Articles tagged with: Barack Obama

With President Obama in Trinidad and Tobago today, after being in Mexico yesterday, there’s lots of news about Latin America. Most of all, people are talking about Cuba. Suppose the United States enacts Citizen Dividends and encourages other countries in the hemisphere to join us in ensuring that every citizen has a guaranteed basic income. [...]

Barack Obama is in London for the G-20 meetings, accompanied by flurries of news and commentary. (And more than 500 people, according to an NPR report, even his own chef. And a mountain of stuff, including decoy helicopters.) London streets have been filled with protesters, many of them focusing, not surprisingly, on economic issues in [...]

A Washington Post editorial today calls for a carbon tax – and provides more evidence for why we need Citizen Dividends, a guaranteed basic income for every American. Here are the opening words from each of the three paragraphs: “The Environmental Protection Agency has told the White House that global warming is endangering public health [...]

Aid to small businesses is a step, potentially, though only a baby step, in the direction of a guaranteed basic income for all Americans. A New York Times story about President Obama’s announcement is here and a 15-minute video is here. A story in the Washington Post, here, includes the following paragraph: “Small businesses are [...]

Here’s Tom Friedman, calling the financial crisis “the big one” and comparing it to “the morning after Pearl Harbor.” If he really believes that, he ought to consider, at least, endorsing Citizen Dividends, a guaranteed income for every adult American. Wielding his favorite weapon, colorful metaphors, he compares our financial system to the heart, money [...]

Lot’s of talk this past week about health care reform. Too bad President Obama and the health care reform advocates haven’t yet joined the basic income movement – because a basic income guarantee could be the key to successful reform. Obama has pledged to enact health care reform this year: “When times were good, we [...]

President Obama last night called for prompt action on energy, health care, education, and deficit reduction. We can achieve his goals more rapidly and easily if we start with income security for all. Regarding energy: Obama called on Congress to enact a cap on carbon to drive progress toward renewable energy sources. Caps will increase [...]

Some questions about President Obama’s budget, regarding each item and expenditure: Who benefits? Who, specifically, is getting our taxpayer money? Is that appropriate and cost-effective? Those are fairly obvious, though often not asked, and the answers typically come in a cloud of conventional assumptions and rhetoric. Here’s a fourth: Would that still make sense if [...]

Though Obama has not called for a guaranteed basic income, he said some things last night that clearly indicate the power and need for this idea: Our immediate job is to reduce the downward spiral. And that means putting money into consumers’ pockets. The bill he and Congress are working on, however, would put money [...]

Here’s some data from The Associated Press: “The country has seen sizable layoffs during the current recession, which began in December 2007. A net total of about 2.6 million jobs were lost last year.” “In another report, the government said that new jobless claims jumped far more than expected last week in an already dismal [...]