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Category: THE SOCIAL DEBATE

  • Study Finds Wildfires Disproportionately Impact Lower-Income Families

     By: Laurenz Busch.

    See original post here.

    Climate change and California’s historic drought are stretching fire season beyond its traditional boundaries, causing worse and more costly wildfires, and according to a new study, they’re disproportionately impacting the most marginalized.

    “Income and Insurability as Factors in Wildfire Risk,” published in the July issue of Forest and authored by two researchers from the University of Georgia, found that in counties with a high risk of wildfire, the majority of homeowners were lower-income, making it more difficult to retrofit their houses and to maintain their homes’ fire defense—leaving owners more vulnerable to insurance non-renewals and cancellations.

    Using data from the U.S. Forest Service, First Street Foundation Wildfire Model, and the U.S. Census Bureau, authors Matthew Auer, Dean of the School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Georgia, and graduate student Benjamin Hexamer, examined the connection between high poverty rates and high wildfire risk “with the issue of insurability,” Auer told LAMag.

    The study identified 98 counties in 14 states with the highest wildfire risk by acres burned annually. It also rated each county on a Wildfire Hazard Potential (WHP) scale of 1 through 5—very low (1), low (2), moderate (3), high (4), and very high (5).

    In 12 of the 14 states analyzed—including California—60 percent of counties with a WHP of 3 or greater also had poverty rates of 12.3 percent or greater.

    Wildfires are becoming more frequent and severe. According to the study “undesirable and erratic wildfires”—rather than controlled—“burned an average of 7.36 million acres per annum in the United States, representing a 37.4 percent increase” over the previous twenty years.

    Such a dramatic increase stems largely from climate change which is amplifying the exhaustive list of variables such as “persistent drought, mild winters, increased days of scorching summertime temperatures, earlier snowmelt timing, increased vapor pressure deficit and wind speeds, increased length of rain-free intervals, [and] the geographical expansion of forest-killing pests and pathogens.”

    The study also states that “the build-up of forest fuels” is contributing, “partly resulting from a prior era of faulty forest management practices.”

    One of the issues that homeowners face is the non-renewal or cancelation of their homeowners’ insurance. “Discontinuance of homeowners’ policies due to wildfire risk increased substantially in California in 2018 and 2019 as insurance companies incurred major losses on policies in wildfire-prone regions.”

    Non-renewals in 2018-19 spiked 31 percent statewide according to the California Department of Insurance (CDI) but eventually began to drop in 2020 after California implemented its one-year moratoriums on non-renewals in communities recently hit by a wildfire.

    “Temporary non-renewal moratoriums are essential to California property owners and communities as stakeholders work to reduce wildfire risk and restore available and affordable insurance options,” said Amy Bach, Executive Director of United Policyholders, in a CDI press release.

    “The science behind incentivizing home safety is indisputable and supported by consumer groups and first responders. Commissioner Lara has undertaken reforms of the FAIR Plan that are long overdue and will help homeowners in the future even after we solve this non-renewal issue.”

    However, although non-renewals have dropped, so-called “last resort” policies issued by the California FAIR plan have continued to increase throughout the state, “which generally entails expensive premiums and more limited coverage,” the study explained.

    Having insurance is important for homeowners, but for those who lose their insurance it can be difficult to find a replacement policy, especially if they need to make costly improvements to their home fire defense such as tree trimming, ember and fire-resistant vents, or upgrading to fire-resistant materials.

    “Adopting these measures, out of pocket, poses comparatively higher economic burdens on lower-income households,” the study said.

    Nonetheless, Auer believes that despite the escalating fire seasons, California is still leading the charge compared to other states with its moratoriums and the recently launched Safer from Wildfires program that aims to increase wildfire prevention tactics in communities.

    “We assume that direct, governmental aid programs—comparable to Safer from Wildfires— will be needed to assist lower-income homeowners,” the authors found. “Counties are vital service-providers for rural and unincorporated areas, including sparsely populated, lower-income areas that receive few or no municipal services.”

    For Auer, personal improvements are vital for combating wildfires, but in our conversation, he emphasized on the necessity of the community effort, something that in rural communities where homes are spread out further can be more difficult to achieve.

    “You can make all kinds of changes to make your house safer from wildfires but if your neighbor doesn’t, it’s not going to be sufficient,” Auer says. “You’re not going to be safe if in the absence of cooperation and collaboration from others, you make all the interventions—to be truly successful, it needs to be a community-based endeavor.”

    The post Study Finds Wildfires Disproportionately Impact Lower-Income Families appeared first on Basic Income Today.

  • Food banks in Canada in crisis amid high inflation, increased demand

    By: Tom Yun

    Original article can be seen here.

    Food banks say they are being stretched thin as more Canadians seek out their services amid skyrocketing prices at grocery stores.

    In June 2022, the Daily Bread Food Bank reported it saw 171,631 visits. That’s nearly triple the number compared to June 2019, which saw approximately 65,000 visits.

    “The stories that we’re hearing — the common theme is people’s income doesn’t match what their expenses are. And so, I’m seeing more and more working families who they have a job, or maybe they’re putting together two part-time jobs, and are unable to make ends meet,” Daily Bread Food Bank CEO Neil Hetherington told CTV’s Your Morning on Thursday.

    Hetherington says food banks in Canada are being hit “on two sides.” In addition to having to deal with the increasing demand for their services, food banks themselves also have to contend with the increasing cost of food, putting a strain on their operations.

    “We are at a crisis stage and as more people come to food banks across the country, it is more expensive for us to be able to feed that need,” he said.

    A survey from Food Banks Canada released last month found that one in five Canadians reported going hungry at least once between March 2020 and March 2022, while nearly a quarter reported eating less than they should because they didn’t have enough money for food.

    Last week, Statistics Canada reported that the annual inflation rate for June was 8.1 per cent with food costs being 8.8 per cent more expensive compared to the same time last year.

    For those looking to donate, Hetherington says the Daily Bread Food Bank is in need of foods that are high in protein, as well as “things that you would enjoy eating at your dinner table.”

    “Those are the types of things you can donate at any grocery store or fire hall, but funds allow us to buy more food and fresh food,” he said.

    Hetherington said he also wants to see lawmakers tackle the structural issues contributing to increasing hunger, including building more affordable housing, strengthening disability income supports and increasing the minimum wage.

    “We’re really hopeful that people will donate food or funds, but not everybody can do that right now,” Hetherington said. “And if that’s the case, then we’re just hoping you can pick up the phone or send an email to your elected official and say, ‘We need help. We need to do something about this.’”

    The post Food banks in Canada in crisis amid high inflation, increased demand appeared first on Basic Income Today.

  • COVID relief funds too generous with businesses, too strict with workers, experts say

    By: Nojoud Al Mallees.

    See original post here.

    Benefits rolled out at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic allowed vulnerable Canadians to stay healthy while maintaining an income, but business supports were excessive and show the outsized influence of business groups on public policy, economists say.

    Nearly two and a half years ago, the federal government faced an unprecedented task of shutting down the economy to slow the rapid spread of COVID-19. That shutdown led to a series of pandemic relief benefits aimed at softening the blow to workers and businesses, with the two most prominent programs being the Canada Emergency Response Benefit (CERB) and the Canada Emergency Wage Subsidy (CEWS).

    Recent analysis from Statistics Canada based on census data shows two-thirds of Canadian adults received pandemic benefits in 2020, with these benefits cushioning income losses and reducing inequality.

    Previous analysis from the federal statistics agency also found that, as was expected, usage of the wage subsidy program correlated with a lower probability of closure and fewer employee reductions.

    While there was little time to spend on crafting the benefits and fine-tuning the details in March 2020, economists are now assessing the successes and failures of these programs in retrospect.

    City of New York University economics professor Miles Corak, who has written analyses on these programs, says any evaluation needs to account for the uncertainty people and governments were facing at the time and the urgent need to keep people healthy.

    That said, Corak said while the CERB was “terribly successful,” the Canada Emergency Wage Subsidy was a “huge failure.”

    “The Canada Emergency Response Benefit got money out the door quickly in time to keep people at home, which is what we wanted to do to save lives,” he said.

    On the other hand, Corak said the CEWS “came too late, it wasn’t well-targeted and dramatically over-insured (businesses).”

    The CERB was quickly announced in March 2020 and $2,000 monthly to Canadians who lost income because of the pandemic shutdown. That was followed soon after by the CEWS, which subsidized businesses’ employee wages by 75 per cent in hopes of encouraging companies to hold on to their staff.

    Corak says that by the time the wage subsidy was introduced, many businesses had already parted ways with their employees.

    Another source of criticism for the wage subsidy program was that it subsidized wages for all workers at affected businesses, rather than simply those whose jobs were at risk of being lost, making it especially costly.

    Jennifer Robson, an associate professor of political management at Carleton University, also pointed to the wage subsidy program as being unsuccessful. Robson said businesses that would have otherwise closed down for reasons unrelated to the pandemic remained artificially afloat because of the wage subsidy.

    “These were not businesses that were going to return to profitability,” Robson said.

    Statistics Canada data shows the number of business closures spiked dramatically in April 2020, but a sharp decline followed, bringing monthly closures to a lower level than pre-pandemic.

    About 31,000 businesses closed in August 2020, while nearly 40,000 had closed in February 2020.

    In hindsight, Corak said the wage subsidy program should have been smaller in scope and targeted to larger businesses with specialized needs where it would be important for companies to hold on to the same employees, such as the airline sector.

    The Canadian Federation of Independent Business has said the wage subsidy was “crucial” for small business owners and noted in April this year that only two of five of its members reported being back to normal sales.

    Adrienne Vaupshas, the press secretary for Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland, said in a statement the focus of the government at the onset of the pandemic was to protect jobs and ensure a strong economic recovery.

    “Today we have recovered 114 per cent of the jobs that were lost during the darkest months of the pandemic,” Vaupshas said.

    In contrast to what some economists have characterized as excessively generous supports for businesses, some low-income Canadians have experienced clawbacks to social assistance benefits because they collected CERB. The Canada Revenue Agency is also hoping to recoup benefits paid out to over 400,000 Canadians whose eligibility was questioned.

    In response, anti-poverty group Campaign 2000 has called for CERB amnesty.

    Corak said while it’s reasonable to ask those who fraudulently collected benefits to pay them back, businesses should be held to the same standard.

    “The concern I would have is the asymmetry in this response between individuals and businesses,” Corak said.

    The CFIB has called for more loan forgiveness for small businesses who accessed loans through the Canada Emergency Business Account. The federal government is already offering partial loan forgiveness if repayments are made by the end of 2023.

    Robson said when it comes to shaping public policy, business interest groups have well-resourced public relations teams to further their interests.

    “There is nothing like that for individual low-wage workers,” said Robson.

    Corak noted that at the start of the pandemic, there was a focus on the role of front-line workers, but with time, this shifted to small businesses.

    “I think the small business lobby was very effective in informing individual MPs and putting pressure on cabinet and the government to respond in a way that many unseen and unheard mothers, fathers workers and families just didn’t have that same voice,” Corak said.

    The danger of the wage subsidy program, Corak said, is that it sets a precedent for providing excessive subsidies to businesses and thereby stifling innovation.

    “We’re almost moving towards a basic income for small business rather than a basic income for individuals,” he said.

    The post COVID relief funds too generous with businesses, too strict with workers, experts say appeared first on Basic Income Today.

  • Millions of Americans have long COVID. Many of them are no longer employed

    By: ANDREA HSU.

    See original post here.

    More than two years after Georgia Linders first got sick with COVID, her heart still races at random times.

    She’s often exhausted. She can’t digest certain foods.

    Most days, she runs a fever, and when her temperature gets up past a certain point, her brain feels like goo, she says.

    These are commonly reported symptoms of long COVID.

    Linders really noticed problems with her brain when she returned to work in the spring and summer of 2020. Her job required her to be on phone calls all day, coordinating with health clinics that service the military. It was a lot of multitasking, something she excelled at before COVID.

    After COVID, the brain fog and fatigue slowed her down immensely. In the fall of 2020, she was put on probation. After 30 days, she thought her performance had improved. She’d certainly felt busy.

    “But my supervisor brought up my productivity, which was like a quarter of what my coworkers were doing,” she says.

    It was demoralizing. Her symptoms worsened. She was given another 90-day probation, but she decided to take medical leave. On June 2, 2021, Linders was terminated.

    She filed a discrimination complaint with the government, but it was dismissed. She could have sued but wasn’t making enough money to hire a lawyer.

    Survey data suggests millions of people aren’t working because of long COVID

    As the number of people with post-COVID symptoms soars, researchers and the government are trying to get a handle on how big an impact long COVID is having on the U.S. workforce. It’s a pressing question, given the fragile state of the economy. For more than a year, employers have faced staffing problems, with jobs going unfilled month after month.

    Now, millions of people may be sidelined from their jobs due to long COVID. Katie Bach, a senior fellow with the Brookings Institution, drew on survey data from the Census Bureau, the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis and the Lancet to come up with what she says is a conservative estimate: 4 million full-time equivalent workers out of work because of long COVID.

    “That is just a shocking number,” says Bach. “That’s 2.4% of the U.S. working population.”

    Long COVID can be a disability under federal law

    The Biden administration has already taken some steps to try to protect workers and keep them on the job, issuing guidance that makes clear that long COVID can be a disability and relevant laws would apply. Under the Americans with Disabilities Act, for example, employers must offer accommodations to workers with disabilities unless doing so presents an undue burden.

    Linders now she thinks back to what she should have asked for after her return to work. She was already working from home due to the pandemic, but perhaps she could have been given a lighter workload. Maybe her supervisor could have held off on disciplinary action.

    “Maybe I wouldn’t have gotten as sick as I got, because I wouldn’t have been pushing myself to do the things that I knew couldn’t do, but I kept trying and trying,” she says.

    Dr. Monica Verduzco-Gutierrez, professor of rehabilitation medicine at the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio, has seen COVID play out in similar ways in other patients.

    “If someone has to go back 100% when they start feeling a little bit better, they are going to crash and burn fast,” she says.

    Figuring out accommodations for long COVID can be complicated

    The problem with coming up with accommodations for long COVID is that there are so many unknowns. The duration and severity of symptoms varies wildly from person to person.

    Gutierrez finds herself stumped by questions on disability forms that ask how long an individual might be out or how long their illness may last.

    “This is a new condition,” she says. “We don’t know.”

    Accommodations in the workplace might include flexibility in where someone works, extended leave, or a new role in a different department. The goal is to get workers on a path back, says Roberta Etcheverry, CEO of Diversified Management Group, a disability management consulting firm.

    But with long COVID, it’s difficult to measure whether an employee is in fact on a path back.

    “This isn’t a sprain or strain where somebody turns an ankle and we know in x amount of months, they’re going to be at this point,” she says. “It’s not — somebody was helping move a patient, and they hurt their back, and they can’t do that kind of work anymore. They need to do something else.”

    With long COVID, symptoms come and go, and new symptoms may arise.

    The Labor Department is urging employers not to rule out accommodations for employees who don’t get an official long COVID diagnosis.

    “Rather than determining whether an employee has a disability, your focus should be on the employee’s limitations and whether there are effective accommodations that would enable the employee to perform essential job functions,” the Labor Department says in its long COVID guide for employers.

    Accommodations may be harder to come by in some jobs

    Still, not all employers have the means to offer the kind of accommodation an employee may need given their symptoms.

    Bilal Qizilbash believes he would have been fired long ago had he not been the boss of his own company.

    “Majority of my team has no idea that I’m working from bed most of the time,” says Qizilbash, a COVID long hauler who suffers chronic pain that he compares to wasp stings.

    As the CEO of a small business that manufactures health supplements, Qizilbash says he tries to be compassionate and at the same time, ruthlessly efficient. Having one employee whose productivity is severely compromised could end up negatively impacting the whole company, he says.

    In other professions, it may be challenging to find accommodations that work, no matter how generous.

    In South Florida, Karyn Bishof was a new recruit with the Palm Beach Gardens Fire Rescue team in 2020 when she contracted COVID, likely at a training, she says. She comes from a family of firefighters, and it was her lifelong dream to follow suit. She was excelling in her training and receiving high marks when she got sick, she says. Now long COVID has left her with profound brain fog, fatigue, light-headedness and a slew of other symptoms incompatible with fighting fires.

    “I couldn’t run into a burning building if I can’t regulate my temperature,” she says. “If I can’t control having hypertension, I can’t lift up a patient or I’m going to pass out.”

    The city of Palm Beach Gardens told NPR Bishof was terminated from her job for not meeting performance-related probationary standards. Bishof recently filed a discrimination lawsuit against the city and has become an advocate for COVID long haulers.

    The Labor Department is crowdsourcing ideas for how to keep workers employed

    Taryn Williams, Assistant Secretary of Labor for Disability Employment Policy, wants to hear from workers and employers. Through the middle of August, the Labor Department is holding an online dialogue, asking for input on policies that may help with workplace challenges arising from long COVID.

    “We want to be responsive,” says Williams. “We’re considering how can we support these workers in what is a transformative time in their life.”

    She says the government has encountered situations in the past when there was a sudden rise in the number of people needing accommodations at work. Significant numbers of service members returned from Iraq and Afghanistan with traumatic brain injuries, for example. Williams says such times have led to shifts in disability policy in the U.S.

    From her home in La Crosse, Wisconsin, Linders has contributed a number of comments to the Labor Department’s online dialogue. Like Bishof, she also spends a lot of time helping other COVID long haulers navigate what she’s been through, including qualifying for Social Security disability insurance.

    Her advocacy helps her feel as if she’s contributing something to society, even if it’s not the life she wanted.

    “I don’t want to be disabled. I don’t want to be taking money from the government,” she says. “I’m only 45. I was going to at least work another 20 years.”

    The post Millions of Americans have long COVID. Many of them are no longer employed appeared first on Basic Income Today.

  • The US can inspire other countries to act on climate by adopting a carbon fee and dividend with a border tax adjustment

    By: Jon Clark – Citizens’ Climate Lobby.

    See original post here.

    In response to Barry Davis’ July 29 essay on climate change:

    Thank you Mr. Davis for your thoughtful, fact-driven letter and thank you for the context you have so clearly defined. As you point out, the U.S. is responsible for about 13% of global emissions, China, India and the E.U. account for over half of global emissions.  The world cannot successfully tackle climate change without significant emissions reductions from ALL of these countries.

    As for the cost benefit analysis of climate action, there is plenty of research done on the costs to our economy with climate action vs. inaction. For example, a study from the Deloitte Center for Sustainable Progress released this year found there’s a “potential to gain $43 trillion in net present value to the global economy by 2070” if we take decisive action now, vs. the potential for unchecked climate change to “create $178 trillion in global economic losses (in present value terms) between now and 2070.”  

    Extreme weather events we know are becoming more frequent and more intense, are costing us billions of dollars and are also a disruptor of our global supply chain and threaten our food supplies and national security, not to mention the loss of lives. 

    According to the World Economic Forum, “Over the past decade, global economic losses from weather events like storms, floods, droughts and wildfires have grown more costly. During the first decade of the 21st century, there were only two years when weather disasters cost more than $200 billion (including 2010). In the second decade, those $200 billion-dollar-a-year losses seem to have become more normal, with seven out of 10 years grossing over $200 billion in global losses from weather events.

    The costliest year on record was registered in 2017, totaling over $470 billion in losses, including those from major Hurricanes Harvey, Maria and Irma. All in all, weather damages totaled approximately $2.5 trillion around the globe between 2011 and 2020, up almost 50 percent from the 2001-2010 figure.” I’m writing this and watching yet another flooding disaster unfold, this time in Kentucky.

    Even if you discount the disaster-related costs, the burning of fossil fuels contributes to four of the five leading causes of death in the United States, including heart disease, cancer, stroke and lung diseases, while putting children at risk of asthma and delayed mental development.  

    According to the National Academy of Sciences, the burning of fossil fuels causes $120 billion annually in health-related damages.  

    All these costs are externalities shouldered by society and if we had a true free-market economy would be included in the price of fossil fuels. They are not. Taxpayers are forced to pay these costs both in lives and dollars. 

    We could disagree as to what dollar amount carbon pollution costs our economy, but I think we could both agree that cost is not zero. That’s what the fossil fuels industry is charged currently in the U.S. for their pollution. I see this as the greatest market failure the world has ever seen. This brings me to your point of what can the U.S. do with countries like China and India who plan on increasing emissions before they reduce them.  

    Currently, the United States and Australia are the only two developed economies that do not put a price on carbon emissions. 

    If we implemented carbon pricing here in the U.S. we could also put in place a border tax adjustment to protect American manufacturers from being undercut by countries who do not have a similar price on carbon. 

    This prevents what’s called “leakage,” manufacturers moving their production overseas where it’s still free to pollute. The EU is doing exactly this. 

    The EU currently has cap and trade (a price on pollution) and their current price on Co2 emissions is about 76 Euros/ton of emissions (about $77 American).  They are also in the process of implementing their own border tax adjustment on carbon intensive goods such as cement, steel and aluminum and plan to expand the scope of what’s taxed at their border. In short, without a similar charge for carbon pollution, American manufacturers will be paying the EU’s carbon tax. 

    In fact China and Russia are already squawking about it but are also talking about setting up their own in-house carbon pricing in response. This is exactly how we get others to act. The incentive is there to keep those fees within their own treasuries vs. paying it out to the EU. Once the EU implements this, other countries that charge for carbon pollution will be lining up to implement their own carbon border tax adjustments as well. Canada and Japan are already talking about this. There is bipartisan support for a border tax adjustment in the U.S. but I think that would be very hard to do without a price on carbon pollution and be WTO compliant.   

    As far as a price on carbon pollution wrecking our own economy, Citizens’ Climate Lobby advocates for returning 100% of the revenue collected back to households equally as a dividend (something Canada is doing now). This is to protect consumers from higher energy costs and encourage behavior change as consumers and manufacturer’s look for ways to reduce their carbon footprint. 

    When gas prices were at their highest, Americans were paying the equivalent of about $150/ton of CO2 emissions with 100% of the revenue going to the oil companies, hence record profits. We need to shift that revenue back to Americans. We want to start out low at $15/ton of CO2 emissions charged to companies where fossil fuels enter our economy (the port of entry, the well or the minehead). This sends a market signal that we should be reducing the amount of fossil fuels we use. 

    We’re not picking winners; we’re just charging an amount closer to what fossil fuels should be costing (not zero) and letting the market do its job, correcting the market failure. 

    We determined that about two-thirds of households would break even or come out ahead with the amount returned to them as a dividend vs. what they pay out in higher energy costs. This puts money in people’s pockets and would be a boost to our economy as most people tend to spend it when they get it.  Basically it would be an economic stimulus.  

    I agree with your statement that we should be having a policy debate, but too often I hear the “what about China and India” argument used as an excuse to throw our hands in the air and continue business as usual. We can inspire other countries to pursue their own emissions reductions with the right policies in place, but that discussion needs to happen with both political parties at the table and acting like we have a global emergency on our hands — official declaration or not. 

    The post The US can inspire other countries to act on climate by adopting a carbon fee and dividend with a border tax adjustment appeared first on Basic Income Today.

  • South Africa’s ruling African National Congress has revived plans to introduce a new tax on the wealthy to fund its basic income grant

    By: Adelaide Changole

    See original post here.

    South Africa’s ruling African National Congress has revived plans to introduce a new tax on the wealthy to fund its basic income grant, Johannesburg-based Sunday Times said, citing an interview with Mmamoloko Kubayi, the party’s head of economic transformation.

    The proposal, which was first mooted at the ANC’s national conference in 2017, calls for an appropriately structured wealth tax, possibly linked to a land tax, to promote equity and raise revenue, the newspaper said. The target should ideally be the top 5% of high net worth individuals, and estates with significant assets, Kubayi is quoted as saying. 

    According to the Sunday Times, some economists see a properly structured wealth tax raising as much as 160 billion rand a year. The income would be used to fund the 350 rand social relief of distress grant, which introduced at the beginning of the Covid-19 lockdown, and has been extended for another year.

    The National Treasury has argued that the plan is unaffordable, while private sector lobbies including Business Unity South Africa and Business Leadership South Africa have proposed a 200 basis point increase in value-added tax to 17% as an alternative. 

    Kubayi insisted that a wealth tax is the only acceptable option as an increase in income tax or VAT would weigh on already overburdened taxpayers. She however wants the grants to be conditional and linked to some form of work or skills development program.

    The comments come as the governing party’s national policy conference sits for a third day at the Nasrec center in Soweto near Johannesburg Sunday. The ANC gathered on Friday to set its policy objectives for the next five years. Among the policies it will discuss is the progress made on a 2017 resolution calling for the nationalization of the central bank.

    The post South Africa’s ruling African National Congress has revived plans to introduce a new tax on the wealthy to fund its basic income grant appeared first on Basic Income Today.

  • South Africa waiting on Minister of Finance to provide final verdict on basic income

    See original post here.

    JOHANNESBURG – The ANC’s (African National Committee) social transformation subcommittee has confirmed that a basic income grant is on the cards.

    This as South Africans endure a surge in consumer inflation, driven by rising transport and food prices.

    Subcommittee chairperson Lindiwe Sisulu says they’re waiting for the Finance Minister to give the grant the green light.

    “We were the committee that made it possible to provide our people during lockdown with R350 as an interim measure for their sustainability,” Sisulu said. “We realised that it was possible to deal beyond that, and deal with the basic income grants. We had several meetings with Treasury to introduce this grants now.”

    This is something on the table, the Minister of Finance will give the final verdict,” she said.

    “He’s trying to work out how we make sure we have this as an ongoing method to ensure our people who won’t have means will be supported by the state.”

    The post South Africa waiting on Minister of Finance to provide final verdict on basic income appeared first on Basic Income Today.

    This post was originally published on Basic Income Today.

  • A basic income is not some radical left wing idea; it is common humanity

    By: Alexandra Willis.

    See original post here.

    This past week Business Unity South Africa (Busa) and Business Leadership South Africa (BLSA) launched an attack on the proposed basic income grant (BIG), taking the position that a BIG is unaffordable.  

    Busa and the BLSA, in a research paper they commissioned, state that raising taxes is the only “theoretically viable option” for South Africa to fund a BIG. Understandably, raising taxes gets conservatives up in arms.

    But contrary to the research commissioned by Busa and the BLSA, and undertaken by market research and intelligence firm Intellidex, there are in fact eight financing options for a BIG, according to research undertaken by the Social Policy Initiative (SPI). 

    The materialisation of a BIG – or absence thereof – largely rests on political will.

    In a press statement, Busa’s CEO, Cas Coovadia, cautions that “the BIG is not an allocation of funds for a few years, but rather a permanent decision that must be carefully considered as, realistically, it cannot be undone once implemented”.

    Coovadia attacks the BIG proposal, saying that “any choice here on any funding front will simply not be available in future for other social wage policy choices, such as National Health Insurance and comprehensive social security reform”.

    On the contrary, research by the SPI supports the position that a BIG could in fact supplement other means of social provisioning through universal public services – free education and healthcare, and subsidised public electricity, transport and mass housing.

    Some people like to think that the debate around whether South Africans should receive a BIG or not is an ideological one. 

    Ideology, whether you’re aware of it happening or not, is (first) formed in the home and is either entrenched or overturned as you mature. That includes ideas that you believe about the role of the state – whether it is to play a minimalist role (the neoliberal view) or a full-on interventionist “nanny” role (far-leftist view), or somewhere in between. These are formed in your mind from the time you’re of school-going age.

    If you’re middle class and went to university, you will remember ideologies being debated inside and outside the lecture halls. If you are part of the majority of this country, life happens, and arguments are seldom about words.

    The far left in this country will have you believe that the call for a BIG is a radical one, but, on closer inspection, this really isn’t the case.

    Not everyone can work in the formal economy and not every business owner has a formal education or parents to provide them with start-up backing, or can access credit. And this describes the majority of black people born in South Africa. who are hamstrung by the legacy of apartheid.

    A BIG is no silver bullet to South Africa’s economic problems of poverty and inequality, but it would be a major step towards transforming the economy and empowering human beings. 

    A BIG would empower people by destigmatising grant recipients through scrapping the means tests for the old age pension, the disability grant and the child support grant. 

    A basic universal income grant could also empower people by, for example, providing start-up capital for an ambitious woman baking and selling vetkoek. And for someone else who is less driven, a BIG would enable them to buy the vetkoek from her (as well as other more nutritious food), thereby enabling the baker to profit and earn tomorrow’s ingredients, and the less ambitious person to survive.

    A BIG is not disincentivising people from working, as some conservatives would have you believe. A BIG does not turn the state into a “nanny” answering to your every need and whim.

    The reason is this: the grant money will never be enough for everyone to lead a decent lifestyle. People who depend only on grant money will always be poor, but they will have enough to survive.

    Thus, the BIG would provide a dignity floor for all people in South Africa.

    People who have ambitions could save their grant money and put it into skills development, or use it as venture capital.

    Whatever people spend their money on is none of our business. But it is our business as South Africans to care about the people who are starving and living below the poverty line. It is our business to care about the underdevelopment of children’s brains due to stunted growth as a result of malnutrition, children who will never be able to complete school because they didn’t have access to food.

    As South Africans, we can disagree on “politics” and on our views about what the duty of the state is and is not, but we should never be debating human dignity and the constitutional right of human beings to access food to be able to get by.

    It is not a radical idea that human beings are human beings.

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  • Millions of U.S. seniors can’t afford basic necessities

    By: Judith Graham.

    See original post here.

    Each month, Seeley, a retired teacher, gets $925 from Social Security and a $287 disbursement from an individual retirement account. To make ends meet, she’s taken out a reverse mortgage on her Portland, Maine, home that yields $400 monthly.

    So far, Seeley has been able to live on this income — about $19,300 a year — by carefully monitoring her spending and drawing on limited savings. But should her excellent health worsen or she need assistance at home, Seeley doesn’t know how she’d pay for those expenses.

    More than half of older women living alone — 54% — are in a similarly precarious financial situation: either poor according to federal poverty standards or with incomes too low to pay for essential expenses. For single men, the share is lower but still surprising — 45%.

    That’s according to a valuable but little-known measure of the cost of living for older adults: the Elder Index, developed by researchers at the Gerontology Institute at the University of Massachusetts-Boston.

    A new coalition, the Equity in Aging Collaborative, is planning to use the index to influence policies that affect older adults, such as property tax relief and expanded eligibility for programs that assist with medical expenses. Twenty-five prominent aging organizations are members of the collaborative.

    The goal is to fuel a robust dialogue about “the true cost of aging in America,” which remains unappreciated, said Ramsey Alwin, president and chief executive of the National Council on Aging, an organizer of the coalition.

    “Even more people are struggling”

    Nationally, and for every state and county in the U.S., the Elder Index uses various public databases to calculate the cost of health care, housing, food, transportation, and miscellaneous expenses for seniors. It represents a bare-bones budget, adjusted for whether older adults live alone or as part of a couple; whether they’re in poor, good, or excellent health; and whether they rent or own homes, with or without a mortgage.

    Results from the analyses are eye-opening. In 2020, according to data supplied by Jan Mutchler, director of the Gerontology Institute, the index shows that nearly 5 million older women living alone, 2 million older men living alone, and more than 2 million older couples had incomes that made them economically insecure. 

    And those estimates were before inflation soared to more than 9% — a 40-year high — and older adults continued to lose jobs during the second and third years of the pandemic. “With those stressors layered on, even more people are struggling,” Mutchler said.

    Nationally and in every state, the minimum cost of living for older adults calculated by the Elder Index far exceeds federal poverty thresholds, which are used to calculate official poverty statistics. (Federal poverty thresholds used by the Elder Index differ slightly from federal poverty guidelines. Data for each state can be found here.)

    Poverty rate “doesn’t cut it”

    One national example: The Elder Index estimates that a single older adult in good health paying rent needed $27,096, on average, for basic expenses in 2021 — $14,100 more than the federal poverty threshold of $12,996. For couples, the gap between the index’s calculation of necessities and the poverty threshold was even greater.

    Yet eligibility for Medicaid, food stamps, housing assistance, and other safety net programs that help older adults is based on federal poverty standards, which don’t account for geographic variations in the cost of living or medical expenses incurred by older adults, among other factors. (This isn’t an issue for older adults alone; the poverty measures have been widely critiqued across age groups.)

    “The poverty rate just doesn’t cut it as a realistic look at the struggles older adults are having,” said William Arnone, chief executive officer of the National Academy of Social Insurance, one of the new coalition’s members. “The Elder Index is a reality check.”

    In April, University of Massachusetts researchers showed that Social Security benefits cover only a fraction of what older adults need for basic living expenses: 68% for a senior in good health who lives alone and pays rent and 81% for an older couple in the same situation.

    “There’s a myth that Social Security and Medicare miraculously take care of all of people’s needs in older age,” said Alwin, of the National Council on Aging. “The reality is they don’t, and far too many people are one crisis away from economic insecurity.”

    Advocates: Seniors need assistance

    Organizations across the country have been using the Elder Index to convince policymakers that older adults need more assistance. In New Jersey, where 54% of seniors are economically insecure according to the index, advocates used the data to protect property-tax relief programs for older adults during the pandemic. In New York, where nearly 60% of seniors are economically insecure, advocates persuaded the legislature to raise the Medicaid income eligibility threshold.

    In San Diego, where as many as 40% of seniors are economically insecure, Serving Seniors, a nonprofit agency, persuaded county officials to use pandemic-related stimulus payments to expand senior nutrition programs. As a result, the agency has been able to double production of home-delivered meals, to more than 1.5 million annually.

    Officials are often wary of the financial impact of expanding programs, said Paul Downey, president and CEO of Serving Seniors. But, he said, “we should be using a reliable measure of economic security and at least know how well the programs we’re offering are doing.” By law, California’s Area Agencies on Aging use the Elder Index in their planning process.

    Maine is No. 5 on the list of states ranked by the share of seniors living below the Elder Index, 56%. For someone in Fran Seeley’s situation (an older adult who is in excellent health, lives alone, owns a house, and doesn’t pay a monthly mortgage), the index suggests $22,560 a year is necessary — $3,200 more than Seeley’s annual income and $9,500 above the federal poverty threshold.

    Budget gap

    A look at Seeley’s budget reveals how quickly necessary expenses accumulate: $2,041 annually for Medicare Part B (this is deducted from her Social Security check), $4,156 for property and stormwater taxes, $390 for home insurance, $320 for furnace cleaning, $1,440 for heat, $125 for water, $500 for gas and electricity, $300 for property maintenance, $1,260 for phone and internet, $150 for car registration, $640 for car insurance, $840 for gas at current prices, $300 for car maintenance, and $4,800 for food.

    The total: $17,262. And that doesn’t include the cost of medications, clothing, toiletries, any kind of entertainment, or other incidentals.

    Seeley’s great luxury is caring for four cats, which she describes as “the light of my life.” Their annual wellness checks cost about $400 a year, while their food costs about $1,080.

    With inflation now making her budget even tighter, “it means I have to cut back in any way I can. I find myself going into stores and saying, ‘No, I don’t need that,’” Seeley said. “The biggest worry I have is not being able to afford living in my home or becoming ill. I know that medical expenses could wipe me out in no time financially.”

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  • Stress Increases Beliefs That Underlie Disorders and Conspiracy Theories. UBI Can Help.

    By: Wageningen University.

    See original post here.

    Stress increases the rigidity of the beliefs underlying psychiatric disorders, prejudices and conspiracy theories. Therefore measures aimed at reducing social stress—a basic income or better job protection—could be the most effective approach for tackling problems such as depression, psychosis, discrimination and conspiracy theories.

    That is the message of a new publication in the reputable scientific journal PNAS, with Wageningen’s professor Marten Scheffer as the lead author.

    Scheffer and his co-authors—the Leiden neurobiologist Sander Nieuwenhuis, University of Amsterdam psychology professor Denny Borsboom and Canadian social scientist Frances Westley—describe recent findings in their fields that demonstrate how stressful circumstances can make harmful beliefs more rigid.

    These insights explain why conspiracy theories and psychiatric disorders tend historically to peak during periods of crisis, in other word when there is a lot of social stress.

    Scheffer says the findings have far-reaching implications. “If we want to combat psychiatric disorders, prejudices and conspiracy theories, we need to reduce the social stress that is associated with uncertainty about such essential factors as work and income.”

    Ineffectual facts

    That is very different to countering with facts, the usual reflex when trying to persuade people to change their beliefs. As the publication stresses, facts are ineffectual in changing false beliefs.

    “Letting an anorexia patient look in the mirror or providing proof that the US presidential election was not stolen has surprisingly little effect.”

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  • The high economic costs of being excluded from an emergency cash grant

    By: Maru Attwood.

    See original post here.

    In April 2020, the SA Social Security Agency introduced the Social Relief of Distress grant to lessen the economic effects of the Covid-19 pandemic. Then, in April this year, the grant was placed under a new legislative framework with additional assessment criteria. Applicants had to reapply, and many were rejected.

    “I don’t have any income … I am a daily survivor,” said Basestana Meletse, a community activist with #PayTheGrants in Westonaria, Gauteng.

    As one of 5.9 million recipients, Meletse was a beneficiary of the R350 Social Relief of Distress (SRD) grant until April this year. She has now been excluded from the monthly payments.  

    In April 2020, the SA Social Security Agency (Sassa) introduced the grants to lessen the economic effects of the pandemic. Under civil society pressure to increase and extend the grant, government agreed to continue the payments until March 2023 – but kept them at R350 a month. 

    Basestana Meletse is a community activist in Simunye, Westonaria, who is appealing her exclusion from the R350 grant. (Photo: Denvor de Wee)

    Meletse (49) used part of her monthly grant money to buy her family grocery hampers and basics such as mielie meal and sugar. She invested the rest in a stokvel with 10 friends and neighbours who were also grant beneficiaries. 

    Eventually, she managed to save enough money to buy equipment and ingredients to set up a shisa nyama corner kitchen, complete with a chip-frying station. She said: “That 350 a month … I’ve learnt that you can undermine small money, but at least it does something.”

    In April this year, Meletse stopped getting that money. The SRD grant was placed under a new legislative framework with additional assessment criteria. All applicants were required to reapply and Meletse was one of millions denied on the grounds of having alternative income sources. 

    “The stokvel has collapsed because we can’t expect anybody to save anything because we know where we got that money from,” Meletse said. She survives on money which her oldest daughter shares from selling cleaning supplies and atchar. 

    Naledi Meletse from Westonaria has been excluded from receiving the R350 grant on the grounds that she is receiving Unemployment Insurance Fund. She told Daily Maverick that she has never worked a formal job that could provide her with UIF. (Photo: Denvor de Wee)

    Melete’s 26-year-old daughter, Naledi, was also an SRD grant recipient. But after April’s changes to the application criteria, Sassa told her she was ineligible because she was receiving a payout from her Unemployment Insurance Fund (UIF). Naledi has never worked for a formal employer.

    “How can I receive UIF when I haven’t even worked? I don’t understand.” She has appealed her application’s status, but to no avail. 

    From anecdotal evidence of the 21 grant applicants in Westonaria who spoke to Maverick Citizen, a third said their requests were declined because – according to Sassa’s database – they were already receiving UIF payments. But they stressed they had either never received UIF, or had received payments which stopped months or even years before they applied for the SRD grant.  

    Zandile Buyaphi from Westonaria stopped receiving the R350 grant because she is registered with Nsfas. But she couldn’t register for university and isn’t receiving a Nsafas stipend either. (Photo: Denvor de Wee)

    Zandile Buyaphi (24) has been barred from receiving the SRD grant because she is registered with the National Student Financial Aid Scheme. However, Buyaphi hasn’t received a stipend from the scheme because she missed the deadline to pay to register for her Unisa teaching courses. 

    Being excluded from the grant means Buyaphi’s money for necessities like toiletries and groceries has diminished. Though she recalled that the monthly R350 did not go very far, some months she had enough money to purchase hair extensions and earned a small income doing people’s hair. 

    Mmasengwe Seitheiso from Westonaria has been excluded from receiving the Social Relief of Distress grant because she helped out a friend by using her bank account to get his money to his children. (Photo: Denvor de Wee)

    Mmasengwe Seitheiso (52), an unemployed former municipal worker, believes she was excluded from the grant because she did a favour for a friend. She agreed to receive and withdraw money from her account on behalf of a friend who lives in Rustenburg and whose children live in Westonaria without bank accounts. When she applied for an SRD grant, she was denied because Sassa believed she had an alternative source of income. She asked: “Am I not supposed to do that? It’s wrong. I should be able to assist, where I can assist, as a black person.”  

    Matshidiso Welkom (42) was excluded because she receives R700 in child maintenance from the mine worker’s salary of her children’s father.

    Thandi Nuvunga from Westonaria supports seven grandchildren with her pension. (Photo: Denvor de Wee)

    Without the grants, the cost of supporting people’s livelihoods is shifted on to relatives. Thandi Nuvunga (62) is a retired domestic worker who supports her family with her state pension. Nuvunga’s son received an SRD grant for just two months in 2020, and put the money towards extending his mother’s house to make space for her seven grandchildren. 

    “My children were trying to help me with the R350. But now they don’t get it any more,” said Nuvunga. They have been barred from the grant because Sassa alleges they are receiving UIF payments or have alternative sources of income. 

    Nuvunga is a seamstress, but the piles of fabric in her home have been abandoned for more than four months. After her son fell ill, she said, “I had to sell the [sewing] machine to buy groceries for him to eat.” She believes reliable payments of the SRD grant could have helped her keep her sewing machine. 

    Meletse says she is growing increasingly frustrated with government’s handling of the social grants.

    Lehlohonolo Motekoane fom Westonaria believes he has been excluded from receiving the Social Relief of Distress grant because Sassa mistakenly believes that he is still receiving a stipend from a mine learnership that ended nearly two years ago. (Photo: Denvor de Wee)

    Sassa’s huge backlog on grant payments for April and May means that even people whose applications have been approved, since the changes in criteria, haven’t been paid. 

    “This R350, it’s like an abusive boyfriend. Because you get it, you don’t get it, you get it, you don’t get it.” Meletse continued, “I want to tell these people of ours, stop voting for this government. It’s abusing us.” 

    Gloria Mhkabela from Westonaria has been approved for the Social Relief of Distress grant, even after reapplying. However, she hasn’t received a payment since March because of Sassa’s backlog in grant payments. (Photo: Denvor de Wee)

    #PayTheGrants, which Meletse campaigns with, is agitating to remove the barriers and means tests that have excluded millions from receiving the monthly payments they have relied on for the past two years. But they’re also intensely aware that R350 is not nearly enough. 

    #PayTheGrants wants to see a South Africa where everyone has a basic income grant of R1,500. 

    After the changes in the grant application criteria, Institute for Economic Justice (IEJ) co-founder Neil Coleman previously said to Maverick Citizen: “There’s never been such a low approval rate, which is the product of all these problematic procedures that they’ve put in place.”  

    After groups such as the IEJ and Black Sash expressed outrage over the low approval rate, Minister of Social Development Lindiwe Zulu called on 11 July for comment on a proposal to raise the grant income threshold from R350 to R624. 

    Bureaucratic barriers and delays on grant payments mean that in communities across South Africa, millions of people who only managed to make ends meet with the help of the SRD grant have been cut off from a vital, if still inadequate, source of income.

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  • DeSantis uses federal COVID-19 relief funds to send nearly 60,000 Florida families a $450-per-child check to ‘offset the costs of rising inflation’

    By: Katie Anthony.

    See original post here.

    HIGHLIGHTS:

    • Thousands of Florida families will receive one-time checks for $450 a child starting this week
    • Gov. Ron DeSantis announced he set aside $35.5 million of COVID-19 relief funds for the checks
    • The stimulus is directed at offsetting the costs of inflation, according to state officials

    _____________________________________

    Thousands of low-income Florida families are expected to receive relief checks to help offset inflation costs.

    Gov. Ron DeSantis’ administration on Thursday announced he’s reallocating some COVID-19 relief funds and sending $450 a child directly to struggling families in the state.

    “This one-time payment assists families who are being affected by rising inflation and preparing to send their children back-to-school,” Laura Walthall, a spokesperson for the Florida Department of Children and Families, said in a statement to Insider. 

    To fund the checks, the governor has set aside $35.5 million from the $1 billion the state received from the American Rescue Plan Act, according to an announcement from Casey DeSantis, Florida’s first lady.

    Eligible recipients include foster parents, relative and nonrelative caregivers, and families receiving funds from the Florida Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program or Guardianship Assistance Program, Walthall said. 

    The Florida Department of Children and Families said it expected about 59,000 families to receive at least one check, and, like other COVID-19 relief funds, there’s no application.

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  • People without secure income or housing have worse outcomes when treated for depression

    See original post here.

    People without jobs or with less secure housing have poorer outcomes when treated for depression with talking therapy or antidepressants, compared to more socially advantaged peers, finds a study led by UCL researchers.

    _______________________________________

    The authors of the new study published in JAMA Psychiatry say that addressing employment and housing needs may be helpful alongside depression treatments to support the mental health of people who are socioeconomically disadvantaged.

    The researchers combined evidence from nine studies, which included a total of 4,864 people who had been treated for depression, where data was available on socioeconomic factors such as jobs and housing.

    They found that after three to four months of treatment, unemployed patients had 28% worse depression symptoms than those who were employed. Homeowners’ depression symptoms were 18% better than for people who were homeless or living in hostels or with family and friends.

    Lead author Dr Joshua Buckman (UCL Psychology & Language Sciences and Camden & Islington NHS Foundation Trust) said: “We found that people who are unemployed or live in less secure housing have a poorer outcome when treated for depression. Additional support to access employment or housing could also lead to improvement in mental health.

    “From our findings, we cannot confirm whether helping to improve people’s work and housing situations would improve their mental health directly, or if it would set them up to be more able to engage in treatment. For example, it might make it easier to turn up to all of their appointments if they can stay in the same accommodation regularly without having to move out of the area.

    “We hope that further research will shed more light on how best to support the mental health needs of people experiencing social disadvantage.”

    People who were unemployed or had less secure housing had worse outcomes even when compared to people who had similar severity or number of symptoms when they started treatment. The researchers adjusted for other factors known to influence treatment outcomes such as a range of mental illness characteristics, in addition to age, gender, marital status, and, for most of the studies, physical health conditions and social support.

    They also reviewed whether financial strain or educational attainment were associated with treatment efficacy, but did not find a significant effect for either factor, nor did those factors explain the links with employment and housing status.

    After the initial few months of treatment, the gaps between groups continued to widen, as after nine to 12 months, unemployed patients had 37% worse symptoms than employed patients.

    The depression treatments given varied somewhat across the studies, including a few common antidepressants, cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT), computerised CBT, structured physical activity, collaborative care and other options, but the results were consistently worse for those people without jobs or secure housing.

    Senior co-author Professor Stephen Pilling (UCL Psychology & Language Sciences) said: “Clinicians can easily ask their patients about housing status and employment, and our findings suggest that this should then inform their treatment plans. If possible, a referral for support in finding secure housing or employment may be beneficial, or else by knowing that such patients are less likely to get better, clinicians might consider a more intensive treatment or additionally prioritise a follow-up appointment soon after starting treatment to see if it is having the desired effect.”

    Co-author Professor Glyn Lewis (UCL Psychiatry and Camden & Islington NHS Foundation Trust) said:

    “Social disadvantage can increase people’s risk of mental ill health, so it is particularly concerning that on top of that higher underlying risk, people without jobs or secure housing are also less likely to recover from depression.”

    The study was funded by Wellcome with support from the MQ Foundation, the Royal College of Psychiatrists, the National Institute of Health Research (NIHR), the NIHR Biomedical Research Centres at University College London Hospitals and South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust and King’s College London, and Alzheimer’s Society, and involved researchers from UCL, Camden & Islington NHS Foundation Trust, UCLA, King’s College London, Vanderbilt University, and the Universities of Southampton, Exeter, York, Bristol and Pennsylvania.

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  • 19% of people think universal basic income would alleviate work frustration

    By: Gili Malinsky.

    See original post here.

    For more than a year, Americans have been expressing their frustration with work by quitting their jobs altogether. More than 4 million people quit their jobs in May 2022 alone, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

    Their reasons vary. Some want better pay or benefits, others are escaping a toxic workplace and bad management, and others are seeking a new career, according to a 2022 Q1 Joblist survey of 18,617 jobseekers.

    When it comes to solutions for alleviating Americans’ frustration with work, job seekers cite options like raising the minimum wage and mandating a shorter work week. And nearly a fifth, 19% of jobseekers think a universal basic income could help.

    UBI is a policy in which citizens receive a regular stipend from the government, say, on a monthly basis, to be used at their discretion.

    At the moment, “there is no developed country that has a significant universal cash transfer that goes to literally everybody in the population that also has no conditions,” says Ioana Marinescu, an associate professor at the University of Pennsylvania whose podcast, “Just Economics,” discusses similar issues.

    So, how likely is that to happen in the U.S., and could it really solve workers’ problems?

    UBI studies found that ‘full-time employment increased’

    There have been experiments both around the world and in the U.S. that offer people a regular income to use at their discretion. Beginning in February 2019, for example, 125 residents of Stockton, California, received a monthly stipend of $500 over the course of 24 months through a citywide initiative. “And they did find that full-time employment increased,” says Donna Pavetti, vice president for family income support policy at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

    “It just gave people some flexibility,” she says, “So if they were working two part-time jobs, they could cut back, which gave them time to look for a better job.”

    A study of 25 residents of Hudson, New York, who began receiving $500 per month in the fall of 2020 on behalf of research organization the Jain Family Institute, found similar results. Participants’ employment (both full and part-time) grew from 29% to 63%, and their physical and mental health improved as well.

    ‘This would only help low-income workers’

    One key component of these studies is that they “are all targeted in some way,” says Pavetti, adding that “they may be targeted to single moms or and they may be targeted to a neighborhood that has a high concentration of people with low incomes.”

    And, in fact, if this kind of policy was ever implemented, these low-income populations would likely benefit the most.

    “To the extent that a basic income would be the same for everybody and presumably not very high, this would only help low-income workers,” says Marinescu. “It would not help higher income workers because the amount is not necessarily high enough to provide a reasonable cushion in the same way for higher income workers.”

    ‘The most similar thing we have’ is the Child Tax Credit

    Though, on a federal level, policymakers have never implemented UBI, recent policies have come close. “The most similar thing we have are things like the Child Tax Credit,” says Marinescu, adding that, “that’s not literally universal, but for anybody who has kids, it gives them cash without any further conditions.”

    The pandemic-era policy gave families access to payments of $300 per month for children under 6-years-old and $250 per month for children ages 6 through 17 up to $3,600 for the former and $3,000 for the latter.

    There were also “the famous [stimulus] checks,” says Marinescu. “So these went to 90% of the U.S. population without any condition.”

    The problem with UBI, specifically, is, “you have to raise the taxes to finance it,” says Marinescu. To match monthly sums to the average American income would take a steep increase. Even one lower than the average income “would imply a significant hike in tax rates,” she says. That could outweigh the benefits for many families.

    Ultimately, with any of these programs, “the question is,” she says, “as a society, are we willing to tax ourselves to get a system like this in place?”

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  • After Roe, Families Need Universal Basic Income More Than Ever

    By:BY STACEY RUTLAND.

    See original post here.

    When I was in my third year of college, I had an abortion. I was several months into a relationship with the man who would later become my husband. During one of the most important times in my life, birth control failed us.

    I had my abortion in 1999. At the time, I was working 30 hours a week, taking a full load of classes, and using Pell Grants and student loans to cover the gaps. The cost for an abortion was expensive, more than $500. Even with my partner helping cover costs, this was a significant shock to my ability to cover my regular monthly living expenses. But I was lucky. My fall student loan disbursement coincided with my finding out I was pregnant. Having that cash meant I could afford the abortion, and exercise autonomy over my own body and life.

    While it’s been more than two decades, I’ve been thinking about this situation often with the end of Roe v. Wade.

    As the head of an organization fighting for basic income, I know first-hand how crucial extra cash will be to women in need of abortion and the extra costs they’ll have to incur to receive one if they live in one of the majority of states poised to outlaw abortion.

    A guaranteed income is not an alternative to abortion access, but it will certainly help women overcome the tremendous barriers they’ll face with the end of legal abortion rights.

    Just like it was for me, the cost of an abortion for millions of women is already prohibitive, or creates a shock to their financial lives in ways that can have long-term impact. We need a federally-funded guaranteed income program, similar to the unrestricted cash distributed through last year’s expanded Child Tax Credit, to help women in states outlawing abortion offset the added financial burden they now face.

    Second only to abortion laws themselves, financial resources are the primary factor in whether a woman can access an abortion. As a recent Brookings report determined: “Economists provide clear evidence that overturning Roe would prevent large numbers of women experiencing unintended pregnancies—many of whom are low-income and financially vulnerable mothers—from obtaining desired abortions.”

    A basic income provides a monthly payment to recipients without restrictions on how it can be spent. Like other forms of income, it is designed to support people as they navigate the ever-shifting landscape of their lives.

    At its heart, basic income is about changing our country’s punitive, unjust systems toward ones rooted in dignity, trust and freedom. It empowers individuals with agency, just as the right to an abortion does.

    Right now, there are more than 80 guaranteed basic income pilots happening across the country. Most pilots offer at least $500 monthly, the average cost of both the abortion pill and a first-trimester procedure, which comprises the vast majority of all abortions. A guaranteed income can also help women living in states that will now ban abortion following the SCOTUS decision to offset those high costs associated with obtaining abortions where it remains legal. We saw this play out in Texas, which recently implemented a near-total abortion ban, where most women seeking an abortion either traveled elsewhere or accessed an abortion pill.

    The financial stability of a guaranteed income can also help women afford birth control, which is a major barrier to the uninsured and is even cost-prohibitive in many cases for women who have insurance.

    It is critical that when we talk about abortion access we recognize that this is an issue of equity. The act of giving birth poses a significant threat to Black women in the U.S., who have four times the maternal mortality rate as their white counterparts. Additionally, the wide racial wealth and income gaps means women of color are more likely to rely on Medicaid, which does not cover abortion.

    Abortion access is inextricably linked to economic security, and—as is the case with all punitive social policies—those who are already marginalized will pay the highest cost.

    The states where women will face the most restrictions are also the states where women are most likely to be low-income, uninsured and have the highest rates of maternal mortality. Mississippi, home to the case that triggered the overturning of Roe v. Wade, just refused to expand Medicaid to support postpartum low-income mothers.

    There is a direct link to women’s ability to access an abortion and their economic prospects, with research finding women who wanted an abortion but were unable to—and their subsequent children—are four times more likely to live under the poverty line.

    Guaranteed income is a proven antidote to poverty and increasing freedom: first year results from the Stockton Economic Empowerment Demonstration found recipients had an increased capacity for agency and self-determination, two things gravely at risk with the rolling back of abortion rights.

    After I graduated from college, my husband and I got married and had a child. As I look at my now-teenager, I am thankful that I had access to unrestricted funds so that I could choose when to become a mother.

    A guaranteed income is not a replacement for what all women deserve—the protections offered by Roe v. Wade to make their own choices about their bodies. But given the reality that a constitutional right to an abortion has now been rescinded, a guaranteed income is an immediate step we can take in an ongoing fight to support and protect women.

    The post After Roe, Families Need Universal Basic Income More Than Ever appeared first on Basic Income Today.

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  • Forcing People to Work So They Can Get a Child Tax Credit Is a Terrible Idea

    By: JIM PUGH.

    See original post here.  

    Last year, Anna James, a mother from Fayetteville, NC received a lifeline: monthly payments from the expanded Child Tax Credit (CTC). The program provided critical financial support as she cared for her two little boys who suffered from a rare and often fatal genetic disease. Between the hospital visits, doctor’s appointments, and care at home, Anna didn’t have time for paid work, and expanded CTC payments were all she had keeping her afloat.

    But this support didn’t last.

    The monthly expanded CTC payments ended in December 2021 after Congress failed to renew the benefit and it reverted to its pre-2021 status: a non-refundable, one-time tax credit. Non-refundable tax credits include a de facto ​“work requirement,” as they can only be claimed by someone with earned income, meaning Anna was no longer eligible to receive support.

    Despite its resounding success in greatly reducing child poverty, the expanded CTC has languished in Congress, due to uniform opposition from Republicans and Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin (WV). While negotiations continue around the policy, Manchin has insisted that any permanent expansion of the credit include an explicit work requirement. This preference has been mirrored by GOP Sen. Mitt Romney (Utah), who introduced his own proposal for a CTC expansion that also includes a work requirement.

    While encouraging work sounds like a laudable goal, work requirements for social programs are one of the most ineffective and harmful design choices that can be made in setting public policy. Attaching benefits to paid work has been shown again and again to have no impact on actually increasing employment rates among eligible populations. A 2021 study by the National Bureau of Economic Research, a non-partisan organization, found that ​“eliminating work requirements would likely transfer more resources to low-income adults than other programs targeting the same population.” This finding is in line with a 2016 report from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a progressive think tank, which found that work requirements don’t actually cut poverty. 

    What’s more, work requirements can actually have the exact opposite effect: blocking unemployed people from accessing critical support may leave them unable to successfully secure employment, acting as a poverty trap.

    This seems to have been the case with families receiving the expanded CTC: caregivers receiving the monthly payments said the money helped them to start or continue running their own business. With a work requirement in place, these individuals would not have had this support — and many would likely still be out of work.

    Work requirements often don’t make exceptions for families in situations where paid employment makes no sense. In the case of the expanded CTC, many of the recipients were retirement-age grandparents providing care for their grandchildren and parents with disabilities or illness, such as Anna James, who are unable to work. Manchin and Romney’s approach to expanding the CTC would block these families from receiving support, despite their dire need for financial assistance.

    If elected officials really want to increase workforce participation among benefits program recipients, there are ways to do that which actually work. A great start would be to remove extreme means-testing around eligibility for programs, which often remove people if their incomes rise above poverty levels. This type of ​“welfare cliff” discourages people from taking paid work for fear that the loss of benefits will outweigh the additional money they earn.

    Another change to encourage work would be to abolish harsh asset limits for benefits program eligibility, which makes enrollees lose support if their savings hit a certain level—just $2,000 in the case of Supplemental Security Income (SSI). This restriction can prevent families from making the investments they need to secure a job and improve their economic situation.

    One immediate way to both encourage work and help families in need would be to make childcare far more affordable than it is today. With the average cost of childcare exceeding $1,700 per month in some areas, it’s no wonder that many parents would choose to forsake a paid job and stay at home, rather than spend all day away from their children and have the money they earn barely cover the cost of care. This could be achieved by either reducing the cost of childcare through subsidies (as was proposed in President Biden’s Build Back Better legislation) or by directly supporting parents with cash payments — as was done with the expanded CTC.

    Finally, it’s important to take a step back and consider how we’re defining ​“work” for parents.

    The concept of a work requirement for the CTC completely ignores the fact that raising children is work.

    One could imagine a circumvention of the work requirement by simply having two families swap children and pay each other for childcare, turning the care work into paid employment. But as long as they’re tending to their own children, the families would be out of luck.

    Designing effective public policy isn’t an easy task. There are many open questions about how to best structure benefits programs and tax credits to make the most positive impact. But the evidence is in for work requirements: they just don’t work.

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  • Why working less can save the planet.

    By: Joanna Thompson.

    See original URL here.

    Jayson Porter never meant to go viral on Twitter. Porter, an environmental historian at Northwestern University, was thinking about an in-class conversation he’d had with some of his students when he tweeted on March 1, 2022: “I’m still stuck on this idea: investing in more sleep for climate justice.”

    The tweet quickly exploded, resonating with hundreds of thousands of users, including climate advocates, sleep enthusiasts and burnt-out millennial types. But it also raised a huge question: Can sleeping more really help combat climate change?

    The answer, according to experts, is yes—with a few qualifications.

    The idea of sleeping in to save the planet is “enticing,” Porter told The Daily Beast, “partly because it’s a reflection of a lot of privilege.” Most of us would love to catch some extra z’s. But simply snoozing your alarm won’t do much to slash carbon emissions. What’s more, not everyone has the time, resources or economic security to sleep more at night without widespread systemic change. That’s why, at its heart, “this is really a question of anti-capitalism,” Porter said.

    The trouble is, we live in a society—and for most of us in the Global North, that society happens to be hyper-capitalistic. “Growth is very much ingrained in capitalism,” Milena Buchs, an environmental sociologist at the University of Leeds in England, told The Daily Beast. It’s an insidious truth reflected in business-speak mantras like “growth mindset” and “rise and grind,” which glorify constant work as a virtue.

    However, from a climate perspective, humanity’s current workload is downright destructive. It takes a lot of carbon to make the stuff we purchase on a daily basis, like clothes, electronics and various plastics. Industry alone accounts for over a fifth of global greenhouse gas emissions, according to the EPA. That slice balloons to 40 percent when combined with emissions produced from powering office buildings and commuting to work.

    “In most developed countries, work time hasn’t really decreased since the mid-1980s, despite very large improvements in productivity,” Jonas Nässén, a sustainability researcher at Chalmers University in Sweden, told The Daily Beast.

    But there are some groups working to counteract this paradox, and their ideas are starting to gain a foothold in the mainstream.

    Degrowth is a movement based on the theory that perpetual growth is ultimately unsustainable, both from an economic perspective and an environmental one. Its proponents advocate scaling back the sheer amount of stuff industrial nations produce and moving towards a sustainable, circular economy.

    “It’s important to emphasize that degrowth is not recession or a forced shrinking of economies, but an intentional shift,” Neera Singh, an environmental economist at the University of Toronto in Canada, told The Daily Beast.

    While a sudden pivot to degrowth policies probably isn’t in the cards for most wealthy nations, some are taking a few tentative steps toward reducing people’s workload.

    In June, over 3,300 workers across 70-plus companies in the U.K. began participating in a pilot program of a 30-hour, four-day work week. The six-month trial, organized by the not-for-profit 4 Day Week Campaign, aims to improve their overall well-being by providing extra time to rest and recover (without reducing pay). The goal, according to campaign director Joe Ryle, is “less stress, less burnout, less overwork.”

    And those hours off work might not just benefit human health—they could be good for the planet as well.

    “Moving to a four-day week is a relatively quick way of bringing down emissions,” Ryle told The Daily Beast.

    The science seems to bear this out, at least in highly industrialized nations. For example, one of Nässén’s studies of Swedish households from 2015 found that every 1 percent reduction in working time reduced carbon emissions across the country by 0.8 percent. Another 2012 study suggested that scaling back work hours by 10 percent in industrial countries could reduce their carbon footprint by over 14 percent annually. Most of those reductions come from energy saved on office building lighting, air conditioning, computer usage, and commuting. And in early 2020, COVID lockdowns caused a 5.4 percent drop in global carbon dioxide emissions (that number quickly rebounded as restrictions lifted later in the year).

    See video here – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MyVfUaXyyqo&t=1s

    So, it seems that in general, less time at work equals lower emissions. But, experts caution, how people spend their personal time matters too.

    Activities that are more expensive also tend to be more environmentally costly. Travel, particularly by plane, is an especially carbon-intensive undertaking. So are consumption-driven activities, like shopping. Whereas “reading a book, having a conversation, or going for a walk are obvious low-emitters,” said Nässén. It turns out that sleeping might just be the greenest activity of all. A 2019 study of nearly 5,000 households in Austria found that sleeping (and generally vegging out) was the least carbon-intensive way for a person to spend their free time; in contrast, going out to eat at a local restaurant emitted nearly 20 times as much carbon dioxide.

    However, even sleep isn’t necessarily carbon neutral. In the summer and wintertime, for instance, folks often leave air conditioners or heaters running all night in order to stay comfortable. And sleeping with a noise maker or other plugged-in device could consume extra nocturnal energy.

    Ultimately, Porter thinks that this sort of “personal responsibility” narrative by itself is insufficient in the fight against climate change. “Sleep is an environmental justice issue,” he said. “There are so many different things, both class and race, that disproportionately affect how people of color sleep.” To reduce emissions in a meaningful way and give everyone adequate time to rest, developed nations need to address larger, more structural issues, like unrestricted industrial growth and socioeconomic inequities.

    Buchs believes that our current pandemic-altered economic landscape might offer an opportunity to allow some degrowth practices to take root naturally (albeit in a less intentional way than many degrowth advocates would like). “Some economists think that this could be part of an obvious sort of era where we see very low growth rates anyway, and where policymakers have to adjust to this very new context,” she said. She sees the growing interest in programs like the 4 Day Week Campaign as a sign that this shift has already begun.

    For his part, Ryle hopes that 4 Day Week’s impact will ripple into environmental justice circles, too. “We need to be taken much more seriously by the climate movement,” he said.

    Nässén sees implementing shorter work weeks and encouraging people to get more rest as a far easier sell than many other sweeping climate policies.

    “While many pro-environmental lifestyle changes are [purely] sacrifices, this is a bit of both,” he said. “You’ll sacrifice a bit of consumption, but you’ll get more time for recovery or to do the things that matter to you.”

    As much as we might wish it could, more hours spent dozing off won’t magically solve climate change. But restructuring the work week to allow for more rest could be a significant step towards a sustainable future—one where we can all… sleep just a little easier.

    The post Why working less can save the planet. appeared first on Basic Income Today.

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  • Is a basic income within reach?

    See original post here.

    A new study was released today saying that Canada is closer than ever to a workable guaranteed basic income (GBI). In fact, the University of Calgary School of Public Policy report says the cost may be less burdensome than many would think.

    Here are the top 5 things for you to know about A guaranteed basic income for Canadians: off the table or within reach.

    1. We can pay for a GBI by eliminating the GST credit and lowering basic personal income tax exemptions, and effectively finance it without imposing an excessive tax burden on Canadians.
    2. A GBI offers a huge opportunity to simplify income assistance. Current provincial “welfare” programs have hundreds of rules and corresponding benefit rates and dozens of specialized benefits. The current income assistance programs can also disincentivize people from working.
    3. Implementing a GBI does not mean provincial income support programs will or should go away. The study says a GBI could supplement these programs on a temporary basis until the tax system becomes more responsive to people’s changing incomes.
    4. The authors recommend implementation by the federal government, and not the provinces, because of its centrality in designing and implementing tax structures and collecting tax revenue.
    5. The GBI proposed in the study could reduce the rate and depth of poverty by over 60%. When you consider that poverty costs Albertans between $7.1-9.5 billion annually, this increases the affordability of a GBI even further.

    The study simulates four options for a GBI assessing them based on disposable incomes, poverty reduction potential, cost and their effect on the labour supply. It provides some much-needed data in the Canadian context to equip policy makers and advocates.

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  • Child Tax Credit: Parents miss the money as inflation rises

    By: GABRIELLA CRUZ-MARTINEZ.

    See original post here.

    Zebulon Newton received the last monthly Child Tax Credit payment of $550 for his two children on December 15th.

    Five months after the credits expired, it’s getting harder to make ends meet. With gas prices surging, costs of grocery bills and day care eroding savings, record-high inflation has left little room for the family of four to front emergency costs, said the North Carolina resident.

    “Our daughter with down syndrome had heart surgery at age four, fortunately the Child Tax Credit helped relieve some of the financial anxiety of medical costs,” said Newton, age 40. “But now our budgets are nearly $600 short each month.”

    The financial pressure is driving Newton, a stay-at-home dad, to look for work to help his wife cover additional expenses. But it’s difficult because his four-year-old daughter requires seven therapy sessions a week, two of which they pay for. To save money, the family found cheaper daycare – just a three-hour program for $200 a month. They also thrift clothes twice a year for their four- and seven-year-old.

    “For six months, childhood life got better,” Newton said. “You can’t deny that.”

    A recent study led by researchers from the Center for Poverty & Social Policy at Columbia University, found that the monthly distribution of tax credit payments kept 1 in 10 children from experiencing a “spell of poverty” throughout the year – as opposed to when payments were delivered in a lump sum during tax season.

    The monthly installments reduced income volatility, which kept households from slipping under the poverty line from July through December 2021. The study builds on new evidence that shows the majority of Child Tax Credit recipients spent the credits on children’s clothing, food, and childcare expenses, costs that are now rising rapidly.

    “Having some regular inflow of cash is really critical for families,” Christopher Wimer, co-author of both studies and Columbia University co-director of the Center for Poverty & Social Policy, told Yahoo Money. “The Child Tax Credit allowed people to take a breath and served as a resource to help pay for kids and raise children.”

    Parents spend CTC on children

    Last year, the Internal Revenue Service paid out six months of advance Child Tax Credit payments – starting in July – worth up to $250 per child ages 6 through 17 and up to $300 per child under 6.

    The payments reached 61.2 million children by the year end, and reduced the monthly child poverty rate by 30%. According to the Center on Poverty and Social Policy at Columbia University, the credits prevented 3.7 million children from falling into poverty by December 2021.

    Since the credits were fully refundable, families earning little to no income were able to access the credits for the first time. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the majority of families earning under $35,000 per year spent most of their CTC payments on food, utilities, housing and education.

    “Maybe the credit amounts weren’t necessarily life altering for some,” said Wimer, “but they gave the lowest income families who historically have been shut out of these programs the opportunity to invest in children. For the first time, many were able to just get through the day a little easier.”

    As the summer rolls in, many families that received the advanced CTC payments last year have likely gotten the second half of the CTC through their tax refund. How they are spending the money hasn’t changed, according to Census data.

    “Parents’ spending has been consistent when it comes to the Child Tax Credit,” Joanna Ain, associate director of policy at Prosperity Now, told Yahoo Money. “The majority are using the money from the tax refund to afford food, clothing, school supplies and rent. But all of these expenses have gone up, and that money is going to run out.”

    Already, in early February 2022, close to 35% of adults living in households with children struggled to cover usual costs without the CTC.

    “I’m not a pessimistic person,” Ain said, “but I think we’re looking at a difficult couple of years.”

    Monthly cash payments reduce poverty year round

    The tax filing season often provides families with a financial boost in income once tax refunds are mailed in. This year, it was no different as millions of families claimed the other half of their expanded CTC.

    According to data from Columbia University, once the annual lump sum of Earned Income Tax Credit and expanded CTC rolled in, the monthly poverty rate fell from 14.4% in February 2022 to 10.8% in March 2022. For children, the monthly poverty rate fell from an estimated 23% in February to 11% in March, and rose back to 23% by May – and will likely remain above 22% for the rest of the year.

    “Parents generally use the tax return to pay back debts,” said Ain. “In the upcoming months, we’re going to see these families’ needs grow because the tax return money has been already used on rent or childcare costs this summer.”

    To reduce child poverty rates throughout the year, researchers from Columbia University suggest monthly CTC payments instead of a lump sum payment at tax time. According to their analysis, the rate of child poverty consistently fell by an average 6.8 percentage points when the CTC was delivered monthly.

    In other words, a monthly installment of the Child Tax Credit cuts child poverty by one-third each month.

    “When I used to work in sales, April was the time most people would come in and buy big ticket items like a TV and furniture,” said Newton. “But during the Child Tax Credit, you didn’t hear about people spending like that. People just went about their routine and made sure they had enough food for their kids at the end of week.”

    According to Newton, while his family received close to $5,000 in tax refund this year through the Child Tax Credit – they have budgeted the cash carefully. Still, he admits it can be hard for some folks to make mistakes after getting a lump sum payment.

    “There’s this real value of the monthly installments because families can count on it if it’s a permanent program,” Wimer said. “You’re more likely to devote it to your routine expenses, it’s essentially a lifeline.”

    The post Child Tax Credit: Parents miss the money as inflation rises appeared first on Basic Income Today.

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  • Brits support universal basic income by 20-point margin

    By: Ben van der Merwe.

    See original post here.

    Nearly half of all British adults (48 per cent) would support the introduction of a universal basic income (UBI), according to a YouGov poll shared exclusively with the New Statesman.

    A UBI would provide every UK resident with a guaranteed monthly income from the state. Unlike existing benefits such as Universal Credit, the payment would be made without means-testing or work requirements. 

    A plurality supported the policy in every region, in both major social classes and in all age groups under 65. However, Conservative voters opposed the idea by 43 per cent to 35 per cent, while Leave voters were evenly split.

    YouGov found that the policy also has broad support in Italy, Spain and Germany. Support in Germany and Italy was similarly split by party and age, though in Spain it was older age groups that were most supportive.

    All groups polled in the UK agreed that a UBI would increase living standards and reduce poverty. However, Conservatives, Leave voters and pensioners expressed concern that the policy would reduce economic growth.

    Indeed, the affordability of a UBI was the greatest concern for the general public, with 45 per cent believing that the government would be unable to pay for the policy (against 35 per cent who disagreed).

    Last year, parliament’s Work and Pensions Committee advised the government against introducing a UBI, arguing the policy would be “extremely expensive, and would not target support at people who need it most”.

    Estimates of the policy’s cost vary widely, owing to disagreement over the suitable level of payment. YouGov’s poll found that a majority of all social classes, age groups and regions in Britain think that a UBI should be enough to live on without any other form of income (54 per cent of all respondents), though a sizeable minority believe it should be set lower and supplemented by employment income or other benefits (41 per cent).

    A 2017 study by the Institute for Policy Research examined a range of possible UBI schemes, examining their distributional effects and cost. The authors concluded that “such schemes either have unacceptable distributional consequences or they simply cost too much”.

    However, a 2020 study estimated that a UBI could eradicate child and pensioner poverty at a cost of £67bn, similar to the cost of the Covid-19 furlough scheme. The researchers suggested the scheme could be paid for by getting rid of corporate subsidies and tax breaks.

    In January this year, a report by the New Economics Foundation called for a mixed system, combining a minimalist UBI with a minimum income guarantee, which it calls a “Living Income”. The system would cost an estimated £137bn, which the think tank suggests could be raised by abolishing the personal tax allowance. It calculated that such a policy could lift 760,000 people out of poverty and boost the average income of the poorest 10 per cent of households by £2,000.

    Sam Tims, an economist at the New Economics Foundation told the New Statesman: “Strong and growing support for UBI demonstrates that we are moving away from the austerity-driven consensus of the last decade, the result of which is an inadequate social security system that fails to protect those who need it most. 

    “At its core, UBI ensures no one’s income falls below a set level and the concept of a decent minimum income should be welcomed and applied to the welfare state. But we don’t need UBI to begin eradicating poverty and reducing inequality. A ‘Living Income’ would provide a minimum income tied to the cost of living through a means-tested system.”

    The poll comes just as the Welsh government begins its trial of a basic income for children leaving care. The scheme, which is set to run until 2025, will see around 500 18-year-olds offered an unconditional income of £19,200 per year for up to two years.

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  • New poll of seven EU countries shows majority support for UBI in Germany, Spain, and Italy

    By: Isabelle Kirk.

    See original post here.

    A universal basic income (UBI) is a fixed payment, paid equally by the government to every citizen of a country, regardless of whether they are in work. The pandemic saw the advent of payments similar to a UBI – ‘stimulus checks’ in the US, for example – and some countries have conducted experiments with basic income programmes.

    People in favour of a universal basic income argue that all citizens deserve a decent standard of living and propose that a UBI could radically reduce poverty. A universal basic income is not means-tested. While this means that recipients are not required to jump through hoops or face the stress and uncertainty of a non-guaranteed benefit, it has also been argued that it is unfair as it’s paid equally to everyone, including wealthy people who do not need it.

    Do Europeans support introducing a universal basic income, and what level should it be set at?

    YouGov’s Eurotrack shows varying support for the introduction of a universal basic income across seven European countries, with support being highest in Germany (55%) and Italy (52%) and lowest in Denmark (29%).

    Great Britain, Germany, Spain and Italy are all more in favour of a basic income than against it, with Sweden split, and France and Denmark more opposed.

    For those who support the introduction of a UBI, the question then becomes what level the payment should be set at. Finland’s universal basic income experiment, conducted in 2017-18, set the level at €560 (£490) a month, but the main debate centres on whether a person should be able to survive wholly on a universal basic income, or whether it should be supplemented by other forms of income.

    Supporters of the scheme in European countries differ on what level the payment should be set at. Six in 10 Germans who support a basic income say a UBI should be set at a level that is at least enough to pay for a person’s basic living costs (62%), even if they have no other form of income. This view is shared by 59% of Italians and 54% of Britons and Swedes who support introducing UBI.

    In Spain, 37% of supporters of a UBI favour this basic costs-level, but the majority (59%) would set it lower than this: at a level that is enough to cover some basic living costs, but is expected to be supplemented by other income from employment or benefits. French and Danish supporters of a UBI are split.

    Can governments afford the cost of a universal basic income?

    A major argument against the introduction of a universal basic income is the cost of the scheme. In the UK, estimates of the cost of a UBI range from £67 billion a year (the cost of the Covid-19 furlough scheme) to £427 billion a year. For a basic income that every individual can survive on, money could be raised from axing benefits entirely, but the scheme would nevertheless be exceptionally expensive in order to give a liveable wage to every citizen.

    Despite high levels of support for the policy itself in some of the countries, all nations polled (except Germany) felt that their governments could not afford to give citizens a basic income. On average, 48% of Europeans felt that a UBI was too expensive, with Spain most emphatic – 57% say the Spanish government could not afford to give its citizens a basic income, with 30% saying they could afford it.

    How would a universal basic income impact quality of life, poverty, work, and economic growth?

    From existing pilot schemes, there is evidence that introducing a universal basic income would improve quality of life and well-being, radically reduce poverty and actually improve employment levels. Opponents of the scheme argue that a UBI undermines incentives to participate in work, and the Institute for Policy Research states that it is “impossible” to design a UBI that controls cost, meets needs and maintains work incentives.

    All countries polled in our survey were more likely to say a UBI would improve quality of life than worsen it, with Spain (57%), Italy (53%) and Germany (52%) most convinced. Between 13% and 22% of Europeans in our survey say a UBI would worsen quality of life, while 15-26% think it would make no difference to quality of life.

    Similarly, between 34% and 52% of Europeans say a UBI would reduce poverty, while 8-16% say it would increase poverty and 26-31% say it would not make much difference. People in Denmark, which has lower support for the policy in general, are least convinced that a basic income would improve quality of life (34%) or reduce poverty (34%).

    On the subject of work and economic growth, Europeans are less sure. Spaniards (40%) and Italians (40%) are most likely to say that a basic income would increase economic growth, while Danes (21%) and Swedes (23%) are least likely to have this view. However, there is more consensus in these countries that a UBI would not make much difference to economic growth (30% in Denmark, 29% in Sweden) than reduce growth (21% and 23%). 

    All countries polled did not think that a universal basic income would lead to more people in work, with most saying it would lead to about the same number of people in work, or fewer people in work.

    For people who remain in work, Europeans tend to think they will do the same number of hours, with between Germans (52%) most likely to have this view. Few think that workers would take on more hours, while 25-36% think that people who remain in work would do fewer hours if a UBI was introduced.

    See international topline results here and UK demographic results here

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    This post was originally published on Basic Income Today.

  • Citizens’ Basic Income Initiative shows strong momentum across Europe for Basic Income

    See original post here.

    Last weekend, the official signature collection period of the European Citizens’ Initiative (ECI) “Start Unconditional Basic Incomes (UBI) throughout the EU” ended. During the past months, nearly 300,000 citizens expressed their support for the initiative with their online signature.

    “We have seen an impressive effort from UBI campaigners, despite the difficult situation with the pandemic. Four national campaigns – Slovenia, Italy, Spain, and Germany – were successful in reaching their official thresholds” said Alessandra Bianchi, Chair of Unconditional Basic Income Europe. “This is a strong signal that European decision makers need to pay attention to the basic income debate.”

    “Now it is important that we keep this momentum and support initiatives around the continent that bring us closer to implementing basic income everywhere, such as the referendum initiative currently running in Berlin” Bianchi added. “Unconditional Basic Income Europe is preparing a campaign that brings together mayors who want to run basic income experiments.”

    “We have seen an unprecedented interest and support for UBI in Italy during the past few months that resulted in a great number of signatures. The European Citizens’ Initiative was a great tool to invigorate the debate in our country and mobilise support” explained Michele Gianella, national coordinator of the ECI in Italy.

    The collection of signatures for the European Citizens’ Initiative “Start Unconditional Basic Incomes (UBI) throughout the EU” started on 25 September 2020 an ended on 25 June 2022. The aim of this initiative was the introduction of unconditional basic incomes throughout the EU, to ensure every person’s material existence and opportunity to participate in society, as part of the Union’s economic policy. 

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  • A Basic Income Is The Answer To Poverty in Canada

    By: WIL ROBERTSON AND TRACY SMITH.

    See original post here.

    Basic income is too complex to implement. At least that’s the thinking in the latest release by the Atlantic Provinces Economic Council. Yet data from Statistics Canada demonstrated that changes to the Canada Child Benefit—a basic income program for families—were largely responsible for a nearly four percent decline in poverty from 2019 to 2020.

    APEC’s report claims that “the evidence on national, long-term basic income programs is limited,” but we do have significant evidence that negative income tax programs (a form of basic income) are effective.

    The Canada Child Benefit and Guaranteed Income Supplement in Canada demonstrate the efficiency and efficacy of providing income security for children and older adults in Canada. There are also reams of global research on the effectiveness of cash transfer programs.

    The “work disincentive” argument (that people will stop working if they receive a basic income) also reared its head in APEC’s report, despite evidence that shows people do not suddenly leave their jobs when they receive income support. Robert Gilbert and colleagues in 2018 examined 16 basic income programs around the world and found they had “no substantial impact” on labour market participation.

    APEC also points to the Canada Emergency Response Benefit (CERB) to bolster its work disincentive argument. Yet a recent report to Senator Nancy Hartling of New Brunswick debunked the false narrative that the CERB caused mass labour shortages.

    Likely the biggest argument levelled against a basic income is that it would be too expensive. The APEC report lays out concerns that implementing a basic income would lead to widespread tax hikes and reductions in government expenditures, threatening its long-term viability.

    No consideration is given, however, to the savings that such a program would invariably accrue over time. Sustaining a system of poverty is hugely expensive. Addressing only the symptoms of poverty, as our systems are currently oriented to do, is costly not only in dollar figures but in human lives.

    A basic income, if offered at an adequate level to those who need it, could essentially eradicate poverty, with tremendous immediate and upstream cost savings.

    The introduction of new taxes could indeed be helpful but only if they target those with excessive wealth. In 2021, the richest one percent collectively owned roughly 30 percent of the wealth in this country, according to researchers James Davies and Livio Di Matteo.

    Perhaps now is time to consider options to make our tax system more progressive. Alex Hemingway, in a policy note composed last year, suggested that imposing a modest tax (one percent on net wealth of more than $10 million, two percent on wealth over $50 million, and three percent on wealth over $100 million) would raise $363 billion in Canada over 10 years. Taxing wealth is an area that others are also considering. U.S. President Joe Biden has proposed a “Billionaire Minimum Income Tax” of a full 20 percent for those making more than $100 million. A basic income is not out of the realm of possibility.

    There is nothing inherently complex about implementing a basic income program in Canada; we have done it in the past and will invariably need to do so again in the future. Hopefully, for Canadians in the Atlantic Provinces and across the country, this future isn’t too far off.

    That future could be closer than most realize. In Prince Edward Island, significant progress has been made towards a demonstration project to trial a basic income, an endeavour supported unanimously by the province’s legislature, including its Progressive Conservative premier, Dennis King. In April, the premier and other party leaders in PEI called on the federal government to help launch the project, but the Prime Minister has yet to agree to move forward.

    As the APEC report highlighted, bills C-223 and S-233, introduced by NDP MP Leah Gazan in the House and independent senator Kim Pate in the Senate, call for the establishment of a national framework for a guaranteed livable basic income – in essence to study and determine what a basic income would look like if we were to implement it across the country. If it is, no doubt we will see that basic income is the answer to poverty we’ve been waiting for.

    ________________________________________

    About the Authors: Wil Robertson is a basic income advocate, researcher, and steering committee member for Coalition Canada Basic Income: Revenu de Base. Tracy Smith-Carrier is Canada Research Chair for Advancing the UN Sustainable Development Goals and an associate professor at Royal Roads University

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  • Halifax council votes to push for federal universal basic income

    By: Rebecca Lau 

    See original post here.

    Halifax Regional Council has voted to urge the federal government to move forward with a guaranteed livable basic income in this country.

    Coun. Waye Mason, who represents Halifax South Downtown, put forward the motion that asked council to request a letter from the mayor to the prime minister, ministers and premier of Nova Scotia.

    The letter would call on government to implement a basic income, “ensuring everyone has sufficient income to meet their needs, which would go a long way towards eradicating poverty and homelessness, alleviating the pressure on municipalities to use their limited resources to fill gaps in our failing social safety net.”

    Councillors voted 10-2 in favour of the motion during Tuesday’s council meeting. Councillors Trish Pudy and Paul Russell voted against it.

    “We are in a social crisis right now. Without programs like this, without new and innovative programs, they will only get worse,” Mason said.

    His motion pointed out that the impacts of poverty have had an effect on municipalities, which have limited resources to deliver social supports.

    “Basic income addresses key social determinants of health, such as income and housing, it can alleviate pressures on municipalities to address poverty and fill gaps in social supports, such as shelter, housing, food security and mental health,” it read.

    During the 2021 federal election, the Green Party and NDP included livable basic income in their platforms, but the other major parties did not.

    Mayor Mike Savage, who served as a Liberal MP from 2004 to 2011, said “it’s time” for such a social net to exist and that it “should not be a political issue.”

    “The cause of poverty-related issues, homelessness, health inequality, education inequality, environmental inequality — it seems pretty evident but it’s true that the cause of that is lack of income,” he said.

    “I’m always very reluctant to tell other orders of government how to do their business. We’re advising what we think.  And I think it’s important that this be something that is considered.”

    The motion said evidence shows that a federally-funded basic income can improve financial stability and quotes Coalition Canada Basic Income, an alliance of income advocacy groups.

    The coalition has previously made a submission to a House of Commons committee on COVID-19 recovery, recommending that the federal government create a national basic income guarantee for adults that is comparable to the $2,000 per month people received from the Canadian Economic Recovery Benefit (CERB) program.

    A report released earlier this month by the Atlantic Provinces Economic Council (APEC), a Halifax-based economic think tank, said income support would reduce inequality, establish a sense of financial security and encourage savings.

    The report also said funding the program would likely require increasing taxes or cutting government spending.

    “One of the biggest risks is how this program would be funded over the long term,” Lana Asaff, a senior economist with APEC, said at the time.

    “It’s quite expensive.”

    A report by the Parliamentary Budget Officer conducted in 2021 estimated that a national guaranteed basic income would cost nearly $88 billion in 2022-2023.

    Asaff added that if social programs were cut to help pay for a basic income, there was a risk certain groups in society would be negatively affected.

    The topic of guaranteed basic income has been discussed for decades, and was back in the forefront during the pandemic.

    “This keeps coming back. When CERB came in in 2020, I remember the discussion just popped up again,” said Coun. Shawn Cleary during Tuesday’s council meeting.

    “But if more municipalities, if more groups, if more citizens pressure our provinces and the federal government to discuss this — to look at this — we might actually make some head way finally on this kind of important universal social safety net and economic development driver.”

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  • California sending out ‘inflation relief’ checks up to $1,050: Here’s how much you’ll get

    By: Alix Martichoux.

    See original post here.

    More than 20 million Californians can expect a new round of direct payments to hit their bank accounts this year, Gov. Gavin Newsom announced Sunday. The state is issuing payments up to $1,050 in what the governor called a new “middle class tax rebate.”

    The direct payments are part of an “inflation relief package” in California’s budget agreement, the governor and California’s legislative leaders said in a joint statement.

    The amount you’ll get depends on your household income and how many dependents you have. Here’s how it breaks down:

    Single filers

    Making less than $75,000: $350 payment

    Making between $75,000 and $125,000: $250 payment

    Making between $125,001 and $250,000: $200 payment

    Those making more than $250,000 do not receive a payment.

    Joint filers

    Making up to $150,000: $700 payment

    Making between $150,001 and $250,000: $500 payment

    Making between $250,001 and $500,000: $200 payment

    Those making more than $500,000 and filing taxes jointly do not receive a payment.

    Those with dependents, whether they file taxes individually or jointly are eligible for an additional amount. To determine the total amount of money you’ll receive, add the number that applies to you from the list above to the number that applies to you from the list below, if you have at least one dependent.

    Single filers with dependents:

    Making less than $75,000: additional $350

    Making between $75,000 and $125,000: additional $250

    Making between $125,001 and $250,000: additional $200

    Joint filers with dependents:

    Making up to $150,000: additional $350

    Making between $150,001 and $250,000: additional $250

    Making between $250,001 and $500,000: additional $200

    Therefore, the highest possible payment goes to couples filing jointly with at least one dependent. They would receive $700, plus an additional $350, for a total “inflation relief” payment of $1,050.

    The payments will be sent out to an estimated 23 million Californians, according to legislators.

    Nexstar’s California Capitol Bureau reported the payments are set to start in late October. The payments should all be issued by early next year.

    The payments will be issued by direct deposit – much like the Golden State stimulus checks sent out last year – as well as debit cards.

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  • Overturning Roe could reverse economic gains

    By: Emily Peck.

    See original post here.

    Legalizing abortion was one of the most meaningful economic policies of the past 50 years for women — bolstering their educational attainment and career advancement, as well as reducing poverty rates for women and families, research shows.

    Why it matters: If Roe v. Wade goes away, some of that progress will likely be reversed, which could slow economic growth more broadly.

    The research: Abortion access allows young women to delay becoming mothers, making it more likely that they will attend and finish college and start careers, a host of studies have found.

    • “Whether and under what circumstances to become a mother is the single most economically important decision most women will make in their lifetimes,” says Caitlin Knowles Myers, an economist at Middlebury College, widely recognized as a leading scholar on this issue.
    • There’s little disagreement on this among economists, Myers told the New Yorker this week.

    She summarized the scholarship on the economic consequences of abortion access in an amicus brief filed by 154 economists to the Supreme Court last year, citing studies that found:

    Key point: 49% of women who obtain an abortion are living below the federal poverty level, and 26% earn only slightly more than that, according to the most recent available data from the Guttmacher Institute.

    To understand the impact of abortion on women’s financial lives, economists and advocates point to a landmark study, published in 2020, that compared the finances of women who accessed abortion to those who just missed the gestational cutoff and instead carried their pregnancy to term.

    • The women who carried their babies to term experienced a large increase in serious financial difficulties — including an 80% increase in bankruptcies, evictions and tax liens.
    • A majority of the women who were turned away for an abortion said travel and costs were causes of their delay.

    The other side: Opponents argue that abortion is morally wrong, and that no benefits outweigh those costs.

    • Supreme Court justice Samuel Alito does not substantively address economic questions in his leaked draft opinion.
    • Some argue that birth control affords women the same economic freedoms. Even with birth control, however, about 45% of all pregnancies in the U.S. are unintended. And 42% of those end in abortion, according to the most recent data.

    The bottom line: Janet Yellen, the U.S. Treasury Secretary and a labor economist who knows all this research, summed it up earlier this week.

    • Eliminating a woman’s right to seek an abortion, she said, would have “very damaging effects on the economy and would set women back decades.”

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  • Casting A Safety Net: Exploring Basic Income for Fisheries

    By: Abby Cole

    See original post here.

    Between unpredictable weather, variable catch yields, fluctuating prices, and highly seasonal work, access to a steady and sustainable income has long been an issue for those employed in the fisheries sector in Newfoundland and Labrador—and across Canada.So when the 4th World Small-Scale Fisheries Congress: North America convened  in St. John’s at the Delta Hotel this week, one panel on Monday explored the idea of implementing a basic income in the fisheries sector.

    Kristen Lowitt, an assistant professor at the school of Environmental Studies at Queen’s University and one of the panel’s organizers, is a strong supporter of the idea.  She has been working with Coalition Canada, a cross-country alliance of basic income advocacy groups, to help make a case for basic income in the fisheries sector in particular.

    The panel was comprised of a variety of fisheries representatives from across the country from unions, and governments, to community members.

    The focus was to think about both large- and small-scale fisheries, and how to strengthen the livelihoods, regional economies, and food systems of coastal and Indigenous communities.

    What a Basic Income Would Look Like

    Josh Smee, CEO of Food First NL and member of Coalition Canada, told The Independent that the focus right now is not so much a universal basic income model,  but rather a model that guarantees a minimum or basic income 

    “Just to say to everyone, you’d have a floor where no matter what is going on in your life, you would never fall below that floor,” he said.

    Smee explained that the “floor” would be set at the poverty line. “People who are advocating for this want to see a more livable basic income” and therefore want to “push that floor as high as you can push it.”

    “You shouldn’t have a social program that pushes people into poverty, which is what we have now.”

    The poverty line can be determined by looking at the Market Basket Measure (MBM).  The MBM is “a measure of low income based on the cost of a specific basket of goods representing a modest, basic standard of living, as defined by Statistics Canada.

    According to Statistics Canada, in St. John’s the MBM total threshold in 2020 was $45,564 annually, while in rural Newfoundland and Labrador it was $43,214. This means that a family living under this threshold would be considered living in poverty.

    The Need for a Basic Income in Indigenous Communities

    Ryan Lauzon, one of the panel’s speakers and an employee of the Chippewas of Nawash Unceded First Nation, explained that the elders of his community say that once upon a time “the white fish were so numerous you could walk on their backs.” However,  since the settlers arrived and introduced  commercial fishing, over-fishing depleted resources for First Nation communities. 

    Lauzon argued that a basic income would not only support the local fishing economy, it would also generate greater ecological sustainability, sustainIndigenous culture by encouraging young people to work in the fishery, and help maintain food sovereignty in Indigenous communities by ensuring access to cultural foods. 

    The Problem with EI

    Another panelist, Sonia Strobel, the co-founder and CEO of Skipper Otto Community Supported Fishery, highlighted that the Employment Insurance system for the fisheries is not good enough because it is based on how much you earn from fishing. The reality is that supply is not always certain due to factors like overfishing and climate change. 

    Strobel described working on the water as a “gamble” because of this uncertainty of supply, stating: “Is it worth the gamble to persist in this way of life?”

    “Basic income means people do not have to make that gamble,” she said.

    The “Welfare Trap”

    Panelist Rick Williams, director of the Canadian Council of Professional Fish Harvesters, highlighted that in Canada, fisher harvesters  on average earn 52 percent of their income from fishing—with 21 percent of their income being earned from EI. 

    The biggest issue for fish harvesters is the challenge of seasonality. Williams emphasized that almost 70 percent of fish harvesters have no fishing income for at least half or more of the year.

    There are however, some problems with basic income programs according to Williams. He told The Independent that “the basic income program the coalition is proposing is great for the people who will never work, such as those with long-term disabilities,” but “for the working poor, if you create a system that offers a trade-off between low-wage work and a fallback welfare program, people will not take the low-wage work.” 

    “The danger is the welfare trap that we’ve seen with provincial welfare programs,” he said.

    However, Williams emphasizes that because of fishery closures and the seasonal nature of working in the fisheries, “we need a base security measure for the people who do not qualify for [Employment Insurance].”

    The Myth of Workers not Wanting to Work

    Staff Representative with FFAW-Unifor, Alyse Stuart, pointed out that the arguments against basic income— workers don’t want to work, that CERB is why workplaces cannot get workers, and that we can’t afford “handouts”—are all myths. 

    In the fisheries, the work is seasonal—not the workers. 

    In rural areas, fishing communities are deeply integrated with EI, because there is no other work outside of fishing(except for “maybe a Tim Hortons an hour away,” Stuart joked). 

    Unifor has been working to fix the EI system, Stuart said, because right now it is not enough. This has included advocating to reform and modernize the benefits by reducing claw backs to EI claims and making EI easier to use. The pandemic also meant that a lot of people lost work and therefore were not covered by EI. 

    Stuart explained that currently, a maximum EI claim (before tax) is $638—which is not enough to live. 

    Climate change will also generate more barriers to income. With extreme weather changes, some people may not be able to fish for the full length of a traditional season. 

    Despite common myths such as “the government cannot afford handouts,” Stuart countered that “we cannot afford to not support the people of this country.”

    A basic income program would have to be responsive to the people they are trying to help and would need to have a worker-centred approach that doesn’t penalize workers for going to work, she concluded. 

    “It’s something we love to do” 

    For Chelsie Kook-Marche, the Mayor of Port au Port West-Aguathuna-Felix Cove, fishing is her and her husband’s life. As a family, they have worked hard to turn their fishery into an enterprise. But she explains that the income generated from fishing alone was not enough to raise a family and pay for childcare. 

    Kook-Marche believes a basic income would help with those costs. 

    Kook-Marche’s father-in-law has had his fishing license since he was 14 (for which he paid only 25 cents). Her in-laws fished for over 50 years, but because the work was seasonal, they had to work for their EI and often struggled to do so.

    “When you fish, you can’t guarantee your catch, and you can’t guarantee your prices,” she said. “But you can guarantee we will be on the water.”

    Kook-Marche’s husband is a third generation fisherman—so you can’t get him off the water, despite the challenges. 

    “For us, it’s something we love to do,” she stated.

    For fish harvesters, it’s basic: they want to fish, and they want the means to survive. And as far as the panel is concerned, a basic income program represents a promising way to make that happen.

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  • Universal Basic Income could transform diets, say experts

    By: Jack Thompson

    See original post here.

    Providing a basic income to all citizens could end hunger and ensure healthy and sustainable diets, experts have said.

    The concept, known as Universal Basic Income (UBI), has been touted as transformational for the wellbeing of the nation and the environment by speakers at a recent event, hosted by the UBI Lab Network.

    “Given the rising cost of living in the UK, UBI would provide people with financial shelter to buy food and not rely on the increasing network of food banks,” said social policy lecturer at the University of Salford, David Beck.

    “We should be shocked that Rhyl (a town in Wales) has more food banks than supermarkets,” he added. 

    The notion of guaranteeing a minimum income is nothing new, dating back to the 16th century, but it is gaining traction as 7.3 million UK adults struggle to put food on the table in the last month due to the cost‐of‐living crisis.  

    Speakers also said that UBI could break the stranglehold of a free market economic system built on cheap labour and food.

    Beck summarised that ensuring that citizens have a minimum income would allow people to make healthier and more sustainable food choices, rather than buying cheap ultra-processed food that drives poor health and types of farming that is heavily reliant on crops grown in monocultures with chemical pesticides and fertilisers.  

    “UBI has the potential to reduce government spending, increase tax revenue, improve the economy and the health and wellbeing of citizens,” said lecturer in tax and accounting at the University of Bangor, Sarah Closs‐Davies.  

    Closs‐Davies said she has calculated that a fully implemented UBI would cost the tax purse £420 billion a year to significantly reduce poverty. This is double the current social welfare budget, but she suggested the government should implement a windfall tax on higher earners and corporations to make up the difference.

    She also stressed: “We must not just consider the expenditure but all of the savings, too.”

    Critics of UBI say that providing a basic income would deter people from working and it would encourage frivolous spending and irresponsible behaviour.

    “These arguments highlight a certain politically driven rationale and assumptions,” responded Closs‐Davies. “I.e., you must work and pay your taxes to deserve benefits.

    “This is quite a narrow-minded and monetised approach to how we govern the welfare of citizens and what we think of others,” said Closs‐Davies.

    Food studies lecturer at Queen’s University Ontario, Elaine Power, added: “It would allow people to walk away from crappy jobs and not worry about putting food on the table.” 

    A basic income could also help farmers grow more sustainably, according to Power, who said: “Basic income is a stabilising force for especially new and younger farmers so they can take the time and not rush into decisions that are less sustainable.”  

    But executive director of the Food Ethics Council, Dan Crossley, stressed it isn’t a panacea: “It [UBI] has the potential to have lots of positive impacts, but it won’t solve everything.

    “We need to think about how it fits with other policies and parts of the equation.”  

    In addition to UBI, rationing food is another idea been forward to address food poverty and unhealthy diets, read more about it here.

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  • By 6-to-1 margin, voters say federal government should spend more on children

    By: Michele Kayal

    See original press release here.

    American voters believe — by a roughly 6-to-1 margin — that the federal government is spending too little on the health, safety, and well-being of our children.

    A nationwide poll of 1,000 likely voters conducted in May by Lake Research Partners found that Americans strongly support increasing our investments in children and prioritizing their needs in public policy, with education, child abuse, and child mental health, hunger, homelessness, and poverty leading their concern. Support for many specific programs, including the Child Tax Credit and making the Children’s Health Insurance Program permanent, crosses race, gender, and party lines.

    “Emergency funding during the pandemic showed Americans what we can do when we invest in our children: slash poverty, slash hunger, keep kids from experiencing homelessness, give more of them health care and robustly protect their well-being,” said Bruce Lesley, president of First Focus on Children, which commissioned the poll. “We need to make this attention, care, and investment in our children the norm, not the exception.”

    “Americans know there are real problems when it comes to kids, and they want an affirmative agenda to address those problems,” said Celinda Lake, president of Lake Research Partners. “People want to invest in our kids and grandkids because it is good for them and good for our society as a whole.”

    Specific results:

    By a 4-to-1 margin, American voters believe we are spending too little on:

    • Public education (60-14%)
    • Assistance for child care expenses (56-14%)

    By at least a roughly 6-to-1 margin, American voters believe we are spending too little on:

    • Funding that benefits children (56-10%)
    • Early childhood education (56-10%)
    • Affordable child health coverage (49-8%),
    • Youth mental health services (66-9%)
    • Reducing child poverty (66-10%)
    • Reducing child homelessness (65-8%)
    • Reducing child abuse and neglect (66-7%)

    Voters, who were surveyed before the mass shootings in Buffalo, NY and Uvalde, Texas, said 3-to-1 that we invest too little in preventing gun violence against children (53-16%).

    When asked about reducing child hunger, voters said 64-5% that we spend too little, a margin of 13-to-1.

    Voters overwhelmingly favor the expanded and improved Child Tax Credit. Voters favor the expanded and improved Child Tax Credit contained in the American Rescue Plan Act by a 72-21% margin, with 57% voicing “strong” favorability. Parents favor the policy by 77-18%.

    American voters are also deeply concerned about child poverty in the United States, a worry that also crosses party lines. 

    Poverty is 59% higher among U.S. children than adults, and 83% of poll respondents said they found this fact concerning, with 60% saying they are “very concerned.” Even more — 86% — said they were concerned by the cost of child poverty, which runs an estimated $1.1 trillion a year due to higher crime, poor health outcomes and lower income levels when children grow up.  Democrats expressed concern by a 97-3% margin (concerned/not concerned), Independents by 82-16%, and Republicans by 75-19%.

    Voters also expressed overwhelming favorability for a current bipartisan bill to make the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) permanent, with 78-14% favoring the bill and 66% saying they favor it strongly.

    Both of these items receive overwhelming support regardless of the voter’s race, gender or political affiliation.

    Favorability of improved CTC:

    • Democrats: 90-7%
    • Independents: 62-22%
    • Republicans: 55-37%
    • Women:73-18%
    • Men: 71-24%.
    • White voters: 70-23%
    • Black voters: 86-7%
    • Hispanic voters: 79-16%

    Favorability of making CHIP permanent:

    • Democrats: 94-2%
    • Independents: 78-13%
    • Republicans: 60-26%
    • Women: 83-7%
    • Men: 72-21%.
    • White voters: 76-15%
    • Black voters: 90-6%
    • Hispanic voters: 83-11%

    Voters also are interested in putting supports, structures and standards in place to ensure that public policy accounts for the health, safety and well-being of the nation’s children. Voters agreed 82-13% that children need greater attention and coordination across our federal, state, and local governments.

    By a 57-27% margin, voters support the creation of an independent Children’s Commissioner to help “protect and improve the care and well-being of children in the U.S.”

    A majority of voters across all parties — 82-10% — also agreed that federal policies involving children should “always be governed” by a standard that makes the safety, protection or well-being of children “the first priority.” With respect to establishing a “best interests of the child standard,” Democrats support the policy change by 91-3%, Independents by 81-17%, and Republicans by 75-16%.

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  • Fed data shows families fared better when Child Tax Credit came monthly

    By: Arthur Phillips

    See original post here.

    Last month, the Federal Reserve released its annual Report on the Economic Well-Being of U.S. Households for 2021. Based on a survey conducted in October and November 2021, it notes that while perceptions of the economy were dimmed, self-reported financial wellbeing in late 2021 was its highest point since the survey was first conducted in 2013. Seventy-eight percent of adults reported either “doing okay” financially or “living comfortably,” up four percentage points from 2020 and 16 points from 2013. In another sign of improvement, 68 percent said they could cover an unexpected $400 expense using cash or its equivalent, four points higher than in 2020. 

    Parents saw particularly large gains last year, with the number reporting they were doing okay or better up 8 percentage points from 2020. This improvement was most pronounced for families with low income. The share of parents earning under $25,000 who reported doing at least okay financially rose by 13 percentage points from 2020 to 2021, from 40 percent to 53 percent. For those earning at least $25,000 but less than $50,000, the share doing at least okay financially rose by 7 percentage points.  

    Relief from the federal government in response to the COVID-19 pandemic took many forms, from enhanced health insurance subsidies to expanded unemployment. 

    But the most significant, broadly shared difference in the financial situations of parents last year was the expanded, fully refundable Child Tax Credit (CTC), which sent parents monthly checks of up to $300 for each child from July through December. National studies confirmed that CTC payments succeeded in dramatically reducing childhood poverty and improving economic stability.

    However, the expanded credit expired this year, and more recent data have observed a concurrent regression in the wellbeing of children. 

    These findings match the experiences of Maine families. Data from the U.S. Census Bureau’s Household Pulse survey, which measures changes in financial wellbeing from month to month, shows parents’ economic security significantly improved while CTC checks were coming in. From July through December 2021, food insecurity among Maine households with children was nearly cut in half. The share of families reporting trouble paying for usual household expenses and those who were behind on rent or mortgage payments also meaningfully declined. However, all these trends reversed in the months after CTC payments stopped. 

    A recent MECEP report, How the Child Tax Credit was spent in Maine, examines how parents used CTC payments. 

    Food was the most-cited use of the CTC payments in Maine, followed by utilities, clothing, savings, and paying down debt. Households with annual income below $50,000 were more likely than others to spend the payments on food, utilities, and clothing, and were about half as likely to save or invest the checks than other Maine families. These payments coincided with rapidly rising prices for food, energy, and other necessities. 

    Data from the Household Pulse Survey also found that just less than half of Maine families with the lowest income reported receiving the monthly CTC checks, compared with around two-thirds of families with annual income between $25,000 and $200,000. While some of this is due to underreporting, a more significant factor is that families with the lowest income are the least likely to file taxes. Dramatically simplifying the tax preparation process and expanding access to free tax-filing assistance would result in more equitable outcomes and would likely have reflected even greater gains in the wellbeing of parents with low income. 

    While perceptions of the economy are currently dim, the Federal Reserve report shows how the U.S. government’s interventions in the wake of COVID-19 improved financial health for many families. Unless Congress acts to extend the enhanced Child Tax Credit, the financial wellbeing of parents will suffer, and many more children will grow up in poverty. 

    This piece was posted with permission from Maine Center for Economic Policy. It was originally published on their blog.

    ____________________________________

    About The Author:
    Arthur Phillips works on MECEP’s inclusive economy portfolio and leads outreach and advocacy on labor issues. Arthur Phillips is an economic policy analyst with the Maine Center for Economic Policy. Arthur worked for seven years as a researcher and campaign strategist with the hospitality workers’ union UNITE HERE. Before that, he conducted research published by the Economic Policy Institute and the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, DC. He holds a bachelor’s degree in history with a minor in economics from McGill University.

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