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When the child tax credit, first established in 1997, was expanded for a year in 2021, it was a major political and social win for the country. At a time when the pandemic had worsened many families’ financial distress, the Biden administration’s decision not only added to the amount of the tax credit and converted the payment from a year-end lump sum to monthly payments; it also abandoned the work requirement for parents. This immediately affected one third of all children in the U.S., including 52 percent of Black children and 41 percent of Hispanic children, whose families were formerly excluded because the parents earned too little to qualify for the tax credit. The tax credit expansion lifted 3.7 million children out of poverty by December 2021 without significantly reducing parents’ work participation. Then in January 2022, the expanded tax credit expired, which plunged 3.7 million back into poverty, with higher percentage increases in poverty among Hispanic and Black children. The credit showed us that cash assistance could help families stay afloat and, contrary to some political beliefs, parents would not leave the labor system because of it. Even so, the failure to renew the expansion should not negate this important political milestone: Congress came within one vote of abandoning parental work requirements as a condition to get cash assistance for their families. The child tax credit expansion is one step toward a universal basic income that could eliminate poverty without increasing unemployment. There are 37.9 million people in poverty in the U.S., according to 2021 Census Bureau figures. Providing a government-funded monthly payment to every individual would broadly lift them out of poverty, while providing millions of children a better chance at a good education, improved health and higher future earnings. With 11.6 percent of people in the U.S. living at or under the poverty line, this payment would benefit millions and save hundreds of billions of dollars by reducing the social costs of poverty. The question becomes: Can we convince our elected officials that poverty is not a moral failing, but a social condition that can be addressed by establishing an income floor below which no one falls? A universal basic income, or UBI, is defined as “a periodic cash payment unconditionally delivered to all on an individual basis, without means-test or work requirement,” according to the Basic Income Earth Network. The child tax credit isn’t quite the same, because it is only for families with children; it also phases out at higher income levels and essentially still forces people to prove they are “poor enough” to need help—a means test. A more ambitious bill approaching the idea of UBI introduced by Representatives Rashida Tlaib and Mondaire Jones, would eliminate the means test, thereby creating a universal child allowance. Universal benefits have several advantages over means-tested benefits. They avoid divisions between “us” and “them,” removing the stigma associated with targeted benefits. Uptake by the needy, a persistent problem with targeted benefits, is improved when stigma and bureaucratic hurdles are removed. Universal benefits tend to be more popular and hence are more politically secure and better funded. And universal benefits, dispensing with means testing, are easier to administer. The universal child allowance would enroll all children at birth so no child would be excluded. No country has yet introduced a universal basic income sufficient for essential needs. But in the U.S., Alaska has enacted its Permanent Fund Dividend, which is an annual cash payment, averaging around $1,600, that goes to every resident without means test or work requirement. It contributes to poverty reduction and has no negative effect on people’s willingness to work. In the U.S., a universal child allowance and Social Security for seniors would mean that the two most vulnerable age groups in our population would have near-universal and unconditional income guaranteed. But of course, extending a basic income to the remaining adults faces serious hurdles. First, no one expects children under the age of 18 to work, and keeping them in poverty is costly for everyone; according to one estimate, social benefits outweigh fiscal costs of universal child allowance by 8 to 1. But there is a widely held expectation that able-bodied adults should work for their income. Empirical evidence from the means-tested minimum income experiments of the 1970s in the U.S. and recent analysis of a similar experiment in Manitoba, among other research, support the idea that few people actually stop working when they are simultaneously receiving a guaranteed income. Such research also shows that those who stop working for wages do so for good reasons, such as finishing high school or taking care of young children, and that a modest guaranteed minimum income can enable people to work who otherwise could not. Even if a few people would take the cash without contributing to society, the benefits may substantially outweigh the costs.

Key Stakeholders: HudsonUP, The Spark of Hudson, Humanity Forward, MGI How is this program different than others? This program gives funds for 5 years while most pilots only run for 1 year Research-Based Program Results This gives research gave advocates a unique opportunity to study the longer-term effects of basic income on the trajectory of recipient lives as the program is a 5-year timeline as opposed to a 1 year. The current published research reports on preliminary outcomes for the recipient after the first year of the program. This research was conducted through interviews and online quantitative surveys (Hamilton 3). According to online surveys employment, both full-time and part-time grew from 29% to 63%. (Hamilton 3). In qualitative interviews, many participants noted that both their physical and mental health had improved since joining the program. In quantitative surveys, the percentage of psychological distress decreased significantly (Hamilton 7). As advocates predicted in the interviews above the majority of participants reported increased feelings of the individual agency during their interviews (Hamilton 7). Finally, recipients of the cash reported greater feelings of stability and security. As well as an improved ability to make plans for the future and family and community relationships. GBI allowed parents to spend more time with their children increasing their child’s development, test scores, and parent-child relations (Hamilton 15).

Guaranteed income reduced income volatility or month-to-month income fluctuations that households face. Income volatility is the month-over-month variation in income. Less volatility in monthly income allowed families to stabilize and plan for the future. In the one-year findings of the SEED program, the treatment group showed 46.4% income volatility while the Comparison Group showed 67.5% (SEED Data Dashboard). Studies show that employment among participants increased over the course of the program. Participants cited that they were able to use the money for transportation and child care to make job advancement accessible. In February 2019, 28% of recipients had full-time employment. One year later, 40% of recipients were employed full-time. Therefore it can be concluded that unconditional cash enabled recipients to find full-time employment (SEED Key Findings)

If the goal is to promote flourishing lives, it is important to recognize that UBI could improve work opportunities inside and outside the labor market. UBI, it has been argued, can contribute to improving working conditions both by helping precarious workers cope financially and by increasing their bargaining power (Standing 2013). It can also enable forms of work outside the labor market that might be both more beneficial to individuals and their communities and more virtuous than many formal job opportunities—for instance, activism, volunteering, and caring for others. In a sense, UBI can be seen as a form of compensation, and perhaps even encouragement, for all those who work without an income (Offe 1992). As Barry (2000) eloquently puts it, this is a knockdown argument for UBI at subsistence level, for “there is surely something crazy about the stipulation that those drawing unemployment benefit must be ‘available for work’ at any moment, which rules out their using the time to improve their qualifications, engage in community work, or help a neighbor while earning a bit extra.” UBI thus does not need to be seen as anti-work; it could potentially help workers secure more fulfilling and productive occupations, or demand better work conditions.

Finally, there is the economic case for a Basic Income. On the macro-economic front, it becomes a very efficient means of stimulating the economy at times of heightened demand stress, ie deep recession. A simple way to increase demand is to top up the Basic Income for a period of time. Rather than quantitative easing supporting financial institutions, central banks can increase the money supply by funding government bonds to finance an increased Basic Income. So-called ‘overt monetary finance’ (OMF), which this would be a form of, has been advocated by Adair Turner and others, albeit with some provisos on management of banking credit to avoid unsustainable credit multipliers.59 This policy could have been very useful in 2008-09 (and something akin to it was attempted in the Australian ‘cash splash’).60 On the micro-economic front, there are grounds to believe that Basic Income could increase productivity. This mechanism would work in a number of ways. Firstly, rather than workers being forced into the first job that comes along as some conditional systems do, Basic Income enables a little more time to search for the right job. As an evaluation of a highly conditional Department for Work and Pensions scheme showed, hard conditionality does little to increase medium term employment rates and only increases number of days in work marginally in a two year period.61 So the benefits are minimal yet the UK suffers from endemic skills mismatch and this impacts productivity. For example, 58 percent of graduates are in non-graduate level jobs.62 The Basic Income would not resolve this issue, as there are strong structural factors, but 58 Erik Christensen, “Feminist Arguments in Favour of Welfare and Basic Income in Denmark,” in Basic Income European Network (BIEN) (Geneva, 2002), www.ilo.org/public/english/protection/ses/download/docs/chris.pdf. 59 Turner, Between Debt and the Devil: Money, Credit, and Fixing Global Finance. 60 Stephen Grenville, “Helicopter Money,” VOX, CEPR’s Policy Portal, 2013, www.bostonfed.org/economic/conf/conf30/conf30a.pdf. 61 Jonathan Portes, “The ‘Help to Work’ Pilots: Success, Failure or Somewhere in between?, National Institute of Economic and Social Research, accessed December 4, 2015, www.niesr.ac.uk/blog/help-work-pilots-success-failureor-somewhere-between. 62 CIPD, “Over-Qualification and Skills Mismatch in the Graduate Labour Market,” August (2015), www.cipd.co.uk/binaries/over-qualification-andskills-mismatch-graduate-labour-market.pdf. Creative citizen, creative state 38 POWER TO CREATE could mitigate it somewhat by giving more secure breathing space to individuals. Secondly, if workers have the ability to withdraw their labour, it provides more of an incentive for employers of low pay, low quality jobs to improve those jobs either by increasing pay, providing better conditions or additional support such as for training. Thirdly, there is a possible motivation effect. Workers would be in a particular workplace because they want to be, not simply because they feel coerced to be. This is a healthier basis on which to develop intra-firm productivity. Finally, the Basic Income facilitates short-term withdrawal from the labour market to improve formal skills and qualifications. This could increase potential productivity. Basic Income is not an economic magic bullet but it is possible to see significant potential macro and micro economic benefits.

Although some conservatives seem to expect that UBI grants would lead to fewer people working, the converse turned out to be true in Namibia. Perhaps the increased amount of money in circulation helped the business climate. It turns out there’s another reason. Santens cleverly points out that when people choose to work, rather than having to work, they are far more motivated and may well end up more successful. Much has been written about the difference between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, intrinsic being far more powerful. He makes another great point here: “In the 21st century, as we continue quickly automating away half our jobs in the next 20 years   — jobs less cognitively-complex and more physically-laborious   — we need to enable ourselves to freely pursue our more creative and complex ventures. “Some of the best work happening right now, is the stuff being done in our free time  —  that is unpaid  —  like Wikipedia and our many other open-source community creations, not to mention all the care work performed for our young and elderly. “Basic income is a means of recognizing this unpaid work as having great societal value, and further enabling it.”

THE MYTH OF THE LAZY WELFARE RECIPEINT One common criticism of basic income is this: if you give people a bunch of undeserved money, you risk making them lazy or less likely to pursue employment. This is arguably false. A 2015 report from Harvard and MIT studied multiple cash transfer programs across developing countries. The study, which included conditional and unconditional cash transfer programs, found that zero of the seven programs participating in the study saw a statistically significant change in employment levels or hours worked because of the financial aid. 6 While the study shows that cash transfer programs are not likely to cause a decrease in productivity, it also illustrates that cash transfer programs fail to create significant upward mobility to those seeking employment.

Then we come to the UBS advocates’ proposal for free local transport. Once again, this is also not universal in any sense. It refers only to buses, which is hard luck on users of trains and metro systems, not to mention the many people living in areas with no or poor bus services. While free bus services are popular, free bus rides are not like free healthcare or free education. Not everybody wants or needs to take buses. And free services may induce excessive or frivolous use. Buses also cause pollution. In rural areas, where the alternative may be the private car, a shift to buses could reduce pollution. But in cities it could encourage people to take the bus rather than use non-polluting alternatives, such as bicycling, walking or staying at home.

The latest report on UBS cites an estimate of £33 billion (1.8 per cent of GDP) for the gross cost of providing free childcare, with workers providing it paid the minimum wage. The cost is then finessed down to a lowly £1.7 billion by assuming employment gains, higher tax receipts and reduced income support payments. But in a sleight of hand, in asserting that UBS would cost much less than basic income, UBS proponents cite only what they claim would be the gross cost of a basic income, not a net cost. Yet the difference between gross and net costs could be expected to be even larger in the case of basic income since, apart from savings in benefit expenditure, the basic income would effectively be clawed back from those on higher incomes through the tax system. As for elder care, the report omits to put a figure on its cost. However, a report on funding adult social care jointly issued by two House of Commons committees cites an estimate of £14 billion annually to make personal care services in England free of charge to all; they are already free in Scotland. An additional £15 billion would be needed just to restore services to their pre-austerity levels. A more recent estimate by the Institute for Public Policy Research has put the cost of free personal care in England at £8 billion over and above the £28 billion needed by 2030 for the present inadequate system to keep pace with demand, against about £19 billion today. While there would be some offsetting savings to the NHS, the IPPR envisages a 2p rise in the basic rate of income tax to finance the proposal. None of this is to argue against better quality provision and affordable access to child and elderly care, both of which are sorely needed. But they are not cheap options and may even be regressive, benefiting the well-off most, depending on how they are funded. Meanwhile, the paternalist emphasis by proponents of ‘universal basic services’ on free state provision risks neglecting those who provide informal care for their own relations and those who try to stay independent of care for as long as possible. According to the House of Commons report, unpaid carers provide an estimated £132 billion worth of care each year. It is unclear how the UBS proponents would deal with such unpaid care.

The newly emerging concept of sustainable welfare refers to welfare systems which aim to satisfy everyone's needs within planetary boundaries and to decouple the welfare-growth nexus. Both Universal Basic Income (UBI) and Universal Basic Services (UBS) have been discussed as suitable, but potentially competing, approaches that could support sustainable welfare. This paper contributes to this debate by asking how UBI and UBS compare in relation to four sustainable welfare criteria: a) planetary boundaries, b) needs satisfaction, c) fair distribution, and d) democratic governance. The paper argues that UBI and UBS are not so much conflicting but complementary approaches for supporting sustainable welfare. UBI focuses on the consumption side of the economy while UBS addresses the production side more directly, both of which would be relevant in any sustainable welfare system. Sustainable welfare outcomes of UBI and UBS would be shaped by the institutional contexts within which they operate, especially by the governance of markets, collective provisioning systems and decision-making at all levels. More attention needs to be paid to these institutional contexts when discussing potential sustainable welfare outcomes of UBI and UBS. 1. Introduction The increasing urgency to tackle the climate crisis and social issues such as global inequality and conflict calls for rebuilding economic systems so that they stay within planetary boundaries (Rockström et al., 2009; Steffen et al., 2015) and satisfy human needs (Doyal and Gough, 1991; Max-Neef et al., 1991). Rebuilding economics systems in this way would also require the establishment of welfare systems that support the dual goals of staying within planetary boundaries and needs satisfaction. A debate about such sustainable welfare systems is beginning to emerge, but more work is required to develop concrete proposals for ways in which sustainable welfare systems could be designed. This paper compares two proposals for sustainable welfare policies that are sometimes presented as competing with each other – Universal Basic Income (UBI) and Universal Basic Services (UBS). However, I argue that both approaches could contribute to sustainable welfare and that they could complement each other, especially if their potential weaknesses are addressed by transforming the institutional contexts within which they operate.

The next UBS on the advocates’ list is free basic housing. That would not be a ‘universal’ service either, since it would be ‘offered on a needs basis’. All the problems related to targeted provision of free food would apply here too. How would ‘need’ be determined without a means test? What would happen if people no longer ‘needed’ the basic housing – would they be evicted? Incentives to become ‘in need’ to qualify for free housing would be enormous, unless the ‘basic’ housing was so unattractive as to weed out all but the truly desperate, increasing their marginalisation in new ‘sink estates’. Perhaps unsurprisingly, in the latest advocacy of UBS, ‘universal’ free food and free housing are not mentioned at all, while free childcare and adult social care make an appearance instead. So, in this manifestation, two of the most basic of needs – food and shelter – are effectively regarded as not basic. And as free childcare and adult social care were not costed by the original report proposing universal basic services, £42 billion is likely to be a considerable underestimate. With the added services, UBS would surely be a good deal more expensive than its proponents claim.

Ecological Economist Milena Buchs (2021) explores this debate within their ability to meet sustainable welfare criteria – needs satisfaction, planetary boundaries, fairness, and democracy. I have drawn out Buchs (2021) key arguments for and against UBI and UBS. It is revealed through this assessment that, like most politics today, UBI and UBS have been polarised as opposing policies, when what is required is to use both to complement each other and contribute to sustainable welfare (Figure 1). ​ Needs Satisfaction Planetary Boundaries Fairness Democracy UBI Pros ​Removes stigmatised and bureaucratic means-testing Supporting livelihoods through low or no economic growth Funded by progressive taxes ​Greater freedom and capacity for democratic participation ​ Vehicle of freedom and autonomy versus employers and abusive relationships Reduced labour supply and consumption. Low-pay wages increase from financial security and high-pay wages decrease through taxation Associated with lower anxiety/stress, greater sense of social security, reduced individual risk, and feeling connected to state. ​ ​ Reduced consumption that boosts social status. Compensate for unpaid care work More likely for support of green politics. ​ ​ Less incentive for carbon intensive job uptake and investments ​ ​ UBI Cons Concerns of market failures e.g., inflated housing markets Labour supply and consumption could increase to meet higher taxes Removal of existing cash benefits impacting low-middle income groups Workplace democracy remains unimproved ​ Crowding out public services No disincentive for environmentally damaging products Decreased wages in knowledge basic living cost needs are met ​ ​ ​ Funding through environmental taxes not sustainable in the long run Increase in product prices due to taxation ​ UBS Pros Governments provide high quality goods and services Wealth redistribution environmentally beneficial Funded by progressive taxes = redistribution Increased social security, connection to state Higher demand for public sector workers that are in stable jobs ​Government designed environmentally friendly energy and housing Basic goods and services shielded from price increase More support of radical green politics ​ ​ ​ ​ Opportunity for user-led, co-produced, and democratically accountable public services UBS Cons​ The prescription of people’s needs rather than public choice Green policies not inherent to governments ​ Chance it will be managed by top-down large state bureaucracies without much user participation. UBI and UBS can work in tandem to produce redistribution via progressive taxation in a way that is just and protects labour, particularly low-income workers from increases in prices for basic goods and services. An exciting opportunity to note here is that with adequate social security and democratic systems of decision-making, both UBI and UBS can open doors of increased and more open-minded political participation that can create a knock-on effect of further green and fair policy.

3. Respect: Universal, Rather Than Targeted Assistance, Will Defy Stereotypes Historically, feminists not only critiqued outright sexism but also the paternalism of efforts to protect women from the world by robbing them of their autonomy. Paternalism has long been used to justify policies that limit women’s and other marginalized people’s choices, like bans on abortion, or sex work, or women working in dangerous industries, on the grounds that they are incapable of deciding for themselves how to live their lives. Today, many social policies in the U.S. are influenced by extremely paternalistic thinking that perpetuates discriminatory stereotypes about women’s abilities to make informed and reasonable decisions for themselves. Conservative complaints about welfare recipients spending benefits on junk food and luxuries have been part of a more general racialized narrative, which has informed existing welfare policy and also perpetuated offensive and stigmatizing stereotypes about members of marginalized groups, especially women of color. But liberals who support limiting the provision of benefits to housing, food, and health care are subject to the same charges of paternalism when they advocate for in-kind benefit policies (such as food transfers and food vouchers) that perpetuate a politics of suspicion and mistrust, instead of supporting cash benefit programs.

Coote claims that UBS "aims to tackle many of the challenges that advocates of UBI are trying to address". This is not true. For a start, advocates of basic income want to limit the paternalistic state, whereas UBS advocates want to extend it by pre-selecting what people need and, as in the case of food, extend conditionality and targeting. The basic income advocate says, ‘I do not know what you need, but believe you should have the right to acquire it if you can’. The UBS advocate says, ‘I know what you need, and I will make sure you can have it.’ A primary justification for moving towards an income distribution system in which a basic income is a core element is that the distribution system of the post-1945 era has broken down irretrievably. A new one suited to a global market economy, the ecological crisis, the ongoing technological revolution and changing household forms must be constructed in its place. A basic income, paid to individuals as a right, without means-tests or behavioural conditionalities, must be an anchor in that system. It is not a panacea; it is merely a necessary part of a progressive strategy, alongside a stronger social state.

Interestingly, under the German social care scheme, admired both by the House of Commons committees and by UBS supporters, three-quarters of beneficiaries opt for cash payments, even though they are lower than the value of the free in-kind services offered, because cash payments give them the flexibility to be cared for at home by family members or other informal carers. This is exactly what supporters of a basic income envisage in supplementing the basic income for those with special needs due to disability or frailty. And a basic income for all could be expected to reduce the incidence of morbidity among the growing population of elderly and so promote more healthy active ageing, as well as facilitate more care work by those wishing to provide it to those they love.

Free ‘universal basic services’ has recently been advocated as a better alternative to a basic income, on the grounds that it would be a cheaper and more cost-effective way of combatting poverty. On the premise that ‘essential services should be free at the point of need’, paralleling the National Health Service and state education, proponents have identified universal free ‘basic’ housing, free food, free local transport, free TV licence and a free ‘basic’ communications package including mobile phone and broadband internet. All of this, they claim, would cost £42 billion or about 2.3% of GDP. We should be united in wanting more and better public services. But improving public services is not in opposition to providing a basic income. They would fulfil different needs and purposes. However, the proposals for ‘universal basic services’ (UBS) are not what they seem at first sight. For a start, what is being proposed is not ‘universal’ in any accepted use of the word. For instance, the provision of ‘free food’ under the UBS banner is deceptive. According to the UBS scheme, the state would provide "one-third of the meals for the 2.2 million households deemed to experience food insecurity each year". That is not universal. It is targeted. Identifying those suffering from food insecurity would necessarily imply means-testing or some complex test of ‘food insecurity’. As with all targeted schemes, many of those eligible would not be reached, while those receiving the free food would, as a result, face an even greater poverty trap and accompanying precarity trap than exist in the British welfare state today. The Department for Work and Pensions itself estimates that going from means-tested benefits into the sort of low-paid job claimants could obtain results in only a 20% increase in net income – a poverty trap of 80%. If they also lost ‘free food’, the net gain would be even less. The proposal would also generate a new moral hazard. Someone deemed food insecure, and thus entitled to free meals, would have a disincentive to become food secure, unless the free food on offer was lousy (which could hardly be a policy objective, even though it is likely to be a policy outcome). That moral hazard would be accompanied by an equally perverse immoral hazard, since some people would have an incentive to become food insecure deliberately in order to claim free meals. Providing ‘the poor’ with free food would extend the charity state and institutionalise the obnoxious system of ‘food banks’, which have mushroomed in the austerity era. The mass provision of free food would also risk more waste of food. However well-intentioned the charity state might be, people receiving free goods tend to value them less and treat them with less care than if they pay for them. In practice, the choice of what food to make free would be arbitrary, based on paternalistic views of what is good for ‘the poor’ and what is not. Those countries that have implemented highly subsidised food have not had great success with it. And there is the likely effect of stigmatisation of food support claimants, as has been the case in the USA with food stamps. Many are so ashamed to show their poverty that they forego their entitlement.

The Chicago Resilient Communities Pilot will give 5,000 city residents $500 per month, for one year. Details of the program The county’s contractor, Give Directly, provided outreach services, performed eligibility checks with the University of Chicago’s Inclusive Economies Lab and designed an application designed for a smartphone, though 15 percent of applicants took advantage of in-person assistance. Subkoviak described the administrative burden as being minimal and the startup period as faster than comparable programs. The payments qualify as a gift, so they will not interrupt families’ eligibility for other public support programs, and participants were offered optional financial coaching support. The study also includes a 3,250-person control group that will not be receiving monthly payments.

The design features necessary for a feminist universal basic income Debates remain largely hypothetical given that there are so few full-fledged UBI schemes, and because where they do exist they are usually not evaluated for gender impacts. It is clear that the extent to which UBI’s potential for reducing gender and other inequalities will be realized depends critically on its specific design features, including the level of benefit provided, its financing mechanism and its interaction with existing tax and social security systems.38 Without parallel investments in quality public services and strengthened support for workers’ rights, UBI could have detrimental effects for gender equality and social justice. However, well-designed UBI that is integrated into a comprehensive system of social protection, public services and labour market regulations could strengthen women’s and transgender and genderdiverse people’s income security, lower poverty rates and go some way to redressing inequalities in wealth and income. This will be perceived by many as a high standard to live up to, and any UBI will have to be rolled out carefully and progressively. Extending the reach of existing social protection schemes aimed at particular groups—such as social pensions and child and disability benefits—and ensuring that these are unconditional and universally available could be an important stepping stone towards achieving universal income security for all. The main recommendations for States considering UBI are as follows: • Follow a rights-based approach to social protection when designing UBI schemes. This includes following the principles of progressive realization and non-retrogression to safeguard against the rollback of existing social security and labour protections. Like all other social protection schemes, UBI should be anchored in national legal frameworks. • Ensure that UBI is accompanied by parallel investments in quality public services, including care services, health care, education, housing and food security, and with attention to the rights of women and transgender and gender-diverse people working within these sectors. • Develop sustainable and redistributive financing mechanisms for UBI. The cost estimates for UBI at national poverty level are substantial, and fiscal trade-offs are likely to arise, especially for low-income and highly indebted countries, with implications for gender and other inequalities. These should be assessed and discussed in a transparent, participatory manner during the design phase. • Ensure that UBI schemes address the needs of groups facing multiple and intersecting forms of discrimination. UBI implementation should be inclusive of incarcerated, migrant, LGBTIQ+ and unhoused individuals, and should be embedded in a broader system of support that addresses the additional needs of people with disabilities, pregnant people and the elderly.

A basic income that supplemented existing welfare structures could make everyone safer while ending the most pernicious forms of policing. In the right context, basic income has the potential to expand cooperative security, which is security with others: the kind of security that a dam provides a nearby village, or that mass vaccination schemes provide a community that develops herd immunity. However, a basic income advanced as a replacement for labor regulations and other security-enhancing government programs—“UBI-,” we call it—will only further exploit those whose lives are made most precarious by this system. Conversely, a basic income that supplements existing or new welfare structures—“UBI+”—could radically redistribute security, remove incentives for the most pernicious forms of policing, and create the conditions for a more thorough overhaul of the current political system. In the absence of a stable and equitable distribution of wealth, the government has long advertised the welfare state as a partial citizens’ security that defends its recipients from extreme poverty. President Franklin Roosevelt proclaimed “freedom from want” as an executive mandate in his 1941 State of the Union address, less than a decade after his administration’s New Deal redefined the character of the U.S. state as a guarantor of security. The New Deal federalized schemes to provide insurance against bank runs and bad crop years, and expanded access to homeownership by establishing the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the Federal Crop Insurance Corporation, and the Home Owners Loan Corporation. Although the New Deal has been well documented as racially inequitable, it was progressive in that it established a state responsibility to make its citizens secure, primarily by protecting their economical well-being. But the discriminatory development and implementation of state security was not an unintended consequence or accidental imperfection. It was a manifestation of the state’s interest in maintaining racial hierarchy. Given this goal, the state secured the interests of white people even when it meant the exclusion and dispossession, and precarization of others. In the ensuing years, many good-paying jobs moved to the exclusively white suburbs that had been made possible by government policies and regulatory schemes. Meanwhile, in the wake of the hundreds of race riots in the 1960s and the associated anti-authoritarian consciousness developing in cities, increasingly large and professionalized police forces were tasked with preventing and responding to urban unrest, partially aided by counter-insurgency strategies developed in Vietnam. For many working-class communities, especially those of color, the government has been simultaneously a last line of defense against the most serious forms of poverty and the first line of attack against their basic dignity and autonomy, offering security with one hand and taking it with the other. True collaborative security requires not only that a government provide all its citizens with resources to survive through tough times, but also that it does not engineer the conditions for those tough times in the first place. Our criminal justice system largely functions to insulate the powerful from the risks of their decisions. The criminal justice system in the United States largely functions to insulate the politically powerful from the risks of their decisions, at both the literal and figurative expense of working-class communities of color. Overpolicing and an increasingly broad set of plunderous police activities, ranging from creative “enforcement” of fine-generating traffic laws to civil asset forfeiture, sits awkwardly next to chronic underpolicing of corporate predation. The everyday shakedowns of working-class people bring a very real risk of bodily harm and can even cause death: Philando Castile was murdered during a routine traffic stop, SWAT stormed Korryn Gaines’s house over unpaid parking tickets. But what is also important are the much more reliable effects: increased revenue for government coffers, arrest statistics that provide police unions and elected officials with the useful illusion of effective law enforcement, and opportunities for incarceration that destabilize communities and provide a political pretext for politically and economically disenfranchising millions. These tactics, taken together, provide antagonistic security for a handful of political elites at the expense of endangering the lives, livelihoods, and political power of entire swaths of the population. Incremental adjustments to our capitalist society—such as means-tested welfare benefits, anti-gentrification, and policing reform—are important and should be fought for. But many of these approaches are perceived, sometimes accurately, to pit exploited groups against each other in zero-sum games. Taxpaying people who are not targeted by specific welfare programs represent welfare recipients as being supported by their dime; efforts to protect neighborhoods from newcomers further constrict an increasingly unaffordable housing market for outsiders; and many view the police as necessary to protect them from intimidating populations, especially youth of color. When these ways of generating antagonistic security dominate political discussions, they support the dangerous and mistaken idea that social groups must primarily protect themselves from other groups, This neglects the hidden framework of false choices that seem to constrict the viable possibilities to only various forms of antagonistic security. The result is a political climate that fails to imagine how we might build cooperative security together. UBI- capitulates to exactly these kinds of forces by secretly serving as an offensive against welfare programs and other forms of government-provided security. UBI+ asks instead that we find ways to struggle together for forms of cooperative security—security that does not sacrifice the lives and liberty of vulnerable people. Only when this is our orientation will we be in a position to dismantle racial capitalism. More radical challenges to racial capitalism are possible. UBI+, by guaranteeing everyone an income sufficient to live on, reframes the way society treats labor and provides security to its citizens. For example, this kind of guarantee recognizes that the labor of raising children and caring for the elderly—work done disproportionately by women—is valued as work. Currently much of this work is uncompensated, and as a result we economically and socially marginalize those who do it. In a capitalist system where economic value and overall value are often conflated, this reinforces the idea that caregiving is not an important contribution to society and penalizes people who try to do this work alongside paid work (e.g., child-unfriendly work policies, expensive child care, lack of clear leave policies for caring for children or elders). UBI- would provide a guaranteed income but eliminate programs that respond to these specific concerns, such as those provided by Social Security that target the needs of elderly and disabled people. This would effectively offer security with one hand while taking it with the other. Because it is unpaid, caregiving is seen as an unimportant contribution to society, and those who do it alongside paid work are penalized. UBI+ likewise helps provide freedom from exploitation. It contributes to freedom from harmful relationships by helping to eliminate reliance on the income of a partner who does paid work, a dynamic that often plays out in relationships between women and men. A UBI+ that is sufficient to meet basic needs, and supported by social services that strengthen its impact, will allow people to live with dignity, choices, and the kind of freedom that many in the United States seek but routinely fail to achieve. A guaranteed income would also give activists and organizers within marginalized communities more space to work on the myriad problems a basic income would not solve. Many people working for a more just world get little to no pay for their work. In a world with basic income, activists would not have to work a day job or constantly hustle to get by, but would be able to give their lives to agitating for other causes without the anxiety that comes from being financially precarious. For these reasons the Movement for Black Lives—a coalition of more than fifty black-led organizations seeking “radical transformation, not reactionary reform” for racial justice—released a six-point platform that included reparations for slavery and the institutional exclusion and disenfranchisement that followed. UBI+ alone would go a long way to improving security for all marginalized individuals and families in the United States, but a UBI+ coupled with a broader social vision of cooperative security, such as the one advanced by the Movement for Black Lives, could change the game. This vision would, wherever possible, embrace radical forms of cooperative security, from universal health care coverage to the abolition of both police and prisons.

A Universal Basic Income is one where every person in society is guaranteed a set amount of money to maintain their basic needs. The UBI does not take the place of other social welfare programs, but rather supplements them. This proposal is most often discussed as a solution for economic security, where people would no longer have to work for money to access their basic needs or steal…by raising the criminal rates high. The UBI could be implemented through various systems: a tax on capital, an increase in minimum wage or even an increase in the general price level. One of the most promising implementations would be an increase in the minimum wage, which increases as productivity increases (and therefore decreases unemployment). And is adjusted to keep the same percentage of income over time.