Stipends? Something scary comes this way
Programs, programs, programs.
How many times have readers read or heard that word when it comes to helping low-income people?
I wish I could count the times, but I only have so much space.
At first, many of these programs sound promising, but then comes the whammy — the bottom line — and we all know when it comes to poor people, that bottom line is always bottoming out.
I guess that is why close to a year ago, I took an interest in what a California mayor was doing to help lift up the poor in his community because it sounded promising. At the time, I thought it was bold and the kind of outside-the-box thinking necessary to trim poverty.
Stockton Mayor Michael Tubbs had proposed giving 100 residents $500 a month each for 18 months with no obligation to repay or other strings attached under an experiment called guaranteed basic income.
Studies show when low-income people have economic security, it leads to less self-destructive behavior, stress and disease.
The program is similar to calls for a governmentfunded universal basic income that would provide monthly cash payments to all United States citizens, regardless of need.
Supporters include former U.S. Labor Secretary Robert B. Reich, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and Tesla’s Elon Musk, who believe a guaranteed basic income is inevitable because of automation and the widening income gap.
That is scary. I have come to believe that guaranteed basic income is a terrible idea, despite the need. It is no different than welfare and simply provides another way to drain a person’s brain and take away his or her ambition and drive to succeed.
The idea of stipends for low-income people isn’t new.
Guaranteed basic income has been implemented in Canada and Finland, and a pilot program is underway in the city of Oakland, Calif.; Chicago is considering it, too.
And now four other states are experimenting with a similar idea. In New York City, Minneapolis-St. Paul, New Orleans, and Omaha, Neb., about 1,000 low-income mothers will receive $4,000 a year for three years once the program officially gets going.
The three-year study is to determine how having more money on a monthly basis affects the wellbeing of children, including their behavior and how their brains develop during the first three years of life. About 21 percent of children nationwide live in poverty, according to the National Center for Children in Poverty.
It is hard to argue with any effort to send poverty packing, but this one has me scratching my head because, to me, it doesn’t make any sense. Why do we need a study to determine how not having money affects low-income people already balanced on the Federal Poverty line?
Hell, they could just ask me. Or maybe you. Or millions of others, including teachers.
I am sure one of us could have provided the answers they seek. Or, they can just use plain, old-fashioned common sense.
Of course not having money during a child’s first three years impacts his or her life. How could it not, when low-income mothers are stressed out and have to share baby formula, diapers and baby food with other struggling mothers?
They want to know how it affects brain power?
Here’s an idea: Take a vacation from the dining table and stand in food lines because you have no choice if you want to eat. Go sit in a social services office — and wait your turn to be called — and fill out an application that burrows into every corner of your life.
Here’s a better idea: Take that money spent on the study and use it to lobby against corporations that refuse to pay people a livable wage.
Because that is what this comes down to — a refusal by corporations to pay people a livable wage; instead, they’re spending money creating monopolies — which I thought was against the law, by the way — and working people get these workarounds.
These guaranteed basic income programs are good for 18 months and three years — but then what? Some iteration of the same thing?
Every program I can remember that is designed to help — even those that are essential — always come with a psychological beatdown for the recipients as the government adds, trims and then cuts the dollars that make the program successful, putting low-income people back at square one.
So, we don’t need stipends and we don’t need more dependents; we have enough of them on the payroll already. And to me, that is what guaranteed basic income would bring — more dependents.
America and the American dream were founded on the willingness to work to get ahead. That willingness provided all that was needed to put food on the table, clothes on the back, money in the bank and pride in one’s family.
But that dream is being executed as the sweat of the brow is being replaced with automation and programs such as guaranteed basic income.
Last week, I was in Greenwich talking with the heads of the United Way and Human Services. Both men talked about the need for corporations to pay a livable wage but feared the country was heading to individual dependency and not selfsufficiency.
I imagine other social service and nonprofit leaders feel the same as they scramble to stretch funding to meet a growing need.
Once again, a program has come along that sounds good — but, as I have written before, poverty is a business, and we are mere pawns in the game.
And there is nothing good about giving people who want to work a handout and not a hand up.
Stipends? Something scary this way comes.