Every poor person will have some income, guaranteed, to meet their basic needs. That income will be provided with minimal government, because the same amount will go to everyone, the homeless, the unemployed, minimum wage workers, single parents, the middle class, and the wealthy. No means-testing, no government intrusiveness, minimal bureaucracy. Plus, we won’t have continuing political disputes about who’s in and who’s out, where and how to draw the lines.

Good reasons for conservatives to endorse this proposal.

Liberals, too, because this is sure to be the most reliable and effective way to help the poor. Current efforts and programs, typically, are too stingy and too vulnerable to changing political and economic conditions. As activists and scholars have noted, “programs for the poor are poor programs.”

These comments are prompted by “States Slashing Social Programs for the Vulnerable” — the headline of a front page story in the New York Times. Here it is.

A similar point was made in a USA Today story a few days ago: “Many of the jobless get no unemployment benefits.” It’s here.

Advocates for the poor, the unemployed, the vulnerable, ought to stop fighting to strengthen or recreate the categorical and conditional programs. Those days and programs are past. Citizen Dividends is the future.

Steven Shafarman

Here’s something from former labor secretary Robert Reich, quoted in a respected liberal blog:

One big reason we are in the crisis we are in, apart from the meltdown from financial markets, is that consumers have run out of money. [...] If they can’t borrow any more and have to rely on their sinking wages, the entire economy is in trouble, because there’s simply not enough demand out there.

Note those phrases: “consumers have run out of money” and “not enough demand.” An obvious solution, it would seem, is to give people money and stimulate demand. That’s precisely what Citizen Dividends will do — give people money, and will do so directly, efficiently, equally, democratically.

That blog post goes on to demonstrate a different aspect of the same ignorance.

“There is over-capacity in everything,” said Richard Yamarone, chief economist at Argus Research. “If capacity is too large, you don’t need that many people employed, which is another reason we’re seeing such high job losses.”

The conventional answer, create jobs, doesn’t address the problem of over-capacity. Basic income does. When everyone has a secure monthly income, people will find or create their own jobs. That’s a lot better and more efficient, and more just, than bailing out the auto industry or other big companies. The bailouts are attempts to save the jobs of the past. Much better is to help us move forward with creating new businesses and industries, the jobs of the future.

That blog post is consistent in its liberal outlook, and concludes be calling for “increased unionization”

As David Madland and Karla Walter found, “if unionization rates were the same now as they were in 1983 and the current union wage premium remained constant, new union workers would earn an estimated $49 billion more in wages and salaries per year.” That’s $49 billion in demand that the economy could desperately use right now.

Unions may be part of the solution long-term, but it’s a rather convoluted path, particularly given the political obstacles to increasing unionization. And there will always be millions of workers who are not in unions, and many more millions who do not work or cannot work for some reason. Each of those individuals is another reason to endorse Citizen Dividends.

Steven Shafarman