are having.

    NewsNation: One of the critiques of these programs is that people are going to want to have more kids so they can get more payments. In Alaska, you get more money from its fund based on the number of people in your home. Is it a valid concern that people might try to take advantage of this kind of system?

    Wyndham-Douds: I think that the way that we need to think about social policy can’t really be found in limiting people’s reproductive autonomy. The solution to poverty is never going to be stopping poor people from having children. The solution to poverty has to be enabling people to live healthy lives and to fulfill their goals which may or may not include having more children.

    NewsNation: Did this change the abortion rate? Abortion is legal in Alaska, though the rate is much lower than the national average and even that rate may be from people from other places coming to Alaska for an abortion.

    Wyndham-Douds: We could easily theorize that this cash transfer could enable someone who has an unwanted pregnancy to end it. But in Alaska we found no effect on the abortion rate.

    NewsNation: Why is that?

    Wyndham-Douds: It’s possible for some population groups that there is an effect on the abortion rate but we can’t pick it up with the available data. The other thing that’s really important about Alaska is that throughout our study period — from the 1980s up until 2010 — Medicaid actually covered abortion in the state.

    We often think about the ability to pay for abortion as a really critical element of access. In Alaska, that might not be as much the case. So if Medicaid hadn’t paid for abortion would we expect a universal basic income would have an effect on abortion? Possibly.

    NewsNation: Do you think the research is still true or relevant today in 2022, given that the period you examined ended in 2010?

    Wyndham-Douds: Barriers to reproductive autonomy present in Alaska during our study period are still barriers people face today. Given this, there’s no reason to believe that cash transfers today would not have similar, though potentially different in magnitude, effects.

    This post was originally published on Basic Income Today.

  • Germany’s upper house blocks key UBI-like welfare reform

    See original post here.

    The upper house of the German parliament on Wednesday put on hold government legislation to put more money into the pockets of people drawing state benefits. 

    The measure to provide a more generous basic income to certain groups claiming unemployment benefits was blocked by the conservative opposition. 

    What’s the debate?

    Planned changes — approved by the lower house, the Bundestag — would introduce Bürgergeld, or “citizens’ money,” in place of Germany’s current Hartz IV system.

    That system, which sanctions people who reject job offers, was introduced in 2005 by the government of Social Democrat Chancellor Gerhard Schröder. However, it has long been criticized by many on the left as being too harsh, with some experts claiming the benefits are insufficient to cover basic living costs.

    The Bürgergeld system would include a more generous sum of money for recipients. It would also place less pressure on the jobless to find work within the first six months of receiving the benefit.

    Conservatives in the Bundesrat, the members of which reflect the political power balance in all of Germany’s 16 states, argued that the new system would be too generous. They say low-income earners will have less money than those benefiting from the changes, something that the government rejects.

    “Our welfare state can only function if there are duties as well as rights,”

    Said Nicole Hoffmeister, labor minister for the state of Baden-Württemberg, who hails from the conservative Christian Democrats (CDU).

    Her counterpart in Bavaria, from the CDU’s sister party in the state, said the reform risked sending a signal that it was not worthwhile to work.

    What happens now?

    The government plans to call on the committee that mediates between the two houses of parliament, with the aim of reaching a compromise.

    That plan was announced even before the vote took place by Labor Minister Hubertus Heil, a member of the Social Democrats (SPD), which is the largest party in the three-party governing coalition.

    Heil said the reform was aimed at protecting people in existential need and more opportunities to find jobs through qualifications and further training.

    The measure is aimed at bridging a skill gap in Germany that is said to be holding back some businesses. 

    As well as receiving the boosted basic income, Bürgergeld recipients would be entitled to additional money during vocational training.

  • Man facing homelessness considers assisted death as an alternative

    By:  Matthew P. Barker

    A local man struggling to survive on government assistance with deteriorating health is considering medical assistance in dying rather than face the uncertainty of homelessness.

    Medical assistance in dying or MAiD laws were introduced in 2016 with recent changes in March 2022 to permit people with disabilities or dealing with pain to access the procedure, even if they are not close to death.

    The change to the federal law “removes the requirement for a person’s natural death to be reasonably foreseeable” helping other people who want to access assisted suicide become eligible.

    Amir Farsoud, a St. Catharines resident, has medical conditions including degenerative disc disorder, spinal stenosis, spondylosis, and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). He lives in constant pain which impacts his standard of living and quality of life.

    Even using strong pain medications there are days when Farsoud said he finds it difficult to move.

    “My best day is about a six to a six and a half, my worst day is about a nine, there’s days I can’t get out of bed,” he said referencing a pain scale.

    “I originally approached the topic saying when MAiD comes to be and if my life ever becomes nothing but pain management, then, I’m probably going to go that way.”

    On average he takes upwards of 20 pills per day to manage the pain along with three inhalers for his COPD.

    Farsoud said it took convincing to get his doctor to sign off on the first stage of the MAiD application, but now it’s a 90-day waiting period for his second assessment to see if he still qualifies for the procedure.

    “It took me awhile to get my doctor on board,” he said.

    “He knows physically I qualified, but he was quite hesitant because I told him the straw that broke the camel’s back, in this instance, was my impending homelessness.”

    The building in which Farsoud lives is being sold and he said there is no reasonable option for affordable housing.

    It is terrifying to think it comes down to housing or death, he said.

    “Death is something that petrifies me, and I was going to tough it out as long as I possibly could until we got to the landlord saying the place is up for sale,” he said.

    Farsoud doesn’t blame his landlord, as he has been the best landlord he has ever had and understands there is monetary issues involved in selling the apartment building, he said.

    Farsoud, who is on the Ontario Disability Support Program, said he would rather die on his own accord, than to be homeless and die on the streets, as prices of housing have well outpaced ODSP rates.

    A single person on ODSP receives about $1,169 per month or $14,028 per year, to pay for rent, food, medication, and a cellphone. This is far below the poverty line in Ontario, which is estimated to be $19,930, a difference of $5,902.

    Rent in St. Catharines for a single room vary wildly between $600 per month to more than $1,000, but Farsoud needs accessible accommodations due to mobility issues, which he says are almost non-existent.

    That could all change, if Bill C-22 passes into law and ODSP rates get increased closer to the poverty line so people could afford to pay rent, said Farsoud.

    For David Fancy, a Brock University professor and disability advocate, more needs to be done to help people who are accessing MAiD because of socioeconomic issues preventing them from living their lives.

    “I am fully in support of people making decisions about when their end of life is, I have no aversion to the legislation or the spirit behind it, which is to increase individual patient citizenship autonomy,” he said.

    Fancy points out the issue for him arises when it comes to several factors outside the medical aspect of the procedure impacting people’s ability to live fully.

    “My problem occurs when there are social circumstances resulting from lack of access to resources, care, and psychosocial supports that restrict individual’s autonomy,” he said.

    Fancy adds this leaves people feeling there are no other options than to apply to end their life, creating what he calls a Hunger Games style situation.

    “It’s like The Hunger Games because people are competing to try to stay alive and they’re being given an option to take themselves out,” he said.

    “It’s these dystopian circumstances for the people who have to make this choice.”

    He said it becomes a problem when its not actually a choice they want to make, rather something they must do to prevent suffering.

    “They would much prefer to be alive and there are simple social means such as housing or additional funding support that could reduce their suffering significantly to the point where they wouldn’t need to try to reduce their suffering by having their life taken for them,” he said.

    Fancy likens it more to a cliff than a slippery slope when there is evidence of the continued erosion of the social safety net including policies of disinvestment and socioeconomic supports coupled with new legislation on MAiD providing people with a way to “take themselves off the government’s payroll.”

    “We shouldn’t be making it harder for people to survive, while at the same time offering legally legitimate ways for having their life taken,” he said.

    “The choice is clear, we need, as a collective, as a society, to continue to invest in the social safety fabric, in a way, that provides support for people who are suffering from a range of overlapping reasons and provide them other ways of reducing suffering.”

    Fancy said other disability advocates have described it as political assistance in dying or PAiD.

    “The acronym PAiD really draws attention to the fact this is about money,” he said.

    “This is about disinvestment in the social safety net and it’s about a disregard of vulnerable persons.”

    According to the third annual report of Medical Assistance in Dying in Canada, in 2021 more than 10,000 MAiD provisions were reported in Canada, which accounted for about 3.3 per cent of deaths in the country.

    When it comes to MAiD laws for people who are going to lose their autonomy through dementia or other cognitive impairments, it was a long time coming said Pauli Gardner, professor of Public Health and Masters of Applied Gerontology Program in the Department of Health at Brock University.

    “One of the things they’re trying to balance is the tension between allowing people to make a choice about end of life as an individual decision and whether or not people are aware, of what’s involved in that decision making,” she said.

    “We can’t be paternalistic about levels of education and income as ‘you can’t make your own decision about things like this,’ so it’s incredibly complicated.”

    Farsoud said he is petrified of becoming homeless as he wouldn’t survive long on the streets in his current condition.

    “If I were to become homeless tomorrow, I’d be dead in a month anyway. The only difference between that and being dead from MAiD is I get to die in my bed with a health professional giving me an injection and me drifting off,” he said.

    “Or I can freeze to death on a subway grate in Toronto in a month and a half.”

    He said MAiD offers a semblance of dignity and pain relief in the final moments of life, something that being homeless wouldn’t allow him.

    Coming to this conclusion was not easy, said Farsoud

    “As much as death frightens me, homelessness frightens me a hell of a lot more,” he said.

    “I wish instead of MAiD, society would decide disabled people actually deserve to be able to have a dignified life.”

    This post was originally published on Basic Income Today.

  • LVT-UBI on the ballot in New Zealand

    See original post here.

    New Zealand is suffering many of the same ills that afflict American cities. Tenants facing ever-rising rents, young people and ethnic minorities being priced out of homeownership, widening inequality driven by soaring land values, sprawling cities and congested streets. A long and bitter debate that blamed land use regulations for these problems has largely been won by ‘YIMBYs’, with several waves of upzoning producing a budding building boom for townhouses and apartments. While there are some signs that rents may be easing as a result, these problems are far from solved, and public attention has begun to look for alternative solutions. 

    One topic that has been tiptoed around for years is the tax system. Like the US, New Zealand has a tax system that largely favors property ownership, with capital gains and imputed incomes from homeownership not being taxed, and mortgage interest (previously) being deductible for property investors. As a result, effective tax rates for property ownership are significantly below those of alternative investment options, encouraging kiwis to funnel their savings into real estate. While successive tax working groups have endorsed land taxation as a solution to this problem, the current government has entirely ruled out the possibility of raising taxes on homeowners or capital gains in general. A desperate scramble to climb onto the property ladder remains essential for access to membership of the middle and upper classes.

    It is therefore incredibly heartening that one of New Zealand’s minor political parties has now made land value taxation a central plank of their policy platform. While not currently in Parliament, The Opportunities Party (TOP) has been active since 2016, campaigning on a proposal to tax imputed incomes from homeownership. Unfortunately, this proposal does not differentiate between a house and the land underneath it, both of which it would tax in the same way. Here at the Center for Property Tax Reform, we have long presented evidence demonstrating the benefits of shifting taxes from improvements and onto land values. However, as New Zealand heads into an election in 2023, TOP has finally announced a bold policy platform that raises taxes on land values, cuts taxes on earned income, and ultimately redistributes revenues through a universal basic income (UBI). Though TOP face tough hurdles in their battle for a seat in parliament––they must receive over 5% of the national vote or see leader Raf Manji win his local electorate of Ilam in Christchurch, there are still many lessons to be learned from their proposals. TOP’s plan would roll out in two phases, which we analyze in turn.

    Phase 1 of TOP’s plan combines a land value tax (LVT) with income tax cuts and additional support for the underprivileged. Residential land would face an annual tax of 0.75% on its market value. New Zealand already has an established statutory process for assessing the value of both land and buildings every three years, making it very easy to implement this LVT. A full cadastre of property ownership will make this LVT difficult to avoid, although the exemption of commercial land could lead to some distortionary behavior if some landowners seek to convert residential land to a commercial zoning. Other exemptions, including for rural, conservation and Māori land, are more justifiable and less prone to avoidance. 

    While this LVT is below 1%, it is expected to raise $7bn in revenue (US$4bn), equivalent to around 8% of existing tax revenues. TOP proposes to cut taxes on earned income (including by making the first $15,000 income entirely tax-free), expand support to people with disabilities by $400m, expand tax credits for low-income working families by $500m, and wipe $2 billion of debt currently owed to the Ministry of Social Development. 

    Here at CPTR, we have calculated how these tax changes will change the tax bills of individuals at different combinations of income and land ownership, which are presented in the figure below. For reference, the median household owns around $400,000 worth of real estate, of which around two-thirds is land. Split between two adults, each would own around $130,000 of land value. A person who is working full-time at the median wage earns around $63,000.

    Here we can observe some striking benefits of using LVT to cut income taxes. Someone with the median combination of income and wealth described above will enjoy a $1,300 tax cut under Phase 1 of TOP’s Higher Incomes Policy. Every single tenant in New Zealand will keep more of their pay. If they are on the median wage, TOP’s Phase 1 will boost their after-tax income by $2,000 each year. Conversely, for those who own half of an average home in Auckland, which is worth $610,000 of land value currently, tax bills are guaranteed to increase. This is a good thing, since these homeowners have enjoyed nearly $450,000 of untaxed growth in land value over the past decade.

    One point to note is that those people with low incomes will face a higher tax bill if they own real estate. On one hand this is entirely reasonable given that these households have recently seen significant unearned growth in their household balance sheets due to rising land values. It is also important to note that their tax bills will be directly proportional to the value of their land. However, some homeowners are truly stuck in a position of not having sufficient cash flow to pay their LVT, such as those who are retired or disabled. In these circumstances, CPTR would advise TOP to allow for tax deferral, whereby the tax bill is allowed to accrue against the property title and be paid when it is next sold. 

    Phase 2 of TOP’s plan actually demonstrates an alternative solution to this problem: combining LVT with a UBI. For this final stage of their plan, TOP proposes to raise the LVT to 1.25% and simplify the rest of the tax system to a flat 35% tax rate on all earned income. Revenues will be sufficient to pay $16,500 a year to every citizen aged 18 to 65, with parents receiving $2,300 for every child under 18, and retirees continuing to receive superannuation payments. Below we depict how this proposal will impact tax bills, again by comparison to the current tax system.

    We can immediately see how combining LVT with a UBI ensures that low income homeowners will have sufficient cash flow to cover their tax bill. People on low or no incomes will be better-off than they are under the existing tax system right up until they own $1.3m of land value. Likewise, tenants are universally made better-off by TOP’s Phase 2, with their annual income net of taxes being at least $3,800 higher than they are currently, and being $6,500 higher if they currently work full-time at the median wage. Someone with the median combination of income and wealth is made $4,700 better off. Tax bills will rise for those New Zealanders who own valuable land and earn high incomes, ultimately making the tax and transfer system more progressive than it is currently. 

    Thus, the policy platform of The Opportunities Party neatly demonstrates the options that are available when land rents are captured for the public good and deployed to cut income taxes or boost household incomes. New Zealand’s failure to meaningfully tax land has allowed wealth to flow from tenants and younger generations into the pockets of property owners, widening inequality and producing sclerotic cities. One crucial way to fight these forces is to raise taxes on land rents and redistribute these revenues through UBI payments or by reducing the taxes paid by workers.

    This post was originally published on Basic Income Today.

  • Key Republicans Say Negligible Decline in Economic Growth Outweighs Enormous Drop in Child Poverty

    By: Joe Hughes

    The temporary expansion of the Child Tax Credit in 2021 led to an enormous drop in poverty, according to Census Bureau data released in September. More than two million children were lifted from poverty in the United States last year by the enhanced credit. The unequivocal success of the one-year expansion has many lawmakers pushing to carry the credit expansion into 2022 and beyond.

    Opponents have undoubtedly realized that the real-world data is not on their side. GOP House leaders—who all voted against the 2021 credit expansion—are now pointing to their own murky data in an attempt to undermine the successes of the credit expansion. Last month, they instructed the Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT), Congress’s official scorekeeper, to analyze a permanent expansion of the credit using “dynamic” modeling—a type of revenue scoring that includes economic feedback effects of tax proposals to estimate changes to economic output. This type of scoring is fraught with uncertainty and, at best, should only be used to estimate a potential range of outcomes.

    The dynamic analysis estimates a very modest decline in Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth over the next decade, driven by a very small reduction in labor supply from low-income parents who would need to work fewer hours to receive the full credit.

    Under current law, many children are ineligible for the full credit because their families do not earn enough. In other words, the current rules literally determine that some families are too poor to receive a tax break meant to help children.

    The 2021 credit expansion suspended these limits and made the credit fully refundable, meaning it was available to all eligible children even if their family’s earnings were very low. JCT estimates that these changes might drive a small drop in total labor supply, less than a quarter percent over the next decade, which in turn would result in a 0.04 percentage point drop in economic growth.

    This idea of economic growth does not, on its own, tell us whether a proposal is good or bad. If child labor laws were analyzed using dynamic forecasting today, it would conclude that they reduce economic growth because it would shrink the workforce, at least in the short-term. Certainly no one today would argue that we should bring back child labor in the U.S. for that reason.

    Notably, the dynamic forecast ignores “any potential long-run benefits from a reduction in child poverty.”

    Previous research has shown that reducing poverty—and childhood poverty in particular—creates better long-term outcomes for the entire economy. As poverty declines, health and education outcomes rise, creating a healthier, smarter workforce. While JCT is required to produce the analysis as instructed by Congress, it makes no sense for lawmakers to exclude the effects of poverty reduction in assessing a key anti-poverty program.

    The JCT report also does not show how a small decline in GDP growth would be distributed. The real-world data shows an indisputable rise in income for families in the lowest income groups, and JCT’s estimates of a decline in labor supply are in part based on these families having higher income and therefore choosing to work fewer hours. A dynamic forecast that included a distribution of income changes across different income groups would likely show a transfer from the very richest to the very poorest.

    Dynamic scorekeeping is a fraught way to assess policy change. That is why JCT’s official revenue estimates instead use “conventional” scoring, which only assesses direct changes to revenue from tax changes and individual behavioral responses to those changes. In official revenue estimates, JCT does not attempt to pinpoint larger changes in the macroeconomy, recognizing that such estimates would rely on extremely uncertain assumptions.

    There is not one single dynamic scoring model, and in fact, JCT has used as many as four different dynamic models in recent years. Several of these produce a range of potential outcomes. Scorekeepers must make decisions about which of these models to use—decisions that are often influenced by political factors, as Congress writes the rules that JCT must follow in their estimates.

    In this analysis, JCT used two separate dynamic models and averaged the results of each model to produce a single point score. While JCT is doing its job as directed, following Congressional instructions to produce a point forecast of the effects of the proposal on economic growth, their report does not tell us anything about the difference in results of each model used or the levels of uncertainty in their results.

    On the other hand, the data provided by the Census Bureau this September is tangible and incontrovertible. The expanded Child Tax Credit reduced child poverty dramatically and immediately. There is no debate or murkiness on this. Some lawmakers have decided that cutting child poverty in half is not worth the cost if it means an ambiguous and negligible decline in GDP growth. This view is not just cruel, it is bad economics.

  • Rishi Sunak urged to examine universal basic income to protect Britain from future crises

    By: Ashley Cowburn, Political Correspondent

    Rishi Sunak is being urged to examine the radical idea of a universal basic income to protect Brits the rocketing cost-of-living and future crises.

    The call comes from 285 campaigners, MPs, academics and mayors from across the country including Sadiq Khan, Andy Burnham and Tracy Brabin.

    Other signatories include the food poverty campaigner Jack Monroe, former Labour Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell, and Green Party MP Caroline Lucas.

    In an open letter to the new Prime Minister, they say a basic income “could be our generation’s NHS ” and prevent households being tipped into poverty.

    They warn Mr Sunak the country faces a “real moment of crisis” this winter with poverty and inequality threatening the “very foundations of the UK itself”.

    The idea of a basic income typically involves replacing means-tested benefits and providing a regular flat-rate payment to all citizens regardless of income.

    Earlier this year the Welsh Government unveiled a three-year £20million pilot of basic income for 500 young adults to support them as they leave care.

    The letter today – organised by the Cross Party Parliamentary & Local Government on universal basic income – urges the Tory Government to set up “substantial pilots” in all corners of the UK and a taskforce to explore the idea.

    This would likely examine how the policy would work in practice and the costs involved if it is rolled out nationwide.

    In the open letter Mr Sunak is told that a basic income could be “set at a modest level – enough to pay for the basics, like food, transport and utility bills”.

    “But it would be enough to prevent struggling households being tipped into poverty when the next crisis hits.”

    With Covid pandemic and the cost-of-living crisis, the letter adds that for a second time in three years ministers have “been forced into putting money in people’s pockets to prevent disaster”

    “These ad-hoc solutions have been too little, too late, and have come at extortionate cost to the public purse.”

    “The system we have put in place to support fellow citizens is failing us, and we need to try something different”.

    Jonny Douglas of the UBI Lab Network said: “The UK has faced an unprecedented series of crises over the past two years.

    “Both the pandemic and the cost-of-living crisis have revealed that our households are woefully unprepared to withstand the kind of shocks to the system that are increasing in both frequency and intensity.

    “A Universal Basic Income, paid to everybody regardless of income, wealth or work, could be part of the solution.

    “It would give everybody a basic level of security, and would stop anyone falling into destitution when the next crisis hits.”

    This post was originally published on Basic Income Today.

  • Mayors in Greece positive to pilot Basic Income, if supported financially and institutionally

    See original post here.

    On Tuersday, October 18th, 2022, CONTENTATIVA and the Department of Social Policy of Panteion University presented the results of the first survey on Basic Income conducted among Greek Mayors. The central research questions concerned the knowledge and attitudes of the Mayors on Basic Income, whether they would be willing to support a pilot programme for its implementation in their municipality and their views on current subsidy policies. The survey was conducted via an online research tool [questionnaire], addressed to all the Mayors in the country [332], between July and September 2022 and received a response from ¼ of them [78].

    Main conclusions of the survey

    • According to the Mayors who responded to the survey, the biggest problem facing their citizens is the inability to meet their daily needs.
    • They consider the benefits provided to be little or insufficient, as well as the amount provided, as they believe that a basic financial benefit in Greece should exceed 500 euros.
    • An overwhelming majority of them declared themselves available to support a pilot implementation in their municipality, provided that funding and institutional framework issues are resolved.
    • Women mayors had a more positive attitude towards basic income and a higher proportion than men considered meeting the daily needs of their citizens as a key challenge.
    • They seem to need more explanation as to the characteristics of basic income so as not to confuse it with the minimum guaranteed income, especially in terms of universality.

    On the issue of funding that concerns the Mayors, Prof. Costas Dimoulas said the following: “A debate has not been opened in Greece yet at least regarding the clarification of the necessary resources needed to finance basic income, so the impression is that the resources do not exist. If the basic income is implemented, there will be no more spending on other social policy programmes and that means savings. Since the basic income will be provided unconditionally, there will be a second saving of time and resources from the endless bureaucracy that is currently needed at both central and local government level. Finally, as it will be universal, even without adjusting the rates of the tax brackets, tax costs will increase and thus a part of the amount will de facto be returned to the Public Treasury.”

    In England where some simulations were run, as better data were available, they showed that the overall burden on GDP would be about 2%.

    “In essence,” Dimoulas continued, “this is not a prohibitive figure for our country, if we only consider that today in Greece – with government statements – 10 billion was given for the management of the energy crisis, about 5% of GDP. So it is more a question of values and orientation than of economics.”

    In Kostas Dimoulas’ opinion, a bigger challenge is the need for institutional reform so that mayors can start a pilot implementation in their municipality, rather than the origin of the necessary resources.

    The Catalan experience

    The guest from abroad was Sergi Raventós, Director of the Catalan Basic Income Pilot Office. Raventós explained that, unlike other pilots around the world that provided basic income to people individually, in Catalonia they decided to study universality more broadly, but also the relationships that would be established at the local community level and the changes that would likely occur in interpersonal relationships within the families.

    Using these criteria, they will select: a) a random sample of 700-800 households in the Catalan self-governing region (corresponding to 2500 people), where the basic income will be provided to each household member; b) two municipalities, each with approximately 1200-1300 inhabitants and located at a relative distance from each other. In the second case, all residents legally residing in these municipalities will receive it, thus in addition 2500 people, excluding the 10% of the richest, for methodological reasons.

    The amount of income will be equal to the poverty line as established in Catalonia, that is, EUR 800 for adults and EUR 300 for each child. The income will be provided monthly, without any requirements and for two consecutive years. His office, in consultation with the Catalan Public Services Evaluation Authority, has planned an evaluation of the pilot implementation throughout the pilot programme and at the end, with a view to drawing conclusions that are useful both for the Catalan people themselves and – as was demonstrated by the interesting discussion that followed – for European and Greek realities.

    The debate was attended by policy institutes, media, students, local authorities, civil society organisations and networks, public and private sector workers, unemployed, farmers, pensioners, etc. The final report based on the survey will be released by the organisers towards the end of 2022, with follow-up case studies expected in the following year. As CONTENTATIVA informed, the survey and the event were supported by the Office in Thessaloniki of the Heinrich Böll Foundation.

    This post was originally published on Basic Income Today.

  • Reducing childhood poverty could cut criminal convictions by almost a quarter, study shows

    See original article here.

    A significant reduction in childhood poverty could cut criminal convictions by almost a quarter, according to a study conducted in Brazil. An article on the study is published in Scientific Reports. The researchers used an innovative approach involving an analysis of 22 risk factors that affect human development and interviews with 1,905 children at two points – a first interview to form a baseline (mean age 10.3) and a follow-up interview seven years later (mean age 17.8).

    The scientists concluded that poverty – measured broadly as a combination of little schooling for the head of household, low purchasing power and limited access to basic services – was the only crime-related factor that could be prevented. They used estimates of the population-attributable risk fraction (PARF) to predict the possible reduction in criminal convictions assuming successful early anti-poverty intervention in the lives of the children.

    In a scenario without poverty, 22.5% of criminal convictions involving these young people could have been prevented. On the other hand, factors such as unplanned pregnancy, prematurity, breastfeeding and prenatal maternal smoking or drinking showed no correlation with future criminal convictions.

    “A holistic view of young people who commit crimes is necessary in order to understand the circumstances that lead to this situation and a range of preventable factors need to be considered,” said Carolina Ziebold, a researcher in the Department of Psychiatry at the Federal University of São Paulo’s Medical School (EPM-UNIFESP) and first author of the article. 

    Ziebold was supported by FAPESP during her PhD research. She also received a Talented Young Investigator scholarship from CAPES, the Ministry of Education’s Coordination for the Improvement of Higher Education Personnel, via its Internationalization Program.

    For Ary Gadelha, last author of the article, the use of a complex measure of poverty including many more factors than household income is a groundbreaking aspect of the study. Gadelha is a professor of psychiatry at EPM-UNIFESP and was Ziebold’s thesis advisor.

    “The study took into account housing conditions and access to public services such as healthcare or sanitation, for example, in order to understand poverty more comprehensively. This led us to advocate broader solutions than merely improving income. The many adversities faced by these children become difficulties in adulthood, such as low educational attainment and unemployment, among others,” Gadelha told Agência FAPESP.

    The approach used in the study is based on an epidemiological method called exposure-wide association, which is similar to the method used in genome-wide association studies (GWAS). “Exposure-wide association studies explore a broad array of potential exposures relating to a single outcome (using a hypothesis-free approach)”, the authors write.

    In this case, they add, the analysis encompassed “multiple modifiable perinatal, individual, family and school-related exposures associated with youth criminal conviction to identify new potential targets for the prevention of this complex phenomenon”. Moreover, they argue, “when a significant risk factor [such as poverty] is identified, the magnitude of its effect on criminal conviction should be explained to inform and guide public measures for crime prevention”.

    Another study led by Ziebold involving the same cohort and published in December 2021 had already found correlations between childhood poverty and a heightened propensity to develop externalizing disorders during adolescence and early adulthood, especially among girls. The researchers concluded that multidimensional poverty and exposure to stressful life events, including frequent deaths and family conflicts, were avoidable risk factors that should be addressed in childhood in order to reduce the impact of mental health problems in adult life (more at: agencia.fapesp.br/37879/). 

    Results

    In the recent Scientific Reports article, the researchers stress that although baseline poverty was the only modifiable risk factor significantly associated with crime as far as the children in the study sample were concerned, most of them (89%) did not have any criminal convictions.

    “We wanted to avoid criminalizing poverty and show that it’s a complex phenomenon. Exposure to this situation during a life can lead to social tragedy. Crime is a social question, and punishment alone may not be appropriate in the case of young people. It would be more useful to create real opportunities for rehabilitation – life opportunities,” Gadelha said.

    Only a small proportion (4.3%) of the 1,905 participants interviewed reported any history of criminal convictions, mainly involving theft, violent robbery, drug dealing and other violent crimes, including a homicide and an attempted homicide. 

    The participants were from the Brazilian High-Risk Cohort Study for Psychiatric Disorders (BHRC), a major community-based survey involving 2,511 families with children aged 6-10 when it began in 2010. They were all students at public schools in two large Brazilian state capitals, São Paulo and Porto Alegre (Rio Grande do Sul). Three follow-up surveys have been completed so far, the last in 2018-19. A fourth has begun this year and is scheduled for completion in 2024.

    Considered one of the most ambitious childhood mental health surveys ever conducted in Brazil, the BHRC, also known as Project Connection – Minds of the Future, is led by the National Institute of Developmental Psychiatry (INPD), which is supported by FAPESP and the National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq), an arm of the Ministry for Science, Technology and Innovation (MCTI).

    More than 20 universities in Brazil and elsewhere are involved in INPD’s activities. Its principal investigator is Eurípedes Constantino Miguel Filho, a professor in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of São Paulo’s Medical School (FM-USP). 

    Impact

    According to a report published by the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) in March 2022, “children and adolescents have always been – and continue to be – the most affected by poverty. By the beginning of 2020, the percentage of children and adolescents living in monetary poverty and extreme monetary poverty in Brazil was, proportionally, twice that of adults”. 

    Between 35% and 45%, depending on the age group, lived on less than USD 5.50 per day in 2020. The proportion living on less than USD 1.90 per day – the extreme monetary poverty line – was 12%.

    Furthermore, according to Getúlio Vargas Foundation’s Center for Research on Social Policies (FGV Social), food insecurity reached a record level in Brazil at the end of 2021, surpassing the global average and affecting mainly women, poor families and people aged 30-49. The proportion of the overall population suffering from food security reached 36%, compared with 17% in 2014. The global average for 2021 was 35%.

    “We know people have yet to feel the full economic impact of the pandemic, including food insecurity and lack of access to schooling. The consequences of children’s exposure will become clear in the future,” Ziebold said, adding that more research is needed to understand how the vulnerabilities of the places where children live can influence juvenile crime rates. “This type of factor has been observed in research conducted in other countries, such as the United States, where young people are more likely to commit crimes if they live in areas without infrastructure or with gangs. This is a topic for further research.” 

    About 46,000 young people in conflict with the law were processed in 2019 by SINASE, Brazil’s special justice system for juvenile offenders.

    This post was originally published on Basic Income Today.

  • U.S. Child Hunger Spiked in Weeks After Enhanced Child Tax Credit Repealed

    By: Cara Murez

    Child tax credits had a huge impact in U.S. households that struggle to afford food.

    And after those credits ended, many low-income American families with children had trouble getting enough to eat.

    Food insufficiency increased substantially, by about 25%, between January and July after the Child Tax Credit payments stopped on Jan. 15, 2022.

    Black families, Hispanic families, and Indigenous and immigrant families were especially hard hit, according to researchers from Boston University School of Public Health (BUSPH) and Boston Medical Center (BMC).

    The researchers said the increase in food insufficiency is an urgent problem. Poor nutrition uniquely affects the health and well-being of growing children, they explained in a university news release.

    “This significant increase in food insufficiency among families with children is particularly concerning for child health equity, as child health, development and educational outcomes are strongly linked to their family’s ability to afford enough food,” said study author Allison Bovell-Ammon, director of policy and communications at BMC-based Children’s HealthWatch.

    “Even brief periods of deprivation during childhood can have lasting impacts on a child.”

    The Child Tax Credit benefits were part of President Joe Biden’s American Rescue Plan. From July to December 2021, it gave about 92% of U.S. households up to $3,000 for each child between 6 and 17 years of age, and up to $3,600 for younger children. Half of the money was distributed through monthly checks.

    The expanded tax credit reduced food insufficiency by 26% in 2021. But Congress did not renew the tax credit at year’s end.

    For the new study, the researchers used U.S. Census data to gauge the impact. They looked at demographic characteristics, employment, social supports and food insufficiency in nearly 600,000 families, from July 2021 to July 2022.

    Not surprisingly, low-income households saw the greatest increases in food insufficiency after the advance payments ended. It was especially notable in the spring, at which point many families likely depleted the tax credits that were a part of tax filings.

    Single-adult, non-Hispanic Black, and Hispanic households also experienced greater food insufficiency, the investigators found.

    “Black, Latino, Indigenous, and immigrant families in the U.S. consistently experience food insecurity — a broader measure that assesses quantity, quality and variety of food — at higher rates than white families as a result of current and historical marginalization and systemic racism,” Bovell-Ammon said.

    Immigrant families also faced barriers to claiming the tax credit, said study co-author Stephanie Ettinger de Cuba, executive director of Children’s HealthWatch.

    “These barriers were due in part to specific eligibility exclusions, but they also occurred even when immigrant families were eligible,” she pointed out.

    “Following the expiration of the payments at the end of 2021, the gains in racial equity were eroded, potentially further exacerbating racial and health inequities and increasing distrust.”

    The researchers urged lawmakers to pass a fully refundable and inclusive advance credit in their year-end tax relief package.

    “The six short months of these Child Tax Credit advanced payments clearly made a big difference for American families, a permanent expansion would be a game-changer for reducing child poverty for good,” said senior study author Paul Shafer, assistant professor of health law, policy and management at BUSPH.

    “There is more to do to make sure that very low-income families actually get the monthly payments, prompting efforts like GetCTC.org, but a permanent expansion allows resources and awareness to build around the policy in a way that short-term fixes don’t,” he added.

    This post was originally published on Basic Income Today.

  • Universal basic income – a solution for youth poverty and violence

    By: Savannah Wilson

    Kids in Erie can have it tough. I was born and raised here, and in my 21 years, I’ve seen how poverty at home and within a community can make it hard to thrive. I moved around to different schools a lot, and nobody explained to me why our schools were closing. The Glenwood playground is a fancy credit union now. There are only two high schools left.   

    My mom worked three jobs and we lived paycheck to paycheck, until my grandparents had to raise me. There were kids who came to school every day in the same clothes because they couldn’t afford more, and they’d be bullied for it every single day. Being poor makes it pretty hard to be a good student.   

    Erie is one of the poorest cities in the country, and almost half our kids are living in poverty. That makes our child poverty rate the one of highest in the country. Seeing these numbers scares me.   

    Poverty leads to stress. Inequality creates desperation, and can lead to crime. So as childhood poverty skyrockets, it should be no surprise that we’re seeing a drastic increase in juvenile violence. Parents working multiple jobs have no choice but to leave kids at home. Too often, this means we end up raising ourselves on the streets.   

    But we know how to solve these problems. One clear way to address childhood poverty and bring down violent crime is by instituting a basic universal income program in Erie. We even have the funds to support a pilot program — COVID relief funds the city has received and still not spent. What could be a better use of this resource than helping our children survive and thrive?

    The research is clear that simple cash transfer programs like universal basic income (UBI) are extremely effective at reducing crime and violence.

    Evidence shows that a guaranteed income can decrease homicide, property crime, overdose deaths, and domestic violence. Cities like Chicago, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Harrisburg, and Jamestown, N.Y., have invested in UBI programs to alleviate the trifecta of racism, poverty, and violence.

    We could alleviate poverty, decrease crime, and help Erie children grow up to be happy, healthy, contributing adults. We just need leaders who have the political will to solve the problem. Right now, we don’t — and that’s perhaps the biggest crime of all.

    Despite the link between income inequality and crime, our city leaders are instead determined to make the problem worse, in my opinion. Most of the arrests Erie police make are for low-level nonviolent offenses. Many of the people impacted are already living on the margins, especially Black and brown residents. And rather than investing in the children and families who live and work here, Erie City Council has directed existing resources to provide our local police with paramilitary-level weaponry, such as the equipment utilized by the S.W.A.T. team.

    Our leaders have been tirelessly promoting their $14.5 million “public safety” plan to residents, when in reality, they’re spending millions of dollars to hire officers that I don’t think we need, to do social work I don’t think they should be doing. Erie residents who can’t afford to put food on the table because they can’t find jobs that pay living wages need better opportunities, not more police. Erie residents who are battling addiction disorders need treatment and health care — not more displays of force.    

    No matter our ZIP code or color of our skin, we know what keeps us safe. It’s living in communities where people can thrive, where we have great schools and health care, and where we look out for each other. A universal basic income would help mothers like my sister, who can’t afford the special diets my niece and nephew need. And it’s the intervention we need to curb the surge in youth violence in Erie.

    This is about funding public safety.

    We need to invest in people. To help them thrive. To help our youth. And to step up and intervene in this moral crisis of young people struggling and dying in poverty. Erie has beautiful sunsets, but our peninsula and tourist attractions shouldn’t be the only thing we invest in. The people here are beautiful, too.

    If you give kids the resources they need to learn and grow, you give them a new perspective on life. You give them a future.

    We as a city cannot be serious about reducing community violence unless we are serious about uplifting our neighbors in poverty. We have the knowledge and we have the resources to solve our problems — we just need leaders who have the courage to do it. 

  • Mohonk Consultations hosts panel on feasibility of Universal Basic Income

    By: Frances Marion Platt

    Building on the tradition begun in 1895 of Mohonk Mountain House in New Paltz hosting high-level convocations to strategize about subjects of ethical concern to the resort’s Quaker founders, such as world peace and restoring the rights of Indigenous peoples, the not-for-profit organization Mohonk Consultations (MC) continues its mission of organizing workshops and conferences on issues of equity, social change and the environment. Since its founding in 1980, MC has become the Hudson Valley’s little think tank that could, planting seeds that have grown into successful community efforts to make the world — or our region — a better place.

    Following a couple of years of virtual presentations during the COVID pandemic, MC has resumed its long-running series of live conferences and talks on cutting-edge approaches to issues that concern us all. The latest symposium took place in the Parlor at the Mountain House on October 16, titled “Universal Basic Income: Transformative Policy or Utopian Fantasy?”

    It’s ironic that the same disruptive global event that forced MC to take a hiatus from hosting such events for a while has also served to nudge public perception of Universal Basic Income (UBI) away from the latter category in that title toward the former. Remember the longshot 2020 presidential bid of part-time New Paltz resident Andrew Yang? He ran what was essentially a single-issue campaign based on having the US adopt UBI — which he rebranded the Freedom Dividend — and it entirely failed to catch fire; Yang’s polling never made it out of the single digits. Most Americans scoffed at the notion that giving people free money would make any of the country’s problems go away, never mind the evidence that such an approach has worked well elsewhere.

    That was before COVID. Nearly all of us have now had the experience of the federal government tucking some extra bucks into our bank accounts — with no eligibility requirements, no questions asked — to help us get through the near-shutdown of the economy caused by the pandemic. Not only did the various stimulus program “handouts,” including three rounds of direct relief payments, help us as individuals cope with the financial impacts on our families, but they also kept the wheels of the larger economy turning through the worst of the crisis. Bad as it was, it could’ve been much worse, had the feds not intervened.

    So, now we know what we average folk would do if we only had a little more money — and it wasn’t hard partying. This unasked-for broad social experiment reinforced what social scientists already knew, from innumerable pilot projects conducted in the US and around the world: Guaranteed income programs work. Contrary to the moralistic assumptions that many of us tend to make that unearned income will be spent frivolously, the repeatedly demonstrated truth is that nearly every beneficiary will use it productively if it’s unconditional and unrestricted. As one of Sunday’s speakers, Dr. Stephen Nuñez of the Jain Family Institute, pointed out,

    “All the evidence suggests that if you give poor people cash, they’re less likely to use drugs. People tend to self-medicate to deal with stress.”

    Most of the many UBI demonstration projects, and Yang’s presidential campaign, have used an extra thousand dollars per month as the baseline for comparing how people’s lives change when chronic financial stress is alleviated, without any bureaucratic hoops to jump through. Filmmaker/activist Conrad Shaw screened clips from a documentary about the Bootstraps Basic Income Experiment, in which a sampling of Americans in ten states, ranging from homeless people and ex-convicts to middle-class families, were asked to share their thoughts about what they would do with that much more money. When 22 of them were finally told that they’d been selected to participate in a UBI program, several openly wept.

    Shaw shared moving stories of how these beneficiaries had turned their lives around by the time the two-and-a-half-year demonstration program ended. “UBI worked in every case. Every participant elevated themselves into a safer, stronger, more confident and more productive situation in life,” he said, adding that for some, the ability to build a financial cushion had “acted as armor against catastrophe,” such as one whose home was destroyed by Hurricane Florence. “What surprised me was how quickly these changes took place. They knew what they wanted. Suddenly life’s mountainous challenges felt bite-sized.”

    These findings were reinforced in the roundtable discussions that wrapped up Sunday’s symposium, in which participants responded to prompts asking what they or people they knew would do differently with a guaranteed extra $1,000 per month, as well as how their life paths might’ve been different had their families benefited from such a program when they were children. Whether they had grown up with a scarcity mentality or in a comfortable home, all (at this participant’s table, at least) envisioned a life meaningfully enhanced by broadened options and less pressure to make decisions based on fears about the future.

    How does such a program get financed, if made universal, as advocated by proponents? Shaw argued that a UBI of $1,000 per month for every American is feasible “on our existing tax system,” given a national average income of $50,000 per year. Nuñez cited revenue from the sale of natural resources, imposition of a carbon tax and a Value Added Tax, as used in many European countries, as potential additional sources.

    “Basic income isn’t so utopian,” said Dr. Almaz Zelleke, professor of Practice in Political Science at NYU Shanghai, after recapping the history of previous federal programs created to alleviate poverty and explaining why the ones with the strictest qualifications and most elaborate bureaucracies were the costliest and least successful.

    “Basic income isn’t so different from what we’ve had before in the US. We just want it to be universal.”

    In fact, Zelleke pointed out, Thomas Paine had advocated for a guaranteed minimum income in the US as early as the end of the 18th century, to be funded by inheritance taxes on landowners.

    Bringing the story back to the near-present day, the fourth panelist, Keiko Sono of Creatives Rebuild New York, presented a slideshow documenting her on-the-ground experiences coordinating the Yang Gang campaign in the Hudson Valley. Perhaps the time is now riper, finally, for the approach that her candidate was advocating.

    ________________________

    More about the author: Frances Marion Platt has been a feature writer (and copyeditor) for Ulster Publishing since 1994, under both her own name and the nom de plume Zhemyna Jurate. Her reporting beats include Gardiner and Rosendale, the arts and a bit of local history. In 2011 she took up Syd M’s mantle as film reviewer for Alm@nac Weekly, and she hopes to return to doing more of that as HV1 recovers from the shock of COVID-19. A Queens native, Platt moved to New Paltz in 1971 to earn a BA in English and minor in Linguistics at SUNY. Her first writing/editing gig was with the Ulster County Artist magazine. In the 1980s she was assistant editor of The Independent Film and Video Monthly for five years, attended Heartwood Owner/Builder School, designed and built a timberframe house in Gardiner. Her son Evan Pallor was born in 1995. Alternating with her journalism career, she spent many years doing development work – mainly grantwriting – for a variety of not-for-profit organizations, including six years at Scenic Hudson. She currently lives in Kingston.

    This post was originally published on Basic Income Today.

  • Fredericton City Council Passes Motion in Support of Basic Income in Canada

    By: JESSICA SAULNIER

    FREDERICTON– On Monday night, Fredericton City Council voted 10-2 on a motion supporting a guaranteed livable basic income.

    The resolution means the City of Fredericton will write a letter to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, Premier Blaine Higgs, and New Brunswick Members of Parliament asking them to implement a guaranteed livable basic income in Fredericton.

    Wil Robertson, a volunteer with Coalition Canada Basic Income, said throughout his undergraduate degree at St. Thomas University he was one of the only voices from New Brunswick at the national table advocating for basic income. Over the last year, he and members from Greater Fredericton Social Innovation worked together to develop the Basic Income New Brunswick coalition, which is part of Coalition Canada.

    “The definition for basic income is basically a floor, an income floor beneath everyone’s feet so that you don’t fall below a certain level of poverty,” said Robertson.

    Implementing a basic income for people around the poverty line means no one is “living in abject poverty without the ability to afford necessities or to afford decent shelter or decent food,” said Robertson.

    This is where the idea of a guaranteed livable income comes from. It allows people from all walks of life, such as people with disabilities, single mothers, and students coming out of post-secondary education to live comfortably without having to worry about covering their required expenses.

    Robertson said programs created to help people experiencing poverty are specific and hard to qualify for. He claims a lot of those problems disappear with a universal basic income.

    “It’s kind of just about simplifying that while respecting that everyone should have a right to live with dignity and a secure income,” he said.

    Robertson believes the implementation of a guaranteed basic income is long overdue. He believes questions have already been thoroughly answered about what basic income does by research and trials from Canada and around the world. The real question, he says, is why a basic income hasn’t been implemented yet when it could benefit people’s mental and physical health, reduce hospitalization rates, and encourage students to stay in school.

    “That’s the frustration now with basic income advocates, is trying to say energized and make sure that we’re educating politicians and the public who may not know much about basic income and have some assumptions about what it is,” said Robertson.

    Council’s vote

    The City of Fredericton’s Governance and Civic Engagement Committee saw a presentation from Basic Income New Brunswick on October 6. After the presentation, a form was created for community members to sign.

    The form had a pre-written letter that Frederictonians could fill out with their name, email contact, and postal code and was automatically sent to the Mayor and council members. The purpose of this form was to show Fredericton City Council members that people from the community have concerns and want to see the motion passed.

    “The Mayor said [Monday] night 381 people filled out the form, which is really what moves the needle. To turn that close vote from the committee to attend the vote the council which was huge in trying to build that support.”

    During the Council meeting, Robertson said it was great to see a 10-to-2 vote supporting the motion. Councillor Steven Hicks and Councillor Jocelyn Pike did not approve the motion.

    Councillor Hicks of Ward 5 said he was surprised to see the presentation come forward.

    “I’m just not comfortable. I feel like we need a better understanding of the implications of such a broad policy before advocating for it. What is the cost going to be? How many tens of billions of dollars? What’s the effect on inflation or the potential effects on the workforce?” he asked.

    He said it is the worst workforce situation he has seen and jobs are already going unfilled. Without more information presented from other sources, Councillor Hicks said he understands the intention of the resolution but he did not support it.

    Councillor Eric Megarity of Ward 6 said it’s a right for someone to have a roof over their head, not a privilege. This motion was not about the programming or money yet but instead just a support letter to get their federal members to look at it.

    While the conversations about a guaranteed livable income for Fredericton will not happen tomorrow at the federal level, Megarity said supporting the letter is a big step.

    “I think they have to hear from the people sooner or later that this is something that they should look at and if nobody speaks out, then they’ll drop it. But at least let them do the due diligence at the federal level and at least we can support the idea,” said Councillor Megarity.

    Councillor Cassandra LeBlanc of Ward 10 said passing this motion does not mean they are seeing if they can afford this as a province and country. Passing this motion is just asking to rethink how social support is done in Canada.

    As the director of the food security organization, LeBlanc said the food banks, community kitchens, and shelters are operating at a level that has never been seen before. People with jobs are also coming to the food banks to help them get by.

    “Emergency services have to become emergency services again,” said LeBlanc. “We’re becoming a normal part of median society.”

    Where else has this been implemented?

    The government of Newfoundland and Labrador held a press conference on October 25 introducing a basic income program for youth receiving residential services. This is a targeted basic income program, said Robertson.

    Over the last several months, similar resolutions were passed in other areas, such as the Union of Municipalities of British Columbia, the Halifax Regional Municipality, and the City of Moncton.

    Robertson is from Moncton and in the spring, he presented the motion to call for basic income before the Moncton City Council. This motion was just recently passed in council in September.

    _____________________________

    Jessica Saulnier is an intern for Huddle in Fredericton. Send her feedback or tips: saulnierj-student@huddle.today

    This post was originally published on Basic Income Today.

  • Opinion: In the Fight for Racial Justice, Our History Demands a Guaranteed Basic Income

    By: TONI PRECKWINKLE 

    America’s history around race and inequality is a painful one and is still being felt today. As a Black woman, I have felt this pain personally; and as an elected official in Illinois, I am committed to fighting back against the remnants of racist policies. At the forefront of our fight for racial justice, we are launching a guaranteed income program in our county to help folks struggling to make ends meet, and I call on my colleagues in the federal government to join me.

    From slavery to internment camps to redlining, our Black, brown, and immigrant neighbors have time and time again endured government-sponsored oppression. And despite the “bootstraps” narratives and meritocracy myths imposed on all of us from an early age, these injustices have made it more difficult for Black and brown Americans to achieve financial freedom today.

    No matter how you cut it—in terms of household wealth, homeownership, access to credit, the list goes on—available data shows that our Black and brown citizens start their lives with less money and face more barriers to building wealth in the long-term. This is a direct consequence of the policies and actions of government throughout our history, and as government leaders, we have a special duty to right the wrongs of discriminatory policies that have sown seeds of disunity and undermined the great potential of our nation.

    A guaranteed income is our opportunity to fulfill that duty.

    The results of direct cash programs speak for themselves. With a stable financial foundation, participants in local pilot programs are empowered to take care of their families, pursue education, and find better employment. And because the hierarchies of wealth and inequality have been drawn by racial lines throughout our history, our Black and brown residents have been shown to benefit disproportionately.

    With more stability, folks have the freedom to set personal goals, take risks, and even start businesses. Across the board, a guaranteed income leads to better health and educational outcomes for participants and their households.

    To put it plainly—it makes people’s lives better.

    For our part, Cook County is proud to be leading the way for government in the American guaranteed income movement. With a $42 million initial investment, our Promise Pilot is the largest publicly-funded initiative of its kind in American history, and we aim to show the nation what guaranteed income at scale can achieve.

    The name of our pilot was chosen purposefully. The word “promise” reflects an understanding of broken promises of the past, and our intention to right those wrongs for the future. We also know that this program will allow residents to reach their promise, their potential to thrive and live meaningful lives.

    Lastly, the program I’m writing about today is a pilot, but we’re not interested in temporary or short-term solutions to the glaring issues of racial and income inequality. Our promise to Cook County residents is to make this program permanent in the years to come. We believe that decades of research justify it and that the results of our program will demand it—just as they have in other guaranteed income pilots across the country.

    But in the end, participants in pilot and local programs only represent a fraction of residents who can benefit from a guaranteed income. Over 200,000 Cook County residents applied for our first round of funding, yet we can only serve 3,250 of them with this historic investment. That’s why action from the federal government, a promise to our residents from coast to coast, is necessary to achieve our goal of righting the wrongs of history—of creating a more just and equitable world for all of us.

    I call on Congress to follow the lead of local governments across the country. If we want to ensure a stable future for all our citizens, a guaranteed income for everyone who needs it represents the best path forward.

    Now it’s our turn to make history.

    ____________________________________

    Toni Preckwinkle is president of the Cook County Board of Commissioners

    This post was originally published on Basic Income Today.

  • Why this S.F. Holocaust survivor supports universal basic income

    By: DAN PINE

    Looking at Gisèle Huff today, elegantly dressed, perfectly coiffed, gliding from board meeting to board meeting, it’s hard to believe the nonprofit executive started out life as a hidden Jewish child in Nazi-occupied Paris.

    That long journey from the Holocaust to the halls of power in her adopted country makes for quite the American success story.

    Huff, 86, tells that story in her newly published autobiography, “Force of Nature: The Remarkable True Story of One Holocaust Survivor’s Resilience, Tenacity, and Purpose.” It’s part memoir, part call to arms on behalf of her most cherished social cause: universal basic income. At its core, the book is the tale of a Jewish woman who never gave up, despite long odds and unbearable sorrows.

    “The motivating factor of [Judaism] is to change the world for the better,” says Huff, who lives in San Francisco. “I do think it’s in the bloodstream.”

    The granddaughter of Yiddish-speaking Russians who immigrated to Paris, Huff was only 4 when Hitler invaded her native France. Ultimately, her father and those grandparents were murdered by the Nazis, while she and her mother went into hiding. Until liberation in 1945, Huff passed as a Catholic girl.

    What she remembers most vividly was the constant fear. “I didn’t feel protected at all,” she recalls. “I was scared every minute of every day. That was the atmosphere.”

    And yet, the trauma had one positive effect on her. “The most significant thing my horrendous childhood gave me is a love of life,” she says. “How precious it is every day. I live for the moment. For me, there is no middle ground: Either you live, or you do yourself in.”

    When she was 11, she and her mother immigrated to the United States, settling in New York. In time, she mastered English, married, bore two children and found her way to a fulfilling career.

    Huff earned a Ph.D. in political science, with a concentration in political philosophy, at Columbia University, taught and later sat on the advisory board for Harvard University’s Education Policy and Analysis Program. For 12 years, she also served as director of development at San Francisco University High School, and for more than 20 years held the post of executive director at the Jaquelin Hume Foundation, an S.F.-based education reform nonprofit.

    She also has visited schools to speak to students about her Holocaust experiences.

    As an education reformer, she was able to befriend a diverse group of politicians, from liberal New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker to former Republican Florida Gov. Jeb Bush. A longtime devotee of libertarianism, she made a run for the House of Representatives in 1998 — as a Republican — but lost in the primary for the 6th Congressional District (Marin and much of Sonoma County).

    There is no word to describe what it is to lose a child … But the world still goes on. I feel he is with me every minute that I’m doing the things I do to continue his dream.

    Huff made a sharp political turn late in life when her son, Gerald Huff, a Tesla engineer and universal basic income activist, persuaded her that UBI was a social necessity, given the upheaval technology and other factors play in modern economic life.

    UBI posits that all Americans over age 18, regardless of socioeconomic status, should receive a monthly check — $1,000 is often proposed — “sufficient to secure basic needs as a permanent earnings floor no one could fall beneath,” according to Basic Income Today. “UBI would be a promise of equal opportunity, not equal outcome, a new starting line set above the poverty line.”

    Gerald Huff died of pancreatic cancer in 2018 at age 54. Gisèle, already widowed by that point, reeled from the loss (her husband, Paul, also had died of pancreatic cancer, also at age 54, in 1987).

    But she rebounded, founding in her son’s honor the Gerald Huff Fund for Humanity, which promotes UBI efforts around the country.

    It’s significant to transform from a low-tax, small-government conservative into a UBI enthusiast, but Huff has made that journey. She says the main objection she hears from wealthy people skeptical of UBI is something like, “Most people will stop working.” Her response to her millionaire friends: “Have you stopped working?”

    “People aren’t going to stop working because you give them $1,000 a month,” she adds. “You can’t live on it. It’s a floor.”

    The Gerald Huff Fund for Humanity is a family affair. In addition to Huff, who serves as president, daughter Michèle Huff, a Berkeley attorney, sits on the board, as does Gerald Huff’s lifelong friend, business consultant Stephen Kuhn. The S.F.-based foundation works to promote the understanding, acceptance and implementation of UBI and supports UBI pilot programs around the country.

    Working with her foundation has helped Huff cope with the loss of her only son.

    “It is unimaginable,” she says of Gerald’s death.

    “It’s beyond devastating. There is no word to describe what it is to lose a child. It completely upends the order of things. But the world still goes on. I feel he is with me every minute that I’m doing the things I do to continue his dream.”

    With a new book out, Huff knows she has to promote it like any other author. She’s done several interviews already and is willing to stretch beyond what she’s used to in order to spread her message.

    “I like to see results,” she says, “so it’s a question of getting people talking about it. I don’t do TikTok. I hope I meet someone who knows it.”

    This post was originally published on Basic Income Today.

  • Opinion: Basic income is an investment in people for the common good and one we can’t afford not to make

    See original article here.

    In recent Telegram columns, SaltWire Network’s Pam Frampton has highlighted the devastating situation of poverty-stricken people in our world and the widening gap between the rich and the poor. This should not and cannot continue.

    Most of us want to do our share to improve our communities and world and, towards this end, more and more people and organizations are embracing a guaranteed livable basic income as an effective way to invest in people for the common good.

    Multiple municipalities, such as the Union of Municipalities in British Columbia, Halifax, and Moncton have endorsed the need for a guaranteed livable basic income. Recently, the City of St. John’s unanimously endorsed a guaranteed livable basic income forwarded by Deputy Mayor Sheilagh O’Leary. Fredericton’s city council has a similar resolution on its October agenda.

    It is no surprise that more and more municipalities, organizations, people and reports are endorsing a guaranteed livable basic income. Poverty costs all of us money, in addition to being a human rights injustice. Cities deal with the costs of poverty on a daily basis in relation to homelessness, crime and vandalism.

    Our N.L. Health Accord report points out that poverty is a major social determinant to health, creating more expensive healthcare.

    Our income support programs, and our minimum wage — even at $15 an hour — still leaves people below the poverty line.

    A guaranteed livable basic income, administered through our tax system, without excessive taxes, is an efficient and effective way to lift substantial numbers of people out of poverty.

    Think, for example, of the savings in excessive healthcare and administration if burdensome monitoring requirements are eliminated. It ensures that single parents, individuals, seniors and others with unpredictable incomes have sufficient means to meet their daily needs (instead of being forced to choose between food for their family and paying the light bill, or food and medication). It ensures that children can develop their minds and bodies to the best of their potential by participating more in school and community activities, that the poverty cycle is broken. In short, it would allow people to live with greater dignity.

    The evidence we have, although limited because the Ontario pilot project was terminated by a change in government, demonstrates that a guaranteed livable income works. In addition to the basic necessities of life, it provided security for some to upgrade their education or to retrain. It demonstrated that, rather than reducing the will to work, it alleviated the stress of uncertainty. In other situations, it meant that a family caregiver could provide child or elderly care.

    A guaranteed livable basic income is not a handout; it is an investment in people for the common good. A guaranteed livable basic income is a way of ensuring that present and future generations can be productive members of society and live with dignity. It is an investment that we can’t afford not to make.

    When there is need, people in Newfoundland and Labrador and elsewhere invariably step up and respond, keeping food banks stocked, providing much-needed aid during the recent disaster of post-tropical storm Fiona, and offering help to Ukraine.

    For a guaranteed livable basic income, we need to step up in a different way. We need to write to our premier and MHAs, urging them to implement the resolution of 2021 (passed unanimously) for an all-party committee to investigate the feasibility of a guaranteed livable basic income. We need to write also to our members of Parliament and senators, urging them to implement a guaranteed livable income, supporting the P.E.I. “demonstration project” and recommending that Newfoundland and Labrador be a place for a pilot project.

    In doing so, we will be joining with politicians of all parties, municipalities, business persons, social workers, physicians and other health-care workers, economists, the Sisters of Mercy, Basic Income NL, and the Religious Social Action Coalition (a multi-faith group of Jews, Christians, Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs). Collectively, we can ensure that there is a guaranteed livable basic income, an investment in people for the common good of all.

    This post was originally published on Basic Income Today.

  • Opinion: The high stakes of a universal basic income

    By: Hein Marais

    For a very large proportion of South Africans, paid work is neither a viable nor sufficient basis for dignified life. Official unemployment, according to the more realistic expanded definition, is more than 44%, and close to one-third of people with paid work are not earning enough to afford basic living expenses. Current economic and social policy models are failing to protect many millions against hunger, destitution and desperation.

    This is in a country battling three deadly pandemics — Aids, tuberculosis and Covid-19 — and steadily battered by climate change-triggered floods and droughts.

    Hence, the growing demand for a universal basic income. A growing alliance of grassroots and nongovernment organisations, trade unions and researchers are demanding that the state transform the emergency relief grants introduced earlier in the Covid-19 pandemic into a full-fledged universal basic income (UBI). They have produced costings and outlined financing options to back that push. The ANC, too, might be considering a limited basic income guarantee.

    More income for poor households will reduce poverty and widen people’s life choices. It will also increase demand for basic goods and services, which would boost growth and, especially, local production and jobs.

    If linked to other forward-looking strategies, a universal basic income can be part of a safety net for communities hard-hit by climate change disasters. And it can become part of the support that workers and communities will need as we transition to a low-carbon economic model.

    Urgent need for new forms of income support

    There’s growing recognition across the board that new forms of income support are needed. At the same time, the idea of a truly universal basic income attracts strong resistance from the business sector and sections of the state, notably National Treasury.

    Achieving and defending it will require social and political forces that are strong enough to prevail against that opposition. And that will require reshaping the “common sense” we use when we define and weigh the claims we have on one another, the state and the common wealth of our society.

    In a society such as South Africa, the universal basic income demand evidently speaks to near-desperate need. But how do we frame the demand? Is it an appeal for “charity”, for the state to “grant” assistance in extreme circumstances? Is it a demand rooted in the state’s duty to “guarantee all members of society the means of existence”, in French revolutionary Maximilien Robespierre’s words? Is it a claim arising from rights inscribed in a constitution? Or is it a claim for what we are due, for a share of common wealth?

    Responsibilities

    A universal basic income is laden with challenging propositions about the responsibilities and entitlements that connect us in society. The demand upsets deeply held beliefs about the role and status of waged work in society, and about the hierarchies of worth and value we attach to different kinds of work (paid or not).

    The demand therefore pushes against prevailing economic and social orders. It challenges the idea that our dignity and fates are irrevocably tied to the sale of our labour on whatever terms and prices are offered. It implies fresh ways of thinking about the roles and duties of the state, and about the claims that citizens can rightfully make on the state and on the commons.

    It is therefore tempting to frame a universal basic income as a dividend of the collectively produced wealth in society. A universal basic income would then implicitly reflect the fact that wealth is socially produced (by people’s labour, paid or not, and social institutions) and it is reliant on the commons (most obviously, non-human nature) and publicly funded infrastructure.

    For the economist Yanis Varoufakis, such a framing steers the debate beyond arguments about who “deserves” assistance. Instead, society stakes a claim on the wealth drawn from it and “that claim becomes a dividend, an income stream that goes to everyone”.

    Framing a demand

    Framing a universal basic income as a dividend highlights the dimension of justice and links to the socioeconomic rights enshrined in the Constitution, which assigns to the state a constitutional obligation to progressively realise the right to social security and social assistance for all.

    It is also in tune with powerful political traditions in South Africa.

    It is in harmony, for example, with the 1955 Freedom Charter and its neglected precursor, the African National Congress’s 1943 African Claims document.

    Framing a universal basic income as a “social dividend”, or a “rightful share”, seems especially appealing in a country where the economy has been built on systemic expropriation and exploitation spanning the colonial and apartheid eras, and continuing subsequently.

    These understandings emphasise the collective character of a universal basic income, rather than seeing it merely as a multitude of separate payments to individuals. They acknowledge that factors beyond individual control decide the distribution of resources and capabilities — and that those means have to be distributed fairly.

    High stakes

    This profoundly changes the implications of the universal basic income demand. It becomes a sustained act of claim-staking, rather than concession-seeking.

    It also implies a different relationship between the citizenry and the state. A universal basic income, then, involves a demand to democratise the wealth a society produces, which poses a political challenge to the small minority that routinely commandeers that wealth.

    The framing of the universal basic income demand will be at least as important as the achievement itself. It’s crucial that progressives approach a universal basic income not as a stand-alone policy fix, but as part of a broader, long-term project of change and emancipation — because there are risks attached.

    Once in place, a universal basic income might become politically too costly to abandon, yet fiscally too expensive to sustain. In the absence of powerful progressive support, this could provide a pretext for cutting other social entitlements.

    Separated from a strong political and social movement of change, a universal basic income could then run the risk of backfiring, of being captured and repurposed in ways that sustain exploitation and inequality.

    Even once achieved, a universal basic income will remain a contested and politically unstable intervention. Ultimately, its impact and fate will depend on how it links with other processes of economic, social and political change, which forces drive them, and whether those forces are capable of defending the desired changes. DM/MC

    This post was originally published on Basic Income Today.

  • Protesters in South Africa continue to demand President and Finance Minister implement Basic Income

    By:  The Daily Vox Team

    Over 200 people protested outside Treasury’s office to demand that Finance Minister Godongwana tax the rich to keep the R350 grant, increase it and turn it into a Basic Income Grant. Protesters also demanded the Finance Minister abandon Treasury’s proposals to scrap the R350 grant and replace it with unworkable grants such as a household grant.

    “We are here to confront Treasury on the issues we experience with the R350. They don’t respond to our complaints, and these R350s are so important in communities, especially low income communities. We need these R350s to be turned into a Basic Income Grant of R1500 as there are no jobs. I’m a breadwinner at home, and everyone is looking at me for a meal.” – Lindiwe Nkosi from Soweto.

    Treasury’s Chief Risk Officer Faith Leeuw told protesters that: “Comrades, your demands will get to the office of the Minister by the end of business today. We have also noted the turnaround times for which we are supposed to respond and you will receive feedback accordingly.”

    When asked by a protester when feedback will be received, Ms Leeuw stated “Don’t worry” to which the crowd erupted with responses such as “We do worry!” Treasury has made controversial proposals, including a plan to replace the R350 SRD grant with a household grant.

    Economists from the Institute For Economic Justice have warned that Treasury’s proposals will exclude millions of poor people.

    “As Finance Minister Godongwana writes his speech to deliver in parliament next week, he must think long and hard about the grievances and demands of people whose dignity hangs in the balance. Finance Minister Godongwana must abandon this nonsense household grant,” said Tlou Seopa from amandla.mobi who organised the protest.

    Earlier this year, in his capacity as ANC leader, President Ramaphosa admitted that there is a need for a Basic Income Grant. Next week’s Mid-Term Budget Policy Statement (MTBPS) will signal whether Finance Minister Godongwana will give political life to what even the governing party has identified as a necessary step.

    Tshepiso Sehume, who was part of protest, said, “The R350 should be increased as it is not enough. They need to be increased and turned into a Basic Income Grant. When we buy food, we cannot buy sanitary pads and toiletries.”

    This post was originally published on Basic Income Today.

  • Slash Child Abuse With One Simple Trick: Cash

    By: CALEB BRENNAN

    When the COVID-19 lockdown went into effect, child welfare advocates and pediatric experts feared that child abuse that would have otherwise been noticed would remain undetected. It was a logical enough fear, because sites where abuse is often discovered—schools, doctor’s offices, religious centers, and other community spaces—were closed. The economic stressors created by the ensuing explosion of unemployment would likely contribute to a spike in child maltreatment, it was thought. This theory was so strongly believed that even the absence of child abuse reports during the initial lockdown was seen as evidence that malicious treatment by parents was a cause for concern.

    But with multiple years of data to comb over, the verdict has proven to be quite the opposite: Physical child abuse dipped substantially, according to a recent analysis of child abuse indicators and statistics published in a journal of the American Medical Association—in large part due to the substantial government investment in keeping families financially afloat during the economic shutdown.

    It illustrates a major analytical error underpinning American child abuse policy. Appalling cases of beating or rape of children are a major political motivation behind child protective services (CPS) and their habit of “child separation,” or taking kids from their families and placing them into foster or group homes. But in reality, a large and growing majority of child abuse is simple neglect, which can be greatly ameliorated with the welfare state; and CPS actions are themselves often abusive.

    Thanks to decades of PSAs and cultural osmosis, Americans often imagine child abusers as either vicious predators or fiendish, vindictive parents who wish to do intentional harm to their offspring.

    In our popular media, this runs the gamut from the abrasive and revanchist punishment of Piper Laurie’s character in the film Carrie to the sensitive acknowledgments between Matt Damon and Robin Williams in Good Will Hunting. In our news, we are horrifically entranced by both the systemic routine abuse perpetrated by religious leader Warren Jeffs and the bizarrely intimate, idiosyncratic manipulations of Munchausen by proxy cases like that of Gypsy Rose Blanchard. In our literature, books like A Child Called “It”—which chronicles one man’s childhood experience with more than a decade of jaw-dropping abuse at the hands of his mother—consistently sell millions of copies.

    And, in the age of QAnon, deranged moral panics about child abuse are once again rampant. A July 2022 study from the University of Miami found that of the 2,000 adults surveyed, a third believed that “members of Satanic cults secretly abuse thousands of children every year,” and a quarter thought “Satanic ritual sex abuse is widespread in this country.”

    But such inflammatory portrayals of child abuse obfuscate the unfortunate mundanity of the situation. “Almost none of [the cases of abuse] are like the horror stories, but … when you hear the words child abuse, people generally think of rape, murder, and torture that exists, but it exists in very, very small amounts,” says Richard Wexler, executive director of the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform.

    “That doesn’t make them any less serious. But it does have a profound effect on how you try to solve that problem. Meanwhile, the system grows and it grows and it grows and laws and definitions are expanded,” Wexler explained.

    Studies bear out Wexler’s observations. What happened during the pandemic follows a longer trend of a steady, 30-year decline in physical and sexual child abuse—while the overall quantity of maltreatment remained roughly steady. The reason is neglect—defined as a failure to provide basic needs like food, shelter, medical care, or safety—which has increased, accounting for more than three-fourths of all child abuse cases and 1,750 deaths in 2020.

    While neglect also diminished during the pandemic, this de jure category of maltreatment still remains the major reason for intervention by CPS and its use of family separation. Most of the time when agents of the state are snatching children away from their families, it is because of neglect, not beating or sexual abuse. There have been something like nine million child separations over the past 20 years, and the investigation of countless more. Unsurprisingly, there are deep racial disparities: Of the 1 out of every 3 children investigated by CPS for abuse or neglect, 53 percent are Black.

    A growing chorus of child welfare professionals, legal specialists, and parents separated from their children under such guidelines are harshly critical of this approach, arguing that it ensures that instances of neglect caused by economic precarity are treated as equivalent to cases of parental sexual abuse. Many times, these critics argue, such policies criminalize poverty and do little to meaningfully intervene in the widespread and often overlooked crisis of rampant child poverty in the most industrious and wealthy country on Earth.

    Jey Rajaraman, an attorney who spent 15 years as the chief counsel of Legal Services of New Jersey’s Family Representation Project, argues that the child welfare system’s overreliance on courts and family separation has proven especially unhelpful in actually dealing with the holistic causes of what we define as neglect. In many cases, the problem is simply that parents do not have enough money to provide a baseline standard of living for themselves or their kids, and separating them is not a humane way to fix that problem.

    “I’ve done this for close to 20 years now, and I honestly can say I’ve never had a case or a parent I defended where I was like, ‘Oh, I’m so glad they took their kids or I’m so glad their rights are terminated,’” Rajaraman said.

    This can in part be attributed to child welfare cases being deeply related to issues of poverty such as lack of income for new, clean clothes, rather than particularly violent or sexually exploitative incidents. The official statistic is that 47 percent of cases are linked to matters of financial instability, but this does not include variables like child care or inability to afford health care—an extremely problematic issue for working-poor parents who work extra hours and have long commutes.

    “It’s always been the other way around. Like, if they were provided a system that supported them, this would not have happened. We have to really think about what we’re doing to families: Drug use and being poor or struggling is not a reason to intervene or interfere [with family separation],” Rajaraman continued.

    Indeed, in many cases, separation actually enables the worst kinds of abuse. Many such children are sent to foster homes or group homes, where, ironically, sexual abuse is four times and 28 times more likely to happen, respectively.

    ONE CAN EASILY FIND UNDENIABLE CASES of economic deprivation that could constitute child maltreatment. Deamonte Driver, for instance, was a 12-year-old boy whose toothache turned deadly back in 2007. All he needed was a standard $80 tooth extraction, but his family had recently lost their Medicaid coverage, and his mother couldn’t spare the cash. The infection traveled into Driver’s brain and eventually killed him.

    Such conditions also create a negative-feedback loop: The stress of poverty can induce mental unwellness in parents, resulting in higher levels of depression, anxiety, and substance abuse—thus creating the conditions for CPS to interact with families. And since poor families rely on services like Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), Medicaid, and Section 8 housing, they are more likely to come in contact with—and be surveilled by—state entities that are entwined with CPS.

    As Dorothy Roberts’s new book, Torn Apart: How the Child Welfare System Destroys Black Families—and How Abolition Can Build a Safer World, argues, CPS is essentially a police agency and thus carries all the well-known pathologies of American police departments.

    Moreover, caseworkers operating under the authority of CPS are able to probe and investigate families in ways in which traditional law enforcement officers cannot, and because child welfare operates under the umbrella of civil legality, the Fourth Amendment’s protection against unreasonable searches and seizures is not always applicable.

    “All it takes is a phone call from an anonymous tipster to a hotline operator about a vague suspicion to launch a life-altering government investigation,” Roberts, a law professor at the University of Pennsylvania, writes.

    “A child might seem unkempt or unattended. A parent might be observed smoking marijuana. A house might appear dirty. Most of the people investigated by CPS are unaware of their rights or the name of a lawyer to call when a caseworker rings the doorbell without warning.”

    Instead of having a teacher report a case of child malnutrition to CPS for investigation, we should simply allocate more resources so a family can eat.

    Much like with American policing more broadly, Roberts contends, this form of “public safety” actually targets Black and brown communities rather than addressing the material concerns that create the conditions for child neglect. This, in turn, transforms family poverty into a proxy criminal offense and makes parents culpable actors.

    “This isn’t a system that cares about parents. The money tells you that, right? What we know is that, you know for every seven dollars we spend on adoptive services, we spend one dollar on reunification. It isn’t funded to support families. It’s funded to keep the machine working,” Shrounda Selivanoff, director of public policy at Children’s Home Society of Washington, told the Prospect.

    Selivanoff, who was charged with neglect while struggling with addiction in 2007, is intimately aware of the byzantine and irrational policies that govern child welfare.

    “I don’t think that it’s an accident that we have the majority of folks in child welfare that don’t need to be there,” she added.

    EVEN WHEN THE VULNERABILITIES that create neglect aren’t inherently present, CPS still cracks down on struggling families. Iesha, a mother of three from New Jersey, was separated from her children following an episode of domestic violence perpetrated by her children’s father. When both parties were arrested and Iesha was sent to transitional housing for battered women, CPS separated Iesha from her children.

    “They removed the children that night because I didn’t have anyone there that could care for them, no one after that was qualified to care for them, and they didn’t think I was qualified to care for them,” she told the Prospect while making her way to her daughter’s cheerleader performance.

    “So they decided that I needed intensive therapy and to move to a shelter where they told me that’s where I would get my children back … but then they told me that wasn’t stable housing, and that the children couldn’t come to live with me there,” she said. Even then, Iesha made sure the spare room in her shelter was prepared for a visit from her children.

    Iesha argued that CPS penalized her for being a victim of domestic violence: “Basically, they told me that I was endangering my children by choosing an abusive man. So they wanted to make sure that I wouldn’t fall into the same pattern before they decided to give me my children back.”

    That CPS decision kept Iesha away from her children for four years. She did eventually regain full custody, but the period of separation has left understandable scars. “They see police lights now and they get scared. Somebody knocks on the door, and they don’t want to answer it,” she said, her voice cracking.

    “We never really knew how it was going to affect them until later.”

    The issue, advocates for intensive reform say, is the ability of CPS and family services to liquidate—rather than provide for—poor families that supposedly neglect their children. For example, instead of having a teacher report a case of child malnutrition to CPS for investigation, we should simply allocate more resources so a family can eat.

    The data backs this up: According to a 2021 study by the University of Washington, a 10 percent increase in the allotment of cash to families from the Earned Income Tax Credit resulted in a 9 percent decline in neglect cases.

    The best policy in American history along these lines was President Biden’s Child Tax Credit expansion, which provided some 35 million families with $3,600 for each child under age 6 and $3,000 for children ages 6 through 17. Despite some technical flaws, that’s the kind of universal welfare state policy that would seriously cut down on child poverty and therefore child neglect. Alas, it expired this past January thanks to Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV), who was reportedly convinced that poor families would spend the money on drugs.

    Until politicians shake off these notions, an expansion of national, universal cash assistance, social housing, and health care will remain impossible—despite these being far and away the best tools for fighting child poverty and all its associated problems.

    “In child welfare, you might hear about inadequate income, lack of child care, unstable housing or food insecurity—any of those things,” says David Kelly, a human rights attorney who worked with both the Obama and Trump administrations on child welfare but now directs Family Integrity & Justice Works.

    “The most helpful response would be to try to address some of those needs, but the more common response is to blame the parent, to see the parent as unfit because those needs aren’t met, and, potentially, remove a child.”

    Throughout the Trump years, there was a deep (and understandable) preoccupation with family separations carried out through the immigration system. But until we respond to the economic deprivation that leads to similar separations with the same sense of urgency, thousands more children will be cruelly severed from their families—and liberal policymakers will have only their austerity mindset to blame.

  • Opinion: Basic Income is the Foundation Stone of a Citizen Future

    By: Jon Alexander

    The doom-laden headlines of our times would seem to indicate there are two futures on offer. 

    In one, an Orwellian authoritarianism prevails. Fearful in the face of compounding crises – climate, plagues, poverty, hunger – people accept the bargain of the ‘Strong Man’: their leader’s protection in return for unquestioning allegiance as “subjects”. What follows is the abdication of personal power, choice, or responsibility.

    In the other, everyone is a ‘consumer’ and self-reliance becomes an extreme sport. The richest have their boltholes in New Zealand and a ticket for Mars in hand. The rest of us strive to be like them, fending for ourselves as robots take jobs and as the competition for ever-scarcer resources intensifies. The benefits of technology, whether artificial intelligence, bio-, neuro- or agrotechnology, accrue to the wealthiest – as does all the power in society. If the first is an Orwellian future, this represents the vision of Elon Musk and Peter Thiel. It sells itself on personal freedoms, but the experience for most is exclusion: a top-heavy world of haves and haves-nots.

    Yet despite the bandwidth and airwaves devoted to these twin dystopias, there’s another trajectory: I call it the ‘citizen future’. 

    Over the past few years I have been researching a book called Citizens, in which I propose a more hopeful narrative for the twenty-first century. In this future, people are citizens, rather than subjects or consumers. With this identity, it becomes easier to see that all of us are smarter than any of us. And that the strategy for navigating difficult times is to tap into the diverse ideas, energy and resources of everyone.

    This form of citizenship is not about the passport we hold, and it goes far beyond the duty to vote in elections. It represents the deeper meaning of the word, the etymological roots of which translate literally as ‘together people’: humans defined by our fundamental interdependence, lives meaningless without community. It’s a practice rather than a status or possession, almost more verb than noun. As citizens, we look around, identify the domains where we have some influence, find our collaborators, and engage. And, critically, our institutions encourage us to do so. 

    When we look beyond the headlines, we find this future emerging everywhere, even here in our increasingly dis-United Kingdom. It is in the 300 plus community energy projects that are generating renewable energy and reliable revenue for local people across England, in the face of the energy crisis. It is in the world-leading example of the Commissioner for Future Generations in Wales, holding the Welsh government to account for the impact of its decisions on generations as yet unborn. It is in the Scottish government’s pioneering embrace of citizens’ assemblies and deliberative democracy, which sees randomly selected, representative ‘mini publics’ come together to make recommendations on major policy decisions (like a criminal jury but judging policy rather than people). Perhaps most ofall, it is in the vitality and determination of organisations like Northern Ireland’s Positive Carrickfergus, where local people are coming together to reimagine and rebuild their own communities, organising festivals, starting businesses, supporting those who are struggling.

    Now we need to take the next step. In order to confirm the viability of the citizen future, we need to give it supporting structures and coherence. This demands we come together on a few big symbolic policy shifts – and is where some form of Basic Income must come in.

    The reason a Basic or Guaranteed Income matters so much (I am less worried about the exact design than the principle) is that introduction of this measure would fundamentally shift the understanding of absolute poverty in the UK, from a personal choice for which the individual is responsible and must change themselves, to a policy choice, a collective responsibility which we must change together. 

    By contrast with existing welfare provision, it would express a deep belief in people. Existing approaches are built around conditions that must be fulfilled in return for ‘benefits’: the underlying assumption is that the recipient can’t be trusted, must be checked on to make sure they are not perpetuating the bad choices through which they created their own situation. Basic Income approaches are the opposite: the underlying assumption is that everyone can and wants to make a contribution to society, and that poverty erects a fundamental barrier to that contribution that must be removed, not just for the good of the individual, but for the good that individual will then contribute to society. 

    Basic Income is, as such, the most powerful and most direct political embodiment of the understanding that people are citizens, not subjects or consumers. If we want to reclaim the future, this is the place to start.

    ________________________________

    More about the author: Jon Alexander began his career in advertising, winning the prestigious Big Creative Idea of the Year, before making a dramatic change. Driven by a deep need to understand the impact on society of 3,000 commercial messages a day, he gathered three Masters degrees, exploring consumerism and its alternatives from every angle. In 2014, he co-founded the New Citizenship Project to bring the resulting ideas into contact with reality. He is the author of Citizens: Why the Key to Fixing Everything is All of Us.