Last month, the US state of Iowa enacted a law that prohibits local governments from adopting basic income programs. This follows similar developments in Arkansas, Idaho and South Dakota.
In Texas, after lawmakers failed to get their own law adopted, the state attorney general sued to stop Harris County from launching the basic income pilot project that its officials had authorized. Declaring the pilot “unconstitutional,” the attorney general took his case all the way to the Texas Supreme Court. What’s going on here? And why are the complexities of America’s seemingly obscure local politics important?
To answer these questions, we must analyze the radical potential that basic income has to reshape our social relationships. Defined as a regular cash payment given unconditionally to everyone, a basic income can be thought of as a pension, just for everyone. Its aim is to provide a basic and permanent level of financial security to all people independent of work, recognizing that if we lack the money or means to do so in the market world, we will be in serious trouble.
Theoretically, the case for basic income is well developed. It is based on the intuitive premise that ensuring people’s basic safety will mitigate the effects of multiple social ills, including racism and other forms of discrimination, and help improve individual and social well-being.
Morally, it is based on two historical truths. First, not all wealth was “earned” – much was stolen, accumulated through violence and exploitation, or reproduced through cycles of inherited privilege. Secondly, poverty is political and not personal – it has to do with where we are in the social matrix and not with who we are and what we do.
Simply put, then, poverty and wealth have to do with power – historical and contemporary – and how this unfolds in people’s daily lives. The idea behind basic income is to rebalance that power, redistributing it from those who have enough to ensure everyone has enough.
This moral argument is strengthened by the decades of research that scholars have done to prove that all types of social ills have their roots in poverty. From physical and mental health problems to substance abuse, homelessness and crime, many of the problems we face are causally related to poverty. Likewise, we know that exploitative labor and domestic violence are easier to sustain and harder to resist when people do not have the “freedom to say no” that money provides.
Crucially, these moral and theoretical cases have received enormous empirical support over the past five years, as a wave of basic income pilots has spread across the world, particularly in the United States, where almost 150 have emerged since the COVID-19 pandemic.
Driven by the first mayor-led pilot in Stockton, California, in 2019, and funded largely by COVID-19 relief money distributed by the federal government, local authorities across the country have been experimenting with unconditional cash as a relief intervention. upstream social policy that could form the basis of a new welfare model.
The conclusions from these pilots are electric – improvements in well-being, education, entrepreneurship, maternal and child health; reductions in stress, depression, homelessness, and recidivism. They provide sufficient evidence to support the effectiveness of basic income programs.
In parallel with these inspiring pilots, a movement has been developing in the US to call for the adoption of basic income as national policy. This movement includes influential progressive organizations, academic institutions, grassroots organizers, and even a national coalition of elected officials, all of whom have rallied around the vision of a basic income for all within the next decade. This movement is so developed that polls suggest a majority of Americans now favor some form of basic income.
The policy’s growing popularity is frightening conservative lawmakers, political lobbyists and their billionaire supporters. They recognize the potential of this movement at this time, particularly in its effort to denaturalize poverty, wealth and the social bases of each person.
They see the inherent danger that a progressively funded basic income would pose to their growing wealth. And they feel, perhaps even intuitively, the threat to their immanent power in a people capable of surviving without having to submit to the tyranny of the market. So now they are acting, in a classic and Machiavellian way, to eliminate the threat in the passage.
That’s why across the country we’re seeing efforts to end basic income programs, like the attorney general’s legal challenge in Texas.
Exceptional investigative work by researcher and basic income advocate Scott Santens shows that one of the organizations supporting the backlash against basic income is the Foundation for Government Accountability (FGA), which also advocates for causes such as banning free school meals and preventing the extension of Medicaid .
Predictably, the FGA is funded by hyper-conservative billionaires like Richard and Liz Uihlein, described by the New York Times as “the most conservative power couple you’ve never heard of.”
The FGA’s “investigation” into basic income is also, predictably, not worthy of the name. Its flagship publication – “Why States Should Ban Universal Basic Income Schemes” – features just a single peer-reviewed academic citation and reproduces multiple discredited tropes, including the idea that basic income “discourages work”, which evidence overwhelmingly rejects.
For example, results from the largest basic income study, which involved 200 Kenyan villages, showed that the distribution of monthly payments did not result in beneficiaries leaving the labor force, but promoted career choice.
Such academic studies and articles were not included in the FGA “investigation” because their aim is not to produce defensible studies, but rather to develop the discursive weaponry necessary as part of the global hegemonic strategy of the billionaire class.
In this regard, the growing battle against basic income can be seen as something of a case study of workplace hegemony, a classic example of both the tools the powerful use to maintain their position and the times they choose to use them. . For progressives, this can only mean one thing – that basic income may just be an idea whose time has come.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of Al Jazeera.
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