San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
GUARANTEED INCOME
Smart Money S.A.: Mayor joins call for monthly checks to help those crushed by the pandemic.
The day after President Joe Biden’s inauguration, a group known as Mayors for a Guaranteed Income took out a full-page ad in the Washington Post with the headline “One More Check Is Not Enough.”
The group’s pitch is that the federal government should make monthly payments to Americans for the duration of the COVID-19 crisis. One-time $600 checks won’t cut it, the mayors argue.
“Nearly half of all households cannot put food on the table, pay utility bills, or afford their rent or mortgage,” they said in the advertisement. They called for “recurring checks through the end of the pandemic.”
Mayors Ron Nirenberg and Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner, the only signers from Texas, joined more than 30 others from across the country in publicizing the proposal.
The cynics among you may point out that it’s cost-free for mayors to take out an ad in the Washington Post — clearly targeting the 1-day-old Biden administration — to ask for help for their cities.
But I am not a cynic. I think this type of aggressive poverty reduction, especially during an emergency, makes sense. If you
can’t work because your industry was crushed by COVID-19, I think you and your kids shouldn’t go hungry or face eviction as a result.
Reviewing the group, the list of mayors represents a preponderance of well-known college towns, such as Madison, Wis.; Middletown, Conn.; Ithaca, N.Y.; Durham, N.C.; Gainesville, Fla.; and Cambridge, Mass. I imagine endorsing a progressive agenda is politically easier in those towns than it is in more politically mixed cities
and states.
San Antonio’s Nirenberg said signing on in favor of guaranteed income during the pandemic was not a difficult call to make, politically.
“I ask myself three questions: Is it fiscally responsible? Is it fair and ethical? Have I done my homework?” Nirenberg said. “If it’s something that helps the community, the answer is pretty clear. I don’t really dwell on the politics.”
Another way to measure the difficulty of adopting a monthly
guaranteed income would be to ask to what extent and in what ways it would interact with other poverty-reduction measures. Does it replace them or supplement them? Does it do a better job of food and housing outcomes, for example, than other programs?
We already have housing programs, food programs, unemployment programs, jobretraining programs, income for elderly, means-tested health care programs and disability income programs. We already subsidize home loans, student loans and small business loans. The federal government offers emergency loans to small and midsize businesses, and massive bailouts for banks and airlines.
Interestingly, these financial safety nets are all relatively noncontroversial. Or, better stated, even if they are controversial to some, they are politically impossible to do without.
Mayors for a Guaranteed Income makes the case that the key advantage of its idea is that it’s unconditional money. Guaranteed income — not earmarked for food or shelter — is the best kind of poverty alleviation because, as the group’s website states, “no two American households are identical in their needs.” And “most families need something different every month.”
That is my favorite part of their plan — the unconditionality of it.
Guaranteed income, rather than food or housing assistance or job-loss or disability income, says two things about the giver’s view of the recipient. First, we (the giver) trust you (the recipient) to make your own decisions about how best to survive. Second, you deserve to survive. Going hungry isn’t OK, no matter your circumstances.
These are powerful ideas. They sound more like what I learned in Sunday school rather than what I learned in government class. In a majority Christian country, I am surprised at how controversial this remains.
Andrew Yang, former Democratic
candidate for president and now candidate for mayor of New York City, helped put the idea of a guaranteed income into the political mainstream. The emergency $1,200 payments sent from President Donald Trump’s Treasury Department last spring seemed to have been a popular and incremental step toward unconditional cash transfers. The Mayors for a Guaranteed Income advertisement marks another move toward mainstreaming this idea.
The city of Stockton, Calif., has a guaranteed income pilot program underway, as do other cities. Stockton’s Mayor Michael D. Tubbs is, in fact, the founder of Mayors for a Guaranteed Income.
Nirenberg said the need for a guaranteed income beyond the pandemic is less clear and warrants further study. But for now, he said, “what’s clear to me is that there has been a reckoning during this pandemic that far too many families lived on the economic brink before this pandemic, and that is a condition we cannot return to.”
Although guaranteed income has a long way to go before it’s broadly accepted, what the Biden administration announced in the first week, addressing an issue similar to that of the mayors, was not nothing. The administration asked the U.S. Department of Agriculture to raise food stamp benefits by 15 percent in dollar terms. Biden also asked states to expand their access to supplemental nutrition programs by up to 12 million people.
That same week saw
900,000 new unemployment claims, underscoring the precarious job market for many households.