This
fall, a truck dumped eight million coins outside the Parliament
building in Bern, one for every Swiss citizen. It was a publicity stunt
for advocates of an audacious social policy that just might become
reality in the tiny, rich country. Along with the coins, activists
delivered 125,000 signatures — enough to trigger a Swiss public
referendum, this time on providing a monthly income to every citizen, no
strings attached. Every month, every Swiss person would receive a check
from the government, no matter how rich or poor, how hardworking or
lazy, how old or young. Poverty would disappear. Economists, needless to
say, are sharply divided on what would reappear in its place — and
whether such a basic-income scheme might have some appeal for other,
less socialist countries too.
The
proposal is, in part, the brainchild of a German-born artist named Enno
Schmidt, a leader in the basic-income movement. He knows it sounds a
bit crazy. He thought the same when someone first described the policy
to him, too. “I tell people not to think about it for others, but think
about it for themselves,” Schmidt told me. “What would you do if you had
that income? What if you were taking care of a child or an elderly
person?” Schmidt said that the basic income would provide some dignity
and security to the poor, especially Europe’s underemployed and
unemployed. It would also, he said, help unleash creativity and
entrepreneurialism: Switzerland’s workers would feel empowered to work
the way they wanted to, rather than the way they had to just to get by.
He even went so far as to compare it to a civil rights movement, like
women’s suffrage or ending slavery.
When we spoke, Schmidt repeatedly described the policy as “stimmig.”
Like many German words, it has no English equivalent, but it means
something like “coherent and harmonious,” with a dash of “beauty” thrown
in. It is an idea whose time has come, he was saying. And basic-income
schemes are having something of a moment, even if they are hardly new.
(Thomas Paine was an advocate.) But their renewed popularity says
something troubling about the state of rich-world economies.
Go
to a cocktail party in Berlin, and there is always someone spouting off
about the benefits of a basic income, just as you might hear someone
talking up Robin Hood taxes in New York or single-payer health care in
Washington. And it’s not only in vogue in wealthy Switzerland.
Beleaguered and debt-wracked Cyprus is weighing the implementation of
basic incomes, too. They even are whispered about in the United States,
where certain wonks on the libertarian right and liberal left have come
to a strange convergence around the idea — some prefer an unconditional
“basic” income that would go out to everyone, no strings attached;
others a means-tested “minimum” income to supplement the earnings of the
poor up to a given level.
The
case from the right is one of expediency and efficacy. Let’s say that
Congress decided to provide a basic income through the tax code or by
expanding the Social Security program. Such a system might work better
and be fairer than the current patchwork of programs, including welfare,
food stamps and housing vouchers. A single father with two jobs and two
children would no longer have to worry about the hassle of visiting a
bunch of offices to receive benefits. And giving him a single lump sum
might help him use his federal dollars better. Housing vouchers have to
be spent on housing, food stamps on food. Those dollars would be more
valuable — both to the recipient and the economy at large — if they were
fungible.
Even
better, conservatives think, such a program could significantly reduce
the size of our federal bureaucracy. It could take the place of welfare,
food stamps, housing vouchers and hundreds of other programs, all at
once: Hello, basic income; goodbye, H.U.D. Charles Murray of the
conservative American Enterprise Institute has proposed a minimum income
for just that reason — feed the poor, and starve the beast. “Give the
money to the people,” Murray wrote in his book “In Our Hands: A Plan to
Replace the Welfare State.” He suggested guaranteeing $10,000 a year to
anyone meeting the following conditions: be American, be over 21, stay
out of jail and — as he once quipped — “have a pulse.”
The
left is more concerned with the power of a minimum or basic income as
an anti-poverty and pro-mobility tool. There happens to be some hard
evidence to bolster the policy’s case. In the mid-1970s, the tiny
Canadian town of Dauphin ( the “garden capital of Manitoba” ) acted as
guinea pig for a grand experiment in social policy called “Mincome.” For
a short period of time, all the residents of the town received a
guaranteed minimum income. About 1,000 poor families got monthly checks
to supplement their earnings.
Evelyn
Forget, a health economist at the University of Manitoba, has done some
of the best research on the results. Some of her findings were obvious:
Poverty disappeared. But others were more surprising: High-school
completion rates went up; hospitalization rates went down. “If you have a
social program like this, community values themselves start to change,”
Forget said.
There
are strong arguments against minimum or basic incomes, too. Cost is
one. Creating a massive disincentive to work is another. But some
experts said the effect might be smaller than you would think. A basic
income might be enough to live on, but not enough to live very well on.
Such a program would be designed to end poverty without creating a
nation of layabouts. The Mincome experiment offers some backup for that
argument, too.“For a lot of economists, the issue was that you would
disincentivize work,” said Wayne Simpson, a Canadian economist who has
studied Mincome. “The evidence showed that it was not nearly as bad as
some of the literature had suggested.”
There’s
a deeper, scarier reason that arguments for guaranteed incomes have
resurfaced of late. Wages are stagnant, unemployment is high and tens of
millions of families are struggling in Europe and here at home. Despite
record corporate earnings and skyrocketing fortunes for the
college-educated and already well-off, the job market is simply not
rewarding many fully employed workers with a decent way of life.
Millions of households have had no real increase in earnings since the
late 1980s. Consider the current debate over fast-food workers’ wages.
The
advocacy group Low Pay Is Not OK posted a phone call, recorded by a
10-year McDonald’s veteran, Nancy Salgado, when she contacted the
company’s “McResource” help line. The operator told Salgado that she
could qualify for food stamps and home heating assistance, while also
suggesting some area food banks — impressively, she knew to recommend
these services without even asking about Salgado’s wage ($8.25 an hour),
though she was aware Salgado worked full time. The company earned $5.5
billion in net profits last year, and appears to take for granted that
many of its employees will be on the dole.
Absurd
as a minimum income might seem to bootstrapping Americans, one already
exists in a way — McDonald’s knows it. If our economy is no longer able
to improve the lives of the working poor and low-income families, why
not tweak our policies to do what we’re already doing, but better — more
harmoniously? It’s hardly uplifting news, but minimum incomes just
might be stimmig for the United States too.
CHENNAI: India aiming to join an elite group of space explorers launched a mission to Mars on Tuesday here.