Don’t Buy The Hype, Universal Basic Income Won’t Tackle Poverty Or Inequality

When an idea stirs the popular imagination, pundits and politicians find it hard to resist.

Never mind if there is no evidence to support it. Never mind if closer scrutiny suggests putting it into practice will be counterproductive or plain impossible.

What matters is the platform it provides for its champions, the energy it generates and the votes it wins. Brexit is one example. President Donald Trump’s Mexican wall is another. And I would add a third: universal basic income (UBI) – the idea that every citizen receives a weekly or monthly lump sum from the government, whether they’re employed or not.

The case against UBI is building rapidly. But so is the clamor to try it out in states and cities around the world. That the latter seems immune to the former is alarming. And the fact that it’s promoted by radicals at both ends of the political spectrum should ring alarm bells.

As Daniel Zamora argues in Jacobin, this is an idea “whose time has come,” not because it is good or practicable, but because it is a creature of the moment.

“As politics move to the right and social movements go on the defensive, UBI gains ground ... not as an alternative to neoliberalism, but a capitulation to it,” he wrote.

We have to assume, as do almost all of its protagonists, that a basic income could only be implemented in very small amounts. The most generous UBI scheme envisaged in a 2017 study by the Roosevelt Institute falls below the poverty line.

This means a range of additional benefits would need to be paid to people unable to work – wiping out the much-vaunted promise that UBI simplifies the social security system and removes the stigma of claiming benefits.

In fact, all it offers is a small rise in the floor above which conditional benefits are required. And even at that level, we would need massive tax hikes to pay for it. In a nutshell, “an affordable UBI would be inadequate and an adequate UBI would be unaffordable.”

Why bother to construct what British economist Ian Gough called a “powerful new tax engine to pull along a tiny cart?” Whose interests are really at stake here?

UBI is an individualistic, monetary intervention that undermines social solidarity and fails to tackle the underlying causes of poverty, unemployment and inequality.

These are systemic problems that need to be addressed by people getting together and building shared control over local economic development, wage bargaining and decisions about national investment in industry and infrastructure, not by governments giving individuals small amounts of money.

Leftist advocates of UBI, like Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams, claim that it “overturns the asymmetry of power that currently exists between labour and capital” by partially de-commodifying labor and loosening the coercive aspects of paid employment.

But here’s the catch: It will only happen, they say, if UBI “provides a sufficient amount of income to live on.” As we have seen, this is not remotely possible. If UBI isn’t generous enough to let you refuse work, it can only suppress wages and support a multiplication of lousy jobs (that you still can’t refuse).

The idea of giving money to individuals sits comfortably with the neoliberal claim that services are better when markets provide and customers choose. Indeed, where UBI has been piloted in countries without free public services, it is often used to buy such essentials as education and healthcare.

Source: Huffingtonpost News