'COVID-19 Is Helping To Make The Case For Universal Basic Income, UBI'
"COVID-19 Is Helping to Make the Case for Universal Basic Income," Washington Monthly. The pandemic has exposed the searing need for direct cash grants to Americans. By David Atkins, July 5, 2020. Excerpts, Edited:
Most conservatives had hoped that Donald Trump’s fluke 2016 election would be the harbinger of a new era of conservative backlash against supposed “liberal overreach.” Not only has a Nixonian silent majority backlash not materialized, the Trump era has actually shifted the popular policy window much faster to the left. Republicans have embraced sexist white supremacy; and recent events and economic trends are demonstrating just how inadequate our current systems and policies are in addressing the needs of the 21st century society and economy.
Even white suburban America is seeing the reality of racist policing that has led to a popular consensus around police reform; the inadequacy of the ACA combined with Trump’s desperate attempts to roll back even its meager protections have pushed Medicare-for-All; combatting climate change is growing at the top of the Democratic agenda. Young people have moved especially far left, even “moderate” politicians like Biden are touting platforms well to the left of Clinton 2016, which was itself well to the left of either of Obama’s policy platforms.
But in few policy areas has the leftward shift been more remarkable than on Universal Basic Income. Once considered a fringe far-left and far-right proposal of Martin Luther King Jr.’s most socialist platform and Milton Friedman’s most libertarian one, the policy has moved from unheard-of to unthinkable to unrealistic to active experimentation in barely over 5 years. Even the Pope has spoken in support. It has moved from the novelty candidacy of Andrew Yang and fringe Silicon Valley supporters to the support of traditionally liberal mayors. This week, Stockton, CA mayor Tubbs announced the formation of the Mayors for a Guaranteed Income Coalition, a group of city leaders who have committed to investigating how to launch direct guaranteed income projects in their communities. The majority of the mayors are Black, the 11 cities they govern have a collective population of 7 million.
The idea of UBI has encountered expected opposition from the Right combined with progressive taxation. Centrists and moderates have long shied away from it because of America’s unique obsession with individual moral hazard: Americans consistently support broad social welfare, right up until they feel their “hard-working tax dollars” are going to “those Other lazy people.” It is intertwined with white America’s history of white supremacy and grievance. There has also been major opposition from the left. Anti-UBI leftists see it as a libertarian techbro camel’s nose under the tent to weaken social safety nets and undermine the power of labor. The fear is that if social support for the working class is disentangled from actual labor leverage, then all hope of workers’ empowerment may be eroded. The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed one of the flaws of this framework. Worker control of the means of production is questioned when public policy's goal is to minimize production and keep workers at home. How do you use the power of organized labor for leverage, when workers are increasingly expendable and a pandemic is accelerating the shift to an automated and decentralized workforce? When a pandemic is principally affecting “essential workers” who also happen to be primarily people of color–even as middle-class whites are increasingly furloughed with benefits or working from home.
It is apparent just how dependent modern capitalism is on consumption. Capitalists are always finding ways of automating or offshoring labor–but they literally cannot make a profit if no one is buying their corporation’s products. Consumers with money to spend in a democratic society with the power to protest and vote may not be as powerless as once feared. Economic support for the 99% will need both new and old approaches and frameworks: increased worker and democratic control of production through more powerful labor unions, also baseline cash grants to those for whom a labor-oriented approach may be inadequate in a modern globalized, de-industrialized, decentralized and increasingly automated economy. UBI is also a potentially essential tool for countering white supremacy and endemic poverty among people of color. If the UBI benefit is broadly shared across the racial and economic spectrum, it will be harder for wealthy conservatives to use it as a racist or classist wedge...
More, https://washingtonmonthly.com/2020/07/05/univeral-basic-income-continues-to-gain-mainstream-support-due-to-covid-19/
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