What if from this day forward, on the first day of every month, you got around $1,000 deposited into your bank account all because you are a citizen. This income is independent of every other source of income and it is guaranteed to you every month. It is a starting salary above the poverty line for the rest of your life.
The idea is called universal basic income, or UBI. It’s like social security for all, and it’s starting to get some steam in countries around the world and across the entire political spectrum, for a bunch of reasons. Rising inequality, decades of stagnant wages, the transformation of lifelong careers into sub-hourly tasks, exponentially advancing technology like robots and deep neural networks increasingly capable of replacing potentially half of all human labor. there was actually a presidential candidate who ran on this platform, his name is Andrew Yang and he was definitely a favorite for me. He advocated that every United States citizen above the age of 18 would get 1,000$ a month.
This income would be enough to secure basic needs and it would also be a permanent earnings floor no one could fall beneath, and would replace many of today’s temporary benefits, which are given only in case of emergency, or only to those who successfully pass the applied qualification tests. UBI would be a promise of equal opportunity, not equal outcome, a new starting line set above the poverty line.
It surprised me to learn that a partial UBI has already existed in Alaska since 1982, and that a version of basic income was experimentally tested in the United States in the 1970s. The same is true in Canada, where the town of Dauphin managed to eliminate poverty for five years. Full UBI experiments have been done more recently in places such as Namibia, India and Brazil. Other countries are doing the same: Finland, the Netherlands and Canada are carrying out government-funded experiments to compare against existing programmes. Andrew Yang launched a privately funded experiment in the US.
There are definitely things that still need to be worked out with UBI. I believe this would give a lot of families and people some wiggle room to help them survive. As a college student something like this definitely would’ve helped me this past year. I hope that people keep looking into this so they see how much it helps families.
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