Low-income Baltimoreans don’t need to be told how to spend guaranteed income

Letter writer Karyn Skaggs, of Columbia, wants to put all kinds of restrictions on Baltimore’s guaranteed income pilot program (“Baltimore’s guaranteed income pilot should have limits on how funds can be used,” April 23). I find her attitude arrogant and officious, as she appears to assume that poor people are incompetent and irresponsible and need supervision. There is no justification for that assumption.

As people who have followed reports of programs that started earlier in other cities already know, poor people have a very good sense of what to do with money when they get it. Reports from Stockton, California, which required only that the participants be at least 18 and reside in a lower-income neighborhood in the city, showed the participants used the money primarily for food, payments at stores like Walmart and Target, and utilities. At the end of a year they were in more stable financial circumstances, and the percentage who could pay cash for an emergency expense had increased from 25% to 52%.

Baltimoreans are certainly as intelligent as the people of Stockton, and I am glad the city will treat them with a similar level of respect. I hope the results of the program will be so encouraging that it will be expanded in future. Being free from constant financial stress ought to be something people can count on in a country as rich as this one.

— Katharine W. Rylaarsdam, Baltimore