[October 2022 note]: This essay was written before the idea of UBI became associated with alleged “centrists” like Andrew Yang. Back in the day, fairly early in the UBI “movement” I was more enthusiastic about it. I still think it would be a part of my utopia, as long as it’s paired with healthcare and a federal jobs guarantee—and whatever else people need.
Part I
The dichotomy between class and race runs deep on the American left. Are you anticapitalist or antiracist? Which is the greater suffering, being poor or being Black? Which suffering defines America?
This false opposition has strategically kneecapped our movements. It ignores the truth: the story of class in America begins with slavery and parallels Black history at every step, with detours only to account for subsequent waves of immigration, all of which were the targets of white racism. Our fights for economic justice must be primarily and explicitly antiracist movements.
Racism oozes from every sector of our society as if it were oil in bituminous sand, and, like oil, has a particular value to capitalists. As has been thoroughly and brilliantly demonstrated by scholars such as Edward Baptist, American capitalism was built by slave labor in a settler-colonial state after forcibly expropriating the land from its native inhabitants. Racism originated as a tool of slavery and colonialism but over time became, according to Carter Wilson, a professor of political science, “a social force of its own, quite apart from its creators,” but still a force embedded in, and shaping the course of, the capitalist economy.[i] The rise of industrialism in some ways replaced the strength of slaves with the energy of fossil fuels, but the underlying structure in which Blacks and people of color provided cheap and expendable labor remained. Black labor was the primary productive engine, and black bodies a primary asset and currency in the financialization of the American economy. Slaveholders used the bodies of slaves as collateral on loans to buy more land (again, stolen from Native Americans) fueling speculative bubbles that slave traders force-marched more Black bodies into.
Racism is not motivated only by economic advantage. There is a libidinal drive behind racist violence. In Trump’s America, we must not look away from the disturbing fact that white people get off on hurting black people, often with a baroque excess that cannot be explained by the economic value they get from it — I thank Frank Wilderson for opening my eyes to this. And there is clearly an emotional vulnerability that is assuaged by anti-immigrant xenophobia. But the fact that American capitalism was built on the exploitation and expendability of Black bodies cannot be ignored. There is no reason to think that structure of our economy has changed. It continually changes its face, and needs to be re-understood with each new incarnation. But the scale of this dynamic has grown apace with the economy and power of America.
Nothing succeeds like success. The racist ideologies of slavery were economically productive, and therefore never truly challenged on a structural level. They continue to be productive today. And so, in the context of the American capitalist system, racism encompasses much more than a private anti-Black sentiment — it is the economic status quo. This is why the Alicia Garza is dead-on when she says, “When Black people get free, everybody gets free.” We’re all suffering under a system predicated on Black suffering.
Both the private power of corporate capital and public bureaucracy use the racism that is sewn into the fabric of our country to enable shocking injustices on a mass scale. Labor is kept cheap and desperate through persistent unemployment, collective bargaining is largely a thing of the past, all while a bevy of laws criminalize a broad range of informal economic activity, justifying the massive warehousing of bodies in jails and prisons. Millions are left to hustle for scraps while preposterous amounts of wealth and power flow to a small group of intensely privileged people. Yet we are divided and set against each other by racism, our communities and lives segregated. Any true solution must take from the rich and give to the rest in a way that addresses racial injustice but does not fan the flames of white racism.
I propose such a solution: enact an unconditional basic income. Obviously, this is not an original idea, yet it is too often talked about as an answer to the “rise of the robots” and too rarely talked about as an answer to persistent poverty and structural racism. Unconditional basic income would have a more beneficial social impact than any other single program, although it would work best if supported by other forms of social insurance, climate mitigation and adaptation programs, and antiracism initiatives.
[i] Carter A. Wilson, From Slavery to Advanced Capitalism, (Thousand Oaks: SAGE publishers, 1996) p 106.
Part II
“The deliberate creation of lack as a function of market economy is the art of a dominant class. This involves deliberately organizing wants and deeds amid an abundance of production; making all of desire teeter and fall victim to the great fear of not having one’s needs satisfied; and making the object dependent upon a real production that is supposedly exterior to desire (the demands of rationality), while at the same time the production of desire is categorized as fantasy and nothing but fantasy.” — Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus
“Unconditional Basic Income”
This phrase is shorthand for a simple policy: sending everyone a check without regard for who they are or what they do during the day. It is also often called “Universal basic income,” and accordingly both universal (given to everyone) and unconditional (without strings attached), but for the sake of this essay, I want to emphasize its unconditionality. I advocate, following basic income scholar Almaz Zelleke, and assuming current economic conditions, that every man, woman, and child get $1,000 every month automatically mailed to them or put in their bank account.
Twelve thousand dollars a year is roughly the individual poverty line — a good starting point. It is worth noting that other proponents of a basic income, such as Martin Luther King, Jr., believed that the guaranteed income should be tied to the society’s median income, and that anything less would perpetuate poverty by maintaining a stratified society. I respect that opinion, but I believe we should begin by simply providing for basic needs. Hopefully, as the basic income generates more widespread wealth in the economy, and as some of the racist and misogynist arguments against it are proven false by empirical reality, we will raise the guaranteed amount until it hits the median income level, and labor becomes a social good and expectation entirely independent of an individual’s need to bring in income.
Although some would choose to survive on that basic income alone, twelve thousand dollars a year is not enough to do so in material comfort. Most adults would choose to supplement it with earned income.
But what unconditional basic income gives everyone is a guaranteed minimum amount of real power. Power to walk away from an exploitative boss without first finding another job. Power to demand fair treatment. Power to leave an abusive spouse without becoming homeless and desperate. Power to make time for political organizing, for caretaking and family, or for art and literature, for an infinite array of meaningful, productive activities that are not properly valued in the labor market.
Of all the changes that a unconditional basic income would bring, its ability to support care and domestic work is the most urgent. Zelleke has argued that existing notions of justice and citizenship assume an “autonomous, ‘independent’ and dependent-free adult,” able to make rational economic decisions for himself (of course, not herself — this assumption is very gendered).[i] This assumption is based on the conceptual separation of life into the public and private (domestic) sphere, and the intellectual laziness of limiting theories of citizenship to the public sphere. The reality is that we are all interdependent; we all rely on care at many points in our lives, and nearly all of us provide care to others at other points in our lives; we were all once children, many of us of us become parents, and those of us lucky to live into old age will require senior care. The Wages for Housework movement, begun in the 1970s, and extended by thinkers such as Angela Davis and Nancy Fraser, exposed the capitalist economy’s reliance on the unpaid work of “social reproduction,” without which no formal economic production could take place. Without the work of parenting, there would be no future generation of workers — not to mention the bottomless consumer market of child-centered products.
We never met the demand for wages for housework, and over time women became a larger and larger part of the workforce while we did nothing to support the care work that continued regardless because it had to. For many Americans, the tension between paid productive work and unpaid work is the largest dissonance in their lives and families. The most common political answers to this dilemma are: 1) the status quo, in which women — and so few men that it constitutes an ongoing social injustice — work a “second shift,” as sociologist Arlie Hochschild showed in her book of the same title, where they work a full day in the workplace and then come home for another full shift in the domestic sphere, or 2) a massive public program to support the commodification of care work — an option currently available and utilized by the most well-off working women. Under this second option, we find a way to pay other people, unrelated to us, to do the work of the private sphere while we labor in the public sphere: child care is provided by care.com, meals are provided by seamless.com, cleaning is provided by handy.com, and so on — in the best scenario, supported by a public subsidy.[ii]
A universal basic income supports the domestic sphere while not disincentivizing women’s participation in the public sphere and without commodifying care. It provides support without removing choice. Families can and will spend their basic incomes on care providers, but can decide for themselves how to balance childcare with their jobs, rather than being forced to work by dire economic need. We will need to work to maintain our lifestyles, but not to put simple food on the table — or be forced to return to a job too quickly after the birth of a child.
The basic income fundamentally change all this. Since it is paid to everyone, including children, in Zelleke’s words it “reduces the power imbalance between care recipients and caregivers by guaranteeing recipients of care at least minimal resources, thereby provid[ing] a caregiver financial resources and a citizenship status independent of paid employment.”[iii] Under the basic income as proposed, an unemployed single mother would have a starting income of $24,000 — her own combined with her child’s. While not adequate, this starting income is breathing room, enough that she can think about her own values (instead of having them imposed upon her) and to make her own long-term plans for her family — whereas in our current system she is probably living day-to-day and meal-to-meal, and/or contorting her life to get through the hoops of the Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF) bureaucracy, which tortuously imposes a set of values upon her life (in subsequent posts).
In the workplace, an unconditional basic income guarantees a minimum of power to each worker individually and to labor as a whole. Workers in unattractive, unrewarding jobs, relieved of the threat of imminent desperation should they lose employment, are much more likely to demand both better working conditions and higher wages, and, if necessary, take the risks needed to unionize to do so. Many employers will quickly understand that they’ve lost some leverage over their workforce, and either make the jobs more attractive with higher wages and benefits, or invest capital to automate these jobs. Jobs that are attractive and intrinsically rewarding, such as in the culture-producing industries — art, filmmaking, publishing, and so on — are in the status quo frequently underpaid and often lacking in diversity, because largely only people from privileged families can afford to do the series of internships and under-paid apprenticeships necessary to break into these industries. Under a basic income, these fields will become much more diverse because a broader range of people will be able to compromise on wage. This will facilitate the production of more antiracist and anti-patriarchal cultural products, of which we are in dire need. Because the basic income would raise the cost of labor, provide workers with leverage to get better conditions, and reduce the social imperative to provide full employment, it would mean the end of “bullshit jobs” that David Graeber famously critiqued.
As these trends compound across society, an unconditional basic income would set the conditions for new economic forms to arise organically. One of the seminal essays about universal basic income, “A Capitalist Road to Communism” by Phillipe van Parijs and Robert van der Veen, argued that a basic income would increase the overall wealth of society by allowing businesses to invest in efficiency, instead of merely and incessantly cutting costs.[iv] I would add that the basic income would also increase the overall wealth of society through the “multiplier effect,” wherein each time a dollar moves through an economy, it generates more economic activity. This is not an ivory tower economic theory, but accepted mainstream practice upon which policy, such as the 2009 Recovery Act stimulus package, is based. Only a few years after implementation, the basic income would cause the economic base to grow. It would begin to be easier to fund the program, and after a while, any popular demand to increase the amount of the payments could easily be met.
As this capital piles up, van Parijs and van der Veen argue, we will be able to increase the basic income to the point where everyone gets the same income regardless of work, allowing labor to be freed from pay, so that we are all working for others’ benefit and not for our own livelihood — a state of pure communism in its ideal form.
As radical as this sounds, van Parijs and van der Veen here underestimate the basic income’s revolutionary potential, especially in the short term and in the microeconomic context. As argued above, with an unconditional basic income in place, it will be more important for work to be personally fulfilling. One way of achieving this, beyond simply loving what you do, is to own and/or control your own business. The security afforded by the basic income will allow more workers to become their own bosses, and to do so in collaboration or cooperation with their fellow workers. Other businesses will try to attract workers by giving them more power within the existing structures, for instance, with the worker self-directed enterprises. More of these businesses, whether co-ops or worker-controlled enterprises, B-Corps, or new organizational forms yet to be designed, are likely to exist for their own sake or for the public interest, since we will no longer need to get rich as individuals simply in order to pay the rent. Overall, the basic income will allow economic experimentation, and new organizational models that arise from a more equitable context will themselves likely be more equitable.
Usually this assertion of broad economic growth would be deeply concerning to all of us worried about climate change and other forms of environmental damage. So would a basic income increase unsustainable overconsumption? Just the opposite.
Overconsumption and overproduction are driven by the specific exploitative relationship of labor to capital under our current system. Labor historian (and basic income opponent) Erik Loomis shows in his book Out of Sight that empowered, unionized workers drove the great environmentalist victories of the 20th century such as the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts — and that the right to labor in a clean and healthy environment has long been a fundamental pillar of workers rights, and a demand of the labor union. Workers care about the environment as the place they work and live, not as an abstract, externalized “nature.” Today, working people understand the immediate threat of extreme weather, and the basic income will free everyone of the economic necessity of climate denialism in the name of clinging to extractivist jobs. This will allow workers the freedom to force their bosses to accept green regulation, or form their own businesses and co-ops under greener models. As Alyssa Battistoni has argued convincingly, a basic income will give people the time they need to create communities and habits that reduce their ecological and carbon footprints. It is the harried and underpaid worker, who may also be an exhausted mother with too little support or childcare, who grabs a burger and a Happy Meal at McDonald’s instead of cooking a meal with vegetables from a local garden. Reducing the pressure on this mother has a cascade of health and environmental benefits. Further, Battistoni points out, it is the very rich who have the disproportionate carbon footprints, so any effort to redistribute their wealth and check their accumulation of frequent flyer miles is a win for the ecosystems of the world. (Battistoni has more recently argued that now’s not the time to advocate a UBI, mostly on strategic grounds — that the idea is becoming unhinged from ideology as more libertarians pile on to the idea as a way to destroy the safety net. I agree with her — we cannot let our vision be compromised by John Galt. My goal is to resist that by arguing us back to a racial justice understanding of the ideal.)
Battistoni proposes some sort of carbon dividend to fund the basic income. Such proposals, based on Alaska’s Permanent Fund Dividend, assume the continued exploitation of carbon resources. This is problematic for a couple of reasons. Either the environmentalists’ goals will be realized — and when we phase out our carbon dependence, our funding for basic income will dry up — or we will all burn. We must leave the oil in the ground and live more lightly on the ground. We should definitely put a heavy price on carbon, but the proceeds should be earmarked to creating the public infrastructure of a clean economy — not only renewable energy projects, but also public transportation, affordable housing, and transit-oriented development. A basic income does not solve our infrastructure problems, but it creates conditions more likely to give rise to a less carbon-intensive society.
A realistic assessment of our current climate predicament reveals that our ability to adapt to a more chaotic world will be even more important than mitigation efforts. A certain amount of change is already “baked into” the climate system. Even if we immediately stabilized atmospheric carbon at its fall 2016 level of ~404ppm, the final temperature after the climate finally stabilizes under these conditions would be two to three times as high as the observed warming of 1.39 degrees centigrade since the 1850s (so 2.78–4.17 degrees). In the long run, this is enough to create a sea level rise on the order of at least 29 meters, again without adding a single ppm of carbon to the atmosphere — and according to many respected scientists, 2–5 meters of this rise will take place during the 21st century. The first, larger number is more certain than the near-term predictions, and although it’s possible we could see a slower sea level rise this century, the news is more likely to be bad. As the scientific understanding gets better over time, their best projections for the future are universally more dire. For every decade of scientific work, as scientists strive get better and better models, they predict another 1.75 meters of sea level rise based on the same assumptions of carbon release — an increase that only is a result of better understanding, not increased emissions. So the odds are long on us getting lucky, and reality turning out to be more gentle than we expected. Anyway, there are so, so many more statistical and scientific ways to say “we’re fucked,” even if new emissions drop to zero overnight. It means that we as a culture must adapt to a life of constant catastrophe, and any progressive vision must include a disaster response policy — and not only seawalls.
It is here that an unconditional basic income policy truly shines: it will help us create a more adaptable, generous society. Many writers, including Rebecca Solnit in her book, Paradise Built in Hell, and anthropologists such as Victor and Edith Turner have noticed the state of mutual aid or communitas that arises in the wake of a disaster. Following a hurricane, earthquake, tornado, flood, or any other major catastrophe, people are generous and work together. Edith turner wrote that after a disaster, “people’s sense is that [communitas] is for everybody — humanity, bar none.”[v] But this state of mutual aid can only be sustained with an overall level of material wealth shared evenly throughout the affected society; people can only be generous with one another when they have something to give. In the data-supported words of the World Bank, “socioeconomic resilience tends to increase with income, whereas risk to well-being decreased with income.” Every dollar spent eradicating poverty in an impoverished place saves $4 of loss in the wake of a disaster, and prevents unquantifiable suffering. The Basic Income would help raise the overall wealth of even the lowest-income communities, so people would have something to start from — their next payment — even after a disaster that wiped out all their assets. But since the basic income is supposed to provide the minimum support necessary in normal times, the policy needs to be supported by the single-payer disaster insurance that Stan and Paul Cox outline in their excellent book, How The World Breaks, wherein everyone pays into a nonprofit, national insurance scheme.[vi]
Imagine what would happen today if a major American city became uninhabitable due to sea level rise and violent weather. (This will happen, by the way; it’s only a question of whether Miami, New Orleans, or Houston will go first.) The refugee crisis would overwhelm us. Many would find shelter with family or friends, but there would still be massive numbers with nowhere to go and no livelihoods. Perhaps they would be kept in camps and provided for by an enfeebled FEMA. A few good samaritans would take in strangers, but the fact is that the huge majority of Americans cannot afford to open their homes to new dependents. Now imagine the same scenario with an unconditional, universal basic income: now each household throughout the country is less economically precarious, and each refugee will bring her or his own basic income into whatever community she or he ends up in, and so will be able to contribute to the host household and community immediately. In this sense, the basic income will bring out the best in human nature; it will sustain the conditions of mutual aid that create a genuinely resilient society as we face a changing earth.
But all of these benefits — support for care work, empowerment of workers and citizens, adaptability in the face of ecological collapse — are moot in the face of the moral imperative to end poverty. We need to decide to take seriously the Article 25 of United Nations Declaration of Human Rights, that “Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.” These are human rights. In an affluent society such as ours, it is cruel to let someone, especially a child, suffer in poverty. We should pass the basic income as an end in itself.
[i] Almaz Zelleke, “Feminist Political Theory and the Argument for an Unconditional Basic Income,” Policy and Politics vol 39 no 1, 27–42 (2011).
[ii] Ibid.
[iii] Ibid.
[iv] Robert Van der Veen and Philippe van Parijs, “A Capitalist Road to Communism,” Theory & Society v.15;5 (1986), 635–655.
[v] Turner quoted in Stan and Paul Cox, How The World Breaks (New York: The New Press, 2016), 117.
[vi] How The World Breaks, 219–221.
Part III: Why Not? Because Racism.
“In a racist society, it is inevitable that policies to assist the poor will be designed to shore up racial hierarchy. Thus, where the labor system is organized around racial distinctions, so will assistance programs reflect and reiterate those distinctions.”
— “Why Welfare is Racist,” Frances Fox Piven
The chief objection any advocate of universal basic income is likely to hear is “That will never happen.” The statement implies that it’s not worth thinking through, and utopian in the pejorative sense. This objection, however, rests on nothing more than society-wide entrenched racism. Let me convince you.
Start with the inevitable reactions to unconditional basic income from rich white men. Take Donald Trump as a proxy, when he wrote in the book that immediately preceded his run for president, “Rich people, business people, work very, very hard! … Raising taxes is a way to punish people for having the audacity to work hard and get rich.”[i] The corollary is that poor people do not work hard — as the former President of the Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino reported his boss saying, “laziness is a trait in blacks.” When he was running for president, Mitt Romney made much the same point, though without the explicit racism, in his “47 percent” comment.
The difficulty of one’s work is not correlated to one’s wealth. It is difficult to imagine harder work than what low wage-earners do, often hustling from one inadequate job to another with no rest — there are many good books on this, beginning with Barbara Ehrenreich’s classic Nickel and Dimed. But it is not just low-wage workers. We’re all out here working our asses off, we all know it, and most of us aren’t getting ahead.
Hard work isn’t correlated with wealth, but race is. Blacks and Latinos make up about 30 percent of the United States population, but combined own about 5 percent of the nation’s wealth, almost all of it invested in housing — one reason why the 2008 mortgage collapse hit people of color hardest. The typical Black family has $25 dollars in the bank. The average wealth of a white high-school dropout is about $10,000 more than a Black college graduate who is the head of his household. If you are a Black head-of-household with a full-time job, your family is poorer than a completely unemployed white family.[ii] And the Black unemployment rate is consistently at least double the white unemployment rate — a measure that only includes workers actively looking for jobs, not the millions utterly pushed out of the economy, or the 2.3 million Americans in prisons or jails (59 percent of whom are Black and Hispanic).
Despite this racial wealth gap in America, Trump and others like Paul Ryan still defend their views as “colorblind” to race, and are widely believed. After he gave the quote with which I opened this essay — “this tailspin of culture in our inner cities” — Paul Ryan was able to credibly feign confusion at the subsequent outrage, saying: “This has nothing to do whatsoever with race. It never even occurred to me.”
Ryan is here exploiting a perceived divide between race and class in America that cleaves even the most radical wings of the Left that ignores the historical fact that the economy is built on the exploitation of people of color. Defenders of the status quo such as Ryan and Trump want the cover of colorblind discourse, but to pathologize a “culture of poverty” is unquestionably coded racism. (Despite the anti-establishment image he cultivated during his toxic campaign, Trump is very much a defender of the status quo.)
Of course there are poor white people, but their role in our public discourse is different. Poor whites are aestheticized for their independent, rebel spirits. Their votes are highly sought. They are talked about as “blue-collar workers” whose jobs have been “outsourced,” and so need help getting through this tough time. You hear, for instance, an astounding amount of public hand-wringing about the loss of Appalachian coal jobs and the obligation of environmentalists to provide these particular workers with alternative employment in renewable energy so they don’t get too angry at the Greenies and block any climate change regulation (as if it were this hundred thousand coal workers, not their bosses, who held the power to block climate policy). These days, we also hear a lot about their growing opioid addictions, which, since it now affects a white population, is now treated as a public health rather than a criminal problem.
So that leaves non-whites to be the takers, the government dependents, those who don’t appreciate “the culture of work.”
It’s also important to recognize the place of Latinos in this structure and in the discourse of work and poverty. It was made clear by Trump’s 2016 campaign, which kept its anti-Black racism barely implicit, that today our culture broadly endorses explicit anti-Latino/a racism (as well as Islamophobia, but in that case for less economically-driven reasons). The rhetoric is that Americans pay a cost — in taxes, in jobs lost — for immigrants. In reality, far from being a drain on the economy, the consensus across economists is that their productivity is crucial to our economy. Their cheap labor props up entire industries that would otherwise relocate abroad. Their cheap labor makes basic services affordable for increasingly penny-pinched consumers. If Trump follows through on his promise to deport all illegal immigrants, it would reduce the GDP by $880 billion annually. But Trump cannot just vanish these people and this money from the economy, and he won’t. He will simply expand the current system, which uses the threat of deportation to keep these workers precarious, impoverished, and without rights, and which uses human bodies to support a private prison industry. Bosses will expand the already-common practice of calling Immigration on their own workers when those workers organize, or simply owed their wages — and that threat will be more potent. As anti-Black racism arose during slavery to justify the cruelty that fueled the national economy, so anti-Latino racism is growing to excuse the dehumanization of the low-wage labor that today’s economy depends upon.
The history of welfare in America, and the discourse about it, is perfectly illustrative of my point. Understanding this history is essential to my argument in this essay: that class in America is raced and gendered, and that a universal basic income would be an antiracist and feminist antipoverty program. This very fact is what makes it seem so “utopian” in a society with deeply internalized patterns of oppression.
I will tell this history as a strategy in itself. If the Left had a better handle on the racist history of the welfare state, the counterproductive argument between those who think it’s all about class and those who think it’s all about race will be resolved. We must all understand that economic and environmental justice in America is predicated on the defeat of racism. As Frances Fox Piven writes, “In a racist society, it is inevitable that policies to assist the poor will be designed to shore up the racial hierarchy. Thus, where the labor system is organized around racial distinctions, so will assistance programs reflect and reiterate those distinctions.”
Which is to say, the road ahead is very long indeed, though we are already weary.
[i] Donald Trump, Time to Get Tough: Making America #1 Again (New York: Regnery Publishing, 2011) 61.
Part IV: Welfare and White Supremacy in American History
“America became white — the people who, as they claim, ‘settled’ the country became white — because of the necessity of denying the Black presence and justifying the Black subjugation…It is the Black condition, and only that, which informs the consciousness of white people. It is a terrible paradox, but those who believed that they could control and define Black people divested themselves of the power to control and define themselves.” — James Baldwin, “On Being White and Other Lies”
What follows is a wildly abbreviated history of welfare in America. I use a specific program, welfare, as a synecdoche for the American safety net, which as a whole is too complex for the scope of this essay. This will be an abridged and pointed overview of an area in which there are excellent and under-appreciated books; please read more deeply.
My intention in establishing this history is twofold: 1) to show that race, class, and gender are not distinct in the American context, but instead are co-constitutive; and 2) to show that the racism and misogyny (rarely two separate things) inherent in existing and historical welfare programs can be read in the conditions they impose upon their recipients. Therefore the unconditional nature of the basic income would be a radically antiracist departure from this history.
On nomenclature: I use the word “welfare” to refer to Aid to Dependent Children, created in 1935 under Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and Aid to Families with Dependent Children, as the program was renamed in 1964. These were replaced by TANF in 1996. Today, TANF is so weak, the primary public support for low-income people is SNAP — food stamps, which are funded by the Farm Bill.
In both welfare policy and discourse throughout the twentieth century, we see the domination of what Kimberlé Crenshaw called “sexualized racism” at the intersection of race and gender. Dating back to the antebellum period — when slaveowners would accuse the women they held as chattel of being seductresses and “Jezebels” in order to excuse their rape habit and to explain the proliferation of mixed-race babies — there has been a pervasive anxiety about controlling Black female sexuality. Slavery stole the reproductive freedom of Black women, and transferred culpability for the sexual abuse they suffered and for the difficult lives of their children onto their own bodies. As Dorothy Roberts writes in Killing the Black Body, “regulating Black women’s reproductive decisions has been a central aspect of racial oppression in America…. It is believed that Black mothers transfer a deviant lifestyle to their children that dooms each succeeding generation to a life of poverty, delinquency, and despair.” Rather than fade with the end of slavery, this toxic trope become more virulent over time. Just as slave-masters outsourced responsibility for their sexual predation onto the bodies of Black women, today social policy outsources responsibility for poverty — an economic phenomenon — onto the bodies of Black women.
Most of the safety net programs that working and poor people depend upon today originated in a much more exclusionist and racist period in our history. The year that welfare and Social Security were enacted, 1935, eighteen Blacks were lynched in the US, Oklahoma passed a law prohibiting whites and Blacks from going boating together, and the same southern Democrats in congress that passed the New Deal blocked a national anti-lynching law.
Roosevelt was eager to make whatever concessions to the racist Dixiecrats he needed to in order for them to maintain power over both Blacks and women, who were characterized as unworthy of assistance.[1] The first iteration of Social Security excluded about half the workers in the American economy, including agricultural and domestic workers — categories that at the time encompassed 65 percent of all Black Americans in the workforce.[2] Today, almost all workers are covered by Social Security, which is today a model for our unconditional basic income in that it is not means-tested and therefore stigma-free. No one today needs to demonstrate his or her worthiness to get Social Security, and no one is ashamed to receive it.
But welfare, explicitly targeted towards mothers in need, received different treatment. The New-Deal era concession to Dixiecrats became deeply entrenched in the institution of welfare: states would administer the benefits, and set their own conditions, criteria, and limits on those benefits. States, in turn, tended to pass along responsibility to administer the benefits down to counties. In the South, where Black families were still concentrated, people in need of aid faced down the same local bureaucracies that denied them the vote, access to good schools, and so many essential aspects of civic life. The sociologist Frances Fox Piven writes, “Southern welfare laws and practices were designed to shore up a rigid caste labor system. Blacks were less likely to get aid, and when they did, their benefits were lower than whites so that the welfare check would compare unfavorably with even the miserable earnings of field hands.”
Most states in the South had, by World War II, enacted “suitable home” rules which denied aid to any mother (almost always Black) perceived to have violated sexual norms by having children outside of wedlock or who was simply rumored to be sexually active. Gunnar Myrdal reflected at the time that “since all Negroes are believed to be ‘immoral’ almost any discrimination can be motivated on such grounds.”[3] Each locality had its own web of exclusions and exceptions, not all denials of benefits were explained, and supervision of the local administration of welfare was exclusively aimed at ferreting out perceived overpayments. As a result, in the first iteration of welfare as established in 1935, Black families were underrepresented relative to their need.[4]
The migration of Black families northward did not by itself solve these problems — there was racism aplenty in the north — but the Great Migration did usher in a new era of expanded services, first under President John F. Kennedy and then, most notably, with Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty. Sociologist Jill Quadnago argues that the War on Poverty was conceived as “an equal-opportunity welfare state.”[5] Johnson expanded the availability of benefits significantly — the number of families on welfare rose from about three million in 1960 to almost eleven million by 1973. The role of the federal government in administering it increased as well, making the program more fair and accessible as power was removed from the local offices prone to local racism, especially in the south.[6]
But we must not ignore the new racial ideology that grew behind the scenes of the Great Society. A spectre haunted the Johnson administration, emerging from the ethereal realm of federal bureaucracy into the public eye, never since exorcised from the collective unconscious: Daniel Patrick Moynihan. His “Moynihan Report” (officially titled The Negro Family: The Case for National Action) was leaked in 1965, the year after the War on Poverty was enacted. Moynihan spent the years leading up to 1964 as the chief architect of the War on Poverty, first under Kennedy, then Johnson. In this role, he was presented Labor Department data that showed that although unemployment was decreasing, the number of welfare applications, mostly from single black mothers, was on the rise. He attributed this to the “deterioration of the Negro family,” a phrase which apparently did not sound as nakedly racist then as it does today. He explained this lack of family values (to use the more contemporary phrase) as a cultural pathology leftover from the conditions of American slavery — an idea drawn from the historian Stanley Elkins, who according to social psychologist Thomas Pettigrew (as quoted in the Moynihan report) argued, “Since many slaveowners neither fostered Christian marriage among their slave couples nor hesitated to separate them on the auction block, the slave household often developed a fatherless matrifocal (mother-centered) pattern.” Moynihan argued that this pattern, and other traumas of slavery, became ingrained in the cultural DNA of Black Americans, to create a “Tangle of Pathology” in the “Negro American,” demonstrated by the emasculated Black male, who failed to provide for his family but rather abandoned them.
Some legitimate present-day scholars with whom I disagree have argued that the Moynihan Report was not all or even mostly bad, and that the backlash against it has counterproductively closed discussion of cultural forms. Indeed, the frank discussion of the unique horrors of American Slavery was cutting edge at the time, and welcome.
That said, the Moynihan Report utterly ignored the ongoing contemporary injustices and economic discrimination that Blacks were subject to, and instead provided an alternative explanation that placed all culpability on the long-ago past and all responsibility for change on Black “self-improvement.” This proved a durable template for liberals and conservatives alike.
This ideology of cultural pathology and self-improvement was disastrously manifest in the War on Poverty programs that Moynihan designed. Most immediately, welfare was wildly underfunded. In Martin Luther King, Jr.’s words, “It did not take long to discover that the government was only willing to appropriate such a limited budget that it could not launch a good skirmish against poverty, much less a full-scale war.”[7] Not only was it limited, the Great Society overall put more distance, socially, politically, and in funding, between the stigmatized “welfare” programs for the poor and the popular social insurance for the middle class, setting up “welfare” as a favorite punching-bag and Social Security as a sacred cow of American politics.[8]
The language Johnson and his administration used to talk about the program made things worse. As Johnson said in his 1964 State of the Union address, “very often a lack of jobs and money is not the cause of poverty, but the symptom.” Influenced by Moynihan, at that point behind the scenes, Johnson meant that a cultural pathology had infected Black people, making them lazy. Although it has become a central pillar of neoliberal ideology, this core idea — that poverty is something other than a lack of money — is counterintuitive, even metaphysical. Is poverty a culture? An identity? A lifestyle? Perhaps, for Moynihan and his followers, all of the above. (White supremacy makes tortured logic seem utterly rational. Poverty is by definition a lack of money.)
Therefore most Great Society programs were focused on educating individuals, not giving them concrete assets. Job training programs were the centerpiece of the policy, and they did train hundreds of thousands of Black men in trades such as construction. But as Black workers graduated from these job-training programs, they were systematically excluded from white trade unions, and thereby the workforce. White workers explained that their membership in exclusive unions was their sole valuable property right — in reality, their white privilege was the asset they sought to protect. Their anger fueled George Wallace’s 1968 presidential campaign,[8] as well as Nixon’s more subtle racism on the campaign trail that year. (That the white supremacist vote was large enough to be split between two of the three candidates that year and still propel Nixon to victory should be a sobering reminder for us as we parse the data on the 2016 election). This resentment is the antecedent for today’s backlash against affirmative action. Johnson and Moynihan would not acknowledge that if there was a cultural pathology behind Black poverty, it was white racism.
But the War on Poverty also provided tools and resources for Black activists. The Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO), the chief administrator of War on Poverty programs, was bound by a “maximum feasible participation” clause, which mandated in specific terms the inclusion in decision-making of the people the program sought to help. These grants were used to create “community action” programs that ended up extending basic political rights to Blacks, especially in the rural South.[6,9] In the North, for example in Newark, New Jersey, this clause allowed the militant local chapters of SNCC and CORE to capture the OEO and directly challenge the white Democratic political machinery, including by convening “unruly” protests. The confrontations between OEO-empowered community action groups and the entrenched white power structures of cities including Chicago (where Mayor Richard Daley kneecapped the OEO), New York, Los Angeles, and Philadelphia, led to a demand from mayors that Congress drop the “maximum feasible participation” clause, which they did in September of 1965, the month after the Moynihan Report was made public. In 1969 Moynihan published a bitter and angry book that lay the entire failure of the Great Society at the feet of “activist[s]” who insisted on “maximum feasible misunderstanding” by including community members in the program’s administration. By this measure alone — Moynihan’s ire — we can regard the OEO community action programs as a fleeting but significant progressive victory.
During the Nixon administration, Moynihan helped dismantle the OEO. He was the chief advocate of replacing welfare with what was called the Family Assistance Program (FAP). This program would have provided a guaranteed annual income to its recipients, replacing Medicare, Medicaid, and welfare with a promise from the government to make up the difference between the recipient’s earned income and the level of the annual income. [That info is from a fascinating primary document: Robert J. Lampman, “Nixon’s Family Assistance Plan,” Institute for Research on Poverty, University of Wisconsin, Madison, (November, 1969) 19.] On the face of it, this sounds close to our proposal for a basic income, and some present-day basic income advocates have looked back on this moment as a missed opportunity. The program was defeated by the Senate, attacked by the Right — as always — but also opposed by many liberals.
Although the program looks good by today’s standards, it was not an unconditional basic income. It carried an inflexible work requirement, that could mean, according to a New York Times postmortem, that “mothers of small children…might be ordered to work regardless of the adequacy of day-care facilities or the appropriateness of the job.” The amount of the guaranteed annual income was lower than the existing welfare payments in many of the Northern states that liberal senators represented, and they didn’t want to risk “putting the whole system up for grabs at a time of inflation, rising taxes and free-floating disgruntlement.” For his part, Moynihan supported the program because it would provide benefits to two-parent households, helping to assuage his concern for the “deterioration of the Negro family.” When the bill failed to pass, he wrote another defensive book blaming liberals for its defeat, and complaining, according to a reviewer in the Times, that “Beggars…can’t be choosers. No one appreciates a panhandler with an ‘exact change only’ sign.” He meant that the liberal Northern senators that objected to FAP because it cut payments to recipients in their states were being greedy on behalf of the poor people they represented. Between 1960 and 1980, participation in the unchanged AFDC program rose from over 800,000 families to 3.8 million families, as Johnson’s version remained in effect.
That takes us to Ronald Reagan’s “Welfare Queen.” This trope gained prominence in Reagan’s 1976 campaign, and suggested not only that welfare recipients were unworthy of social support, sexually promiscuous, and lazy, but they were also scammers. As if welfare weren’t already stigmatized enough, this rhetoric made it seem like the act of receiving welfare was itself a crime.
The Welfare Queen narrative arose from a real, well publicized case, that of Linda Taylor, who was a legitimate con artist. Taylor was white, but in many of her various assumed identities, she posed as Black. Of course, hers was a single case — no systemic pattern of fraud has ever been found in American welfare recipients.
In the public narrative of the “Welfare Queen,” there was no question that she was Black — indeed, the “Welfare Queen” was Black before she was Linda Taylor, because the narrative itself predated Taylor according to historian John Hinshaw: “The Welfare Queen driving a pink Cadillac to cash her welfare checks at the liquor store fits a narrative that many white, working-class Americans had about inner-city blacks. It doesn’t matter if the story was fabricated, it fit the narrative, and so it felt true, and it didn’t need to be verified.” Even twenty-three years later, in 1999, sociologist Franklin Gilliam, Jr. found that listening to audio from Reagan’s campaign speech about the Welfare Queen reliably aroused racist sentiments in test subjects. Once in office, Reagan enacted draconian cuts to welfare programs, cutting aid to most working parents, and slashing benefits for poor families with no other sources of income.
By the time Bill Clinton ran for President in 1992, welfare was so racially coded that, according to sociologists Kenneth J. Neubeck and Noel A. Cazenave, politicians were able to “exploit racial animus to promote their political ambitions and goals simply by speaking the word welfare.”[10] This was useful to Clinton as he ran a racially-charged campaign that sought to woo whites back from Reagan’s Republicans, with campaign stops at Stone Mountain, Georgia — birthplace of the KKK — and back in Arkansas to preside over the execution of a mentally disabled Black man. Clinton’s promise to reform welfare became a central plank in his platform. So when Newt Gingrich and his cohort outlined the policy that was to become TANF in their Contract for America, Clinton only needed to present a thin veneer of resistance before essentially granting his Republican opponents their promise to “Discourage illegitimacy and teen pregnancy by prohibiting welfare to minor mothers and denying increased AFDC for additional children while on welfare, cut spending for welfare programs, and enact a tough two-years-and-out provision with work requirements to promote individual responsibility.”That sentence from Gingrich’s “Contract with America,” serves as a summary of the welfare racism related to this point: anxiety about black women’s sexuality; the idea that black women use their sexuality and childbearing to defraud the system; that the best way to handle the impoverished Black mother is to be “tough;” that they are lazy and must be forced to work; and that they lack “personal responsibility.” The conditions to be imposed on welfare benefits are the molding-cast for the most powerful racist stereotypes of the time.
And so it came to pass. With the passage of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act in 1996, welfare became Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF), an entirely different beast than its predecessors. TANF was administered as a block grant to states, so the federal government would give states money, with some specific conditions to be imposed on all aid recipients, but it also gave total freedom to states to impose their own conditions, rules, and bureaucratic systems.
The nationally imposed conditions included a lifetime limit on the total amount of time a family could be on the program (five years), and a two-year limit on continuous aid. Immigrants — even legal immigrants — were barred from the program, and recipients must do specific “work activities” — generally 35 hours a week, or 20 hours a week for single parents — or have their aid penalized or terminated. The subsidized “work activities” do not generally allow more than a year of a GED or a secondary education, leaving the remainder to be done on your own time (though if you get financial aid from your educational institution, that can count as “income” and disqualify you from the program).
At this point in the American political discourse, it was assumed by all sides that the goal was primarily to shrink the welfare rolls, not to help people or make sure that kids weren’t growing up in poverty. So the legislation included strong incentives to states to withhold aid. States could re-allocate unused portions of the federal grants to fill other holes in their budget, or to fuel unrelated ideological crusades. The journalist Bryce Covert showed that seven states use TANF money to fund “crisis pregnancy centers” that try to prevent women from getting abortions by misleading them about their medical options. This incentive was bolstered by a “caseload reduction credit” that lowered the obligations states had to meet for their programs if they reduced their welfare rolls. So states could get free money from the federal government by kicking people off the program, and then the federal government would reward them by then lowering the standards for the program. To further this end, the federal law explicitly asserted that states have no obligation to provide assistance to any individual or family.
By this measure it was a “success.” In the twenty years from 1996 to 2006, the average monthly caseload of the program fell by almost two-thirds — from 4.4 million families in 1996 to 1.6 million families in 2006. The percentage of impoverished families that receive assistance has declined from 68 percent to 23 percent. Hillary Clinton, a strong advocate of TANF, proclaimed proudly that former welfare recipients were “no longer deadbeats — they’re actually out there being productive.” She had no empirical basis to say that; all she knew was that there were fewer people receiving welfare.
One of the big selling-points of the TANF welfare reforms on the Left was that it would fund childcare for families on the program, allowing women to get jobs in the market economy and thereby achieve economic “independence.” This allows the economy to get the full benefit of women’s labor without “wasting” their time on informal, unpaid care work, and commodifying the care work that replaces this unpaid labor. Perhaps some women would prefer to work for a wage than receive payments and be able to stay home — but TANF, with its work requirements, refuses poor women that choice, forcing them to use the childcare provided by the Child Care and Development Fund, which receives partial funding from TANF block-grants. It essentially replaces a wages-for-care work scheme under AFDC (though AFDC did fund childcare, including Head Start, at a lower level) with a wages-for-labor scheme. It assumes that the unpaid work of mothers raising children is essentially worthless. And families on TANF find themselves in a real trap either when the parents’ wages exceed the eligibility requirements — almost universally, still well below the poverty line — or when they time out of the program and so lose their childcare. There’s no good way out of that situation unless they can rely on some other program for childcare.
Within the TANF framework, states have nearly limitless power to determine eligibility, type and level of aid given, conditions for receiving aid, and enforcement mechanisms. This is what allows the sexualized racism manifest in TANF to rise to a fever pitch. In some states, TANF barely exists at all: in Georgia, which has the sixth highest poverty rate in the nation, only 7 percent of families in poverty receive any TANF benefits.
In San Diego, the city enacted a program that allowed investigators from the Public Assistance Fraud Division to conduct preemptive, unannounced searches of the homes of any TANF recipient, even to look for “fraud” in the form of a “secret boyfriend” who might be paying the bills on the sly, according to an unsuccessful lawsuit challenging the practice. One inspector barged into the home of a naturalized refugee, and, according to reporter Matt Taibbi, “reached into her underwear drawer and began sifting around. Sneering, he used the tip of the pencil eraser to pull out a pair of sexy panties and looked at her accusingly. If she didn’t have a boyfriend, what did she need these for?”[11] The lawsuit against the practice details not only one-off searches, but dogged harassment of TANF applicants, forcing applicants to empty their trash cans and sort through the contents in front of the investigators, and even intimidating applicants into signing forms that withdraw their benefits.[12] This lawsuit failed when the appeals court ruled that you give up your Fourth Amendment right to be free of unreasonable searches when you receive public assistance. [13]
Many such invasive programs are excused as anti-fraud efforts. In reality, welfare fraud is a very small problem. Numbers are hard to come by, but conservatives cite a range of Inspectors General reports from different states that find “improper payments” in the range of 20–40 percent of TANF cases, but when you drill down into “improper payments” it is almost always bureaucratic incompetence (or bureaucratic malevolence disguised as incompetence). “Eligibility and payment calculation errors” or “documentation errors” are used to deny people aid even if they’d been receiving it already, or even to demand that they repay back aid. Most estimates put true welfare fraud at somewhere between 1–2 percent of all TANF payouts. Unemployment insurance fraud, which is marginally easier to commit because UI is less conditional, is at 1.9 percent.[14] Yet, when sociologist Arlie Hochschild asked a couple of Tea Party supporters in Louisiana for her book, Strangers in Their Own Land, “what proportion of people were gaming the system, the woman estimated 30 percent while her husband estimated 80 percent.”[15]
As of 2015, thirteen states, representing all regions of the country, require TANF applicants, and often food stamp applicants, to submit to drug testing. These policies are clearly written in response to a public narrative that drug use and poverty go hand-in-hand. Going back at least to Moynihan, the idea that poverty is a moral disease pairs nicely with the perception of addiction as a moral disease.
But it does not reflect reality. In a survey of 10 states that had the drug testing programs in place over 2015, there were only 321 positive tests total — a rate of positive tests to total welfare applicants of .3 percent. As Liz Schott, senior fellow at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, explains: “What this is really doing is creating more of a roadblock, yet another hurdle to get over when you’re trying to get on benefits. The more hurdles you put in front of an applicant, the greater the share of people who won’t make it over all those hurdles.” The block-grant system provides a strong financial incentive for states to erect these hurdles, with the bonus that they stoke racial resentment that can be useful on Election Day. Even as these programs are challenged in the courts, as Florida’s was, more states are pushing for drug testing programs.
So here we are. Families who apply to TANF face a bewildering gauntlet of bureaucracy, all animated by a strong incentive to refuse them aid. All too often this bureaucratic system becomes a moralizing one that shames people, especially Black women, for their desperation. In Georgia, Teresa, a single mother of a two-year-old, fled from an abusive relationship to a domestic violence center. When she applied for aid, the welfare officers asked, “Wouldn’t you rather work?” Teresa remembers, “I was sitting there crying — I just didn’t know what else to do.” It didn’t matter; she was rejected for filling out her paperwork incorrectly. Other women who did get into the program were further degraded; one woman who was seven months pregnant was ordered to take a waitressing job that would force her to be on her feet all day, or lose her benefits. Another woman was told that if she applied for TANF while living in a shelter, her children would be taken away by the State. Another was told, “If you can’t find a job, we’ll have you shoveling shit at the dog pound.”
Since TANF replaced welfare, there has been a fifty percent increase in the number of people living in extreme poverty, or on less than $2 per day. This population overlaps significantly with the group of people, especially mothers, considered “disconnected” — who are not employed and do not receive TANF or Social Security SSI benefits. In 1996, when welfare reform was passed, one in eight low income single mothers were disconnected, but by 2007 — so as not to count the recession — it was one in five. Many of these women had been timed out of TANF after reaching either their two-consecutive-year limit or their five-year lifetime limit; though many of them had jobs while they received TANF, when they lost the childcare services provided by the program, they had to quit. They are largely left with only food stamps — SNAP benefits — and if they need anything besides cold food, they must sell their food stamps on the informal market.
TANF is American racism enshrined in public policy. It is experienced differently by every person it affects, and this diversity of experience, plus the patchwork of state-driven policies and programs, makes it hard to have a national conversation about it. Meanwhile, its daily operation reinforces and entrenches racism. It creates a growing class of desperately poor people who must struggle every day to maintain their dignity or become a player in what Frances Fox Piven called a “theater of racial degradation.”
The unconditional basic income is the best way out of this system and our current broken social contract.
Part V: Counter-CounterArguments
“The current, financialized form of capitalism is systematically consuming our capacities to sustain social bonds, like a tiger that eats its own tail.” — Nancy Fraser
This history shows that welfare works best when controlled at the national level by a fair and nondiscriminatory rule-of-law, and when benefits are given with fewer strings for bureaucrats to pull to justify refusing to grant them. It follows logically that the most effective and fair policy would be direct payments that are universal and unconditional.
Basic income is an antiracist social policy because it is unconditional, and therefore does not respond to or reinforce these racist narratives — that aid recipients are lazy, addled, or scammers. Its universality reduces the stigma because everyone will receive it, even including those above the median income. These are the reasons why the Movement for Black Lives included a demand for universal basic income in their platform, writing “No other social or economic policy solution today would be of sufficient scale to eradicate the profound and systemic economic inequities afflicting Black communities.”
We must understand the resistance it encounters as a manifestation of racism. There will be people, on both the Left and the Right, who might say, “Yes, racism could be one reason to oppose an unconditional basic income, but I have other, non-racist reasons for opposing it,” or, more defensively, “I’m not a racist and I oppose a basic income.”
But as we’ve come to understand, our economy is structured around a racial hierarchy, so most arguments about labor and economics are, at a deep level, arguments over whether and how that hierarchy should be maintained, and what the consequences would be if we tried to level things out. Advocates for basic income — or any other structural economic reform — ought to become adept at uncovering the racial and racist valences of the counterarguments we face. But first, the exception that proves the rule — a justified objection: can we really afford it?
A. Funding
NOTE: When I wrote and published this story, I miscalculated the finance/funding section by an order of 100. It was suspiciously, terribly easy to get to the numbers I wanted. I’m re-working the math in my spare time, and it’s bloomed into a whole side project of accounting — lots of spreadsheets — and I will post a new story with that later. For now, I’m leaving the old, wrong-as-hell math below, so you can see how wrong I was! — JB
One exception is the question of how we would fund a basic income. This question, of course, has racial implications, but it is an important question in itself, because the details matter. We not only want to provide a basic income as a social insurance — social security for all — we also want to use it as an instrument to form a more equitable society. If the program is funded entirely by destroying other social services that currently go to the middle class and the poor, rather than through redistributive policies such as eliminating the carried interest tax loophole and raising taxes on the rich, it will not create a more just society, it will only make existing benefits more portable, a valuable but modest improvement over the status quo.
To run through the back-of-the-envelope math: Again, I’m proposing $12,000 per person per year. When you multiply $12,000 times the current population of the US, you get 3.82 trillion dollars. Let’s round it up to four trillion as a top-line number.
First: Divide taxpayers into five groups by income, each of which comprise 20 percent of the population — quintiles. I would design the system so that people at the bottom of the fifth (top) quintile, at the 80th percentile of earners, will pay back the full quantity of their basic income on top of their existing taxes. For these people, the basic income would be essentially an annual no-interest loan; they can still receive their payments but they’ll pay it all back at tax time (of course, they could opt out of the payments). Earners above them in the fifth quintile will pay progressively more to fund the program, on top of their existing taxes. Citizens in the fourth quintile, the top 60–80 percent of income earners, will have their basic income progressively phased out. This phase-out eliminates an eligibility cliff that would suddenly disincentivize these upper-middle class workers from taking a pay raise at a certain level, a problem that today very poor people face. So, to make the math easy, say citizens at or below the 60th percentile will receive their full basic income, citizens at the 65th percentile would receive $9,000 of it, at the 70th, $6,000, at the 75th, $3,000, and at the 80th, none, so that on the whole the fourth quintile would be paid a half of the amount paid to the lower three quintiles.
The top quintile will be paying into the program rather than receiving payments from it, so we can subtract their basic income from the four trillion total, bringing us immediately down to 3.2 trillion. The fourth quintile will be paid a total of half the other quintiles, bringing us down to $2.8 trillion to raise on net.
[[EDIT: WRONG PART CUT; SEE MY ARTICLE ON NATIONALIZING BANKS]]
Let us turn finally to a few more common arguments against unconditional basic income.
B. Work as Inherent Value
One fear mainstream economists have is that a basic income would create, in the words of Eduardo Porter writing in the New York Times, a “disincentive to work,” especially for the “almost quarter of American households [who] make less than $25,000 [a year]. It would hardly be surprising if a $10,000 check each for mom and dad sapped their desire to work.”
On whose behalf does Porter feel this anxiety? Ostensibly, for mom and dad themselves. In the paragraph immediately preceding, he says “Work…is not just what people do for a living. It is a source of status. It organizes people’s lives. It offers an opportunity for progress. None of this can be replaced by a check.” If all this is true, why would the check create a disincentive to work?
Porter’s true fear is my hope: that the threat of economic desperation will no longer loom over the working poor, and they will be less inclined to let their bosses abuse and take advantage of them.
(Other basic income advocates such as Scott Santens and Andy Stern argue for a basic income exactly because it would shrink the workforce. They think that technological change will soon eliminate the need for large sectors of the workforce, and they may very well be right. I don’t know whether their predictions will come true. I don’t disagree with them, but I can’t prove them right, either.)
Of course labor is often gratifying, and even waged and salaried work is frequently gratifying, especially to privileged middle-class professionals like myself. But to argue that wage-earning is inherently more dignified and noble than unpaid pursuits ignores the tremendous suffering that people experience on the job. Take, for instance, the experience of Erika Morales, a night-shift janitor who cleaned corporate office buildings in California (her case was described by the excellent journalist Bernice Yeung in her expose, Rape on the Night Shift, which is a must-read). Her boss took advantage of her isolated working conditions to repeatedly harass and even rape her in supply closets. She thought about quitting, but she said, “in that moment…I didn’t have another income for myself and my two children.” Her abuser was a serial rapist who consciously took advantage of the economic vulnerability of the women workers he oversaw, telling a reporter that “these women” were “doing it all for the money.” This representative story, I think, says more about work in America today than any set of statistics. The bargain of many people’s jobs is trading desperation for exploitation. And yet we almost never hear these stories spoken aloud.
The ideology that even very low-wage and very degrading wage work confers upon laborers some intangible level of dignity has its roots in the “happy slave” narratives that were used for hundreds of years to excuse slavery — a foundational trope in American culture. America has clung to the slavery-era idea that work is an inherent good, but since Blacks are a lazy people, they must be forced to work, for their own good.
This trope has easily been subsumed into the contemporary misconception that people who receive welfare and food stamp benefits are lazy. When Arlie Hochschild interviewed white Tea Party supporters in Louisiana to understand their political convictions, many of them talked about welfare as something that set them against the idea of government in general, saying things like, “I think if people refuse to work, we should let them starve,” and “With welfare what it is, it’s not worth it to get a real job,” and that welfare recipients “lazed around days and partied at night.”[i] All of these people said they were proud of their “hard work” in contrast to these dissolute poor people. Although few of those interviewed had regular interactions with Black people, this sentiment must be put in the context of the racialized discourse around welfare; studies have shown that news stories about welfare and negative stories about poverty continue to be illustrated with Black faces. Meanwhile, stories about poor people overcoming hardship to succeed are predominantly about whites (pdf).
Discourse aside, the Black unemployment rate is twice the overall unemployment rate — and for the last seventy years, has always been double, in good economic times and bad (pdf). The “unemployment rate” is not a measure of who isn’t working; it’s a measure of who is out actively looking for a job but unable to find one — in other words, the people counted by this statistic are desperately seeking employment but shut out of the economy. This is the result of a confluence of problems: divestment in Black communities’ schools; exclusion from unions and other worker protections (the unemployment gap between Black and white people emerged as unionization expanded in the mid-20th century), and employer discrimination.
Although this deep attachment to the ideal of “hard work” is not always so explicitly racist, it always carries its racial history along with it. The strong labor movement of the 20th century has left behind a residue of blue-collar pride that said work is essential to masculine dignity because it allows a man to achieve “independence.” People who argue from this vantage point typically have a certain type of work in mind when they wax poetic about the dignity of honest jobs, and it’s not the service and retail jobs that dominate today’s economy. As historian Adolph Reed, Jr. points out, the unionized manufacturing jobs of the 20th century that everyone is so nostalgic about are most often associated with white men, the latter with women, people of color, and women of color, and thus seen as “degraded.” The American ideal of “hard work” is not universal — it is raced, and gendered. It only applies to some people doing some kinds of jobs.
Further, this notion of work is androcentric, as Almaz Zelleke defines it, taking “men’s dominant life patterns…to represent the norm for all…an assumption of an autonomous, independent worker as the model citizen.“[ii] This valorization of waged work slights unpaid care and domestic work. If such pro-labor advocates do acknowledge the “crisis of care,” as philosopher Nancy Fraser terms it [iii], they are likely to embrace policies that make childcare universal in order to allow more women to shed their daytime family responsibilities and become autonomous, independent workers in this model. Universal childcare is a laudable policy goal in conjunction with an unconditional basic income, but in the absence of basic income, most mothers are forced by economic need to go out and work for a wage. Zelleke points out that these policies reinforce the androcentric idea that individual women can only reach their full potential in the public sphere or in jobs — i.e. empower women, but only as long as it contributes to the GDP.
Care work is only one example of the essential labor not defined as “valuable,” though we are all hugely dependent upon this type of work. There are other types of labor that are essential but undervalued. Take, for example, political organizing and campaigning. Regardless of its ideological affiliation, political engagement is essential to the idea of democracy, but is currently paid only when it aligns with the interests of the rich. Because it is undervalued and the cost of entry at least in terms of time commitment is high, not enough people participate, and the people who do participate do so because they passionately believe something to the point of extremity. This is how political discourse gets polarized — everyone who would be interested in a moderate politics of compromise is too busy at work. The basic income gives everyone the opportunity to use more of their labor in the public interest.
We have not mentioned art and culture yet. A miniscule proportion of the people with artistic talent are currently at liberty to pursue their craft. A basic income would spur a renaissance in the arts.
Advocates for the ideal of “hard work” should ask themselves whether work must always be in service of another private entity’s interest — the boss or the company — and if not, who is allowed to make that decision. They should ask themselves whether this ideal of hard work requires all parents to be separated from their children during the day in order to be equitable across gender lines. And whether depending on a job for survival really confers an individual with a unique “dignity.”
c. Reproduction
The other conversational reaction to the idea of unconditional basic income paid to all people, even children, is, “wouldn’t that incentivize having children?” This is also rooted in the racist discourse around welfare. In Strangers in Their Own Land, Hochschild recounts a dinner-table conversation: “Women on welfare have six or seven children, Fay [Brantley] notes. The consensus around the table is that the government should support one out-of-wedlock child but not the remaining ‘five or six,’ since the woman in question should have learned her lesson.”[iv]
According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (pdf), which collects data on this issue, it costs the average American family $245,340 to raise a child (born in 2013, the most recent year for which data are available) from birth to age 18. So, $13,630 per year, or $1,630 more than the basic income payment I have proposed. I do not imagine that a statistically significant number of families would intentionally have more kids to try to raise them with sub-average resources in vain hopes of reaping a profit.
Moreover, overpopulation is not an ecological problem in America — unsustainable overconsumption is the more pressing issue. But data on fertility rates are collected, and if we do notice an unsustainable increase in fertility, we can modify the policy. In that case, I would propose a reduced payment for third and subsequent children, to be increased to the full amount paid directly to them when they turn 18. Parents could use economies of scale (such as hand-me-down clothes) so that this would not place a too-stringent economic cap on child-rearing.
D. Inflation
Unless it is funded by the Federal Reserve, universal basic income would not create inflation in the economy; we’re not printing money, we’re reallocating existing money. Nor would the price of certain specific products go up. To argue that the price of milk would increase assumes that under current conditions, there are vast numbers of potential milk drinkers who cannot afford it now. Therefore, people who fear that a basic income would create inflation assume that the contemporary economy fundamentally relies on widespread poverty — that if everyone could afford to eat, the price of food would go up. In reality, we over-produce food relative to the need. After we eradicate poverty and its attendant hunger, the prices for common foodstuffs would stabilize.
If the price of housing rises after implementation of a basic income, that will be a product of the real shortage in affordable housing. We need an affordable housing policy regardless of a basic income, but a basic income would create an increased market demand for developers to build more affordable housing, and would make that term less of a misnomer.
We have enough wealth in our economy to cover everyone’s basic needs; the amount of production is not at fault for our dire conditions, but our distribution of resources.
Inflation will continue independent of the basic income, and so any good legislation that enacts a basic income would be indexed to the rate of inflation, independent of government interference, so a hostile administration cannot inflate the program into irrelevance. One of the big failures of Clinton’s welfare reform in the 1990s — one that I didn’t have space to mention above — was that the funding was not indexed to inflation, and so payments have stagnated at the dollar values in the original legislation, deeply eroding the program. The basic income program must not repeat that mistake.
[i] Hochschild, 35, 159, 159.
[ii] Almaz Zelleke, “Feminist Political Theory and the Argument for an Unconditional Basic Income,” The Policy Press, 2011,
https://almazzelleke.com/
.
[iii] See also Fraser’s book, Fortunes of Feminism.
[iv] Hochschild, 188.
Part VI: Strategy. Can We Make It Happen?
“Capitalism, through its process of production, produces an awesome schizophrenic accumulation of energy or charge, against which it brings all its vast power to bear, but which nonetheless continues to act as capitalism’s limit.” — Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus
I have shown that racism — and the ways it intersects with misogyny — are the only barriers to a basic income. But that “only” does not mean I am optimistic. Racism and misogyny are two of the most powerful forces in our country today.
I wrote this essay because it is strategically vital that any perceived division between “class analysis” and “racial justice” must be eradicated by a conscious effort at cross-movement solidarity. The Black Lives Matter protesters who challenged Bernie Sanders early in his campaign had an excellent strategy. But they shouldn’t have to ask us (I’m white, to be clear) to center race in our economic analysis — racial exploitation has been a driving force in the development of American capitalism, and if we adopt a “colorblind” or “rising tides lift all boats” argument, we will not have the tools or analysis to challenge the real injustices of our economy. If we wish to change the system, we must fight the racial distinctions at its core.
Racial justice activists must also demand economic justice and equality, and in the same breath that we condemn the police and the prisons. This is essential to realizing the goal of prison abolition, because mass incarceration is both a legal and an economic phenomenon. We also need to make sure that the movement is led by Black women and feminists able to make the arguments that transcend the prison walls..
Economic justice gives the movement what it’s fighting for. Speaking broadly, the Black Lives Matter movement has done an admirable job of affirming that it is not merely fighting against state violence and incarceration, as can be seen in the Platform of the Movement for Black Lives, in the actions around the Sanders campaign, and elsewhere. Yet the national media, and most white people, still think that BLM is simply a campaign against police brutality. A concerted effort should be made to broaden and deepen the narrative. Publicly and forcefully advocating for a basic income would be a good tactic to do this.
On the other hand, the climate movement has, until recently, failed to broadly adopt radical economic and racial justice position on the national stage. The voices that most loudly challenge energy policy and carbon dependence in the US have failed to articulate the economic critique that the issue demands. Also, these voices are overwhelmingly white and male. We will be facing more climate-related catastrophes, both in the form of disasters and systemic breakdowns, and the only hope we have of fostering the required resilience is to create a more equitable society with a wider distribution of wealth. We need to demand climate reparations on a global scale, and direct cash payments to vulnerable populations before they are stricken by disaster.
However, on the local level, climate and environmental justice activists have been quietly and skillfully organizing around demands that will make their communities more adaptable and low-carbon. The groups doing good work are too many to list here, but include the Los Angeles Bus Riders’ Union, The New York Environmental Justice Alliance, The New Economy Coalition, We Act, and so on. The problem is that their voices are drowned out on the national stage and the entity vilified as “mainstream media.”
The most notable exception to this lacuna in the discourse is Naomi Klein. Her book This Changes Everything advocates for a universal basic income as one of many solutions both to the injustices of neoliberalism and to climate change. But the movement as a whole has sadly not adopted her strategy of using the science of climate change to challenge the fundamental oppressions of capitalism in its current form, preferring instead to tackle the problem piecemeal — one piece of infrastructure at a time, one consumer decision at a time, one endowment at a time. The scientists who have led the public charge, such as Michael Mann and James Hanson, are disturbingly narrow in their proposed solutions: Hanson stakes his hopes for the future of the planet on nuclear power, and Mann embraces market innovations as the last best hope. I hope that emerging or under-recognized voices such as Cherri Foytlin, Alyssa Battistoni, Clayton Thomas-Muller, Jacqui Patterson, and Kate Aronoff, and others yet to come will gain prominence as the condition of the climate becomes more dire over the next few decades.
Why Haven’t We Started This Fight Yet?
We’ve ignored the frayed social safety net, and failed to present radical alternatives to it, focusing instead what little energy we spend on these issues on simply playing defense. Most of our attention is glued to the power and wealth held by the very few at the top of society, and we are transfixed by the spectacle: an ineffectual government that shades and comforts sprawling corporate systems with their inhuman agendas. This complex of opaque, overlapping conflicts of interest is what the sociologist C. Wright Mills called “The Power Elite,” not long before novelist Thomas Pynchon invoked “the jaws and teeth of some Creature, some Presence so large that nobody else can see it.” Though it can seem like a paranoiac’s fever dream, the Creature really is there behind the scenes, grown to grotesque proportions and able to mutate the orange tumor of hate we’ve elected president on a “burn it all down” platform into an even more ruthless instrument of its own capital-hoarding agenda. It is so pervasive, so fascinating, so malevolent, and so hard to pin down that we, especially we economically comfortable white male progressives, become obsessed with naming it and critiquing it, at the risk of ignoring the larger human suffering unfolding around us.
The precarity of the American family and worker is so great and so manifold that the remnants of the New Deal welfare state provide almost no support whatsoever, and instead exist largely as tools of state control over marginalized and stigmatized populations. No single, targeted safety net program can meet the need. The only solution is to evolve beyond conditional programs — apparently neutral behavior modification that masks the goal of nullifying assistance.
We must take power and wealth from the top and unconditionally give it to those below in the form of a basic income. It will require a deep empathy, a generosity of spirit, a communitas valued by all of us but long absent from our economy and polity. We must trust and respect one another. In America, that will be impossible as long as racism dominates discourse, culture, and the economy. The struggle for economic justice requires first a radical antiracism. Especially in the coming age of Trump, racial justice is a prerequisite for economic justice.