Give a Buckis Mashable's deep dive into Universal Basic Income — an idea gaining currency in a time of pandemic and free markie post sex videomass unemployment. Now more than ever, our future depends on whether we can pay the bills.
Raise your hand for a vote: Option #1 means getting a lump of cash deposited into your bank account every month, no strings attached. Option #2 means...not getting that cash.
Which would you pick? We're guessing you'd take the money.
Two radical concepts growing in the mainstream consciousness — universal basic income and guaranteed minimum income — represent some version of just giving people cash.
As political interest in cash transfers builds, it's become increasingly important to understand the differences between universal basic income and guaranteed minimum income. After all, the differences — and similarities — between the two could one day determine whether or not you're getting more stimulus-like checks in the future.
So, if you're holding out for Option #1, read on.
How universal is universal basic income, really?
Universal basic income (UBI) is often used to describe any instance in which a government or organization hands out some form of cash with no strings attached. The nearly two dozen programs sprouting up around the U.S. that have been associated with UBI, however, are actually not all that universal.
These trials, better described as tests of guaranteed minimum income, tend to be limited to single parents, families who live above the poverty level but still can't afford basic necessities like housing or childcare, or teens aging out of the foster care system.
Cash transfer advocates have often discussed UBI and this type of guaranteed minimum income in the same breath until recently, Chris Hughes, Facebook cofounder and co-chair of the Economic Security Project, a nonprofit working to advance policies like guaranteed income, says. It's been confusing for people to understand the difference because they have a simple commonality: They both give cash directly to the people, he says. That alone was a radical enough concept for so many years that there often wasn't enough room in the public discourse to substantively discuss the differences.
Now that more people are talking about basic incomes thanks to the pandemic and the popularity of the stimulus checks, advocates see an opening to discuss the nuances.
To Hughes, guaranteed minimum income is about countering income inequality, racial injustice, and other social ills. While universal basic income backers care about income inequality, they are also driven by fears of automation, or when the robots take many of our jobs.
Unlike the guaranteed minimum income programs being tested from Compton to Chicago to Pittsburgh, a universal basic income would be given to everyonein a designated geographic area and it would be distributed unconditionally, regularly, and on a long-term basis, as Dr. Ioana Marinescu, an associate professor of economics at the University of Pennsylvania who studies UBI, explains it.
It's about as straightforward as it sounds, but what does that look like in practice? Let's give a UBI spin to the stimulus checks included in Congress' relief packages for COVID-19 as a hypothetical example.
For the stimulus checks to become a UBI, everyone would need to get the same dollar amount. That means Elon Musk, teachers, food service workers, and lawyers would all get an identical $1200 check. Then, the payments would have to arrive at regular intervals (monthly, quarterly), and there would need to be an identified, lengthy duration for that payment. This cash would also have to come without rules: There would be no stipulations on what people could spend it on and no qualifications for receiving the money.
Though the stimulus checks didn't come with any directives on what one could do with the money (to many people's glee), these payments were not recurring, nor were they distributed to everyone for a lengthy period of time. Eligibility for the stimulus checks has also varied based on income.
While the call for recurring stimulus checks has been welcomed by many UBI advocates, there's still heated debate about how to fund future cash transfer programs. In order to actually give people cash, you need to get that money from somewhere — and it needs to either replace or supplement the existing social security net. Questions around those two options remain some of the biggest political hurdles, Marinescu says.
Related Video: The past, present, and future of Universal Basic Income
When it comes to funding a UBI, or a guaranteed minimum income, some suggest increasing wealth, carbon, income, or sales taxes. During his 2020 presidential run, Andrew Yang proposed a number of tax increases to fund what he called the Freedom Dividend, $1000 monthly payments to every American adult, no matter their income bracket. A nationwide UBI program like Yang suggested was forecast to cost around $3 trillion annually. As a point of reference, the COVID relief billsigned into law by former President Trump in March 2020 cost $2 trillion, and that covered a round of stimulus checks, business loans, and some healthcare funding.
We've yet to see any large-scale guaranteed minimum income program in the U.S. that's funded solely by taxes. Many guaranteed minimum income programs underway are funded by private donations or a mix of public and mostly private funds.
Whether or not a basic income should replace other forms of financial assistance is a matter of political preference, Marinescu explains. Left-leaning UBI advocates would likely want to see it added on top of existing social safety provisions, while right-leaning ones might suggest a basic income should be the sole financial assistance from the government. It's also a matter of math: A targeted population means less money needed to start the program — and potentially more political will for funding it.
SEE ALSO: Universal Basic Income is older than you think, but coronavirus gave it wingsUBI has lately curried the favor of the tech and business sect. Meanwhile, Marinescu notes guaranteed minimum income is more likely to primarily attract progressives concerned with poverty and helping disadvantaged communities.
Basic income has had an array of supporters across the political spectrum. At some point, Richard Nixon and Martin Luther King Jr. both supported a form of basic income.
What have we learned so far from guaranteed income programs?
The Economic Security Project has funded some of the more notable guaranteed income projects in the U.S. so far, and it's intentionally focused on poverty alleviation. Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey has also given $15 million to the cause. The nonprofit helped fund the Stockton Economic Empowerment Demonstration, the first mayor-led guaranteed income project to give $500 per month for 24 months to 125 random Stockton residents living in neighborhoods with a median income below $46,033, as well as the Magnolia's Mother's Trust Initiative, which has provided $1,000 per month to three cohorts of Black mothers living in extreme poverty in the Deep South. In theory, a guaranteed minimum income could hinge on a variety of qualifications, anything from citizenship status or performing community service, but income status has driven the experiments carried out so far in the U.S.
The Stockton program found that participants were more likely to find jobs when supplied a guaranteed minimum income. But what happens in general when you reach slightly above a set income ceiling while in a minimum income program?
"What can be really pernicious about it is that in the simplest case, where it's literally 'only if you have the income below this, then you qualify, and otherwise you don't,' then once you reach that threshold... [by] making one more dollar, your whole $1,000 benefit is being shot," Marinescu says.
Most guaranteed minimum experiments have focused on lower income individuals so it's easier to measure the impact of that cash for research purposes. A cash transfer experiment measuring the impact of Jeff Bezos getting an additional $1000 a month won't illuminate what that cash would mean to a single mother earning minimum wage, or a family of four whose primary breadwinner was laid off. Also, it's easier to set up guaranteed minimum income trials because unlike UBI, you don't need to distribute that cash to an entire population.
When the Economic Security Project launched in 2016, Hughes says it struggled with how much of a distinction to make between the two ideas, ultimately deciding at the time the "more people advocating for cash transfers, the better."
But with the public now increasingly aware of the concept of cash transfers, he says the organization has since focused on clarifying the differences between the terms.
"It's phenomenal. It exceeded just about everybody's expectations," Hughes says of public awareness of cash transfer programs thanks to the pandemic, adding that we're in a "very, very different place than we were a year and a half ago."
Read more about Universal Basic Income:
The future of free money
The tech needed to give people free money
Give people guaranteed income, and then trust them
Every U.S. city testing free money programs
Topics Activism Social Good Universal Basic Income