5 reasons to consider a no-strings-attached, basic income for all Americans

Salon ^ | March 19, 2014 | Lynn Stuart Parramore

[Cincinatus' Wife]

What if you could receive a guaranteed basic yearly income with no strings attached? Didn’t matter how much money you made now, or in the future. Nobody would ask about your job status or how many kids you have. The check would arrive in the mailbox, no matter what.

Sounds like a far-fetched idea, right? Wrong. All over the world, people are talking guaranteeing basic incomes for citizens as a viable policy.

Half of all Canadians want it. The Swiss have had a referendum on it. The American media is all over it: The New York Times’ Annie Lowrey considered basic income as an answer to an economy that leaves too many people behind, while Matt Bruenig and Elizabeth Stoker of theAtlantic wrote about it as a way to reduce poverty.

The idea is not new: In his final book, Martin Luther King Jr. suggested that guaranteeing people money without requiring them to do anything in exchange was a good way for Americans to share in prosperity. In the 1960s and early 1970s, many in the U.S. gave the idea serious consideration. Even Richard Nixon supported a version of it. But by 1980, the political tide shifted to the right and politicians moved their talking points to unfettered markets and individual gain from sharing the wealth and evening the playing field.

Advocates say it’s an idea whose time has finally come. In a world of chronic job insecurity, stagnant wages, boom-and-bust cycles that wipe out ordinary people through no fault of their own, and shredded social safety nets, proponents warn that we have to come up with a way to make sure people can survive regardless of work status or economic conditions. Here are five reasons they give as to why a guaranteed basic income might just be the answer.

[exDemMom]

I didn’t say money wouldn’t inflate. But the value would have nothing to do with whether it was earned or given to someone, which is what you said.

The value has *everything* to do with whether the money is traded for production of goods and services, or whether the money is handed out for nothing. Printing money and handing it out does nothing to increase the quantity of goods and services. Throwing more money into the system without adding any value in the form of goods and services cannot have any effect *other* than to cause inflation.

A question: how well do you understand mathematics? If you are math illiterate, then I am afraid that you are incapable of understanding the relationship between quantity of money and quantity of goods and services.

[exDemMom]

How can anyone think this idea is even remotely viable must be brain dead....

I think they are mathematically illiterate (or innumerate, to use the proper word). The laws of economics (the real ones, not the fake ones invented by socialists e.g. Keynes) are as absolute and unchangeable as the laws of physics. But someone who is incapable of understanding mathematical relationships will never understand that.

Unfortunately, the innumerate major in subjects like sociology--where they can come up with all kinds of ideas that can never possibly work in the real world, and they don't even understand that.

[exDemMom]

Similar to what the Fed is doing?

Yes. In fact, with all those trillions of worthless dollars pumped into the economy, I do not understand why inflation is as low as it is. But maybe that's why the stock market is so high, it's the bubble inflating to absorb the extra cash. I'm not an economist, so I can only speculate.

[exDemMom]

Well, there’s five right there! Didn’t take long, either.

Pretend I'm clicking on the "thumbs-up" button.

[Hugin]

How well do you understand English? I've already acknowledged that printing money decreases the value of each dollar. My point is that each dollar still has the same value as any other dollar regardless of how it was acquired, whatever that value may be. The original poster claimed that dollars given by the government were worth less than dollars earned, just because they came from the government. I say that's nonsense.

And btw, how is that different than what we are doing now? We're running huge deficits already, with trillions and trillions of unfunded liabilities looming. However the money is spent, the effect on inflation is the same.

None of that means I support the idea. Of course I don't support what we're doing now either. I'm just comparing the idea vs. what we have now. It might have some advantages in terms of fairness, and motivating people to work and save. I've been accused of sounding like a Democrat, but the Democrats would never support any idea that eliminated millions of unionized government bureaucrats.

[ourworldawry]

It’s called ‘enslavement’.