Debating Universal Basic Income | Matt Zwolinski, U of San Diego | Lincoln-Douglas

0:00 and serve assessment of what they tend to have in common okay so now you know what the basic income policy is we could say a little bit about why some people like it and why some people don’t like it with some of the arguments that have been given for and against dark and we’ll talk about just in answer to your question and we’ll talk a little bit about the the cost issue of the basic income and how much a basic income tends to be is that’s a good question to ask so the idea just to give you a little bit of history first has been around for quite some time in one form or another so if you do some digging in the intellectual history you can find proposals for things that look a lot like basic income even if they didn’t use that name going all the way back to the 18th century there is an English school man named Thomas Spence it was widely credited with being one of the first proponents of the basic income though you also find a very similar kind of policy in the American Founding Father Thomas Paine who proposed it in the short little pamphlet called agrarian justice so it’s been around for a very very long time in one form or another picked up a lot of steam around the 1970s in the United States in Europe and that’s when you started seeing a lot of academics get interested in this idea and some people started to incorporate it into their research and write books defending the idea but a relatively small group of academics that didn’t really capture much attention outside

1:31 that small circle for a very long time certainly not any kind of large-scale public interest that didn’t happen until just a couple of years ago really just about 2015 2016 when Switzerland had its referendum in 2016 which proposed a basic income for the country of Switzerland it failed quite resoundingly but it around that time that’s when you started seeing a lot of popular public interest a lot of newspaper articles about the basic income and that interest has been sustained more or less ever since then so what what’s been driving the interest in a basic income why are people attract this policy I’ll talk very very briefly about five different arguments that tend to be given in defense of the basic income so the first argument is a kind of economic efficiency argument based on the fact that the basic income is a cash grant and the arguments fairly simple it’s that you produce more welfare you you make people that are relatively better off when you give them cash as opposed to when you give them in-kind benefits because they can always use the cash to get exactly what they want whereas if you give them an in-kind benefit they might be stuck with something that is

3:01 less than the most desirable thing from their perspective right so they might think that what they really really need is to pay their phone bill right because they’re a month late on it and you give them food stamps which okay they get something to eat but if they had the money equivalent of the food stamps they would have done something that from their perspective made their family much better off so there’s a general economic preference for cash transfers when cash over in-kind transfers win cash transfers or policy possible simply because people can then use that cash in the most effective way possible from their perspective and the thought is they sort of know what they need better than the government does which leads to the second argument and very closely related argument for a basic income which is that it’s a a non paternalistic policy right so it doesn’t it doesn’t treat adults like children who’s who need to be managed by the government because they don’t know what’s good for them it provides people with cash and allows them to make their own decisions like adults like like people who know what’s best for them and can can make rational decisions in light of that so it’s like I said it’s related to the efficiency argument for a cash Graham but this is a more kind of moralistic sort of argument the efficiency argument is people are just going to be better

4:33 off if you give them cash the anti paternalism argument is that there’s something morally objectionable there’s something wrong with treating welfare recipients paternalistically but that’s disrespectful in some sense failing to treat them as as rational autonomous adults to use kind of philosophical language so that’s that’s a second argument and again I can talk about any or all of these in more detail in the question answer period if you’re interested in them another a third argument is a kind of freedom based argument and it’s that a basic income provides everybody everybody with them which sometimes called the material conditions of freedom right freedom means there’s a controversial idea well it’s a controversial concept people defined in a lot of different ways but one very common understanding of freedom is the ability to live your life the way you want the ability to do what you want to do without being bossed around without being stopped by other people and a basic income provides people with money obviously right which they can then use to avoid being bossed around by other people so if they want to spend time right away from work caring for their child maybe they’ve just had a child in their family and they want to spend some time you know bonding with that child the basic income provides them with the freedom to do that if they want to take time off work to write a

6:05 novel write or surf the beaches the basic income provides them with the freedom to do that it provides them with cash and cash in our world in our capitalist economy is a kind of freedom insofar as it opens a lot of doors for you that would otherwise be closed out and one of the important features of the basic income in this respect is again it like a lot of welfare policies right it provides resources to to people but unlike a lot of welfare policies it provides it to everybody and that’s that’s tied in with this freedom market right so it’s not like a minimum wage right where you only get the benefits of a minimum wager if you’re working for the Earned Income Tax Credit the idea here is even the unemployed get some benefit out of a basic income and so it’s it’s a kind of universal freedom everybody gets the benefit everybody has some level of material resources that they can then use to exercise some control over their lives ok so that’s a that’s a third argument to more real quick and then we’ll get to some of the objections so the fourth one this is probably the one that you’re you’re most familiar with if you’ve done any reading on a basic income so far because it’s one that gets a lot of attention both from the popular presses and from from some of the more well-known proponents of a basic income nowadays and it’s what we call the automation argument so the argument here is that the future of work

7:37 is radically changing such that we cannot reasonably expect that in 50 years a hundred years everybody who has a kind of basic level of competence and responsibility is going to be able to get a job why not because there’s jobs are going to go to machines with the advance of artificial technology artificial intelligence rather robots essentially are getting smarter and smarter and getting able to do more and more things that only humans used to do like for instance writing cards right right now Hoover employs people to drive its cars or contracts with people in 50 years they probably won’t probably significantly less than 50 years right in 50 years most cars are going to be self-driving and so all the people who used to work driving for uber aren’t gonna have that option available to them anymore I think ok well that’s just that’s just one set rate of the economy but the thought is that this is a fairly widespread phenomenon and it’s going to eliminate a lot of jobs a lot especially a lot of the relatively low skill jobs that are available to the mass of the general public right so maybe university professors like me will still have a jobs because it’s you know it’d be hard to program a computer to you what I do it’s important

9:07 in the students job but but but a lot of jobs won’t right like so you know you already go to restaurants and restaurants are replacing a lot of service staff with iPads same kind of thing so the idea is like how does that tie in to a basic income well if it’s unreasonable to expect everyone to sort of go out and get a job because there aren’t any jobs to get then what do we do with all these people who don’t have jobs anymore and the answer is well you don’t let them starve in the street and you don’t feel like it’s so important to encourage them to go look for a work as many of our traditional welfare programs are designed to do so you just you give them cash and you let them you let them live their lives as they want if they want to find a job to earn more money or just to find self fulfillment great but you’re not gonna be driving to that it’s not going to be seen as it’s sort of as an essential part of a normal human life okay so that’s again very very popular argument these days very common there’s been a lot written about that we could talk more about it in the Q&A last one and again I’ll be fairly brief with this the last one is in some ways one of the more philosophical ones it’s also one of the older arguments this this is the argument you actually find in Thomas Paine and Thomas Spence the you know the 18th century advocates of a basic income and the idea here is that a basic income can be thought of as a kind of dividend for the use of the Earth’s common

10:41 resources right so there there are certain resources in the world that in some way belong to us all right like the the air that we breathe or the water or maybe the land that we live on right like nobody made the land that we live on we just sort of found it and some people put fences around parts of it and called it their own but the thought here is that in some sense all that stuff belongs to all of humanity and there’s some kind of injustice involved in certain individuals or groups of people cordoning off those resources and claiming them as their own exclusive private property the thought then is that well okay we’ll let them keep it because there are certain kinds of economic efficiencies involved with private property but we’re going to require them to pay attacks on the unimproved value of those resources and we’ll use the revenues from that tax to fund a basic income that distribute to everybody so it’s like even if you don’t own any land you’ll still get a check in the mail that represents like your share of the common ownership of all the land on the earth so again that’s a fairly obscure philosophical argument for a basic income but it’s a kind of interesting one Henry George one it was very very popular in the United States in the early part of the 20th century was a big advocate of something like a basic income law and roughly those grounds okay so those those are the arguments in favor now let me talk about arguments against and I’ll just give you

12:12 three arguments against which is a smaller number but there’s strong arguments so you can get away with fewer of them first argument and perhaps the most obvious argument here is the issue of cost how much is this gonna cost and a few of you asked about this already in the questions box and the worry is that it’s gonna cost too much right it’s gonna it’s gonna bankrupt the federal budget and I’m like depending on the version of the basic income that you’re proposing and again a lot of different versions are out there and they all differ fairly radically in terms of cost so okay just to illustrate like what the what the issue is here so the current federal poverty level sorry current federal poverty level for a single non elderly individual in the United States is something roughly on the order of $12,000 per year so in other words $12,000 is what it would take to lift that person out of poverty if they weren’t earning any other income suppose you wanted to guarantee via a universal basic income that nobody was living in poverty right you wanted to provide enough money that everybody could escape poverty and therefore have all this freedom to live their lives as they want how much is that going to cost well there’s about 300 million adult US citizens in the United States so you know one simple way you could go about this would be to multiply twelve

13:44 thousand dollars by three hundred million citizens and that gets you a very very big number it gives you it gets you roughly three and a half trillion dollars which is almost the size of our entire federal budget and roughly a little over three times what we spend on all other welfare programs including like Medicare Medicaid Social Security at both the federal and state levels so it’s a huge huge number so that probably won’t work you can’t do something like that you got to find some way I’m cutting down on the cost of this program if it’s to be economically sustainable and some people think like there’s just no way of doing it to make it economically sustainable at least or to be a little bit more precise there’s no way to provide to do two things at once right one of which is to provide a benefit that’s large enough to do people real good and the other of which is to provide a benefit that’s small enough not to bankrupt the government finding a way to do both of those things at once turns out to be very very difficult we can talk about that more a little bit more in the Q&A but I’ll point out one complicating factor here one really important thing to think about and when you’re discussing the cost issue and that’s not just the size of the basic income right is it going to be ten thousand dollars a years it’s gonna be five thousand dollars a year or

15:15 something less it’s whether that basic income is being proposed as a supplement to existing social welfare policies or a substitute for them right so in other words are you going to add the basic income on top of Social Security and Medicaid and all that other stuff or is the basic income supposed to replace a lot of those policies that’s an issue that obviously has a tremendous impact on the overall cost of the policy or the overall affordability of the policy and it’s an issue on which proponents of the basic income disagree so for instance in your further reading list there one of the books that I’ve recommended is a book by the conservative thinker charles murray called in our hands so he’s he’s a American Enterprise Institute scholar fairly fairly conservative advocates of basic income but only as a replacement for other welfare policies very like he thinks is all this inefficiency in the current welfare system and that a basic income would be much more efficient much do a much better job of providing people with freedom but he would not be okay with a basic income added to existing social welfare policies on the other hand someone like Phillipe Vaughn Price who wrote the first book on the list basic income a radical proposal for a

16:46 free society wants to see the basic income added on top of existing programs and he’s okay with the fact that that we were both result in a very very large federal budget okay so the first first issue is cost the first critique of a basic income is cost a second issue is and again this is a very common objection is the issue of work disincentives all right so we’ve seen that a basic income policy is unconditional you don’t have to be working to get a basic income you know if you’re looking for work you get a basic income and as a result people worry that well look if we give people a basic income they’re not gonna work right and that would be a bad thing a lot of people think it might be bad for a variety of reasons right you might think it’s bad because if fewer people work then there will be less economic growth right our economy will be less productive because we’ll have all these people sitting idle at home playing video games all day or surfing the beaches of Malibu and you might think it’s bad just as a matter of kind of moral idealism right because there’s a there’s a fairly standard conservative view it’s not just a conservative view but it’s especially prominent among conservatives that work is good for you right that it’s part of a good noble dignified human life and if a basic income would discourage people from working that would be bad it would be bad because it would lead people to make bad choices about how to live their lives choices in other words that would

18:19 would make them worse off as individuals you consider their whole well-being okay last argument against is you can call the argument from fairness or reciprocity and it’s the argument that it is simply unfair to tax people who are making a contribution to the economic pie in order to provide benefits to individuals who could be making a contribution but choose not to so so the argument isn’t that it’s always wrong to provide welfare benefits that’s not the argument some people believe that but very few people believe that right most people think it’s okay to provide welfare benefits to people who genuinely cannot find work so if you’re trying to find work you can’t maybe because you’re disabled maybe because you you spent most of your life in a certain occupation and now that occupations been automated so you’ve been you’ve been put out a job by technology or by foreign competition nobody really has a problem providing welfare benefits to people like that the thing that about the basic income though that makes it controversial is that it seeks to provide basic income to everybody including people who just choose not to work because I don’t want they don’t want it right like they’d rather they’d rather hang out at their

19:50 house and and read or play games or whatever a lot of people think that’s just wrong it’s wrong I mean if they want to do that fine but the rest of us have no obligation to support that kind of lifestyle so it would be and it would be unfair for us to be forced to support it now the interesting thing about that argument right that sounds like a kind of conservative argument like yeah these people don’t want to work they’re lazy who you’re gonna make me support and that’s not fair but actually you find that argument a lot being expressed by people on the political left right so there was a famous philosopher a famous liberal kind of left-wing philosopher in the 1970s probably most famous political philosopher the 20th century named John Rawls who advocated for a very kind of egalitarian state with a lot of taxes on the rich and a lot of transfers before but he thought the basic England was a horrible idea and his reasoning was just this sort of reciprocity reason sake you have a claim to be provided with a basic level of support only if you’re willing to make some contribution to the system yourself interestingly Marxists also tend to object to the basic income on precisely this ground and you might like a lot of people think basic income sounds like communism right like everybody’s gonna get money no matter how much they work or how little they

21:21 work and in fact Marxists actually don’t like the basic income and the reason is they think it’s exploitative in the same way that they think that capitalism is exploitative right so so what’s the problem with capitalism for a Marxist the problem is that capital is a certain class of people capitalists who own the means of production can reap the benefits without actually having to do any work right it’s the proletariat it’s doing all the work they’re the ones building stuff and the capitalist just kind of scoop income off the top of that so the the problem Marxist half of capitalism is that non workers are able to exploit that is to say live off the productive powers of the people were actually doing the work and the basic income looks like it does exactly the same thing right it allows the non workers to live off the fruits of the people who work so it’s not just a conservative argument it is an argument that some conservatives make but there are a lot of really influential thinkers on the on the left to make a similar kind of fairness based or reciprocity based argument okay so those are in very brief form the major arguments against a basic income and for a basic income there are others as well that I haven’t gone into just because they’re not as prevalent in in the in the public debate and of course there’s a lot more to be said about each and every one of those

22:52 arguments right so every one of those arguments has a counter argument on the other side and just responds to that counter argument so so we’ve been talking about any and all that stuff that you’d like I’m gonna stop with my formal presentation now and and just respond to your questions and and try to tell you more about about what you’re interested in hearing so I think I think this is all done through text right you don’t actually speak yeah okay let me let me take a look here and see what you guys have asked so far how much does the ubi need to be in order to be considered a ubi asks Evan fairly early on there’s no there’s no cut and dried answer for that question so a basic income can be very small and still be considered a basic income policy as long as it’s a cash grant as long as it’s unconditional may be tends to be individual and there are there are different philosophies on this on how big a basic income should be right like obviously one of the considerations is cost you don’t want to make it so large that it’s completely unaffordable but there there’s also disagreement about the size of the basic income that’s rooted in differing views about what the purpose of a basic income is okay so some people think that the purpose of a

24:24 basic income should be to allow individual the ability to live a decent life without having to work at all right that it could be a complete substitute for a traditional work if you think that if that’s your view of what a basic income should do then obviously the level of the basic income has to be relatively high in order to achieve that purpose other people don’t think that the purpose of a basic income should simply be a kind of top off it should not be enough for a person to live on that’s not the point of a basic income some people say the point of a basic income is simply to provide enough money that people can get by if they’re between jobs right like if they they lose their job for some reason the basic income gives them as something of a cushion that they can use until they find their next job or if they want to take some time off to be with their family or stay in school a little bit longer right or go back to school maybe the basic income can help them do that but it’s not intended to be a substitute for work if that’s your view of the basic income then it doesn’t need to be nearly as high and can be relatively low right it could be maybe like five hundred dollars a month and still be a basic income on that view so yeah the the levels at which basic incomes are proposed really are all over the map both for kind of pragmatic

25:55 reasons and for the for the reason that different people have different understandings of the purpose that a basic income ought to serve as a resolution state to s 7 a universal basic income does that mean all 300 million citizens in the u.s. get it did the lower classes get more etc depends a lot more the ends are the most these questions is it going to be it depends right so do all citizens get it uh depends on the proposals that you’re looking at some proposals say children don’t get it right so automatically you’re ruling out like one large class of individuals some proposals rule would rule out felons somebody asked about rent fast about felons some proposal would say you don’t get it if you’re a felon you for that that one interesting category of individuals that’s that’s worth thinking about our non citizen resident aliens I’m so question would with individuals like that get it or another related category what about new immigrants newly newly minted citizens of the United States should they get a basic income though the worry there is that if you say that anybody who becomes a citizen of the United States gets the basic income then that’s going to lead to fairly strong resistance among some groups to increase or even continuing existing levels of immigration in the

27:27 country right the ID the worry is like looking at every immigrant who come here like all of a sudden the taxpayers are on the hook for paying that person of basic income then like we don’t want any immigrants anymore that’s a worry that’s a worry that people who were like favorable to immigration have right they like the immigration they think it’s a good thing and they worry that a basic income would kind of undermine the political feasibility of immigration policies and there’s some empirical literature to suggest that in general the more robust a welfare state the less political support there is for higher levels of immigration so yeah it depends you know different policies rule out different people they generally say that lower classes don’t get more right so generally speaking the level of benefit is constant regardless of your your level of income or wealth although there’s one version of the basic income kind of that’s that’s not like that so there’s a policy called the negative income tax which is associated with the libertarian economist Milton Friedman this is something that he advocated at first time I believe in the 1970s and the negative income tax is kind of like a basic income but a means-tested version of a basic income and the way it works is well so think about how a regular income tax works to start so with a regular income tax there’s some threshold let’s say it’s

28:57 $10,000 per person and if you make less than that threshold you don’t pay any income taxes you pay income taxes only on whatever income you earn above $10,000 so suppose the tax rate was 10% right the threshold was $10,000 if you earn then $11,000 you paid 10% of the difference between $11,000 and $10,000 which is to say you pay $100 in taxes yes so that was just a simplified version of how standard income taxes work the negative income taxes does that in Reverse for people who earn less than the threshold so if your thresholds $10,000 in your tax rate is 10% then if you earned $9,000 right $1,000 less than the threshold then you would get 10% of the difference between what you earned and the income threshold so in this case you did $100 if you were in $0 you did a thousand dollars in benefits so everybody would earn something right and so in that sense it’s a kind of universal income if you had a negative income tax not everybody would get something from the government right because if you earned more than $10,000 you wouldn’t get anything but everybody would have at least some source of income either from labor or from the negative income tax and the nice thing about a negative income tax is that it doesn’t have a sharp threshold at which benefits cut off and

30:31 let me let me say a little bit about that and why that’s important so suppose you had a welfare policy that says like everybody earning under $10,000 gets $1,000 from the government and then nobody earning above 10,000 gets anything if that was the policy right then let’s say you were earning like ninety five hundred dollars a year so you’re getting a thousand dollars from the government during ninety five hundred dollars from labor you’re getting a thousand dollars from the government and then your boss offers you to work some overtime which would push your annual income to say ten thousand five hundred dollars if you work an extra like 40 hours over the course to the year well what just happened you’re working 40 hours more but you’re earning $500 less your income your your earned income is going up from ninety five hundred to ten thousand five hundred dollars but you lost your thousand dollars in government benefits so overall you’re actually five hundred dollars worse off right that’s called the welfare cliff and as a dramatized example of it but you find things like that in the current welfare system where your benefits just automatically cut off and those those provide a real disincentive for people to work because the worry is if you work more you your income goes up because you get a raise you could actually wind up were so overall by virtue of losing your benefits negative income tax doesn’t do that because the incomes fade out gradually right it’s like you lose ten percent essentially of every dollar you

32:02 earn by virtue of the lost negative income tax benefit so so that’s a kind of interesting variant on the basic angle which is kind of means-tested and as a result of being means-tested is actually much more affordable than just giving everybody including like Bill Gates ten thousand dollars so let me let me read on and see what other questions we’ve got here is it easy to apply for the benefits of a low-income family are there any tactics to prevent detect fraud as Ingrid um it depicts re it depends I’m not sure whether you’re asking whether it’s easy under the current system or it would be easy under a basic income one of the arguments for a basic income is that it would be substantially easier for people to get the benefits to which they’re entitled than it is under the current system right so if you’re getting welfare benefits right now you’re getting welfare benefits from a bunch of different sources probably right so you might be getting food stamps not be getting housing vouchers you might be getting medical benefits right and you gotta apply for all these things you might have to visit different offices to fill out paperwork all these different forms it’s really not easy to get the benefits that you’re entitled to especially if you’re poor you have a car right and maybe you have to work during regular business hours so you can’t make it down to the office with a basic income on most proposals it would be relatively easy to get your benefit

33:33 right like you file your taxes in filing your taxes you show what your level of income is on the negative income tax scheme and then you get a check in the mail at the tax rebate or if you add another version of the basic income you just get a check you don’t even have to do anything other than maybe provide your social security number or something so it makes it a lot easier for the recipients to get their benefits as far as fraud goes yeah I mean that’s that’s a good like I don’t think it’s any easier to defraud a basic income scheme than is any other welfare scheme but if the level of benefit is high enough then the stakes are higher and so the incentive to defraud the scheme are gonna be higher and so you might get more fraud as a result so that would be an issue one that some proponents of a basic income try to resolve by tying into some kind of national ID system of the sort that we don’t currently have in the United States for my fifth argument does that mean the wealth gap decreases this is the common resources argument yeah that is one of the arguments right so insofar as the existing wealth gap is based on control of sort of monopolistic control of common resources then yes the basic income would would probably have the implication that the the wealth gap would decrease as a result and probably on any version of the or any argument the basic income you would find out at this result Konnor wouldn’t this increase our

35:04 national debt yeah maybe again depends on on the level of basic income it depends on what do you do any means-testing I should say right so right on the means-testing question any serious basic income proposal has to find some way of controlling the costs right you can’t say responsibly we’re just going to double the size of the of the federal budget and we’re okay with that because that would likely have disastrous economic consequences right so almost every policy out there has some kind of measure affiliated with it to control the cost right so the negative income tax does that in a fairly clear way insofar as it does means testing on the front end you might say right like so you don’t get the negative income tax unless your income falls below a certain threshold a lot of other basic income proposals don’t do that kind of means testing but they do another kind of more hidden hard-to-see means testing which is they make the basic income grant that everybody gets part of your taxable income and then they just raise up the progressive income tax to the point where somebody

36:36 like Bill Gates right who has a ton of money already he would get the basic income so he’d get a check from the government but he would wind up paying all of that basic income back to the government in income taxes so you get the exact same result they’re functionally equivalent right whether you do the means testing on the front end by only giving it to certain people or whether you do it on the back end by giving everybody the check but then taking it back from those who are too wealthy same difference right but every policy has to do something like that otherwise the cost spirals utterly out of control and so they all do like even Vaughn Price who’s willing to tolerate a much larger federal budget than we currently have thinks that some form of means testing of that sort has to have to take place Connor okay so you raise the immigration point good so I hope I hope I covered that in the my comments haven’t asked question could Rawls veil of ignorance theory be used on the affirmative side or the negative shut it down and say that Rawls like a ubi um yeah no I think you I mean you could and I think you could use it fairly effectively on the affirmative side right so the the veil of ignorance theory from from John Rawls is that it’s a kind of thought experiment to think about justice in society he says like imagine that you didn’t know your place

38:10 in society right you didn’t know whether you you you were born into a good social class you know an upper social class or a lower social class you didn’t know what your intelligence was you didn’t know how wealthy your family was you don’t know any of these particular details about your life what kind of rules would you like to see govern the distribution of wealth and opportunities in society to ensure that no matter where you end up in society you’re not doing the too badly off that’s the basic gist of the veil of ignorance idea right and Rawls says that persons under a veil of ignorance would choose these two principles of justice which would lead to a fairly redistributed social program right so fairly heavy taxes on the well off in order to provide very large social welfare benefits to the bottom off okay so I think you can you take that argument and and make us pretty strong case for a basic income and say that a basic income provides the provides a threshold a minimum level of income that nobody falls below so that no matter how unlucky you get in what Rawls calls the natural and social lotteries right like no matter how bad a family you get born into or how bad a social circumstance you get born into you’re not gonna be desperately bad off because you’re always going to have that cushion that basic income to rely upon it’s true that Rawls himself didn’t favor a basic income but he didn’t not

39:44 favor it because he thought it was incompatible with his veil of ignorance argument right that he gave a separate distinct argument based on the idea of reciprocity against the basic income so I think you could you could disagree with that argument right you could say I don’t think Rawls is argument about prosody works and here’s why and in fact I think Rawls’s veil of ignorance argument provides a very strong support for the basic income and here’s here’s how that would work so I think you could divorce those two things they don’t they don’t stand or fall together Lauren asks you mentioned the referendum in Switzerland fails or there are examples even of a smaller scale where a type of basic income was implemented yeah good so I’m glad you asked there are and a varying degrees of success and scale right so one basic income like policy that has been around for a very long time and that enjoys a great deal of popular support is the Alaska Permanent dividend and so as you might know everybody who lives in Alaska receives a check from the government each year which is represented as their share of the natural resources of the state mostly oil revenue so the size of

41:15 the dividend varies depending on how much revenue Alaska has extracted from oil over the course of the year it’s not enough to live on right so you you couldn’t view this as a substitute for work so it falls into the kind of top off category of basic income schemes right to cushion that makes it a little easier to get by if you do lose your job or makes it a little easier to maybe not work and go to school longer but certainly not to like to support your whole family on that’s been around for a very very long time it’s very very popular people and Alaska love it as you might imagine and and nobody sees it as kind of bankrupting the state or encouraging idleness or any of the other kinds of arguments that often get made against the basic income that’s you know it’s Alaska is a unique place right they have a tremendous wealth and natural resource in a way that a lot of other jurisdictions don’t it also is is kind of insulated from the immigration problems in a way that other states aren’t right so like it’s hard to immigrate to Alaska in a way that it’s much less hard to immigrate to like Texas or something so they don’t have the same concern that if they implement this like everybody’s gonna come flooding into Alaska so you know how generalizable is it yeah I don’t know but it’s it’s an example there are also a lot right now there are a lot of experiments taking place on the basic

42:46 income where you have different jurisdictions running small scale kind of project basic income projects and then looking to see how well they work and gathering data that might then be used to support a fuller more robust implementation of a basic income in the future so you have basic income projects in Finland you have them in the Netherlands in the depth city of Utrecht there’s Ottawa has a pilot program taking place right now there’s a really interesting program that a charitable organisation called give directly is running in Kenya in Africa right now which is interesting for two reasons one of which is it’s being run by a private organization and not by a government right so most of these basic income programs are government agencies right using this as a kind of social welfare policy give directly is raising all its money through voluntary contributions and and obviously it’s giving this money to people who are very very very poor and so the level of the basic income by like the u.s. standards is extremely low but it makes a big difference in these people’s quality of life because they’re their initial income is very very low so even a small basic income can have a fairly large effect and their overall

44:16 income so they’re gonna be doing this for like they’re just starting out it’s a 10-year program they want to see how a long term basic income works that’ll be really interesting to see what results it brings one other thing I’ll mention just because there’s a lot of data on it and it’s often very it’s often widely cited in these discussions so during the 1970s in the United States there were a series of experiments called the negative income tax experiments where Friedman’s negative income tax or something more or less like it was implemented on a small scale in different cities and and a lot of data came out of that as to how people respond to a basic income it’s a little controversial what lessons to draw from that data but that’s certainly something you should look at another one is in Canada there was something called the min come experiment mi n C ome experiment that was run in Manitoba Canada there’s a Canadian economist Evelyn 4j spelled like forget who has done a lot of interesting work documenting the results of that experiment and and she thinks it was a fairly favorable experiment that it had all these great benefits people stayed in school longer they had these long-term health benefits because they were able to get medical care early for for problems at the recovery but you know it’s there’s a lot of these experiments taking place right now and there’s more being developed every day so but but in terms of like large-scale statewide implementations there’s not much of that um it might be in a couple

45:47 years we’ll see um but but not yet all right let me keep going here [Music] what is it so so Rhea what are some counter plans the negative could run to avoid answering poverty sealing arguments or counter or any counter plans you recommend could you could you rephrase that a bit I’m not entirely clear on what you’re insane asking I think you you want arguments that people opposed to a basic income could provide to to avoid answering poverty ceilings arguments I’m not quite sure what you mean by that so if you explain that I’ll try my best to answer it let’s see do you think David S do you think converting some of the total ubi to provide essential services freely and unconditionally things like basic health care and mobility and transportation food staples etc has any merit at all or would this be a worse solution than higher cash atonement allotments in the lower direct provision yeah good so I think a lot of a lot of people who argue in favor of the basic income in fact I would say most people who argue in favor of basic income do not see a basic income as substituting for all existing

47:18 welfare policies right there are a few people like charles murray who tend to be kind of on the right end of the political spectrum libertarians or conservatives who do think that we should scrap all existing welfare programs and replace them with a basic income but most other people think that this is something we’re gonna add on top of at least look at least some existing welfare programs you might want to replace some of them but we’ll keep some of them too right so for instance you might think like health care there’s something kind of special about health care in the United States right such that the market is is kind of an oddly functioning market and simply providing people with cash might not be as effective a way of meeting for their health care needs as would be providing them with medical benefits directly right or like I mean just to provide a really obvious example think about things like mental health services right or addiction treatment facilities you can characterize those as maybe as a kind of social welfare program and clearly they’re not the kind of social welfare program that you could meaningfully substitute with cash right like if somebody’s suffering from mental health problems you can’t just give them cash and say well here you go right do you know do what you think would be best with this so so the question then is like how much of existing social welfare programs stay on the table as they are providing any kind benefits and how much

48:49 can you substitute with cash grants of the sort that a basic income would provide and you get a lot of disagreement among people on that question but I think most people agree some stuff still has to stay in kind okay that just a few minutes left here hmm could the universal basic income take money from the poor and give it to everyone therefore increasing property depriving the poor the new target support Evan I’m very glad you asked that question that’s an excellent question I mean I’m not sure that it would have that effect but there are influential people who have made that argument so I’ll give you one name there’s a guy named Jared Bernstein who as an economist with I believe the Roosevelt Institute but if you just google Jared Bernstein basic income you’ll find your stuff really clearly and he is a left-wing economist there’s in favor of a much bigger government much more robust social welfare policies for the poor but he thinks the basic income is a horrible idea for precisely the reason that you state he thinks it would be regressive in its nature and that it would eliminate a lot of well if you substituted for other welfare programs it would eliminate a lot of programs that are directly targeted at the poor and then it would kind of diffuse that money amongst the whole of society so that at the end of the day people who are genuinely poor might up receiving might end up receiving less than they would have under the previously existing policy has a very nice article for it he

50:19 makes exactly that point in a really clear and effective way so that’s that’s a nice place to look as a resource for the negative [Music] yeah okay you say you got from an online source that that might have been Jared okay well josh is 4:59 I didn’t see a clarification from Ryo for questions I’m afraid I’m not going to be able to answer that so so I guess I’ll stop those are those are really great questions I wish I had time to talk to you more if you’d like to follow up with me over email IB I’d be more than happy to talk to you I can provide you with some more pointers you know just google my name you can find my email address really easily and send me something so I wish you all the best of luck with your debates and any questions is how to get in contact with Matt any questions about the further reading resources so that’s what you guys can use to get a hold of me also this whole webinar recording is going to be posted on YouTube probably early next week hopefully late this week but we’re not really sure I’m so

51:52 probably early next week and then you guys can access that on our Bill of Rights Institute YouTube page and and that’s really all there is to it for the rest of tonight I hope you guys had a wonderful time I think we’re asking really great questions and thank you once again that i muted myself but thank you too