Opinion: Guaranteed income inevitably “cannibaliz[es] existing welfare programs”

PR-wise, SCC lefties have been in seventh heaven since Ellenberg announced a guaranteed income trial run for homeless high schoolers. But pol science prof Alyssa Battistoni can't help but point out the obvious in Dissent, despite herself supporting universal basic income (UBI) laws: UBI is a compassionate ideology but a not-so-pragmatic idea. Obtaining the funding involves more wealth taxes and/or pulverizing arguably helpful welfare programs.

But you don’t need to be Robespierre to be suspicious of a proposal that explicitly announces its intent to protect the rich from working-class rage—particularly when one of the major questions of UBI is where the free money will come from. Stern cautions UBI supporters against advocating a “soak the rich” tax on political grounds: the broad coalition that UBI requires will be impossible if the rich are against it from the start. (Alas, this is already the metric for most policies.) Instead, he proposes to fund UBI by cashing out major welfare programs (food stamps, housing assistance, the earned income tax credit) and charging a value-added tax on consumer goods; more tentatively, he considers a wealth tax, a financial transaction tax, and cuts to military spending. But funding a basic income by cannibalizing existing welfare programs and imposing regressive consumption taxes perversely places the burden of subsidizing low wages on the poor and working-class people making them in the first place....

Though Bregman’s version of UBI is far more appealing on the merits, his political program is disappointing. Ideas change the world, Bregman declares, and UBI is such an obviously good idea that we just need to spread the word. The last line of the book belongs to Keynes, the book’s implicit hero, who famously said of ideas, “indeed, the world is ruled by little else.” But of course, it’s ruled by many other things—money and power chief among them. The fifteen-hour work week Keynes predicted didn’t come to pass because the idea alone wasn’t enough. More importantly, Keynes was talking about ideology rather than ideas per se, about the systems of thought that underpin our assumptions whether or not we know it, not just clever notions.

And the problem with basic income is that it tends to be read as an idea without an ideology. [Dutch journalist and basic income advocate Rutger] Bregman describes the pro-UBI movement in Europe as grassroots and “cross-ideological” in character. At the local level where most programs are proposed, the debate is largely pragmatic. The program in Utrecht, for example, is known as “Weten Wat Werkt” or “Knowing What Works,” in acknowledgment that many see the current welfare system—which even in Europe has ceded more and more ground to workfare—as unaffordable and dysfunctional. But of course, what counts as pragmatic depends on the existing balance of political power. Even Bregman’s own position, though solidly on the left, shifts between advocating for UBI as what the Belgian philosopher Philippe Van Parijs described as the “capitalist road to communism” and the capitalist road to . . . saving capitalism from itself.

This article originally appeared in Dissent. Read the whole thing here.

Read more about guaranteed basic income here.

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