To see the origin of this post, go here. Today, I continue to lay out a positive vision for what I would like my community and nation to become.
I envision a country in which all citizens receive a set, basic income to cover their basic needs for food and housing.
Guaranteed Basic Income (GBI) or Universal Basic Income (UBI) programs are now being tested in over a dozen communities around the US. Their focus is mainly on populations receiving different forms of state support, such as CalWorks here in California.
In lieu of support from them, recipients receive a monthly check for a set amount. The amounts in these programs vary from $50 per month to over $1,000 per month. The cash is unrestricted, but participants’ expenditure categories are tracked via a cash card, and they typically agree to answer questions about the impact of the program on their lives.
These are pilot programs, and few, if any, have income streams that will permit them to continue, let alone expand.
The results are positive, with evidence of participants taking on new jobs, spending more on childcare, food, and other basic needs, and some saving money—perhaps for the first time.
State-funded cash transfer programs or cash-like programs such as SNAP (EBT or CalFresh in California), are under constant threat from legislators who state that “welfare leads to laziness.”
(I am simplifying, but that is basically it. Meanwhile, these same people will promote various forms of corporate welfare. And while that is “another story,” it is essential to this one, given budgeting priorities.)
In an ideal world, we would build enough housing of all types—including multifamily rental housing—to help keep rents low. In an ideal world, people would be paid a minimum wage that would cover their basic needs (even recent adjustments to minimum wages in some states and local jurisdictions still leave real incomes far below where they were a generation ago). In an ideal world, the universal scam we call health insurance would yield to MediCare-like free primary health care so that the threat of losing everything to medical costs would not loom over so many.
You get the picture: UBI is another band-aid that covers a multitude of policy injuries that we could change but apparently won’t.
Still, the value of knowing that there will be money tomorrow, no matter how meager, can change the trajectory of families’ lives.
By now, my PhD research is far behind in the rearview mirror of my life. But it changed me and my understanding of how people manage risk and uncertainty.
I examined how impoverished people survive in one of the harshest climates on earth—the Sahel region just south of the Sahara Desert in West Africa.
Using a variety of learning activities and interviews with community members, I learned that the simple act of creating a shield against the ever-present uncertainty in families’ lives consumed nearly all the living hours of people in that region. Not only did people work mainly in subsistence agriculture and herding, but they also spent hours working to create obligations towards themselves by various gift-giving mechanisms so that if disaster struck, they could hopefully call in a favor.
These techniques were very forward looking and their geographical breadth was amazing. But they placed people on an endless treadmill of anxiety and labor. They included the mass migration of men out of communities, first during certain seasons, and later all year round and quasi-permanently to urban centers both domestically and abroad. This further stressed families who lost contact with their migrant members but was a boon to those who continued to benefit from their family members’ remittances.
Living was a constant pursuit of just surviving, and it tore families apart, left women and children particularly vulnerable, and was not particularly effective (even when family members went far afield) given the broadly covarying risks of that region.
When there is no certainty about how the bills will be paid, all of life becomes a side hustle. The effects are well known: little to no savings, poor quality food purchases—and high food insecurity (food purchases being one of the few fungible expense categories most people face), poor health outcomes, children lacking parental presence, people forced to work long hours at multiple jobs, costly transportation costs as people drive many miles to work in places they could never afford to live in.
All of this brews a broad toxic stress in household members—but especially women. This in turn leads to the development of chronic health conditions such as high blood pressure, heart disease, and Type II diabetes.
We know this.
Yet we continue to allow millions to live on this razor-edge, like the former nomads I spoke to in Mauritania, who lived, literally, on the desert’s edge.
The big question, of course, is how would we ever pay to expand UBI nationally to all who need it?
I know what you are thinking—why not attack the root causes you outlined above, Robb? I would love to. But we are, at this stage, pretty far down a road of coaxing poverty to continue as a kind of ambient reality.
And so… maybe a bandaid.
Paying for it? I feel like I should not even dignify that with a response so I will simply say, for perhaps the millionth time: “Budgets are moral documents.”
We spend on what we value.
Nearly a trillion nationally on creating the most creatively destructive military the world has ever known. Billions more on caging people. Further billions so people with everything can have more.
We know that uncertainty and risk management born out of a lack of the means to live keeps millions from flourishing as human beings and relegates them to the constant and exhausting pursuit of “getting by.”
We can change that.
Traveling at the Speed of Bike 