More Than Enough

If guaranteed income is an attempt to provide people with more resources—resources that come with very few restrictions—it demands a conversation with the people who would most benefit from it. It also demands a conversation about deservedness. When we ask “How much would it be?” “Who would get it?” And “How would we pay for it?” what we are really asking is who deserves more and who doesn’t.

I’m not the only one who thinks Guaranteed income is a realistic option, either—it’s actually being tried out as we speak. Presidential hopeful Andrew Yang advocates for Guaranteed Income as part of his platform. Aisha Nyadoro’s project—The Magnolia Mother’s Trust, which you heard about in Episode 2 [link to episode]—is getting ready to launch their second round of a guaranteed income project in Jackson, Mississippi. The city of Stockton, California, and its mayor Michael Tubbs are also running a demonstration of Guaranteed Income right now—they are working to build an economy that grants everyone the right to have enough to get by.

Over the last two years, I’ve talked to wide-ranging audiences about guaranteed income. One of the things that consistently gets fretted about is the boldness of guaranteed income. People have said to me, What will poor people do with that money? The Right will never go for it. How will we pay for it? And I can’t help but think of the people who thought that ending slavery was too hard, to bold an idea.

Too many of us have become convinced that the rules, as written by fear, scarcity, and avarice, are the ones we must play by.

We don’t. We have to be willing to dream our most courageously when it comes to policy and systems change, because we cut ourselves off from the best possible outcomes if we start compromising our ideal before we begin. So let’s be bold, let’s be courageous, and let’s start by recognizing that this country has more than enough wealth—enough money, enough talent, enough courage—for all of us.

Show Notes

When I travelled across the country to report out this podcast, I found myself doing a lot of thinking about “the good life.” As I talked with folks who are struggling to make ends meet about guaranteed income, it became clear to me very quickly that what is on people’s minds isn’t captured by a conversation about one specific economic policy.

As soon as you start talking to people about money—about what it feels like not to have it, about what would be different if you had just a little bit more—the conversations becomes about something more fundamental to our experience as humans.

Money has a practical impact on our daily lives, but the sense of scarcity that so many of us feel when it comes to money also affects our sense of wellbeing. Money (or the absence of it) can limit what you think is possible for your life, how you’re able to spend time with your loved ones, where you’re able to go, how you feel about yourself, and who you can be. Money, practically and psychologically, impacts how much agency we have. We all want “the good life,” however we define that, and these conversations made me think about what we believe about who deserves it (and who doesn’t).

Part of my work over the last couple of decades has focused on how social capital can mitigate people’s experience of being poor. One of the things I’ve learned is that when people who experience economic injustice get the financial resources they need to care for themselves and their families, they will often expand their focus to support others in their community.

Cash allows you to pay for what you need and want, when you need and want it. When we have that kind of agency, we can make those decisions based on what makes sense in our own lives. That self-determination is what allows us to build our futures.

Could Guaranteed Income be one way of ensuring we all have the agency we need to pursue “the good life”?

Subscribe today on Apple Podcasts Spotify Google Podcasts, or your favorite podcast app.

For a full transcript visit https://www.thenation.com/podcast/economy/poverty-universal-basic-income/

—Princeton Study “Income’s Influence on Happiness”

—All of Us or None - a project of Legal Services for Prisoners with Children

If you’ve never been poor, you don’t know how soul-crushingly hard it is to always be struggling to make ends meet. The grinding challenge of not knowing how you are gonna pay for this bill or that fee takes a real toll. 

But on top of that, our current poverty alleviation programs—things like food stamps, welfare payments, disability assistance—they all come with some real strings attached. We make people experiencing poverty jump through more hoops to get this measly assistance than people who haven’t experienced poverty can even fathom. And the dirty secret of all that busywork we set up for people struggling to make ends meet? Our poverty alleviation programs just aren’t working in the way they should.

A big part of why they don’t work is because the people who create and run programs and services don’t trust poor people. Instead of trust, they devise hurdles people must navigate to prove they are worthy of support. 

The truth is that self-determination—our ability and desire to make choices about what our lives look like—is restricted when it comes to poor people—and this is to our collective detriment. Whether a person might become a powerful agent for social change or seek out their dreams as an artist, it does no one any good when we hold people back by not providing more equitable access to resources. Thankfully, there’s a better way, and it begins with trusting poor people to make the best decisions about how to shape their own lives.

Subscribe today on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, or your favorite podcast app. 

* * *

This is the first episode in a new podcast mini-series from me, Mia Birdsong, and The Nation. More Than Enough is about guaranteed income, deservedness, dignity, and the country America can and should be. We hope you’ll subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, or your favorite podcast app. New episodes will premiere each Wednesday. But first, a bit about how this podcast came about.

A few years ago, I found myself in a sun-lit conference room full of policy makers, academics, and social justice advocates talking about what a guaranteed income policy might look like. After more than two decades doing intersectional social justice work, much of it advocating for giving cash directly to people who experience economic injustice, I was excited by the conversation.

This wasn’t the first time I’d heard about guaranteed income. You’ve probably heard about it by now, too—everyone from Silicon Valley titans to presidential hopefuls are talking about guaranteed income (also called universal basic income) as a way to deal with increasing automation and runaway inequality. I first heard about the concept in college in the mid-90s through the 1967 writings of Martin Luther King Jr. In the year before King was assassinated, he wrote “the time has come for us to civilize ourselves by the total, direct and immediate abolition of poverty” by providing a basic level of material well-being to allow all Americans to truly flourish. To be honest, when I first read that, I thought it sounded ridiculous. Free money went against everything I'd learned about being a respectable citizen. But people change and our ideas evolve. I no longer think guaranteed income is absurd.

When it comes to economic injustice in the United States, we have a well-established practice of talking about people who are poor but not listening to them. We try to solve the problem without talking to the people closest to it. As a result, we’ve created a lot of bad policy that treats poor people as a problem to solve instead of the holders of the solutions. (The actual problem to solve is wealth hoarding.) Back at that conference a few years ago, I was thrilled about the genuine interest in implementing guaranteed income, with its underlying ethos of self-determination and trusting people to do what is best for them. But I was wary of any movement that didn’t include the voices and leadership of the people it was meant to support. So I brought up this critical omission. Instead of being challenged, as I often am, heads were nodding, and I was asked to do something about it. So I did. This podcast is the result.

I reached out to activists, advocates, and service providers across the country to set up workshops with groups of people who are living at the shit end of all our collective money distribution problem. I went to six cities—from Jackson, Mississippi, to Minneapolis, Minnesota, to Los Angeles, California, and heard from more than 100 people. I did a dozen phone interviews with advocates like Ai-Jen Poo of the National Domestic Workers Alliance, Aisha Nyandoro of the Magnolia Mother’s Trust, and Anand Giridharadas, writer of Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World.

The stories were overwhelmingly powerful—partly because of how unnecessarily traumatic and difficult economic injustice has made people’s lives, but also because of how innovative, determined, and collaborative people are when it comes to surviving and imagining a better future for themselves, their families, and their communities. When it came to the idea of guaranteed income, what I heard was an overwhelming “yes.” There was a wide range of things people said about the difference it would make in their lives, and none of it was surprising. 

A woman in Jackson said she’d go on vacation for the first time in 10 years. That vacation would be driving with her kids two states over to Georgia to visit family her children had never met. A mother from LA said she’d pay the legal fees necessary to help her parents emigrate to the US. A young man from San Francisco would help his sisters out with diapers and clothes for his nieces and nephews. People talked about paying off debt, going back to school, working less so they could spend more time with their kids, caring for aging parents, saving for a house, buying a car, starting businesses, and taking their family to Disney World. It was all of the regular things people do when they don’t have to worry so much about money. 

As I was having these conversations, I was also talking about guaranteed income to a lot of audiences at conferences and seminars (this is what happens when you become one of, like, four Black people publicly talking about guaranteed income). Most of these audiences were liberal or progressive. And I was struck by the two main concerns that often came up. 

The first is best summed up as, “But, how can we pay for it?” That’s not really the question people are asking though. We are the wealthiest nation in the world. The question isn’t, can we pay for it? But, do we want to? This question is really about who we fundamentally want to be as a nation. Do we want to ensure that everyone has access to the basic human rights that cash can enable? Or do we want to continue to be a country where people are saddled with medical and education debt, working multiple part-time jobs to make ends meet, and living on the street because the rents to damn high?

The second question was, “But what about X other important super thing (like education or health care)?” And I kept thinking, Why do we think we have to choose? People on the left keep behaving as if we are sitting at someone else’s table. And we compromise before we even get there. I get it, there are so many pieces that need to come together to get us to the future we actually want and every one will require a fight. But I think we need to demand more, not less. I’m so pleased to see candidates like Warren, Sanders, and Castro, when he was still in the race advocating for multiple bold policies. We deserve all of it! (Yes, the candidate who is actually talking about guaranteed income, Andrew Yang, is missing from my list. This is because his plan would gut welfare benefits and I think that’s a non-starter for any genuinely progressive guaranteed income proposal. As you’ll hear in the podcast, there are strange bedfellows in the guaranteed income world.)

Guaranteed income isn’t a silver bullet (and let’s stop looking for silver bullets, because there are none). But I think it's a policy worth exploring. Perhaps even more importantly, it invites us to have a long overdue conversation about deservedness. 

Capitalism conspires with racism and sexism to tell us that personhood is earned through paid labor. It tells us that our humanity is conditional. It saw we have to prove ourselves worthy of basic human rights like shelter, food, education, and healthcare. It has us taking pride in working later and not getting enough sleep because demonstrating “productivity” is one of its highest virtues. We believe that hard work equals success. We accept the idea that people who aren’t successful must not be working hard enough. If they are not working hard enough they are not proving that they are deserving.

It's utter nonsense that people who are poor are not working hard—in the podcast you’ll hear from people working multiple jobs, people working exhausting shifts, all just to keep food on the table for themselves and their families . But that’s not even the point. The point is, we do not have to earn our human rights. A total slacker is just as deserving of a roof over their head, food in their bellies, and access to schools and healthcare. 

We need a new story of what America is that tells us this: Our worthiness, our value as human beings, is intrinsic to our very existence. It’s not something we have to earn and not something we can un-earn. We need a story that says success is a collective endeavor, that connection and care are the values we should use to measure our achievements. We need a story that starts with the assertion that there is more than enough for all of us.

Subscribe today on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, or your favorite podcast app. 

* * *

Guaranteed Income Research Round-up from the Economic Security Project

Mia Birdsong first heard about the concept of Guaranteed Income in the mid-90s through the 1967 writings of Martin Luther King Jr. King. He asserted that “the time has come for us to civilize ourselves by the total, direct and immediate abolition of poverty” by providing a basic level of material well-being to allow all Americans to truly flourish. Birdsong thought it sounded "absurd.” As Birdsong notes, "Free money went against everything I'd learned about being a respectable citizen. But people change and our ideas evolve. I no longer think guaranteed income is absurd.”

After years of political education and activism, Birdsong came to reject some ideas that most of us believe: that having a job makes you a whole person, and that you have to earn the things we all deserve to live a good life.

From The Nation, More Than Enough is a four-episode podcast hosted by Birdsong that explores the concept of guaranteed income, or "universal basic income," through conversations with the experts, people who experience poverty in America.

We invite you to listen to these under-explored conversations with Americans about Universal Basic Income: what it is, what it means, and what it says about a culture that so closely correlates deservedness with work. Join Birdsong as she explores the idea of the meaning of work, of inequality, and most importantly, of what America is and what it can be. More Than Enough launches January 15.

Sign up for updates at thenation.com/morethanenough.

* * *

Guaranteed Income Research Round-up from the Economic Security Project

Support for the production of More Than Enough was provided by a few generous folks and the Economic Security Project, an organization advancing cash-based interventions in the United States and reigning in corporate monopolies.

More Than Enough is a project of The Nation Magazine.

Mia Birdsong photo by Nye' Lyn Tho.