Coincidentally, it was sent to me just as I was watching Republican governors try to squeeze out low-wage workers who hadn't yet jumped at the chance to return to their poorly ventilated kitchens for $9 an hour. The 21st Century Income Guarantee is a plan to make poverty a thing of the past. The proposal was developed by Naomi Zewde, Kyle Strickland, Kelly Capatost, Ari Glogower, and Darick Hamilton for the New School Institute on Race and Political Economy, and was developed by Naomi Zewde, Kyle Strickland, Kelly Capatost, Ari Glogower, and Darick Hamilton for the New School Institute on Race and Political Economy. The plan guarantees an annual income of $12,500 and an allowance of $4,500 for each child. This is what geeks call a “negative income tax” plan, and unlike a universal basic income, it is phased out as households move up into the middle class.
“The only way to deal with poverty is to eliminate it,” Hamilton told me. “We give people enough resources so they don't become poor.” It's simple, but not cheap. The research team estimates that the proposal would cost $876 billion a year. To give you a sense of scale, total federal spending in 2019 was approximately $4.4 trillion, of which $1 trillion went to Social Security payments and $1.1 trillion went to Medicaid, Medicare, the Affordable Care Act, and children's health care. Funds are earmarked to support insurance programs.
Hamilton and his co-authors write that the plan “will require new revenue sources, additional borrowing, or trade-offs with other government funding priorities,” as well as how it will be costed. There is no mention of whether it will be covered. It was Kasey. “There are many ways to make up for it, and deficit spending itself is not bad unless there are certain conditions,” he said. I'm not all that reckless about funding a program that would increase federal spending by almost 20%, but at the same time it's clear that it's possible. Even if everything was covered by taxes, the U.S. tax burden would be about the same as the national average.
I think the real political issue with guaranteed income is not the cost, but the benefit. Such policies would give workers the power to make real choices. They could say no to jobs they didn't want to do, or quit jobs that exploited them. They can and will demand better pay, or demand time off to attend school or simply rest. When we talked, Hamilton tried to sell it to me as a truer form of capitalism. “People cannot reap the fruits of their efforts without some baseline level of resources,” he said. “When you lack basic necessities when it comes to your financial well-being, you have no freedom of choice. You are dictated to by others and you live in misery.”
But those in power in the business world profit from the desperation of low-wage workers. One man's misery is another man's fast and affordable home lunch delivery. Hilary Hoynes, an economist at the university, said: “It's true that goods and services can be consumed at lower prices even if you lower workers' wages and don't have a social insurance system to cover people like Uber and Lyft drivers.'' ” he said. at UC Berkeley, where she also co-directs the Opportunity Lab, she told me.
