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Category: THE SOCIAL DEBATE

  • 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.

  • Bold new basic income strategy could help tackle mental health crisis among young people

    See original article here.

    Researchers at the University of York played a key role in a major new study which suggests that Universal Basic Income could help to reverse the epidemic of mental health problems among young people in the UK.

    Soaring living costs are causing unprecedented pressure on UK households, resulting in a dramatic increase in the number of people suffering from mental health conditions such as anxiety and depression – particularly among 16–24-year-olds.

    A new Royal Society of Arts report, compiled by a team which included Professor Kate Pickett, of the Department of Health Sciences, and Professor Richard Cookson, of the Centre for Health Economics at York, explores the introduction of Universal Basic Income (UBI) as an alternative to conventional policy options. 

    Public support

    Under the UBI scheme, every UK citizen would receive regular payments to support their basic needs and provide them with a level of financial security. This addresses a frequent criticism of the existing welfare system: that it does not support those who are aspirational, hard-working and responsible. 

    The research, funded by the Wellcome Trust and led Northumbria University, reveals that:

    • UBI is economically feasible,
    • that it can prevent or delay a wide range of health conditions
    • that it is particularly effective in mitigating the mental health pandemic among young people
    • that public support for UBI is strong, especially in the ‘red wall’ constituencies of Wales, the Midlands and North of England. 

    Epidemic

    Professor Pickett said:

    “We really do have an epidemic of mental health problems among young adults in our society. This has been made worse by the Covid-19 pandemic and you can only imagine it is going to become worse in the current economic crisis. 

    “UBI would raise the income floor for a lot of people, reduce inequality and take away some of the sources of anxiety which young people particularly find so challenging. It would also save massively on costs to the NHS and other services.” 

    Professor Cookson added:

    “There is already overwhelmingly strong evidence that reducing poverty and income insecurity in childhood and adolescence can improve mental health; our work using up-to-date data tells UK policy makers by how much.” 

    Anxiety and depression

    The project, which began in August 2021, involved detailed modelling work using links between income and anxiety and depression, a series of focus groups to gauge young adults’ views on UBI as well as a series of surveys in ‘red wall’ constituencies to assess support for Universal Basic Income. 

    The research is part of a project called Assessing the Prospective Impacts of Universal Basic Income (UBI) on anxiety and depression among 14-24-year-olds. It serves as a pilot study for a broader, long-term examination of the role of Universal Basic Income as a public health measure.

  • There’s new optimism the $300 monthly child tax credit checks can be renewed — but the relief may look different

    By: Lorie Konish

    When Natacha Chavez began receiving monthly child tax credit payments last year, it added $500 per month to her family’s budget.

    The funds enabled her to take care of needs like a new prescription for her son’s eyeglasses that she might otherwise have put off.

    But like millions of other Americans, her family received their last monthly check in December when those payments expired.

    Having the extra income would have helped this year, as Chavez was temporarily without a job and prices at the grocery store and gas pump soared.

    “Every once in a while, I keep thinking about how this extra money would have helped offset inflation,” she said.

    Chavez, a Democratic political campaign organizer, has been active in promoting renewal of the payments for families who need the money even more than hers.

    But amid the ongoing pandemic, record high inflation and economic uncertainty, it has felt like a long haul.

    “At this point, I feel like we’ve been in this fight for the renewal of it for longer than it’s been around,” Chavez said.

    How the enhanced child tax credit worked

    The child tax credit was temporarily expanded through the American Rescue Plan Act in 2021. The existing credit of $2,000 per child under age 17 was increased to $3,600 per child under 6 and $3,000 per child ages 6 through 17.

    Half of the enhanced sum was made available through monthly payments starting last July — up to $300 per child under 6 and up to $250 per child under 18.  Families could claim the remaining money when they filed their tax returns for the year.

    Democrats had hoped to renew the more generous credit this year. But key legislation they hoped to pass through a one-party majority — Build Back Better — fell apart. Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia opposed renewing the payments without additional work requirements.

    Now, Democrats and advocates are hoping to get one more go at renewing the enhanced child tax credit this year.

    “I feel better about it than I have at any point in 2022,” said Adam Ruben, campaign director at the Economic Security Project, an advocacy organization that promotes extending economic power to all.

    A number of signs are pointing to new momentum, according to Ruben.

    New signs show promise

    President Joe Biden called the enhanced child tax credit “one of the most effective programs we’ve ever seen” at the recent White House Conference on Hunger, Nutrition and Health.

    “That’s why my national strategy calls on Congress to expand the child credit permanently,” Biden said.

    “We’ll get it done this time,” he added.

    Recently released Census data shows the credit expansion helped reduce child poverty by more than 40%. That prompted Democratic lawmakers such as Sens. Michael Bennet of Colorado, Sherrod Brown of Ohio and Cory Booker of New Jersey to call for extending the enhanced credit before year-end.

    The post-election period could be a key opportunity for revisiting the proposal, experts say.

    There is more optimism compared to last year, as lawmakers eye a year-end tax deal to revisit corporate tax cuts put in place in 2017. Advocates hope an enhanced child tax credit can be included in that package.

    “No more tax breaks for big corporations and the wealthy unless the child tax credit is with it,” Brown said in a recent interview. “And I will lay down in front of a bulldozer on that one.”

    Child poverty reductions key to success

    A few key features were behind the success of the 2021 credit, according to Elaine Maag, senior fellow at the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center.

    In addition to the higher credit amounts and monthly payments, the credit was also made fully refundable. That made it possible for low-income households to access the full credit.

    Experts say when lawmakers negotiate on new terms, an enhanced child tax credit may not be as generous as the 2021 pandemic-era relief.

    “If I could only have one thing, I would want to make sure the very lowest-income children receive the full benefit of the credit,” Maag said.

    The 2021 child tax credit expansion was particularly instrumental in reducing poverty among Black, Latino and Native American children, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

    Now, child poverty is poised to increase relative to last year, according to Kris Cox, deputy director of federal tax policy at CBPP.

    “Policymakers have a real choice here whether they take action and stem some of the rise in poverty,” she said.

    How work requirements may be different

    Work requirements may be a sticking point in the negotiations between the parties. Republican Sens. Mitt Romney of Utah and Marco Rubio of Florida have each put forward proposals that come with income rules.

    The full child tax credit benefit per Romney’s plan would be available to families who meet a $10,000 earnings threshold. Rubio’s bill makes it so the credit cannot exceed a family’s payroll and income tax liability.

    The goal of the Republicans’ plans is to promote workforce participation so everyone who wants jobs can get them, thereby preventing poverty that way, said Shai Akabas, director of economic policy at the Bipartisan Policy Center.

    “There’s still a pretty big gap between what Democrats are calling for and what most Republicans seem ready to support,” Akabas said.

    Advocates for renewing the expanded child tax credit point to the need demonstrated by the data.

    “It would be unconscionable for Congress to leave at the end of this Congress, at the end of this year, go home on vacation and leave working families hanging,” Ruben said.

    This post was originally published on Basic Income Today.

  • The False Economy of Means-Tested and Conditional Income Support

    By: Hein Marais

    Battle lines separate the demand for a universal basic income (UBI) from the hold-out view that the support should be rationed and restricted to those who most “deserve” it. Ranged on one side are civil society organizations, trade unions, academic researchers and sections of the ANC; on the other is organised business and the Treasury.

    The latter appear to favour an exceedingly narrow, exclusionary and complicated approach that would deprive millions of people of desperately needed income support by adding layers of restrictive terms. The preference is to tightly ration income support by making it conditional (for example, on seeking employment) or “targeting” it at subpopulations (eg the “poorest” households, by testing for income levels). 

    Both of those approaches claim they are the most cost-effective way to provide income support (since they only go to the people who are most in need of support). In fact, they are bad at reducing income poverty and near-useless for building social cohesion.

    Targeted and conditional schemes rely on detailed information about the targeted beneficiaries (for instance, regularly verifying their incomes) that is often out-of-date, incomplete or plain inaccurate. When tied to job seeking, they force people into the costly theatrics of proving they’re looking for work, even when the odds of finding employment are vanishingly slim, as they are in South Africa. 

    It’s been estimated that job searching costs on average around R940 per month (roughly what Statistics South Africa says a month’s supply of basic food and other essential items cost). 

    Burdensome and prone to error and delay, targeted programmes routinely miss large proportions of intended beneficiaries. Brazil’s flagship Bolsa Familia programme, for example, missed very large percentages of intended beneficiaries (despite the country’s relatively strong administrative capacity) as did Mexico’s Oportunidades programme. 

    None of the 42 targeted social protection schemes examined in a large review had exclusion errors of less than 44%; 12 of them had exclusion errors of more than 70%.

    Similarly, the emergency cash payments provided in South Africa during the first wave of the Covid-19 pandemic brought vital relief to millions of people. But they were marred by serious inefficiencies and inaccurate and out-of-date information, which led to huge delays and gaps in coverage. In the grant’s initial cycle, only 6.4 million applicants were approved, even though the eligible population was estimated at 10-12 million people. Almost half of eligible individuals who were not receiving the social relief of distress grant by mid-2020 were in the poorest third of households. 

    Means-tested programmes are also highly unfair in places with widespread poverty. They artificially segment populations who, in reality, live in similar desperation – offering one group support, while denying it to the rest. 

    Studies of income distribution data from Ethiopia, Malawi and Zambia, for example, have shown that very small actual differences in personal and family circumstances separate people in the bottom 50%-60% of per capita consumption. 

    Limiting income support to people earning less than, say, R663 per month (the current “food poverty line”) and denying it to others with, say, R800 entails a basically arbitrary segmentation between people in equally dire circumstances. When eligibility is based on tiny variations which ordinary people don’t see as real differences, it feeds a sense of unfairness, resentment and social tension. 

    That is why Thandika Mkandawire argued that means-tested income support does not make sense in places where large proportions of the population are poor. 

    Minute changes in circumstance shift people in and out of eligibility for means-tested support. Because the schemes struggle to reliably identify who should receive support at a given point, unmerited interruptions and delays in payment are built-in features. The schemes are typically designed and administered in ways that make it arduous to prove eligibility, remarkably easy to “lose” access, and exceedingly difficult to restore it.

     Tying income support to conditionalities became a staple of social policy during the neoliberal era. This distrustful approach assumes that people with little or no money must be forced to do what’s “good” for them. Defenders say conditionalities can “engineer” certain desirable behaviours (like enrolling and keeping children in school, having them vaccinated or having regular health check-ups). In fact, it’s very often not the conditionalities that lead to the desired behaviours, but the fact that families can afford to keep their children in school, or travel to a health clinic. 

    Job-seeking requirements hinge on further fallacies. They imply that living in poverty is the fault of work-shy individuals and they assume that income support encourages idleness. 

    The evidence says otherwise. 

    Numerous studies, including a World Bank review of cash transfer programmes, show that adults do not work less when they get income support. Income support enables economic activity, increases rates of self-employment, supports job searching, and especially boosts women’s economic independence. In South Africa, with close to half of adults unable to find paid work, a job-seeking conditionality seems especially blind to reality.

    Universal is easier, cheaper and fairer

     A UBI is easier to implement and avoids the administrative burdens, costs, inefficiencies and unfairness that plague conditional and targeted income support. It would be much more effective at reaching people with no or very low incomes and therefore better at reducing severe income poverty. Indeed, the cost of a UBI tends to be overstated, because estimates often don’t consider cost-savings due to its administrative simplicity and limited scope for corruption. 

    A UBI also spares people the stigma and humiliation of having to constantly “prove” their poverty to state officials. Since everyone would be eligible for a UBI, it would affirm the principle of universalism and satisfy the criterion of fairness. 

    Some people find it disturbing that a UBI would democratise people’s access to support by dispensing with deciding who “deserves” support and who does not. Waged work serves as a beacon in that moralistic outlook, which draws on a deep-felt sense that it is chiefly through selling our labour that we “earn” our place in society. 

    Such sentiments are untenable in a labour market like ours. They also rely on very narrow and distorted notions of what counts as work. Not having paid work doesn’t mean a person is inactive or unproductive. A great deal of vital work goes unpaid and is taken for granted: raising families, tending the sick and frail, volunteering, assisting neighbours, studying and acquiring skills, or trying to get an income-earning activity going. Societies would cease functioning without the (typically unpaid) reproductive and other care work that women and girls perform, for example. Work can mean many things.

    A UBI would underwrite all forms of work, paid or not, as well as people’s search for jobs, by providing a dependable source of income for the tens of millions of South Africans who currently lack it. It would implicitly recognise that even having paid work is not a sure shield against poverty. And it would provide indiscriminate and dependable support that enables people to plan ahead and take greater charge of their lives. DM/MC

    This post was originally published on Basic Income Today.

  • As inflation hits, people turn to crowdfunding to meet basic needs

    By:  Vinod Rajasekaran

    Prime Minister Justin Trudeau recently announced a $4.6-billion package of income-tested measures to help Canadians cope with steeply rising prices. His government will double for a period of six months a sales tax rebate received by low-income earners, top up a housing benefit for some renters, and fund a dental-care plan for families earning less than $90,000 per year.

    On the provincial front, Ontario Premier Doug Ford’s government’s recent throne speech increased the provincial minimum wage to $15.50 an hour and increased payments through the Ontario Disability Support Program by five per cent. The speech highlighted that “as inflation drives the cost of living higher, these actions are helping to blunt the impact on household budgets by putting more money back into Ontarians’ pockets.”

    However, none of these measures actually gets to tackling the systemic affordability issues to which all levels of government need to turn their attention.

    Canada’s elected officials might be suffering from a lack of perspective on what the affordability crisis looks like up close. Where can they gain that perspective? Reading the stories on crowdfunding platforms. They’d learn a ton.

    People around the world who are struggling to make ends meet are turning to crowdfunding platforms for support. On GoFundMe, the world’s largest crowdfunding platform for personal causes, Canada ranks fourth worldwide in terms of the overall number of donations per-capita. . While Canada might be proud of its social safety net, it’s also a country in which personal and family emergencies remain the top and fastest-growing fundraising category on GoFundMe.

    Experts say that personal campaigns on GoGetFunding and GoFundMe have significantly increased since the pandemic began. Take a quick browse through these platforms and you’ll see there are people seeking support for rent, food and monthly bills – like a single mother in St. John’s, NL, who has a seven-month old daughter. According to her campaign, she has “two full time jobs but still struggles keeping up with the cost of her diapers and formula on top of rent and bills.”

    You’ll see campaigns for seniors who need to move – such as a senior who is a unable to afford rent in Chilliwack, B.C. She expressed her frustration about Canada’s housing crisis: “the crisis has been going on for years with affordable rents vanishing daily. The homeless keep on growing.” In her campaign, she also notes that she is “about to be homeless and destitute.” Reading the breakdown of this woman’s income, I doubt that Finance Minister Freeland’s recently announced plan to increase old age security (OAS) payments by 10 per cent would make a difference.

    You’ll see campaigns for international students doing internships in Canada – like a woman from Mexico who moved to Napanee, Ont., but discovered how unaffordable it is to live. She is interested in staying and finishing her veterinary internship but cannot make ends meet.

    There are campaigns for people who can no longer pay tuition – like a student in Ottawa who cannot cope with the rise in college tuition, bills and housing costs to finish her third year. She fears that more debt would set her back even more. In her campaign, she shares, “I myself have been able to work only part-time due to my heavy course load this year, and that is barely enough to cover some of our living expenses.”

    You’ll see campaigns to buy tools for employment – like a woman in Surrey, B.C., on disability who cannot afford to purchase a laptop, printer and paper to apply for jobs – technologies that have become essential for education and employment these days.

    There are loads more. These stories are heartbreaking. Many of them were too difficult for me to read.

    But this is the consequence of a so-called progressive country hanging on to an outdated, fragmented and broken social support system that doesn’t listen to lived experiences. These systems were never designed to help people at the margins live flourishing lives.

    The failure of our social services and benefits systems – at municipal, provincial and federal levels – to keep up with lived experience is becoming less sustainable by the day. The recent federal and Ontario announcements will do little for the people in the stories I have highlighted, and there are thousands of such stories across Canada.

    The fact that people who cannot afford many necessities are turning to GoFundMe and GoGetFunding is a failure at all levels of government. It’s a visible demonstration of how disconnected our municipal, provincial and federal elected officials, and policy-makers, are from lived experience, and how inequitable our social policies and social safety nets are. Anyone in the funding world should pay attention to the stories on crowdfunding platforms right now with the rise in inflation and they’ll have ample evidence on where to direct support.

    University of Washington doctoral student Mark Igra’s research on inequality in crowdfunding highlights that nine out of 10 campaigns do not reach their financial goals. The median campaign raises only a few thousand dollars. Indeed, none of the 50 or so stories I read is on track to make their goals, including the ones I have highlighted.

    This research underscores the importance of social networks. Crowdfunding campaigns seem to work best for people who have very large social media followings. In an op-ed in Scientific American, Igra notes that “before a worthy crowdfunding campaign can receive a donation, it must first get a donor’s attention, typically via a post on Facebook, Instagram or Twitter.”

    However, according to Igra, most of the people seeking funding simply don’t have the time or capability to harness the power of their stories on social media. They’re busy working overtime to make ends meet, caring for sick loved ones, or dealing with any of the other myriad life circumstances that necessitated the crowdfunding campaign in the first place.

    Crowdfunding is unlikely to be helpful for people where there are stark income inequalities, social disparities and where social media popularity matters. Igra points out the strong correlation between successful campaigns and strong social networks makes it difficult for many at the margins to meet their fundraising goals.

    Meanwhile, it seems like mainstream media celebrate and glorify crowdfunding as a win-win without highlighting the systemic issues and policy failures that drove families to use it in the first place. For example, North Shore News highlighted North Vancouver as the most generous Canadian city in 2021 as named by GoFundMe. But context matters here. Vancouver has the most expensive housing market in North America.

    Generosity is good but it cannot be the answer to a broken social benefits system. University of Toronto researcher Caroline Shenaz Hossein states: “We can often glorify forms of mutual aid, but that lets big philanthropy and government off the hook.”

    If Canada’s social policies and benefits system are once again failing to help people live flourishing lives, what can be done? Here’s where I’d start: Every personal crowdfunding campaign reveals a story, a systemic issue and an insight into which social support services, policies, benefits and funding are letting people fall through the cracks. These stories are evidence that multiple levels of government policy-making aren’t working.

    Non-profits are feeling the pinch of inflation as well. The Winnipeg Free Press reported recently that families struggling to buy now-unaffordable necessities are straining non-profits’ dwindling resources. Mareike Brunelli, at the West Central Women’s Resource Centre of Winnipeg, said families on fixed incomes are increasingly forced to make tough decisions about how to spend. At the centre, “we are really short on tampons and pads, which has never been the case.”

    In 2021, GoFundMe’s CEO Tim Cadogan told the U.S. Congress: “We can’t do your job for you.” Yet, in the U.S. and in Canada, COVID-related support programs have recently ended. This is an opportunity for municipal, provincial and federal governments as well as civil society organizations to reimagine care and benefits, policies and systems. It’s time to stop the dehumanizing and disempowering practice of crowdfunding basic needs.

    This post was originally published on Basic Income Today.

  • To Win in the Midterms, Democrats Should Go All In on Reviving the Child Tax Credit

    By: JIM PUGH 

    With the November midterm elections fast approaching, the path the United States government will take over the next two years is looking very uncertain. Recent polling shows that control of both the Senate and the House of Representatives is up for grabs between Democrats and Republicans. To maintain control of both chambers – and possibly expand their majority in the Senate – Democrats will need to take advantage of any edge they can find to bring in more support.

    Fortunately for Democratic candidates, there’s a way to gain an electoral edge while simultaneously supporting highly effective social policy: campaigning on the expanded Child Tax Credit (CTC).

    The expanded CTC was enacted as part of President Biden’s American Rescue Plan in early 2021. It augmented the existing Child Tax Credit to provide substantially larger payments to families with children, delivered monthly, while making low-income families eligible for the full benefits. For example, while a middle-class family with a 4-year-old and 7-year-old would previously have received a one-time payment of $4,000, the expanded CTC provided them with $550 per month, totalling $6,600 for the year. At the same time, 23 million families became eligible to receive the credit for the first time.

    The impact of the policy was monumental: the program lifted 3.7 million children out of poverty, decreased food insufficiency for families with children by an estimated 26%, and led to the lowest rate of childhood poverty in U.S. history. Last week, Biden described the policy as ​“one of the most effective programs we’ve ever seen.”

    Yet despite its incredible success, Congress has not yet renewed the expanded CTC beyond its original one-year duration. While the Biden administration pushed to make the program permanent in its Build Back Better legislative package, the effort was derailed in the Senate by uniform opposition from Republicans as well as from Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin (WV). While many of the programs from Build Back Better were later enacted through the Inflation Reduction Act, passed in August, the expanded CTC was not among them. As a result, since the program lapsed in January 2022, millions of children have fallen back into poverty.

    Congressional opposition to continuing the expanded CTC was bolstered by early polling after the program’s enactment showing that Americans didn’t have a favorable view of continuing the expanded credit beyond its one-year duration. While the conventional wisdom at the time was that the policy wasn’t generally popular, recent evidence challenges this conclusion.

    A messaging experiment conducted in August 2022 for the advocacy group Economic Security Project Action found that political ads that focused on the expanded CTC received a net positive response from potential voters, and were actually among the most persuasive this election cycle, shifting voter choice by up to 15 points from Republican to Democratic candidates. These results bolster the conclusion of a June 2022 survey by Democracy Corps, which identified the expanded CTC as a powerful motivating policy for voters this November. The new results suggest that the earlier tepid reception to the expanded CTC may have been due to its novelty and not yet having time to appreciate its impact. Now that families have had a chance to better understand the policy — and directly benefit from it — they view it far more favorably.

    These results present a highly compelling argument for why Democratic candidates should focus on the expanded CTC in their campaigns. But the question that then arises is: now that the Inflation Reduction Act has been passed, how can the program be extended? 

    The most likely answer lies in a year-end bill called ​“tax extenders,” which is most often used to renew the corporate research and development tax credit. The renewal has broad support from both Democrats and Republicans, but multiple Senate Democrats have drawn a line in the sand, saying they will only vote for the bill if it includes a continuation of the expanded CTC. Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) went so far as to say he would ​“lay down in front of a bulldozer” to prevent corporate tax credits from moving ahead without the expanded CTC.

    While it’s unclear if these senators currently have enough leverage to push the continuation through, given that it would require 10 GOP senators to overcome a Senate filibuster, a strong showing by Democrats in the midterms could significantly strengthen their position. And, if they maintain control of the House of Representative and expand their majority in the Senate, it would also open the possibility of passing the policy in 2023 through budget reconciliation, which would not require Republican support.

    For now, the choice for Democratic candidates couldn’t be clearer: campaign on renewing the expanded Child Tax Credit. It will help their chances at the polls in November and bring the country closer to reviving the most impactful anti-poverty program in a generation.

    This post was originally published on Basic Income Today.

  • Poll: UBI supported by 59% of all voters in the UK – and 71% of progressive voters

    By: Sam Gregory

    A groundbreaking new report has revealed majority support in the UK for a wide range of progressive and transformative policies that could address issues of collective concern.

    The Common Ground looked at public support for ideas ranging from a Green New Deal to a £15 minimum wage, as well as Universal Basic Income, wealth taxes and rent controls.

    The Sheffield-based campaign analysed 2,000 data sources and say that what they found turns the received wisdom that Britain is an inherently conservative country “on its head”.

    “We face a perfect storm of climate inaction, social injustice and corrupted democracy – but we have plenty of solutions available to us to solve the problems we collectively face,” said Common Ground co-founder Jon Maiden.

    “All we lack is the political will. By uniting around the common ground we share, people in the UK can collectively reclaim their power and use it to deliver for the common good.”

    To establish what constitutes the common ground of British politics, the campaign looked at policies that attracted at least 65% support from progressive voters and at least 50% support from all voters.

    The campaign define progressive voters as those who said they voted Green, Labour or Liberal Democrat at the 2019 general election.

    They found that 75% of all voters want an ambitious Green New Deal for green jobs and infrastructure, while 65% support a £15 minimum wage. 74% of voters want to see rent controls introduced – such as a cap on rent – to help deal with the cost of living crisis, while between 65% and 69% want energy, water, rail, buses and mail to be nationalised.

    “The UK needs radical and progressive change and this Common Ground report shows that millions of people already support many of the changes we need,” said Simon Duffy, co-founder of Citizen Network.

    “Our democratic system is asleep at the wheel and we hope a focus on our common ground will help us all wake up to the positive future we can create together if we leave the old broken politics behind us.”

    Started by Maiden and his father Charles, The Common Ground hope to unite voters around a common cause and inspire them to think pragmatically about how they can achieve the changes they want to see. The group found that even supposedly radical policies like Universal Basic Income are supported by 59% of all voters – and a staggering 71% of progressive voters.

    They also found that:

    • 78% want the NHS run in the public sector and 65% support tax rises to boost NHS funding
    • 83% of all voters want free social care for the over-65s
    • 64% want a national house-building programme of 500,000 new homes a year
    • 75% want to rewild at least 5% of the UK
    • 63% want to see wealth taxes introduced and 65% support higher Income Tax on earnings above £100,000
    • 68% support higher corporation tax and 87% want more done to reduce tax avoidance
    • 82% of all want more power devolved to local areas across the UK

    With the policies that The Common Ground looked at, they found that support amongst progressive voters was 7% higher on average than among voters in general.

    But they say that support amongst self-identified conservative voters was still relatively high, coming out at 54% on average.

    The area with the highest degree of consensus between left and right appears to be responding to the climate crisis, while policies on migration, police and justice were more divisive.

    Overall, the full report found 200 policies that could appeal to a majority of people in the UK, and form the basis of a progressive political programme.

    “We believe that the question for opposition parties isn’t whether voters support progressive policies, but rather which of those policies should be prioritised,” said The Common Ground in a statement.

    “We found that there is considerable scope for opposition parties to unite around a bold, progressive agenda that delivers real change in people’s lives.”

    This post was originally published on Basic Income Today.

  • Universal Credit is cruel, inefficient and counterproductive – it must be scrapped for UBI

    By: Ben Ramanauskas

    Last Thursday night my friend burst into tears explaining that the job centre was deciding whether or not to cut her Universal Credit payments because she had missed an appointment. The reason she missed her appointment was because she had a job interview. She had given the job centre plenty of notice, but her absence still had to be passed onto a decision maker because she had previously missed other appointments – for other job interviews, and once because she’d had Covid.

    You don’t have to be an expert on the welfare system to see that this is an obvious flaw. Proponents of Universal Credit claim that it incentivises people to work, yet the system is designed in such a way that it in fact penalises people who are actively trying to find jobs.

    This is not a bug in the system so much as a feature. Universal Credit is full of built-in frictions that prevent people from getting the resources they need to survive, right from the point of the lengthy application process and the long wait before a claimant actually receives any money. I had assumed these were set up deliberately as a way to deter people from applying for benefits, but it turns out that once a person is in the system things get even worse. My friend has been made to sit through patronising courses on finding a job and has to travel for over 30 minutes each way every week just to attend a two-minute meeting with an adviser. This is infantilising and a waste of her time – time which could be spent applying for jobs or attending interviews. It’s also a waste of taxpayers’ money and scarce public resources.

    Universal Credit is a deeply cruel system, as anyone with first-hand experience of it can attest to. One of my relatives has suffered from arthritis for many years, which made it impossible for her to do her job, but when Universal Credit was introduced an assessor (with little to no medical training) deemed that she was fit to work, making her jump through a series of bureaucratic hoops just to get enough money to live. She was eventually able to successfully appeal against the decision and a doctor agreed that she was in no fit state to work. Despite the pain, suffering and anxiety it caused her, she was comparatively one of the lucky ones. It is common for the physical and mental health of people on Universal Credit to deteriorate thanks to the callousness of the system.

    It is difficult to get the full picture of just how bad Universal Credit is given that when Thérèse Coffey, now the Health Secretary, was running the Department for Work and Pensions she suppressed the release of a number of reports, including on the impact of sanctions and on the deaths of benefit claimants. We do, however, know the impact of one benefit change: the two-child limit. It failed in its intended purpose of deterring low-income families from having more children, and instead it just made them poorer. We also know from official statistics that about 40 per cent of people receiving Universal Credit are in work but earning so little they rely on the state for support. Threatening to cut their benefits if they do not look for extra hours of work, as the government has recently done, will not help to lift people out of poverty. And it won’t save the taxpayer money either. Of those who are not working, many are caring for children or disabled adults.

    It’s time Universal Credit was scrapped and replaced with a true safety net – one which ensures people don’t fall through the gaps and can have enough money to not only survive but also thrive.

    A Universal Basic Income (UBI) would pay money to everyone, regardless of their circumstances, which could then be regained through the tax system from those who do not need it.

    While this idea is too often condemned as a left-wing fantasy, it has an impressive list of supporters from across the political spectrum. As someone who has worked for a number of right-wing think tanks and as an adviser to Liz Truss, I can tell you that there is a strong free market case for a UBI. It would free people from a degrading system that forces them to rely on the whims of uncaring bureaucrats. It would give people the freedom to find the right job, retrain or even start their own business, providing jobs for others and increasing productivity. It would allow them to undertake socially useful activities such as caring for children or elderly relatives and volunteering, reducing the burden on public finances. Moreover, the bureaucrats themselves could then be freed up to do more important work, either in the private sector or in other parts of the public sector, further reducing the size of the state.

    Universal Credit isn’t just a cruel system – it is inefficient and counterproductive, as my friend’s experience shows. It should be scrapped and replaced with a system which takes power away from the state and gives it to the people, and would allow everyone to flourish, regardless of their circumstances.

  • Basic income grant is needed to avert social upheaval

    By: NEIL COLEMAN

    Views are sharply polarised, with unions and civil society campaigning for the introduction of a BIG starting at a minimum of the food poverty line (currently R624), and sections of the government — particularly the Treasury — and organised business strongly opposing it, despite conflicting signals from the president on the matter (“Treasury cites fiscal stability as it seeks to pare down income grant”, September 9).

    Recently the ANC policy conference resolved to propose a universal BIG, supported by union federation Cosatu and the SACP at this week’s congress. In contrast, the Treasury has made proposals to limit income support, largely to a small grouping of the unemployed who can prove they are looking for work, thereby appearing to close off the possibility of extending and expanding the current social relief of distress (SRD) grant into permanent basic income.

    Academic research shows the importance of the R350 SRD grant in combating worsening hunger and poverty in the Covid-19 crisis, which continue to be widespread. Government statistics suggest more than half the population live in poverty and about 18-million in dire poverty, with income below the food poverty line. This means one in three fellow South Africans is food insecure and faces daily hunger, while more than half of the population cannot afford to buy basic necessities. For millions the SRD grant, tiny as it is, is all that stands between them and total destitution.

    Now the country faces the question of what happens when this grant expires in March 2023. Organisations working on the issues of poverty and hunger reacted with shock and disbelief to the Treasury’s proposals to terminate the grant. The Institute for Economic Justice (IEJ) published a statement and memo extensively analysing the details of the Treasury’s proposals. In essence, these proposals are rejected because:

    • They would exclude millions of beneficiaries previously receiving the SRD grants. The IEJ estimates that at least 5.5-million SRD beneficiaries would be excluded under the new proposals;
    • Many grants would be limited to “active jobseekers” — frustrating in a labour market where jobs simply do not exist, and marginalising for those who can’t look for work;
    • Apart from being exclusionary the proposals would be expensive and impossible to administer;
    • The proposals, including limited jobseeker, caregiver and household grants, are discriminatory and probably unconstitutional; and
    • They are based on a false understanding of the relationship between social protection and jobs, namely the myth that attaching job-seeking conditionalities to grants is necessary to avoid dependence. This is contradicted by international evidence.

    In the run-up to the medium-term budget policy statement the finance minister has stated that he will announce proposals to replace the SRD grant. But the Treasury has no policy authority or expertise in the area of social protection and seems to be driven by narrow fiscal considerations and a determination to block the introduction of a system of basic income, despite the obvious need for it in response to our social crisis.

    Two research papers released this week by the IEJ summarising the international and local evidence, show that:

    • Social grants, and a system of basic income, far from creating dependence and withdrawal from the labour market, activate and support job-seeking and economic activity by beneficiaries, give women greater economic independence, and increase rates of self-employment. There is a complementary, reinforcing relationship between jobs and basic income; and 
    • A review of the effects of basic income on poverty reveals wide-ranging beneficial ones, not only on income poverty but also on labour market participation, health, education, social cohesion and sustainable livelihoods. In addition, it has various beneficial macroeconomic effects as a result of the economic stimulus from injecting resources into local economies.

    Official statistics, including this week’s Quarterly Employment Survey, show that the economy continues to shed jobs, with employment around 800,000 below the pre-Covid-19, March 2020 level.

    The evidence suggests that, particularly in this situation of economic crisis, basic income could create a bridge to economic activity and employment, stimulating demand. Grant rollouts are rapid high-impact interventions, whereas deep economic transformation, investment and employment creation — as critical as they are — are more medium-term in nature.

    However, the Treasury’s document says the grants cannot be afforded, and that the tax overruns of more than R200bn achieved since 2021 should rather be used to retire debt. Yes, revenue overruns can be used to pay off debt rather than to tackle poverty and hunger. But making such choices based on narrow calculations of “affordability” can have costly social and economic ramifications. Fiscal space needs to be used wisely.

    People should be worried about social upheaval if the crisis is not dealt with — the price, in human lives and rand and cent, can be extremely high, as we saw in July 2021. Estimates now suggest the looting cost more than R100bn (R70bn in eThekwini alone), double the amount previously thought. A repeat is likely if nothing is done to tackle peoples’ hunger and desperation.

    It has been observed that a low-intensity version of July is happening all the time, at significant cost to society — looting of infrastructure and selling of cables is rampant in communities where people are increasingly desperate. And social devastation is loading as grants are withdrawn, including the phenomenon of children turning to prostitution.

    We are told by the Treasury and conservative think-tanks that a BIG will be economically damaging and unaffordable. However, they don’t seem to have fully applied their minds to the evidence. Research shows that a basic income set at a reasonable level is both affordable and would have beneficial social and economic effects.

    • The economic multiplier benefits and associated rise in demand and revenue resulting from a large injection of income into poor communities is significant;
    • The net costs of a BIG are substantially lower than the gross costs (often used as a reference) once the recouped tax (including via VAT), an income tax clawback, the stimulus impact and partial uptake are considered; and
    • There are multiple financing options available. These need to be carefully selected and sequenced, avoiding unintended consequences either on revenue or on the intended beneficiaries.

    Clearly the grant will be a significant commitment, and the wealthy in society will have to be prepared to make a moderate sacrifice to make it happen. A BIG is not a silver bullet, nor is social welfare a substitute for development. It must be combined with an investment and jobs policy.

    But we also need to acknowledge that as economies are changing, jobs are becoming more difficult, not easier, to create, and that a basic income floor will increasingly become part of the social contract. This is a growing discussion internationally.

    We have the opportunity to take a visionary decision to uplift our people, or to allow excessive fiscal caution to accelerate our downward spiral. The choice should be clear.

    This post was originally published on Basic Income Today.

  • Support For Basic Income Is Growing, So Where Are The Feds?

    By: WIL ROBERTSON

    Moncton city council voted unanimously to call for the provincial and federal governments to work to implement a guaranteed livable basic income (GLBI) on the evening of September 20. Halifax council voted to do the same in June and the Union of Municipalities of British Columbia voted similarly last week.

    The Moncton motion was introduced by councillors Charles Leger and Paulette Theriault. By endorsing it, council recognized the significant challenges facing the community, including a growing social crisis, higher rates of poverty, food insecurity, and a mental health crisis.

    The motion acknowledged that studies on basic income show that it has significant positive impacts on these issues and more broadly across the social issues facing low-income citizens. The passing of the motion now requires that Mayor Dawn Arnold write a letter to Premier Blaine Higgs, all MLAs, and New Brunswick MPs and Senators, calling for them to work together to make a GLBI a reality.

    What is a guaranteed livable basic income?

    A Guaranteed Livable Basic Income is an income floor beneath everyone’s feet that eliminates the risk of falling into poverty should disaster strike. A GLBI aims to be sufficient to allow people to live a life with dignity and the ability to afford necessities.

    A GLBI should be accessible to those who need it; based solely on the condition of income and residency; sufficient to live with dignity and security; respect the autonomy of individuals in avoiding stigmatization and overly burdensome oversight; complement the other elements of our social safety net and delivered reliably while changing with a person’s income level.

    These are the foundational principles of a GLBI.

    Growing support for basic income

    As the province of New Brunswick, and Atlantic Canada, face significant social crises and challenges, support for basic income has started to grow at the grassroots level. Polling conducted by Narrative Research in February shows 73 percent of New Brunswickers support the idea of a GLBI, while 53 percent support a universal basic income (UBI). Across Atlantic Canada, 69 percent of people support a GLBI and 44 percent support a UBI.

    In Prince Edward Island, the legislature has unanimously supported the implementation of a basic income program and has asked the federal government to help in this effort. Work is ongoing at this moment to make basic income a reality in PEI.

    The City of St. John’s will soon debate a similar motion to that passed in Moncton. In recent days, Fredericton’s deputy mayor, Greg Ericson, has alluded to a motion regarding GLBI being introduced at city council soon.

    What’s next?

    The federal and provincial governments have long downloaded the costs, responsibilities, and consequences of poverty to municipalities. In calling for the implementation of a guaranteed livable basic income, communities can proactively advocate for an effective economic tool to tackle poverty in our cities, province, and, indeed, in our country.

    As these motions are passed across communities in our region, it is increasingly up to provincial and federal governments to act. To ignore our cities’ calls for such an impactful program, that could benefit the lives of thousands of people by lifting them out of abject poverty, is both a democratic and social injustice.

    I hope MLAs, Premier Higgs, and the federal government take these calls and the issues they address seriously and begin working towards implementing a guaranteed livable basic income. Our fellow citizens are struggling now. We need basic income now.

    __________________________

    Wil Robertson is a basic income advocate for Basic Income New Brunswick, researcher, and steering committee member for Coalition Canada Basic Income: Revenu de Base.

    This post was originally published on Basic Income Today.

  • Ottawa group says there’s enough evidence to support a basic income program

    By: Kate F. Mackenzie

    An Ottawa group is advocating for a basic, livable income for those living below the poverty line. 
     
    Joe Foster, who is involved in the Basic Income Ottawa group, told The Sam Laprade Show on Sept. 20 that it would ensure people meet their basic needs regardless of their work status.

    He added that the recent spike in people accessing food banks in Ottawa indicates greater poverty problems. 
     
    Foster, whose background is in economics and engineering, said the concept of a basic income has been around for a long time, but people still know little about it. He explained that myths around providing a basic income include that people will be too lazy to find work and that the program would be too expensive.

    “If you look at the money we put into poverty from federal, provincial, municipal [levels], we’re pouring in lots of money… we’re putting a lot of money into poverty elimination, but we’re not really doing it properly,” he said. 
     
    Foster said there have been enough pilot projects to realize it’s a viable option, with countries including Finland and Brazil experimenting with it, and Canada testing it in Manitoba from 1974 to 1978.

    “Look at the facts. There’s enough evidence,” he said. 

    This post was originally published on Basic Income Today.

  • If you file taxes in these 17 states, you could be getting an inflation-relief check from the government—here’s who qualifies

    By: Mike Winters

    Since prices for necessities like shelter and food have risen by 8.5% year-over-year, many U.S. state governments are cutting checks to help their residents cover household costs.

    The effort is mostly funded by tax revenue surpluses, either as automatic rebates mandated by state law or as part of legislation specifically to address the costs of rising inflation. Either way, residents are getting some extra cash over the next few months.

    Here are 17 states where you might eligible for a check.

    California

    Sometime “between October 2022 and January 2023,” millions of Californians will receive a tax rebate paid out in cash — either as a direct deposit or debit card — totaling up to $1,050.

    Most Californians will qualify for at least some money. The income limit for eligibility is $250,000 or less for individuals and $500,000 or less for heads of household or couples filing jointly. Recipients have to have been California residents for at least six months during 2020, and they must be residents when the payments are issued.

    More details about eligibility can be found on the state’s Franchise Tax Board website.

    Colorado

    By the end of September, most Coloradans will have received a one-time tax rebate paid out as a mailed check totaling $750 for individual filers and $1,500 for joint filers. 

    Eligibility is limited to tax filers who were 18 or older on Dec. 31, 2021, lived in Colorado for the entirety of 2021 and filed a state tax return during the 2021 income tax year. More details can be found on the state’s Colorado Cash Back website.

    Delaware

    The Delaware Relief Rebate Program is mailing one-time $300 “relief rebate” checks to residents who either filed a 2020 or 2021 tax return or were 18 and older as of Dec. 31, 2021. Joint filers will receive $600, according to a press release announcing the funding.

    The first round of rebates were issued in May to over 600,000 Delaware taxpayers who already filed their 2020 tax returns. The state provides a website to check your rebate status, in case you haven’t received it.

    Florida

    In July, Gov. Ron DeSantis announced one-time $450 stimulus checks to low-income earners already participating in the state’s Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program. Families caring for children can qualify for these checks as well if they are part of the Guardianship Assistance Program.

    Checks will be sent automatically, based on a database query by state officials, according to NBC affiliate WFLA. 

    Georgia

    In May, Gov. Brian Kemp announced one-time tax refunds for residents with a tax liability in the 2020 tax year, provided that they filed state returns for both 2020 and 2021. Single tax filers qualify for funds up to $250, heads of household up to $375 and couples filing jointly up to $500.

    Most of the funds were sent via check or direct deposit in August, although the state has advised that “it may take some time for all refunds to be processed.” Residents can still receive these checks if they haven’t yet filed a 2021 tax return.

    More information about refund eligibility is provided on the state’s Department of Revenue website.

    Hawaii

    In June, Gov. David Ige announced one-time tax refunds for Hawaii residents, the total of which varies based on their income for the 2021 tax year. 

    Single filers who earned less than $100,000, or couples who earned less than $200,000, will receive $300 each. The benefit also applies to dependents, which means that a family of four would receive $1,200. Taxpayers who earned $100,000 or more, or couples who earned $200,000 or more, will receive $100 each, which also applies to dependents.  

    Funds were sent out by Sept. 12, either as a mailed check or through direct deposit. A government website provides more details.

    Idaho

    Earlier this month, Gov. Brad Little signed a new bill into law that redirects a state tax surplus into bonus rebates for residents who filed income taxes for both the 2020 and 2021 tax years, according to the Idaho Press.

    The bonus rebate is $300 for individual filers and $600 for joint filers, or 10% of income taxes paid for 2020, whichever is greater. This is in addition to another tax rebate from earlier this year, which pays out $75 per taxpayer and each dependent, or 12% of income taxes paid, whichever is greater. 

    While most of the rebate checks from earlier this year have been mailed out already, the newer bonus checks are currently being processed. To receive the rebates, residents must file their 2020 and 2021 tax returns by Dec. 31, 2022. Idaho’s state tax commission website has more details.

    Illinois

    As part of the state’s $1.8 billion family relief plan, this month residents began to receive one-time income tax rebates totaling $50 for single filers who earned less than $200,000 in 2021 and $100 for joint filers who earned less than $400,000 in 2021. Tax filers also receive $100 per dependent, for a maximum of three dependents.

    Payouts will be either direct deposit or a mailed check. More information about eligibility can be found on the Illinois Revenue website.

    There’s an additional rebate worth up to $300 for homeowners if their gross income does not exceed $500,000 for joint filers or $250,000 for all other returns, per a press release announcing the funding.

    Payments were sent by mail or through direct deposit beginning Sept. 12, but it will take roughly eight weeks for everyone to receive the funds, according to NBC Chicago. The state has a website where you can check the status of either rebate.

    Indiana

    As part of the state’s automatic taxpayer refund law, single and joint tax filers for tax year 2020 will receive one-time rebates of $125 and $250, respectively, regardless of income.

    Most residents received these funds earlier this summer via direct deposit or mailed check. However, payments sent by mail are still experiencing delays related to supply chain issues.

    In August, the Indiana legislature passed another round of rebates amounting to $200 for single filers and $400 for joint filers. Because of this, residents might receive a mailed check for combined payments, totaling $325 for individuals or $650 for married couples filing jointly.

    More information can be found on the state auditor’s website.

    Maine

    Full-year residents who file a 2021 tax return by Oct. 31, 2022 qualify for $850 relief checks mailed to their homes. Eligibility is limited to those who make $100,000 or less for single filers, $150,000 or less for heads of household and $200,000 or less for couples filing jointly.

    The first round of relief checks were mailed in June 2022, but checks are being sent out until the end of the year. More information can be found on the Office of Gov. Janet Mills’ website.

    Massachusetts

    Last week, Gov. Charlie Baker announced that tax rebate checks will be sent to full-year residents who file a 2021 tax return on or before Oct. 17, 2022. The checks are automatic rebates based on state law and will likely be worth 13% of each resident’s 2021 income tax liability.

    However, this is a preliminary estimate that will be finalized in late October. The funds will be automatically sent to residents sometime in November through direct deposit or by mail.

    A state website provides more information, as well as a calculator to estimate what the rebate might be.

    New Jersey

    If you haven’t yet filed a 2020 tax return, you can still qualify for New Jersey’s Middle Class Tax Rebate program, which offers a tax credit worth up to $500 for each child under 6. To qualify, residents must claim at least one dependent child and have a 2020 tax balance of $1 or more. More information can be found on the State Treasury’s website.

    In June, Gov. Phil Murphy announced rebates for property taxes and rent. Homeowners earning less than $150,000 will receive a $1,500 rebate on their property taxes, while those earning between $150,000 and $250,000 will receive $1,000.

    Renters earning up to $150,000 will receive $450 checks. However, these rebates will not be paid out until spring of next year, with details on how to apply coming later this fall, per NJ.com.

    New Mexico

    There are a couple of tax rebates available to New Mexico residents. For 2021 tax filers, an automatic rebate of $500 was sent in July to joint filers and heads of household who earned less than $150,000. A $250 rebate was sent to single filers who earned less than $75,000. 

    Another refundable rebate for all residents followed in August. The second disbursement has no income thresholds, with single filers receiving $500 and joint filers and heads of household receiving $1,000. No action is needed, as residents receive these payments automatically by direct deposit or check.

    New Mexico residents can still claim both of these credits if they haven’t yet filed a 2021 tax return, according to New Mexico’s Taxation and Revenue website.

    New York

    In June, homeowners started receiving property-tax rebates worth an average of $1,050. The average benefit in New York City is about $425, according to a press release announcing the funding.

    To be eligible for this credit, New York residents need to qualify for the 2022 School Tax Relief (STAR) program, have income below $250,000 for the 2020 tax year and have a school tax liability for the 2022-2023 school year that is more than their 2022 STAR benefit. More information about eligibility can be found on the state’s Department of Taxation and Finance website.

    In late August, New York City Mayor Eric Adams signed legislation to provide a one-time property tax rebate of up to $150 to hundreds of thousands of eligible New York City homeowners.

    To be eligible for the rebate, the property must be your primary residence and your annual income must be less than or equal to $250,000 for the 2020 tax year. More information on how to apply can be found on the city government’s website. 

    Pennsylvania

    As of September, low-income homeowners enrolled in Pennsylvania’s Property Tax Rent/Rebate program will receive a one-time tax rebate. To be eligible, homeowners must be 65 and older, widows and widowers 50 and older or people with disabilities 18 and older.

    This bonus rebate follows a previous rebate that recipients claimed in 2021. The new rebate will be sent in September, amounting to 70% of the original. That means a claimant who received a maximum standard rebate of $650 in 2021 will receive an additional one-time bonus rebate of $455, according to a government website FAQ.

    It’s not too late to claim both rebates: The deadline for the first disbursement has been extended to Dec. 31, 2022. To make a claim for either rebate, visit myPATH, the Department of Revenue’s online filing system. 

    South Carolina

    As part of a tax cuts bill, South Carolina residents who have a tax liability in their 2021 returns will receive a rebate worth up to $700. That amount is an estimate: The actual maximum amount will be calculated by the state’s department of revenue sometime after Oct. 17.

    Funds will be sent by Dec. 31, 2022, but no sooner than Oct. 17, which is the deadline to claim the rebate.

    The money will be delivered via mailed check or direct deposit. A more detailed explanation can be found on South Carolina’s Department of Revenue website. 

    Virginia

    To “help families lower the cost of living,” Gov. Glenn Youngkin recently announced that Virginia residents with a tax liability in 2021 are eligible to receive a one-time rebate of $250 for single filers and $500 for joint filers.

    To receive the rebate, residents must file their 2021 tax returns by Nov. 1. Residents who filed their tax returns by July 1 should receive their rebate via direct deposit or mailed check by Oct. 31. Residents with tax returns filed between July 1 and Nov. 1 should receive their rebate within four months of their file date.

    This post was originally published on Basic Income Today.

  • Opinion: Implementation of a basic income grant could help eliminate the need for ‘black tax’

    By: Cuba Houghton

    See original post here.

    The necessity of a black tax would in many ways be alleviated by a basic income grant. The benefits of BIGs extend beyond income assistance, resulting in increased labour market participation, women empowerment and increased feelings of self-worth and dignity.

    Upon earning a regular income for the first time, I wrestled with the idea that all I made was mine to spend. In part, this was due to the financial struggles my family was enduring, which created a sense of duty to contribute to monthly expenses. It also came from a culture that promoted remittances “back to the village” or to caregivers by those in families who had moved to the city and made a life for themselves.

    Following some research, I discovered the term “black tax” — broadly referring to financial support given to relatives or dependants on a regular basis, outside of their living expenses. The term originated from a racial dynamic imprinted in the apartheid history of South Africa.

    Along racial lines, the apartheid government forced millions of South Africans out of economically productive areas, towards their so-called “homelands”. As a result, migrant workers left their families in search of work elsewhere. Once work was found, they would send money and goods back to their rural households to support their impoverished relatives, creating a culture of remittance dependence that still lingers in society several decades later.

    The vast majority of these families were black. Today, the term “black tax” is used in communities of colour across the world to describe this system of remittance, with particular emphasis on the idea that the familial obligation imposes a “tax” on one’s income.

    From an African communalist standpoint, the idea of a black tax is not too odd. Based on tradition, one could argue that it is simply one way that we contribute to the community of people that raised us, ensuring a cycle of progress — especially in families scarred by economic imbalance. This is in line with the ethic of ubuntu, which envisions the identity of an individual as inseparable from his/her community and vice versa.

    From a more Western, individualist perspective, however, interpretations of black tax as a burden instead of a progressive tool would seem more fair.

    Regardless, the history of black tax has seen it evolve to address the challenges of generational poverty and inequality across many African communities. Worldviews aside, the prevalence of “black taxes” alongside other official redistributive mechanisms is not a symptom of a well-functioning and equal society.

    Restructuring income tax

    Within the African context, there are calls for more inclusive tax systems that take into account the different levels of financial responsibility held by income earners.

     Zenkosi Dyomfana, an investment manager at Investec, writes that “governments in many African countries fail their people by not using their taxes efficiently or appropriately to provide for people’s basic needs. Black tax then becomes a double tax on black professionals… they end up paying for the services that are supposedly provided for by government from the taxes they pay.

    For example, a recent study found that although the South African tax system provides tax credit for medical support, there are no provisions for deductions on private transfers to dependents or family. In fact, Section 23 (a) of the Income Tax Act explicitly prohibits deductions related to costs incurred in the “maintenance of the taxpayer, the taxpayer’s family or establishment”.

    The study goes on to argue that with regard to restructuring income tax, inspiration can be drawn from the American tax system. Two provisions in particular, Section 151(c) & Section 222 of the US Tax Code provide conditional tax credit for those providing income support and those paying tertiary education tuition for related dependants.

    Such provisions would be pivotal in the South African context, where many black South Africans bear more financial responsibility for the same amount of income than their white peers — owing in part to larger household sizes.

    Basic Income Grant

    In a recent working paper, the Social Policy Initiative (SPI) explores the alternative scenarios for financing a basic income grant (BIG) in South Africa. The paper comes amidst calls for a radically transformative plan to reduce poverty and income inequality and steer the economy away from its dystopian future. What would the implications of a BIG be for black tax?

    Intuitively, the more individual income people have, the less their dependence on family members to provide their livelihoods. In a sense, the institution of a BIG would shift the financial obligation implied by black tax from professionals in the black middle class, to the state.

    According to the SPI working paper, “the first (BIG) stimulus to the economy would cost 2.5% of a projected GDP of R21.8-trillion during the three-year implementation period. If a household discovered that it would cost 2.5% of income to eliminate black tax, it would pay the money without batting an eyelid.”

    While the obligation may still remain on these professionals, perhaps in its cultural form, the necessity of a black tax would in many ways be alleviated by a basic income grant. Research from pilot programmes around the world has shown that the benefit of BIGs extend beyond income assistance, also resulting in increased labour market participation, women empowerment and increased feelings of self-worth and dignity.

    However, the enjoyment of these benefits is contingent on the method of financing chosen for a BIG. Attempts to finance a BIG through higher taxes would simply nationalise black tax, as opposed to eliminating it. As SPI rightly suggests, more alternatives should be explored to this end.

    Given the current economic situation in South Africa, policy innovation is key to the alleviation of economic imbalance and its generational effects — as seen through the popularity of “black tax”. More effort must be placed into tax reform and discussions around new ideas like basic income support to achieve substantial and inclusive change for the nation at large. DM

    _______________________

    About the Author: Cuba Houghton is a research intern at the Social Policy Initiative (SPI) and a final year Economics student at the University of the Witwatersrand. He writes in his personal capacity.

    This post was originally published on Basic Income Today.

  • White House and Senate Democrats eye child tax credit Hail Mary

    By: Hans Nichols

    The White House is engaging with Senate Democrats about making one last push for an enhanced child tax credit this year — and in return for GOP votes, may dangle support for corporate tax credits for research and development that expired last year, Axios has learned.

    Why it matters: Some Democrats see a year-end legislative horse-trade as their last chance to enshrine some version of President Biden’s enhanced child tax credit into law before Republicans take one — or both — chambers of Congress.

    • A compromise package would require 60 votes in the Senate, meaning that at least 10 Republicans would need to support it without any Democratic defections.
    • In response to the Supreme Court decision on Roe v. Wade, some Republican senators, including Mitt Romney (R-Utah) and Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), have been floating pro-family policies, including a cheaper and less expansive version of Biden’s child tax credit.

    But, but, but: A Hail Mary tax package would face not only a ticking congressional clock but also potential opposition from Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) — who may not be willing to support more deficit spending.

    Context: Republicans and Manchin let Biden’s one-year child tax credit, which provided families with up to $3,600 per child, expire at the end of 2021.

    • After some discussions about lowering the income caps and including it in a slimmed-down version of Build Back Better, the tax credit ultimately didn’t make it into the Inflation Reduction Act that Biden signed into law in August.
    • To lower the costs of his 2017 corporate tax cuts, President Trump covered only four years of the R&D credits, putting an expiration date on tax incentives that had long been in place for corporations.
    • Republicans were banking on a future Congress to extend them, but 2021 passed without any action and they lapsed. Business groups have been looking for opportunities all year to restore them.

    Driving the news: Biden officials have been in quiet conversations with Democratic senators, including Sen. Michael Bennet (D-Colo.) — one of the child tax credit’s main champions — to discuss how to get a deal.

    • “It is a priority for the White House and it’s absolutely a priority for me,” Bennet told Axios. “We should have never allowed it to sunset, and I think we can find a way at the end of the year.”
    • “I would be very reluctant for us to extend things like the R&D tax credit for business enterprises, without extending this important tax cut for working families,” he said. “And I hope we can come to an agreement on that.”

    The big picture: Congress will return to Washington after November’s election for a lame-duck session, in which funding the government, and potentially a debt-ceiling package, will be atop the agenda.

    • But taking action on a child tax credit is clearly a priority for Democrats, who feel they have found a potential point of leverage over Republicans, according to Business Insider.

    Between the lines: If Democrats retain control of both chambers — and pad their majority in the Senate — there will be less urgency to fiddle with the tax code this year.

    • Biden will want to use a potential 2023 budget reconciliation package to revive many of his Build Back Better priorities that were vetoed by Manchin.
    • The Senate’s initial $3.5 trillion dollar legislation, with fresh funding to dramatically expand the social safety net, was ultimately trimmed to a $740 billion package that only included new money for climate, health care and the IRS.

    What they’re saying: “I’ve got a proposal that has a good deal of support on our side of the aisle,” Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) told Axios. “I have not really socialized it yet on the other side of the aisle.”

    • “I’ve had conversations with the White House,” Romney said. “They say they have interest and we’d like to chat about it.”
    • “Would I like there to be a deal? Absolutely,” said Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.). “I think they are both good policies.”
    • “I am for both the child tax credit and I’m for the R&D,” said Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), chair of the Senate Finance Committee.
    • “We’re simply not going to help business, help big corporations, without helping the child tax credit,” said Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio). “This administration is full in on this.”

    Be smart: Bennet, who is facing a stiff challenge from moderate Republican Joe O’Dea, would love to have movement on the child tax credit before the election to help motivate his progressive base.

    • But he’s realistic about the short-term prospects: “I don’t think plausibly it will be done before my election,” he said.

    This post was originally published on Basic Income Today.

  • 5 ways South Africa could fund a basic income grant – and why Treasury doesn’t want to hear any of it

    See original article here.

    South Africa’s National Treasury has voiced its opposition to a campaign by the Department of Social Development and civil rights groups for stipends to be paid to millions of the country’s poorest citizens on a permanent basis.

    Extending a temporary R350 monthly grant that was introduced in 2020 to shield the vulnerable against the fallout from the coronavirus pandemic would cost at least R50 billion a year, the Treasury said in a document, which was penned ahead of next month’s medium-term budget policy statement and seen by Bloomberg.

    The only way to secure the money would be to raise taxes, incur new debt or reallocate funds, and none of those options were desirable, it said.

    The Treasury refused to comment on the document because discussions on the 26 October budget update are still ongoing. These are its potential options for raising additional revenue and why it doesn’t favour any of them:

    Raise personal taxes

    The document outlines several scenarios for increasing the personal income tax take, by raising the marginal rates and not adjusting tax brackets to account for inflation.

    But individuals in South Africa already pay more personal income tax than their counterparts in peer countries, Australia and the UK, and increasing their burden would further erode the country’s competitiveness.

    Furthermore, previous tax increases didn’t yield as much revenue as anticipated, failed to narrow the budget deficit and may have hampered economic growth, the Treasury said.

    Levy a wealth tax

    South Africa already taxes wealth indirectly by imposing estate duty, donations tax and other levies.

    While a new wealth tax may help reduce inequality, in practice, such measures raise limited revenue, are expensive and difficult to administer, and often lead to capital flight and discourage savings and investment, the Treasury said.

    Increase value-added tax

    VAT is the most reliable source of revenue and from a purely macroeconomic standpoint, increasing the rate would have a less detrimental effect on economic growth and employment than raising personal income tax, according to the Treasury.

    It estimates that raising the rate by two percentage points to 17% could generate R49.4 billion, although the measure may be somewhat inflationary in the short term. Labour unions have fiercely opposed VAT increases in the past, arguing that the poor are most negatively impacted.

    Take on new debt

    The Treasury is adamant that increasing the state’s debt burden, which currently stands at R4.2 trillion and costs about R306 billion annually to service, is a terrible idea. “Debt-service costs have become a binding constraint on the fiscus,” are the single-largest item of spending and are growing at a faster rate than gross domestic product, it said.

    Re-prioritize funds

    A number of projects across a range of government departments could be terminated or scaled back, but the potential saving would only amount to R21.2 billion, according to the Treasury.

    Delaying capital projects provides the biggest scope for reallocation — about R12.8 billion may potentially be realized. Another R2.4 billion could be saved by ending a peacekeeping mission in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

    While consideration could be given to merging some departments with similar mandates and doing away with others, the state may incur additional legal costs and administrative charges and have to give severance pay to those who lose their jobs, the Treasury said.

    This post was originally published on Basic Income Today.

  • COVID-19 Relief Spending Pushed Poverty To Record Low In 2021

    By: Arthur Delaney

    WASHINGTON — Poverty fell to a new low last year thanks to new federal spending passed in response to the coronavirus pandemic, according to new federal data released Tuesday.

    Extra unemployment benefits, stimulus checks and a monthly child allowance helped push the poverty rate to 7.8% in 2021, according to an annual Census Bureau poverty measure that accounts for tax benefits and stimulus payments. The rate had been 9.1% in 2020.

    The monthly child benefit slashed child poverty to 5.2%. Both the overall and child poverty figures are the lowest on record, officials said.

    “Refundable tax credits, including the child tax credit, kept 9.6 million people out of poverty in 2021,” the Census Bureau’s Liana Fox told reporters on Tuesday.

    Democrats included the various relief policies in a $1.9 trillion bill called the American Rescue Plan, which passed Congress on a party-line basis in March 2021. The bill represented Democrats’ vision of a more humane political economy that better supports parents and laid-off workers.

    The bill provided $1,400 stimulus checks to most Americans, added $300 to weekly unemployment benefits, and gave parents as much as $300 per minor child each month from July through December.

    Republicans pilloried the Rescue Plan as too much spending on an economy that was already improving, and they have blamed it for the record price inflation that has tanked consumer sentiment this year.

    Economists have said that yes, the bill did contribute to inflation, though there’s an ongoing debate over how much prices would have risen anyway due to pandemic-related supply chain problems.

    The Census Bureau’s “official” poverty measure, which doesn’t factor expenses, omits key sources of income, and fails to account for geographical differences in costs such as rent, showed a slight increase last year from 11.4% to 11.6%, which officials said was not a statistically significant change. Though it’s outdated as a poverty measure, the federal government uses the official threshold — $27,740 for a family of four last year — to set eligibility for various federal programs, such as food benefits.

    Democrats celebrated early estimates suggesting that their temporary changes to the child tax credit, which provided monthly payments to parents in the second half of last year, produced a record decline in child poverty. Still, inflation has remained a top concern for voters.

    But Tuesday’s release from the Census Bureau showed that early estimates showing a sharp drop in child poverty were right. The supplemental poverty measure, which accounts for tax benefits, showed that child poverty declined from 9.7% in 2020 to 5.2% last year, the decline resulting almost entirely from the six rounds of monthly payments.

    “It is pretty stunning,” Indivar Dutta-Gupta, president of the Center for Law and Social Policy, said in an interview.

    “This was obviously a very well designed and targeted program if your goal was to keep kids out of poverty.”

    The Census Bureau has only published its supplemental poverty rate since 2009, but experts at the liberal Center on Budget and Policy Priorities and the Columbia Center on Poverty and Social Policy have said the 2021 child rates would still be the lowest on record according to their analysis of historical data.

    The vast majority of American families automatically received the child tax credit payments as advance monthly checks from the IRS starting last July, even if they had little or no income and therefore no federal tax burden.

    “We knew that this was the greatest policy impacting levels of child poverty in the nation’s history,” Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) told HuffPost on Tuesday.

    “It’s an extraordinary breakthrough.”

    But the lack of an income requirement ― the same thing that made the policy so effective at reducing child poverty ― proved an insurmountable political obstacle. Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) refused to go along with a planned continuation of the payments last December, complaining to his colleagues that his constituents told him parents wasted the money on drugs.

    Democrats have said they may try to negotiate with Republicans to revive the monthly benefit in some form, though such a deal is unlikely to come together anytime soon. Republicans, for their part, didn’t have much to say about low child poverty last year.

    “You can always end poverty by taking money and just giving it to people that are poor, which is a nice thing to do, but not going to solve the problem long term,” Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) told HuffPost.

    Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.) answered a question about child poverty by talking about inflation. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported Tuesday that inflation had once again risen in August.

    “Three-quarters of families say they are stressed by inflation under Biden and the Democrats, which is why we’re going to continue to talk about that,” Barrasso said.

    This post was originally published on Basic Income Today.

  • Homeless People Need Homes — and Money, Too

    Analysis by Francis Wilkinson | Bloomberg

    Many affluent and dynamic North American cities share a great flaw: high levels of homelessness. But its prevalence in Vancouver is especially striking.

    That’s partly because homelessness is both a serious and highly visible problem in Vancouver, where I’ve lived for short periods in recent years and visited last month. And it’s partly because I expect, perhaps naively in this case, to see a higher level of commitment to collective well-being (and less resort to punitive catharsis) in Canada than typically exists in the US.

    Like other cities, including Toronto, Vancouver has deployed many strategies to address the problem, from a focus on health care and drug treatment to temporary modular housing and tiny shelters for the homeless. There was a foreign buyer’s tax and an empty homes tax. There was an investigation into whether money laundering and corruption were behind the persistent rise of Vancouver real-estate values.

    Currently there are proposals to change the property tax structure and to grant incentives for high-density housing. And one community organization is actually handing out cash, no strings attached, to carefully screened homeless people and tracking their progress.

    But the problem persists, with small encampments on downtown sidewalks and one neighborhood — Downtown Eastside — that has for years been inundated with homelessness and high incidences of mental illness and drug abuse. Other cities have more homeless people, but few have such a high concentration as Vancouver does in the Downtown Eastside, where hundreds of people, many in obvious distress, occupy sidewalk space. The area around East Hastings Street may be the most chaotic city blocks I have seen in North America.

    ***

    In the US, leaders in many stereotypically liberal cities have lately made a show of frustration with their own homeless citizens and the encampments where many congregate. In December, for example, San Francisco Mayor London Breed implicitly linked homelessness and crime when, in an address about a promised anti-crime initiative, she cited rampant homelessness, including people living in tents. “We are past the point where what we see is even remotely acceptable,” Breed said.

    San Francisco is more of a leading indicator than an outlier.

    Los Angeles, Portland, Seattle and others have also clamped down on homeless camps this year, and the political rhetoric has grown more harsh.

    Vancouver has the profile of a homelessness incubator. It consistently has the highest rents in Canada (more than C$2,200, or  about $1,671) for a one bedroom) and the housing supply is notoriously limited, not only by economics and development trends but by the water and mountains that encircle the city. Wealth abounds: Single-family homes, of which there are many, in nice neighborhoods, of which there are also many, go for millions.

    The city seems to confirm the thesis that homelessness is driven first and foremost by the high costs and inadequate supply of housing. So I was surprised when I sat down with a longtime activist in Vancouver who wanted to focus attention on other factors.

    Heather Hay is the acting CEO of Foundations for Social Change, a nonprofit organization currently running a pilot program that provides cash transfers to 200 homeless people in Vancouver. (The group is also following a control group of another 200.) The project grew out of a smaller test of cash transfers that yielded positive results.

    “My background is working with marginalized populations,” said Hay, a registered nurse who led a health and safety initiative for 15 years in the Downtown Eastside. “In Vancouver, when everybody thinks of homelessness, they think of the Downtown Eastside.” 

    When Hay’s organization began looking for potential clients for cash transfers, they screened for a range of issues. “We were looking for individuals who had no complex mental health issues, no misuse of drugs or alcohol and no significant gambling issues,” she said. In other words, people who could “make appropriate decisions for themselves.”

    Hay likened screening the homeless population to searching for a needle in a haystack. “When they did the pilot project, they interviewed over 780 people to get a sample size of 115,” she said. The vast majority of interviewees failed to meet the criteria because the Downtown Eastside, she said, is “over-representative of people with complex mental health and addiction issues.”

    Vancouver’s point-in-time count in March 2020 found almost 2,100 homeless in the city, with almost half in the Downtown Eastside. Many outside the Downtown Eastside don’t exhibit the kind of behaviors that are prevalent there. Even so, Hay remains skeptical that the much-vaunted “housing first” approach can actually solve homelessness. “In the pilot project, many of our participants were working three or four jobs, and the reason they defaulted to the street was because they lost one of those jobs. Or else it was because their car didn’t work, and it was a huge expense,” she said. “For some populations, we need to give people money.”

    Of course, lack of money for rent is one way a lack of money manifests itself. In an expensive city, the resulting struggle leads to people “white knuckling it on the edge,” Hay said. The more time a person spends unhoused following a financial or other setback, the more likely they are to fall prey to mental illness, drugs or alcohol.

    “So I think, yeah, we could throw housing at this problem,” Hay said. “But I don’t think housing is going to address the overarching issue.”

    ***

    Gregg Colburn is an assistant professor of real estate at the University of Washington, a post he obtained after he made a mid-career shift from high-level finance to academia. His view of homelessness is clear from the declarative title of a book he co-authored: “Homelessness is a Housing Problem: How Structural Factors Explain U.S. Patterns.”

    “When you look at regional variation and rates of homelessness, the places with high rates of homelessness don’t have more poor people. They don’t have more people who are addicted. They don’t have more people who are mentally ill,” Colburn said.

    Colburn’s argument about homelessness has the same basic parameters as a familiar analysis of American exceptionalism in firearm homicide rates. Europe, for example, doesn’t have fewer people with mental illness than the US. It generally doesn’t have lower rates of nonviolent crime. What Europe has are fewer guns; that’s why it has less gun violence.

    Colburn similarly points out that many troubled cities have worse problems than L.A., Seattle, Vancouver and the other cosmopolitan places with high rates of homelessness. But what those troubled cities don’t have, Colburn said, is a housing crunch.

    Seattle doesn’t have a homelessness problem because we have more people who are mentally ill. Now, is mental illness a cause of homelessness? Sure it is. But there are mentally ill people in Detroit and Chicago and West Virginia and Arkansas and all these places. And they don’t have near the problem that we have.

    And when you think about drugs, the places with some of the most acute drug problems in the United States, like Arkansas and West Virginia, where the opioid epidemic has just ravaged communities, they don’t have homelessness problems. And so if drugs are really the big driver here, we should see a massive homeless population in Arkansas and West Virginia. We don’t. In fact, there are really, really low rates of homelessness. 

    Low-income residents of Seattle have no margin for error in the relentless struggle to afford rent. If the car breaks down, or they have an extended illness, they could be sunk. Climbing back into the ranks of the housed is also more difficult.

    “The other problem is the vacancy rates are just razor thin,” Colburn said. “Even if you might have some resources, if you lose your housing, finding another place is really, really hard. So it doesn’t take a lot for someone to be in an OK place, lose a job, have an unexpected expense, lose their housing, and then pretty soon they’re in the system and, you know, getting out of that system’s really hard.”

    To Colburn, the distinction between Seattle and cities with high poverty rates is telling.

    Detroit has the highest poverty rate in the country by far. Cleveland has very high poverty rates. St. Louis, Baltimore — all those places have really high rates of poverty, meaning the percentage of people below the federal poverty line. And they have very, very low rates of homelessness. Seattle and San Francisco are two of the most affluent cities in the country. So are there poor people in Seattle? Sure there are. But as a percentage of the total population, the percentage of people below the federal poverty line in Seattle and San Francisco is really, really low, right? In fact, we have relatively few poor people. But the consequences of being poor in a market like this are really severe. That’s fundamentally the problem.

    Creating more affordable housing is difficult — at least it appears to be based on mostly meager results in all sorts of places. As my colleague Justin Fox points out, Minneapolis recently relaxed its single-family zoning laws to encourage the kind of medium-density construction that housing activists applaud. The rule change has not yet produced much in the way of actual housing, however.

    ***

    Handing people cash to support themselves may be a more promising route. But if the Foundations for Social Change pilot program is any indication, it’s also highly dependent on the kind of people who receive the cash.

    I asked Hay what her ideal menu of policies would be. None was very shocking. Legalize drugs in order to eliminate the criminal incentives endemic to homeless groups of people, she said. Or provide the kind of comprehensive “therapeutic community” that could help some of the regulars around the Downtown Eastside to escape their trauma.

    In one previous incarnation of Vancouver policy, Hay recalled, housing was provided to homeless individuals along with varied levels of services, ranging from comprehensive “Cadillac” social services to basic housing. “The folks that were in the Cadillac, with the highest level of support, absolutely fared better, and had more sustainability to be able to move on,” she said. “Just putting the control group in place, in housing, didn’t accomplish much.”

    One thing she knows from countless conversations with homeless people, she said, is that many wish to be elsewhere. “We know that a lot of people don’t want to be there. So why don’t we ask them, ‘Where do you want to be?’ and help them move where they want to be in some kind of supportive housing?”

    Ultimately, Hay said, improving the situation is a matter of public will. “Why don’t we just have a policy that is zero tolerance for homelessness?” she asked. “Instead of enabling and continuing, we could just adopt a policy.”

    Hay’s suggestion sounds both simplistic and impractical. But she may be articulating the only course with a chance of lasting success.

    Canada does a vastly better job preventing gun violence than the US does not because it brings more financial resources to bear but because it has more social, moral and political capital devoted to making sure its people are not targets. It has, in effect, zero tolerance for gun violence. The US, by contrast, has an exceedingly high tolerance for gun violence — and eight times the per capita firearm deaths that its neighbor has. If Canada cared as much about reducing homelessness as it cares about preventing gun violence, then Americans might have something else to envy about their neighbors to the north.

    This post was originally published on Basic Income Today.

  • The BIG fix: Basic income will grow South Africa’s ailing economy

    By: Duma Gqubule

    See original article here.

    South Africa is in an economic policy cul-de-sac. The government is committed to austerity policies and will not spend more money because it believes public debt is too high. But the idea that South Africa’s 70% debt to gross domestic product ratio is too high is propaganda and fiction. 

    Even if it was too high, a national budget does not operate like a household budget. Austerity is a self-defeating policy because it reduces GDP growth, the bottom part of the debt ratio. It is the cause of a rising debt ratio.     

    Economists have forecast GDP growth of 1.5% a year between this year and 2026. On this trajectory, South Africa would have a second “lost decade” between 2020 and 2030. The number of unemployed people would increase to 17-million. The unemployment rate would increase to more than 50%. 

    Between 2009 and 2019, South Africa had a “lost decade” during which GDP per capita did not grow. By 2030, the beloved country would be an economic wasteland with unbearable levels of political and social instability.

    According to Keynesian economics 101, the private sector cannot invest if there is no demand for the goods and services produced. 

    In May, large industrial companies were using only 77.2% of their capacity. The major reason was “insufficient demand”, according to a Statistics South Africa survey. If one extends this to the R6.1-trillion economy, the spare capacity of 22.8% was equivalent to R1.4-trillion. 

    The only way to get out of this cul-de-sac is for the government to spend more money on the economy — the difference between the forecast growth rate of 1.5% and an ideal target of at least 6% GDP growth. Since infrastructure projects and industrial policies take time to implement, the quickest way to spend new money and reach 6% GDP growth is to implement a basic income grant (BIG). The BIG is primarily a macroeconomic policy issue, although it could eliminate income poverty in three years. 

    First, the point of the grant is that it must be large enough to take us to the 6% GDP growth rate. For this reason, there should be a BIG for adults (aged 18 to 59) and children. After escalating the 2021 poverty line by 5% a year, the BIG would be at the food poverty line of R655 a month during the first year, the lower poverty line of R982 a month during the second year and the upper poverty line of R1 546 a month during the third year.

    Therefore, a budget-neutral or fully funded BIG, with new taxes to finance it, is a dumb idea and does not make sense in the context of an economy that needs a large stimulus to propel it onto a new growth path. New taxes, depending on which ones are selected, can withdraw money from the economy and reduce the size of the stimulus as well as the efficacy of fiscal policy.

    We can tax the top 1% because they don’t spend most of their money. But such taxes would be to reduce inequality, not to finance a BIG. To maximise the economic stimulus, there must be no new taxes on 99% of South Africans.

    Second, the BIG must be as inclusive as possible and have few administrative hurdles to prevent people from receiving it. It makes no sense to try to make the BIG smaller by excluding people because it defeats the purpose of achieving a 6% GDP growth rate. In a new policy brief, the Institute for Economic Justice reviewed proposals by the presidency and the treasury to replace the R350 a month social relief of distress grant with a new system of grants for the working-age population. The bizarre proposals, which could be announced during the medium term budget policy statement on 26 October, would significantly reduce the number of beneficiaries of the social relief of distress grant and introduce stringent means tests. They include targeting so only certain people the unemployed and households or families can receive them.

    The onerous conditions of receiving the new grants include requiring beneficiaries to prove that they are actively seeking work by registering for public employment programmes and job matching databases and showing that a spouse does not receive an income. But public employment programmes reach few of the 12.3-million unemployed people because of limited budget allocations. There are 6.6 million profiles on job-matching data-bases but the economy only created 793,000 jobs between the fourth quarter of 2008 and the second quarter of this year. The proposals are unimplementable. For example, it would take years to develop a register of households.

    Third, there is a self-financing element to the BIG. The presidency and the treasury must understand the difference between the gross and net costs of implementing a BIG. More than 50% of the gross cost would flow back to the government after considering VAT, a clawback from taxpayers and additional tax revenue from the economic stimulus.

    Finally, nothing is affordable within the context of the current macroeconomic policy framework of austerity where new spending requires increases in taxes or cuts to other programmes. This results in a downward spiral of endless cycles of budget cuts, lower GDP growth, lower tax revenues and more budget cuts.

    The BIG can only be sustainable within the context of a new macroeconomic policy framework that has a 6% GDP growth target that is binding on the treasury and the Reserve Bank. After providing the first stimulus to the economy during the three year implementation phase of the BIG, there must be additional macroeconomic policy levers to lock in the higher GDP growth rate.

    A second stimulus must increase the budget which is allocated to public employment programmes, which must be amalgamated under a new institution that has the capacity to provide up to five-million jobs in five years.

    In practice, the new institution would create the residual number of jobs that cannot be created through higher GDP growth and increased spending on infrastructure and industrial policies.

    The basic income grant is primarily a macroeconomic policy issue, although it could eliminate income poverty in three years.

    _____________________

    About the author: Duma Gqubule is a financial journalist, analyst, researcher and adviser on issues of economic development and transformation

    This post was originally published on Basic Income Today.

  • The National Education Health and Allied Workers’ Union adds its voice to the calls for basic income in South Africa

    See original article here.

    The National Education Health and Allied Workers’ Union, NEHAWU, says it supports calls for the introduction of a universal basic income grant.

    The labour union says the grant will go a long way in addressing social and economic crises affecting the youth and women of South Africa in particular. NEHAWU made its position known on the matter, in a statement referred to as a special note, ahead of the 36th anniversary of labour federation Cosatu, which was formed in December 1995 and of which NEHAWU is an affiliate.

    National spokesperson of NEHAWU, Lwazi Nkolonzi, says the union is calling on government to make sure that the current SDR [social relief of distress] grant that is in place is made permanent, and that it is converted into the universal basic income grant.

    “How the government ought to do this, for example, is to increase the current SDR to above poverty line of R650, or make it R450.”

    “In this way, you’re going to be able to address challenges of poverty, unemployment, and inequality,” adds Nkolonzi.

    This post was originally published on Basic Income Today.

  • South Africa’s Treasury Proposes to Increase Poverty Instead of Introduce Basic Income

    See original article here.

    South Africa is facing a dire socio-economic crisis with widespread poverty, persistent and high unemployment and growing hunger. While its value is grossly inadequate and there have been myriad problems with its administration, the R350 Covid-19 SRD grant has played a critical role in providing support to some of the most vulnerable people who bear the brunt of this crisis and have not previously been eligible for income support. 

    Instead of steps to make this permanent and progressively scale it up, National Treasury has prepared regressive and unworkable proposals that seek to exclude many, if not the majority, of its current recipients. This threatens the livelihoods of millions of people. This is apparent in a set of proposals from Treasury and Presidency that have come to light. While there are connections between the two proposals, they also differ substantially. As assessed in a detailed memo released by the IEJ today  the proposals, particularly by Treasury, are deeply problematic,  both in terms of the underlying logic and subsequent proposed design. 

    The Treasury proposals are opaque and convoluted, but clearly propose replacing the SRD with an overly complicated and highly exclusionary system.

    The proposals are underpinned by a logic of narrowing the grant beneficiaries as much as possible – that is excluding as many people as possible – and preferring non-income support interventions.

    The proposals separate poor people into three somewhat arbitrary and hard to distinguish categories (“extreme poor/multiple constraints”, “poor/some constraints”, “less poor/fewer constraints”) and then proposes a complex web of interventions dependent on the category. This includes the removal of income support entirely in the third category and, in the remaining two, the possible replacement of the SRD grant with a household grant or a jobseekers grant, adding yet another layer of conditionalities, many of which are nonsensical given South Africa’s context.

    There is a clear preference in the document for attaching income support to job-seeking conditionalities. This seems to draw largely from a 2021 World Bank proposal for replacing the SRD grant with a jobseekers’ grant aimed only at active jobseekers. This is highly problematic: 

    • It assumes that jobs exist in the economy for people to “seek”, ignoring the structural nature of South Africa’s persistent unemployment and the failure of existing job-seeking databases and skills development programmes to produce any real change. 
    • It rests on the fundamentally patronising and moralistic assumption that without such conditionalities, grants are likely to increase dependency and laziness; something which is not supported by any of the evidence from South Africa or globally. 
    • The attachment of such conditionalities adds an extensive layer of bureaucracy to the process of applying for the grant. This is both counterproductive and inefficient, as evidenced in the administration of the SRD since conditionalities were introduced in April 2022 that resulted in the exclusion of as many as 5 million previous SRD grant beneficiaries.   
    • The policy risks having perverse outcomes, for example, should the policy end up having a (shared) household grant for the “extreme poor” and a (individual) jobseeker grant for the “poor”, then those more in need receive less than those regarded as ‘less in need’. This categorisation also risks further stigmatisation of poor people. 

    The household grant is similarly problematic if it is to replace individual income support: 

    • In targeting household heads, not household members, it will radically reduce the number of beneficiaries, lessen the poverty-reducing impact of households pooling a number of individual grants, and limit the positive impact that social grants can have on women’s autonomy. In this it is fundamentally anti-poor. 
    • It is administratively burdensome to test for such complex conditionalities and poorly suited to the South African context where there is no single, fixed definition of a household, such a situation runs the risk of heightened corruption. 
    • This is no doubt why a previous Treasury proposal for this grant failed to gain support in government and garnered strong opposition by civil society. 

    In addition to a jobseekers’ grant, Treasury floats a highly-limited version of a possible ‘caregivers grant’. Treasury appears to support a version in which only those caring for children under the age of 2 qualify. Such a limitation radically alters the scope of the grant. There are approximately 7 million caregivers overall and 4 million who receive the SRD grant but only 1.5 million with children under 2 and in late pregnancy. A combined jobseekers’ grant (going to only Treasury’s ‘middle group’ category of 4.1 million jobseekers targeted for this grant) and caregivers’ grant could well be restricted to around 5.5 million beneficiaries, around half of the SRD grant beneficiaries in March 2022. 

    The preference for widespread exclusion is also present in Treasury’s extensive argumentation for why a continuation of the SRD grant, or variations thereof, are ‘unaffordable’, a position which privileges narrow fiscal considerations over human wellbeing. It rejects with superficial consideration a myriad of proposals that have shown ways in which the grant can be fiscally appropriate, through progressive financing. It also ignores the manner in which the grant would stimulate the economy boosting economic growth and creating a multiplier effect, in the process reducing the cost to government through increased revenue (including from VAT). Further, it is a profoundly political choice to channel large tax overruns (over R200 bn) to reducing debt rather than to extend income support to millions living in poverty and experiencing daily hunger.

    The Presidency document has, on the whole, a more realistic appraisal of various options, and takes a more detailed and thoughtful approach to wider issues. However it fails to fully follow through on the developmental aspects of its analysis. These aspects include: acknowledgement of the international evidence on the developmental value of grants; that the country needs immediate high-impact interventions which address the poverty crisis; and that employment strategies will only have an impact over the medium term. The logic of these elements, however, needs to be consolidated, extended, and better integrated into the proposed policies. For example, the policies do not follow through on the complementarity between grants and promotion of local economic activity, including self-employment and job-seeking. 

    Devastating implications

    The upshot of these proposals, if adopted, would be that millions of poor people – those who should be the primary target of cash transfer programmes like this – will be excluded from receiving support for the grant, either because they do not qualify or because the complexities of the system being imposed make it entirely inaccessible to them. 

    It is likely that these proposals are intended for incorporation into the MTBPS in October 2022 with timelines in the Presidency document signalling the intention to finalise the proposals by 9 September 2022. Worryingly, indications point to the unilateral role of Treasury, who have little expertise in this policy area, in deciding these policies despite them being opposed by the Department of Social Development, the entity responsible for, and with expertise in, social protection. 

    These developments should also be read in the context of the fact that the Presidency has reneged on commitments made in April 2022 to meet with the civil society coalition in preparation for a planned follow-up meeting with the President by the end June 2022.

    Indications are that these proposals have been developed over the last several months, and that the decision not to engage civil society was deliberate.

    This signals a lack of respect for democratic participation and makes a mockery of the President’s continual reference to social compacting. At this critical juncture in South Africa’s history and with the precarity of the current global economic situation, we cannot afford to embark on a regressive path which will exclude millions of the poor through unworkable and unconstitutional measures. This historical conjuncture gives us a unique opportunity to make transformative inroads in addressing poverty, something which has evaded the government post-apartheid.

    Representatives of the coalition have written to the Presidency today to express our strongest objections both to the contents of the proposals, and to the failure of government to engage with the coalition despite repeated undertakings to do so. The detailed memo analysing these documents was sent to Presidency, DSD, and Treasury with a proposal to urgently meet with the civil society coalition to provide feedback on these proposals; hear alternatives from the Coalition on pathways to basic income; and to make arrangements for a follow-up meeting with the President, following our successful meeting in January. 

    We will continue to pressurise for an urgent response to our demands, and will engage with a range of stakeholders and civil society actors, including unions, business, and community organisations, to explain our concerns with these dangerous proposals, and to mobilise for a clear pathway to the introduction of a fair and workable system of income support for all those who need it in South Africa.

    This post was originally published on Basic Income Today.

  • Psychologist believes we’ve been told devastating lies about mental health

    By: Sanah Ahsan

    We are living, we’re told, through a “mental health crisis”. Mental health services cannot cope with the explosion of demand over the past two years: 1.6 million people are on waiting lists, while another 8 million need help but can’t even get on these lists. Even children are showing up at A&E in despair, wanting to die.

    But there is another way to see this crisis – one that doesn’t place it firmly in the realm of the medical system. Doesn’t it make sense that so many of us are suffering? Of course it does: we are living in a traumatising and uncertain world. The climate is breaking down, we’re trying to stay on top of rising living costs, still weighted with grief, contagion and isolation, while revelations about the police murdering women and strip-searching children shatter our faith in those who are supposed to protect us.

    As a clinical psychologist who has been working in NHS services for a decade, I’ve seen first hand how we are failing people by locating their problems within them as some kind of mental disorder or psychological issue, and thereby depoliticising their distress. Will six sessions of CBT, designed to target “unhelpful” thinking styles, really be effective for someone who doesn’t know how they’re going to feed their family for another week? Antidepressants aren’t going to eradicate the relentless racial trauma a black man is surviving in a hostile workplace, and branding people who are enduring sexual violence with a psychiatric disorder (in a world where two women a week are murdered in their own home) does nothing to keep them safe. Unsurprisingly, mindfulness isn’t helping children who are navigating poverty, peer pressure and competitive exam-driven school conditions, where bullying and social media harm are rife.

    If a plant were wilting we wouldn’t diagnose it with “wilting-plant-syndrome” – we would change its conditions.

    Yet when humans are suffering under unliveable conditions, we’re told something is wrong with us, and expected to keep pushing through. To keep working and producing, without acknowledging our hurt.

    In efforts to destigmatise mental distress, “mental illness” is framed as an “illness like any other” – rooted in supposedly flawed brain chemistry. In reality, recent research concluded that depression is not caused by a chemical imbalance of the brain. Ironically, suggesting we have a broken brain for life increases stigma and disempowerment. What’s most devastating about this myth is that the problem and the solution are positioned in the person, distracting us from the environments that cause our distress.

    Individual therapy is brilliant for lots of people, and antidepressants can help some people cope. But I worry that a purely medicalised, individualised understanding of mental health puts plasters over big gaping wounds, without addressing the source of violence. They encourage us to adapt to systems, thereby protecting the status quo. It is here that we fail marginalised people the most: Black people’s understandable expressions of hurt at living in a structurally racist society are too often medicalised, labelled dangerous and met with violence under the guise of “care”. Black people are more likely to be Tasered, sectioned, restrained and over-medicated than anyone else in our mental health services today.

    The UK could learn a lot from liberation psychology. Founded in the 1980s by the Salvadorian activist and psychologist Ignacio Martín Baró, it argues that we cannot isolate “mental health problems” from our broader societal structures. Suffering emerges within people’s experiences and histories of oppression. Liberation psychology sees people not as patients, but potential social actors in the project of freedom, valuing their own lineages, creativity and experience, rather than being forced into a white, eurocentric and individualistic idea of therapy. It directly challenges the social, cultural and political causes of distress through collective social action.

    This framework makes complete sense when we hear that the pandemic in the UK has affected poor people’s mental health most. Does it mean wealthy, privileged white men don’t experience suffering? Of course they do. We’re still learning about the complicated ways these structural issues affect our everyday lives. For example, how the pressures of individualism and capitalism may lead to isolation and substance abuse, or how colonial violence towards immigrant families plays out within homes and on bodies.

    Let me be clear, I’m not saying people in distress should be out there on the picket line.

    Pain can be debilitating. But those of us who are supporting people in distress, such as mental health workers, have a key role in social transformation. Social action is the medicine that relieves people’s personal and collective distress.

    Instead of trying to change “mindsets” in therapy, we need to change race- and class-based hierarchies, the housing and economic system. Universal basic income has psychological benefits, and recent studies show how it improves the “crises of anxiety and depression”. As a clinical psychologist, some of my most powerful work has been not in the therapy room but in successfully advocating for secure housing for, or working in the community with, queer, black and brown facilitators in organisations such as Beyond Equality, to prevent gender-based violence. The network Psychologists for Social Change shows us a practical imagining of this work. We also need social change that is preventive, such as investing in young people and community-led services such as healing justice london and 4front. They work to shift trauma in marginalised communities through building social connectedness, social action and creativity, towards futures free of violence.

    None of this is to dismiss the value of one-on-one therapy (that’s part of my job, after all). But therapy must be a place where oppression is examined, where the focus isn’t to simply reduce distress, but to see it as a survival response to an oppressive world. And ultimately, I’d like to see a world where we need fewer therapists. A culture that reclaims and embraces each other’s madness. Where we take the courageous (and sometimes skin-crawling) risk of turning to each other in our understandable, messy pain.

    Meaningful structural transformation won’t happen overnight, though the pandemic taught us that big changes can happen pretty quickly. But change won’t happen without us: our distress might even be a sign of health – a telling indicator of where we can collectively resist the structures that are hurting so many of us.

    To return to the plant analogy – we must look at our conditions. The water might be a universal basic income, the sun safe, affordable housing and easy access to nature and creativity. Food could be loving relationships, community or social support services. The most effective therapy would be transforming the oppressive aspects of society causing our pain. We all need to take whatever support is available to help us survive another day. Life is hard. But if we could transform the soil, access sunlight, nurture our interconnected roots and have room for our leaves to unfurl, wouldn’t life be a little more livable?

    This post was originally published on Basic Income Today.

  • South Korea plans to provide every family with a newborn child a monthly allowance of $740 as ‘parent pay’

    By: Sam Kim

    South Korea plans to provide every family with a newborn child a monthly allowance of 1 million won ($740), in its latest move to encourage more births and try to address the world’s lowest fertility rate.

    The handout will begin next year at a level of 700,000 won a month and then rise to the full amount in 2024, according to a budget proposal unveiled this week. Once the child turns one, the stipend will be reduced by half and run for a further year.

    Dubbed locally as “parent pay,” the 1 million-won allowance was among a series of election campaign pledges by President Yoon Suk-yeol to address Korea’s dangerously low birth rate.

    Yoon, who took office in May, has described the demographic outlook as a national “calamity.”

    The expanded support for parents comes even as the nation shifts to a more stringent fiscal policy in order to rein in pandemic-era debt. The spending initiative on newborns underscores the urgency of tackling one of the nation’s greatest long-term risks.

    Under the previous administration of Moon Jae-in, who ran a more expansionary fiscal policy, each newborn child was provided with 300,000 won a month over their first year. That program will now be subsumed by Yoon’s.

    South Korea shattered its own fertility record in 2021 when the expected number of babies per woman slipped to 0.81 from 0.84 a year earlier. That shone a light on an already dire outlook with the United Nations predicting the population of 51 million will more than halve by the end of this century.

    A shrinking workforce presents an array of challenges for policy makers that includes everything from stagnant economic growth to soaring welfare payments.

    Korea’s demographic problem may be a harbinger for the rest of the developed world that is also aging rapidly.

    Among economies with per capita GDP of at least $30,000, Korea is the fastest-aging, according to UN and World Bank data. By 2100, its population is projected to fall by 53% to 24 million.

    In the decades following the 1950-53 Korean War, the population at least doubled, and in an effort to curb the baby boom in the early years of economic development the government encouraged couples to have only one child. That policy was scrapped around the turn of the century as births started to tumble.

    Korea is estimated to have already spent hundreds of billions of dollars on trying to reverse the decline. The results so far have been underwhelming, with only 260,600 babies born last year, or 0.5% of the population.

    This post was originally published on Basic Income Today.

  • Homicide and hunger rise in St. Louis. We should talk about them together.

    By: Tony Messenger

    See original article here.

    When the late summer St. Louis homicide surge comes — and it almost always does — nobody talks about hungry children.

    They should.

    In recent days, those two stories — hunger and homicide — have filled the airwaves and headlines as unrelated news items.

    After a couple of violent weekends, the annual homicide count, a crude but often-used data point for judging a mayor’s performance, rose above last year’s pace of homicides. That’s generally bad political news for Mayor Tishaura Jones. Homicides in St. Louis fell in her first year in office. If, in a few months, the yearly numbers go up again, pressure will build for new solutions.

    We know what the old solutions are: more cops, and higher pay for more cops. Even though St. Louis has long had more police officers per capita than similar-sized and even many larger cities, the tough-on-crime crowd will keep pushing for that. There’s no data — not here, not anywhere — that suggests more cops on the streets will significantly reduce homicides.

  • All Saskatchewan residents getting $500 ‘affordability check’ this fall

    By: CKOM News

    See original article here.

    With prices still on the rise in Saskatchewan, the provincial government is now ready to provide financial help to its residents.

    In a video posted on social media Monday, Premier Scott Moe announced that everyone aged 18 and over in the province will be getting $500 from the Saskatchewan government this fall.

    Moe has been hinting for months that the province would offer some kind of relief for consumers given the rising resource prices.

    Moe said that windfall for the province is responsible for the government’s financial picture improving. Finance Minister Donna Harpauer is to lay out the details Tuesday when she outlines the province’s first-quarter financial report.

    “You own the resources and you should benefit when those resource prices are high,” Moe told viewers.

    “So this fall, we’ll be sending a $500 affordability tax credit cheque to everyone in Saskatchewan aged 18 and older to help with some of those rising costs.”

    The prices of potash, oil and gas have risen significantly, which Moe said “has greatly improved our budget position, from a deficit to a surplus.”

    When Harpauer delivered the budget in March, the province’s deficit was expected to be $463 million. The government also announced it would start charging the provincial sales tax on certain items and added other new fees.

    Moe said Harpauer will have more to say about the cheques, as well as the deficit, during Tuesday’s media conference.

    “She will also announce some other important measures, like paying down debt and helping our small businesses in Saskatchewan,” Moe said.

    “We are able to do these things because we have a strong and growing economy. Our industries are driving growth, they’re creating jobs and they’re keeping Saskatchewan strong and that means that we are able to help you deal with these rising costs.

    “That’s growth that works for everyone.”

    NDP responds

    NDP Finance Critic Trent Wotherspoon issued a statement after Moe’s video appeared, calling the government’s offering ” ‘buy’-election bucks.”

    The government is required to call a byelection in the Saskatoon Meewasin constituency, a seat that previously was held by then-NDP Leader Ryan Meili.

    “While Saskatchewan families have been struggling with historic inflation rates, rising cost of living expenses and record gas prices, the Sask. Party sat on billions in windfall revenues,” Wotherspoon wrote. “Not only did they sit on these windfall revenues, but they also increased taxes and utility rates, adding to the hardships many Saskatchewan families and businesses were already facing.

    “They should have offered this relief months ago as we’ve been calling for, in addition to scrapping their new taxes, utility increases and fee hikes.”

    Wotherspoon noted that while governments in other provinces offered some relief for inflation, the Saskatchewan Party waited until just before the byelection call to provide financial help to residents.

    “This money belongs to the people of Saskatchewan, not the Sask. Party,” Wotherspoon wrote. “The Sask. Party will consistently put their political interests above the wellbeing of the people of Saskatchewan — as they have done with these ‘buy’-election bucks.”

    This post was originally published on Basic Income Today.

  • National Freedom Party calls for introduction of Basic Income Grant amid national shutdown in South Africa

    By: Yogashen Pillay

    See original article here.

    Durban – The National Freedom Party (NFP) said that they support the call by workers and labour unions across South Africa for the introduction of a Basic Income Grant and a decrease in the price of fuel and electricity.

    On Wednesday morning, dozens of members of the Congress of SA Trade Unions (Cosatu) and the SA Federation of Trade Unions (Saftu) are holding marches across the country, including in Durban, to demonstrate their unhappiness with the rising costs of living.

    NFP MP Ahmed Munzoor Shaik Emam said that the cost of living in South Africa was becoming unaffordable for the majority of South Africans.

    “The poor and working class are facing the brunt of the high cost of living. Therefore, we support the call for a basic income grant.”

    Emam added a staggered approach to the introduction of the Basic Income Grant, will allow for its implementation.

    “We understand that at this very moment, the government does not have the funds to implement a comprehensive Basic Income Grant for all qualifying citizens. However, we believe a staggered approach is both feasible and practical.”

    Emam said that the party calls upon the government to:

    – Utilise the infrastructure of the Social Relief of Distress (SRD) grants and convert it for the purposes of the Basic Income Grant

    – Develop a qualifying criterion for the Basic Income Grant

    – Select a portion of qualifying citizens to start the roll-out with – such as those between 18 and 25 who are in the process of looking for jobs and need the support for transport and internet access for the applications process

    – Set roll-out targets and increase the number of qualifying citizens over a defined period so that all qualifying citizens can benefit.

    Emam added that the NFP also supported the call for today’s national shutdown by labour unions as a mechanism to push the government to take action.

    This post was originally published on Basic Income Today.

  • Means tested tax credits punish the poor for working. Maryland makes it worse

    By: Nate Golden and Max Ghenis

    See original article here

    Federal income tax rates range from 10 percent in the lowest income bracket to 37 percent at the highest bracket. At the state level, Maryland levies progressive rates ranging from 2 percent to 5.75 percent. This might suggest that the rich face substantially higher tax rates than the poor. Yet, a holistic examination of the income tax code reveals the opposite: Low-income households face the steepest tax rates, and Maryland makes it worse.

    What explains this counterintuitive trend? Means testing: a determination of whether a household is eligible for the full amount, partial amount, or none of a government benefit based on their income. For example, the Earned Income Tax Credit withdraws $21 for each $100 of earnings above $19,520, for parents with two children. This is equivalent to taxing that parent at a 21 percent rate. Either way, the recipient loses $21 for every $100 they earn. A means test is a tax.

    When we combine all of the means tested credits and benefit programs with explicit income taxes, we can calculate a household’s marginal tax rate: the amount of additional tax paid for every additional dollar earned. A study from the Congressional Budget Office found that marginal tax rates on low-income households frequently exceed 50 percent and sometimes 80 or even 100 percent due to means tested benefits. Such severe marginal tax rates essentially trap low-income folks near the poverty threshold. If you only get to keep $200 for every $1,000 you earn, your incentive to work more nearly disappears.

    A new Maryland tax model, created by PolicyEngine, allows the public to compute their own marginal tax rates. 

    Our new research, conducted at the UBI Center using PolicyEngine, finds that Maryland especially discourages low-income parents from working.

    For example, if a single parent of two working full-time at minimum wage chooses to work one more hour per week, they would earn $650 more per year, but their net income after taxes and benefits rises only $86 per year. They face a marginal tax rate of 87%, of which Maryland taxes explain about one sixth. Their hourly wage isn’t $12.50, it’s $1.65.

    Maryland exacerbates this problem largely by matching means tested federal programs such as the Earned Income Tax Credit and the Child and Dependent Care Credit. While matching federal programs offers more simplicity than creating new means tested programs (such as Maryland’s Poverty Line Credit), it also amplifies the federal programs’ work disincentives. As a result of this matching, Maryland’s top marginal tax rate isn’t 5.75% paid by the richest, but 15.3% paid by families with income around $40,000 to $60,000.

    As the 2023 legislative session approaches, state legislators should prioritize shifting the tax burden away from low-income families. Now may be the perfect chance to do so. The enhanced Earned Income Tax Credit and Child Tax Credit are both set to expire this tax year and many legislators see updates to these programs as a top priority. Instead of continuing to means test these programs, Maryland can create a single universal child benefit that avoids taxing the poor at higher rates through means testing. Legislators could apply similar updates to Maryland’s Child and Dependent Care Credit and Poverty Level Credit, or consolidate these programs into a more generous child benefit.

    Policymakers means test programs to lower the spending number. Touting that one’s new means tested credit only costs $20 million instead of $200 million may win votes from fiscal conservatives, but it fails to understand the economics at play. The real cost of a new spending program is not the big spending number, it is the economic distortion from the taxes required for its funding. We cannot escape these costs by creating implicit means tested taxes over explicit ones.

    A more equitable and transparent policy approach is to provide universal benefits and claw back money from high-income households through explicit taxation.

    Rather than continuing to opaquely tax the poor, Maryland lawmakers should seize the opportunity for substantive reform and embrace universal programs.

    _______________________________

    About the authors: Golden is a Baltimore City Schools teacher, the president of the Maryland Child Alliance, and a research associate at the UBI Center. Ghenis is the founder and president of the UBI Center.

    This post was originally published on Basic Income Today.

  • After ballot measure snafu in San Francisco, guaranteed income proponents remain hopeful

    By Adam Shanks | Examiner staff writer

    Because of a flawed ballot measure, hopes have been dashed for a new tax that would fund universal basic income programs in San Francisco.

    But proponents of guaranteed income programs are hoping it’s only a temporary setback. They are already mulling new ways to fund their efforts, which could include asking The City to dedicate a portion of its budget directly to the cause.

    Proposition K was supposed to raise funds for a guaranteed income program by taxing large online retailers. But, the way the measure was written, Amazon might be able to avoid the tax, which instead would fall largely on smaller retailers already struggling through the pandemic.

    After realizing they’d made a fatal error, proponents are withdrawing their support for their own proposal.

    It’s a huge loss for those hoping the tax would be a boon to the burgeoning universal basic income programs in The City.

    “I would want to make sure that any guaranteed income (program) was being funded in a responsible way,” said Jim Pugh, co-director of the Universal Income Project.

    Guaranteed income programs — which provide unrestricted cash payments to those who qualify — have sprouted up across San Francisco and elsewhere in recent years. Proponents see them as a more effective and efficient way to help people in poverty. They point to early success in pilot programs like Miracle Money, which provided people experiencing homelessness with $500 monthly payments.

    The tax measure in San Francisco, which is still slated to appear as Proposition K on the November ballot, would create a centralized fund that would support guaranteed income programs and also support for small businesses.

    In its initial review of the proposal, the city Controller’s Office estimated that the tax would generate $48 to $72 million each year.

    But the proposal’s flaws were highlighted in an Aug. 13 Twitter thread by Sharky Laguana, president of the San Francisco Small Business Commission.

    The tax would apply to businesses that receive more than 80% of their revenue from shipping goods or services to customers in The City. But Laguana pointed out that Amazon’s business is diversified — for example, Amazon Web Services sells cloud computing services to San Francisco-based companies — and would likely argue that its revenues don’t meet the tax threshold. 

    Hundreds of businesses a fraction of Amazon’s size and based in San Francisco, however, would be subject to the new tax and would struggle to comply.

    “Many small businesses are hanging on by a thread, and don’t have accounting systems that can easily accommodate this. To remain in compliance they will have to switch to new systems, or spend enormous amounts of time going through invoices manually,” Laguana tweeted.

    The measure was developed by the Tenants and Owners Development Corporation, also known as TODCO, the nonprofit housing provider in SOMA. Its leader, John Eberling, told The San Francisco Standard that he will seek to have the measure removed from the ballot and plans to redraft it.

    San Francisco Elections Director John Arntz told The Examiner there is no process in the local election elections code to allow an initial proponent to withdraw a measure from the ballot once it’s approved to appear on it.

    The proponents could request that a judge find cause to strike it from the ballot, but “how they would go forward with that, I don’t know,” Arntz said.

    The measure’s supporters had already raised nearly $1 million to support it, according to city campaign finance data.

    Still, Pugh does not see it as a waste of money and effort.

    Supporters hope that the fact that the measure garnered enough signatures to make it onto the ballot shows that there’s momentum behind the concept of guaranteed income in San Francisco.

    After lying mostly dormant for decades, the concept of guaranteed income has received increasing attention in recent years, including in the failed presidential campaign of Andrew Yang.

    The City of Stockton started a universal basic income program pilot in 2019, and the benefits were widely reported in news headlines around the country. 

    “It’s definitely not that this doesn’t work, it’s simply a delay,” Pugh said.

  • Argentina’s Vice President Pushing for Universal Basic Income

    See original post here.

    Argentine Vice President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner (CFK) has been reportedly pressing Economy Minister Silvina Batakis to move forward with a proposal to create the so-called Basic Universal Wage (BUW), as a way out of the current scheme of handouts in the form of endless unemployment subsidies.

    According to reports, there have been negotiations in this regard among Senators who in one way or another respond to CFK.

    The bill has been known to spark bitter disputes among lawmakers from the ruling Frente de Todos (FdT), while word at Casa Rosada has it that the government will not push the BUW through Congress for now, but it has not been ruled out altogether.

    Buenos Aires Province Minister of Community Development Andrés Larroque, a hard-line Kirchnerite and Secretary-General of the La Cámpora youth movement founded by Deputy Máximo Kirchner, has warned that the Alberto Fernández government has two months to come up with the BUW either through a Law of Congress or via a decree, or face “serious and deep consequences.”

    Earlier this year, Larroque was one of the strongest voices calling for the dismissal of then-Economy Minister Martín Guzmán.

    However, Presidential Spokeswoman Gabriela Cerruti insisted that “for the time being we are not going to move forward with the Universal Basic Wage, the accounts do not add up.”

    Security Minister Aníbal Fernández also said that “the things that can be done are done,” meaning the Treasury has no way to finance the BUW for now.

    The Universal Basic Wage bill submitted to the Lower House by Deputies Itaí Hagman, Fernando Fagioli, and Natalia Zaracho mentions a monthly payment of AR$ 14,400 (around US$ 50 at the unofficial exchange rate) to each adult.

    To be eligible for the SBU, the bill states people must be aged between 18 and 65 and Argentine citizens by birth or through nationalization with a permanent residence of no less than 2 years, with no other social benefit.

    Meanwhile, economists at the Kirchnerite think tank Instituto Patria are studying the possibility of a new one-on-one convertibility between the Argentine peso and the Brazilian real, subject to former President Luiz Inácio Lula Da Silva returning to power as all polls forecast.

    “The bimonetary economy unites all the crises in Argentina: the shortage of dollars, the exchange run, devaluations, and inflation,” said CFK in one of her last public appearances. Hence the idea to decouple Argentina’s economy from the US dollar.

    If Lula wins October the presidential elections in Brazil, a new geopolitical scenario would boost CFK’s chances to return to Casa Rosada.

    Lula has delivered various speeches and conferences at the headquarters of the Instituto Patria.

    Last week, Productive Development Minister Daniel Scioli discussed with Brazil’s Economy Minister Paulo Guedes the possibility of bilateral trade leaving aside the US dollar, of which there are not very many left in Argentina’s coffers.

    The post Argentina’s Vice President Pushing for Universal Basic Income appeared first on Basic Income Today.

  • Study finds economic inequality promotes belief in conspiracy theories

    By: Eric W. Dolan

    See original post here.

    New findings published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology indicate that economic inequality increases susceptibility to belief in conspiracy theories. The research provides evidence that the perception of societal breakdown is a key pathway between inequality and conspiracy beliefs.

    “A lot of previous studies focused on individual characteristics of people believing in conspiracy theories. While I support the idea that there are individual differences in the tendency to believe in such theories, I wondered how societal features can have an impact on conspiracy beliefs,” explained study author Bruno Gabriel Salvador Casara (@BrunoGab92), an adjunct professor and postdoctoral fellow at the University of Padova.

    “With my PhD supervisor, Prof. Caterina Suitner, we started to think about how economic inequality may represent one of the structural antecedents of conspiracy beliefs and developed the idea that conspiracy beliefs are used to psychologically cope with economic inequality.”

    “Then, I had the opportunity to work with Professor Jolanda Jetten at the University of Queensland. I am very grateful to them as they did not just provide fundamental technical and theoretical guidance, but also boost my interest in such topics.”

    In a series of three initial studies, the researchers examined conspiracy belief scores from a 2018 study that collected data from 25 countries, conspiracy belief scores from a 2020 study that collected data from 18 countries, and conspiracy belief scores from the YouGov-Globalism Project 2020, which collected data from 20 countries. The researchers used Gini index estimates provided by the World Bank as their measure of economic inequality.

    Although the three datasets used different measures of conspiracy beliefs, Salvador Casara and his colleagues found that greater economic inequality was consistently associated with greater endorsement of conspiracy beliefs at the country level.

    In another study, 515 Australian citizens completed a task that assessed their perceptions of economic inequality. Participants were shown a table of five rows representing different wealth categories: “very poor,” “poor,” “average in wealth,” “wealthy,” and “very wealthy.” They were asked to estimate the number of people in each wealth category and wrote the number in a box at the end of each row, with the five estimates adding up to 100 people.

    The participants then completed another task that assessed their general tendency to believe in conspiracy theories. They read a brief blurb noting that “some political and social events are debated,” such as the 9/11 attacks, the death of Lady Diana, and the assassination of John F. Kennedy. “It is suggested that the ‘official version’ of these events could be an attempt to hide the truth to the public,” the blurb added. “This ‘official version’ could mask the fact that these events have been planned and secretly prepared by a covert alliance of powerful individuals or organizations (for example secret services or government).”

    The participants were then asked the extent to which they agreed or disagreed with the statement “I think that the official version of the events given by the authorities very often hides the truth.”

    The researchers found a positive relationship between perceived economic inequality and conspiracy beliefs. In other words, participants who perceived greater economic inequality in Australia were more likely to doubt “the official version of the events.”

    The findings provided evidence that greater objective inequality and greater perceived inequality were both correlated with greater endorsement of conspiracy beliefs. But to determine whether inequality causes greater endorsement of conspiracy beliefs, Salvador Casara and his colleagues conducted a series of four experiments that manipulated the perception of inequality.

    All four experiments, which included 543 individuals in total, found that participants who envisaged their life in a highly unequal society were more likely to endorse conspiracy beliefs, compared to those who envisaged their life in a more equal society.

    The researchers also found evidence that anomie (meaning the perception that social systems have begun to fall apart) mediated the relationship between inequality and conspiracy beliefs. The findings indicated that “economic inequality prompts conspiracy beliefs because inequality enhances the perception that society is breaking down (both its leadership and its social fabric) and such increased anomie then triggers a search for meaning and control which conspiracy beliefs promise to provide,” the researchers explained.

    “If we want to address the spreading of fake news and conspiracy theories, it is necessary to start to think about how our societies are creating suspicion, confusion, and conflicts among groups,” Salvador Casara told PsyPost.

    “Targeting individuals’ beliefs or debunking conspiratorial information may not be enough if the environment creating the need for believing in conspiracy theories is not changed.”

    The findings shed new light on the proliferation of conspiracy beliefs. But Salvador Casara said that many factors related to conspiracy theories still need to be explored.

    “Conspiracy beliefs are a psychological concept related mostly to the receivers of conspiracy theories, and previous research mostly focused on individuals holding conspiracy beliefs,” the researcher explained. “However, to fully understand the conspiracy-related phenomena, it is important to highlight the important aspects of the other actors involved in the communication process, including the senders, those that create and/or share conspiracy theories, and the messages, namely conspiracy theories, and the means of communication. I think it is fundamental that future research would focus on the interaction among these aspects.”

    The study, “The Impact of Economic Inequality on Conspiracy Beliefs“, was authored by Bruno Gabriel Salvador Casara, Caterina Suitner, and Jolanda Jetten.

    The post Study finds economic inequality promotes belief in conspiracy theories appeared first on Basic Income Today.

    This post was originally published on Basic Income Today.

  • Opinion: The Democrats’ sweeping economic package doesn’t go far enough for low-income families

    By: Mark Wolfe

    See original post here.

    The Inflation Reduction Act, the Democrats’ tax, climate and health care bill that the Senate just passed, sets the nation on a path to meet its climate goals, and provides a set of practical initiatives that will help lower-income Americans who have fewer resources than other households to invest in reducing their energy use and adapt to rising temperatures. It will provide tax credits and rebates designed to help them afford electric vehicles and home retrofits and reduce their use of fossil fuels.

    But helping low-income families transition to clean energy is not a substitute for helping them afford basic needs, like food, rent and utilities, or for reducing child poverty rates in the US, which are among the highest in the developed world.

    Congress must do more to help families afford basic needs and reduce the nation’s high rate of child poverty.

    The Build Back Better bill, the House-passed, larger version of the Inflation Reduction Act, would have extended the enhanced Child Tax Credit for families with children, as it was only in effect for one year. The plan increased the size of the credit from $2,000 to $3,000 for children over the age of 6, and to $3,600 for children under the age of 6. And it was fully refundable, so lower-income parents who did not have sufficient taxable income could take full advantage of it.

    These enhanced credits provided an additional income boost to families, especially those who needed it most, and extending them would have kept millions of children out of poverty.

    In fact, the Center on Poverty and Social Policy at the Columbia University School of Social Work estimated that the rate of child poverty increased from 12.1% at the end of December 2021 to 17% in January 2022, which is when the credit ended.

    The Build Back Better bill would have also increased lower-income families’ ability to participate in the labor force, especially lower-income women with children or dependent elderly relatives, by providing subsidized child care, universal prekindergarten for 3-year-olds and 4-year-olds and home-based care for older adults and people with disabilities. The bill would also have required employers to provide up to four weeks of paid family and medical leave.

    Further, the bill would have addressed the racial disparities in health coverage in the country. It would have provided a pathway to Medicaid coverage for the two million low-income Americans in states that haven’t expanded it. In 2019, people of color made up 60% of those in this coverage gap, including 28% who are Latino and 28% who are Black.

    The loss of these benefits is significant.

    For example, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, the enhanced Child Tax Credit provisions had been projected to reduce child poverty by more than 40%. precisely because families receiving the enhanced child tax credit used these funds to pay for basic necessities including food, child care and school expenses.

    If the Senate had agreed to the social welfare provisions in the Build Back Better bill, it would have represented the most significant increase in social spending for families in several generations. And the need for these benefits is only getting worse, as rising inflation in basic goods is forcing families to choose between necessities like food and medicine.

    Congress needs to tackle these issues head-on and revisit funding for the suite of social welfare provisions included in the Build Back Better bill. While it does not appear likely it will do so this year, there are opportunities to include at least some additional funding to rental assistance and child care during the regular appropriations process, which would help low-income families. In addition, Congress could add at least some of the provisions back at the end of the year when it considers extending certain business tax breaks that are set to expire.

    Energy-efficient housing is a must, but it is not going to put food on the table or pay the rising cost of gasoline for the country’s struggling families. We shouldn’t have to wait for another generation for these provisions to become law. The midterm elections are coming up in the fall, and voters will have the opportunity to send a message to Congress about the importance of providing strong support for hard-working American families.

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