Can universal basic income fix a crisis that's already begun?
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The COVID-19 pandemic has thrown millions of Americans into unemployment, highlighting the impracticality of living paycheck to paycheck, which a shocking number of Americans must do. Yet pandemic unemployment is just a glimpse of the fallout the US can expect in a future where more and more jobs are automated.
Is universal basic income the answer? In this video, a range of experts from economists to entrepreneurs and historians explore different facets of basic income, like why we need it, how it's different to welfare, and how we'll pay for it.
Yanis Varoufakis, Greece's former Minister of Finance, explains why he's not in favor of a UBI tax, but rather the creation of a public equity fund: "[T]hese days capital is socially produced ... Take for instance ... the capital stock of Google. To a large extent it is produced by all of us. Every time we search something on the Google search engine, we are adding to the capital stock of Google. This is not just a consumer transaction. So, if capital is socially produced why are the returns to capital privatized? On what basis?"
What's your favorite argument for (or against) UBI? Let us know in the comments!
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ANDREW YANG:
Andrew Yang is an entrepreneur and author who is running for President as a Democrat in 2020. In his book The War on Normal People, he explains the mounting crisis of the automation of labor and makes the case for the Freedom Dividend, a Universal Basic Income of $1,000 a month for every American as well as other policies to progress to the next stage of capitalism.
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TRANSCRIPT:
ANDREW YANG: Universal basic income is an idea that's older than America, where Thomas Paine was for it at the founding of the country, [he] called it the citizen's dividend. Decades later, Martin Luther King, Jr., was for it and he championed it before he was assassinated in 1968. And Milton Friedman and a thousand economists signed the studies in the late '60s saying this would be tremendous for both the economy and society. It received so much support that it passed the House of Representatives twice under Richard Nixon in 1971 and the only reason it didn't become law was that Democrats in the Senate wanted an even higher income threshold. So, universal basic income has been with this country for a long time and it actually became law in one state in 1982, where now every person in Alaska gets between $1000 and $2000 a year—no questions asked—from a petroleum dividend. It's wildly popular, has created thousands of jobs, has improved children's health, has decreased income inequality, and it was passed by a Republican governor who made this argument to the Alaskan people: Who would you rather get the oil money—the government who is just going to mess it up or you? And the Alaskan people said ""us"" and now it's so popular that a majority of Alaskans, which is a deeply conservative state generally, the majority of Alaskans said they would accept higher taxes to pay for this dividend moving forward.
My plan, the Freedom Dividend, would pay every American adult starting at age 18 $1000 a month or $12,000 a year. This would push every American adult to just below the poverty line, which is $12,770 a year right now. But this money would get spent in main street businesses, on car repairs, food and tutoring for your kids, the occasional night out, a hardware store. It would go right back into our economy and would create two million new jobs, would grow the consumer economy by eight to ten percent, would make our families and communities stronger, would improve children's health and nutrition, would improve everyone's mental health and productivity, it would decrease domestic violence and hospital visits. So, universal basic income is a powerful policy that helps improve human welfare and that's why I'm proposing it.
NEWS ANCHOR: The Labor Department is out with the jaw-dropping new numbers.
NEWS ANCHOR: Unemployment claims skyrocketing with 6.6 million people filing in the last week alone.
NEWS ANCHOR: It's still 1.5 million. It's still an enormous number.
NEWS ANCHOR: One of the clearly worst parts of what's happened over the last couple of months is it has taken a much worse toll on the African-American community.
WOMAN 1: I feel sad...
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