Philippe Van Parijs makes a good intellectual case for his proposition.
As he says, the idea is not new. But it has been some time since anyone
proposed it, so it is interesting that it is surfacing again. One consequence
of the so-called "welfare reform" in the United States is
a modest resurgence of discussion of how to help people who have no
cash income. This is good, because the issue now has particularly pressing
significance. On any given day there are about one million women, plus
their two million children, who were pushed off the welfare rolls or
can’t get on welfare now, and have neither a job nor cash assistance.
Restoring a cash safety net is urgent.
The UBI is one relevant idea. Others include a refundable care-giving
tax credit, which would provide income for people caring for children
or for elderly or disabled family members. These ideas are a long way
from being enacted, but the fact that they are being put forward is
valuable.
To be honest, though, I am ambivalent about spending time just now
on proposals like the UBI. If discussing a guaranteed income helps move
the issue of income adequacy toward the front burner, I am pleased.
Frankly, I am not sure that it does. At the moment, anyway, those who
advocate an income guarantee in a way that is not directly related to
work face a steep burden of persuasion. We should have a family
allowance, or some kind of income base, in the United States. But I
worry that serious pursuit of such proposals at the present time imposes
an opportunity cost–the time not spent on more politically salient
ideas, which could actually be enacted, with immediate consequences
for the lives of low-income people.
At best the UBI is only a piece of the picture, anyway. We actually
have a UBI "cousin" in the United States–food stamps.
It’s not pure because it has some work requirements, but these
are not stringently applied, so food stamps amount to an income guarantee
of about $3,500 for a family of four with no cash income. They constitute
an enormously important policy, but that policy is grossly insufficient
if it is not nested in a mixture of other policies and strategies. In
the "good old days," when "welfare reform" meant
a guaranteed income, I used to worry that its adherents weren’t
concerned enough about policies to help people find work. I am still
concerned that people on the progressive side who want to reduce poverty
in the United States do not have a broad enough view, and I think the
reappearance of ideas focusing heavily on cash income skews the debate
and moves us away from that synthesis. Recreating a decent safety net
for those who are not in a position to work is vital, but I would focus
centrally on work, including attention to wages and working conditions,
and treat proposals like the UBI more as a component than as a centerpiece.
I once had a conversation with Robert Kennedy, while he was running
for President in 1968, that has stayed with me. I told him the staff
was proposing to put his support for a guaranteed income in a position
paper we were drafting on welfare. He said, "I’m not for a
guaranteed income. I’m for a guaranteed job." His point was
one of emphasis, because he did in fact favor provision of decent cash
assistance for people who were not in a position to work. But he believed
that we had excluded large numbers of people, especially young people
of color, from the labor market, and he wanted to focus on remedying
that awful set of facts. I have the same reaction to ideas like the
UBI when we don’t discuss them in proper context.
Experience with the 1996 welfare law has revealed three stories that
need to be addressed in the forthcoming debate over its reauthorization.
One is of those who have jobs but did not escape poverty. The 60 percent
of former welfare recipients employed on any given day are earning an
average of about $7 per hour and working an average of around thirty
hours per week. They need help with income, continuing health and child
care coverage, and housing–and these are needs they share with
millions of others who were never on welfare and are not, given the
stingy way we define poverty, even considered "poor." A second
story is of those who are off the rolls and not working. For those people,
a safety net must be reinvented. In the short run this is only going
to occur within the framework of the welfare structure created in 1996–not
in talk about something like the UBI. The third story is of those still
on welfare who are going to hit the time limits soon. Some of them,
anyway, can work, but need a lot more help than they have gotten so
far, and maybe a publicly supported jobs program as well. (And that’s
just the jobs and income side of the equation. We also need to invest
in education and activities for children, attend to the special challenge
of neighborhoods where poor people live in concentration, and reestablish
in our inner cities the safe and supportive community environment the
rest of us take for granted.)
So, while I appreciate Van Parijs’s contribution, I don’t
think it gets us very far in the real world of policy and politics where
the decisions will actually be made.
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