This weekend, April 24-26, the US Congress will be debating and probably voting on the CARES 2 Act, the next phase in responding to the health and financial crisis brought on by the coronavirus. A remarkable coalition has formed, under the leadership of the Income Movement, and including USBIG, Humanity Forward, the Fund for Humanity, […]
Coronavirus, Economic Crisis and Basic Income By: Guy Standing, Labour Economist and Professional Research Associate at SOAS In January 1918, the global pandemic known as ‘Spanish flu’ began, and by its end in December 1920, well over 40 million people had died. That tragedy hopefully dwarfs what will happen as the coronavirus pandemic unfolds. But […]
Wondering About UBS By: Michael Anthony Lewis (Associate Professor of Social Work, CUNY) In a Medium piece back in August of 2019, https://medium.com/bigger-picture/why-ubis-cousin-ubs-is-better-c08778c7c865, Inez Fernandez argued that Universal Basic Services (UBS) is preferable to Universal Basic Income (UBI). The services included in UBS would be, at a minimum, health care, housing and utilities, transportation, education, […]
Yang’s Freedom Dividend: What’s It Got to do with Freedom? By: Michael Anthony Lewis (Associate Professor of Social Work, CUNY) Anyone following Andrew Yang’s attempt to win the Democratic Presidential Primary knows that a key part of his platform is the Freedom Dividend. This is his name for what others call a universal basic income […]
UBI: A Bad Idea? Michael W. Howard According to Daron Acemoglu, universal basic income (UBI) is “a flawed idea, not least because it would be prohibitively expensive unless accompanied by deep cuts to the rest of the safety net.” A UBI of $1000 a month would be, he says, about $4 trillion. But that’s the […]
By: Michael Anthony Lewis (Associate Professor of Social Work, CUNY) Jonathan Church is an economist who’s recently taken Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) to task here for her misunderstanding of economics. What she apparently misunderstands is the notion of scarcity. Church doesn’t mention basic income in his piece, but he could have. That’s because some have advocated […]