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Despite the widespread use of VAT systems across the world, the United States remains a notable exception. Implementing such an indirect tax in the US would face numerous roadblocks and challenges.

One of the primary reasons why the US has not adopted a VAT system is the federal system of government. Due to that, the US has a more decentralized tax system than many other countries, with the US Constitution granting significant powers to individual states. US states have their own tax laws, and they collect sales and use taxes (sometimes not just states, but local governments, too), which are an essential source of revenue for states and localities. In light of these differences in the tax foundations on a state level, many of them would likely resist attempts to harmonize their state tax systems with a national VAT, not to mention the substantial political challenges it may bring.

It’s often noted that Milton Friedman as well as Martin Luther King, Jr. supported basic income—and the new generation of advocates is similarly eclectic, running the gamut from Trump-supporting venture capitalists like Thiel to “fully automated luxury communists” like Peter Frase. There are, in short, many different reasons for supporting UBI—and just as many versions of what it could be. One version functions as a kind of noblesse oblige—a handout to the unfortunates being made obsolete by robots smarter and more efficient than they are. Another version aspires to egalitarian universalism and challenges the legitimacy of privately accumulated wealth. There’s a version that sees UBI as the spark for a generation of entrepreneurs, and another that simply attempts to stave off a revolt of the precarious masses. Basic income is therefore often posited as a post-ideological solution suited to a new era of politics: the odd confluence of interest from the left and right tends to be read as a sign that political positions should be eschewed in favor of rational compromise. But UBI’s cross-ideological appeal is the bug, not the feature. Because basic income is politically ambiguous, it also has the potential to act as a Trojan horse for the left or right: left critics fret that it will serve as a vehicle for dissolving the remains of the welfare state, while proponents herald it as the “capitalist road to communism.” The version of basic income we get will depend, more than policies with a clearer ideological valence, on the political forces that shape it. Which is why the prospect of pushing for basic income in the United States right now—when the right controls everything—should be cause for alarm: UBI’s supporters on the left should proceed with caution.

A range of economists have come to Capitol Hill to sing the praises of a value-added tax (VAT), but their song is falling on deaf ears.

While some elected officials have pledged to keep an open mind about the VAT, many lawmakers from both parties remain far from convinced, with concerns ranging from how regressive VATs can be to the prevalence of consumption taxes elsewhere in the world.

Can that happen here in America? It is hard to imagine President Obama, or any future U.S. presidential candidate, running for office on a platform that includes raising taxes. But suppose Obama was reelected in 2012. At that point, he could spend his new political capital on getting a VAT enacted without fear of having to run again.

The task would require leadership and skill in forging coalitions. Progressives would need to be persuaded that using a regressive tax to fund redistributive programs like Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security is not a betrayal of their ideals. Rebating revenues to the poor will help. Conservatives would have to be persuaded that adopting a VAT will increase America's competitiveness, which can be achieved if the VAT revenue is used in part to cut other taxes (such as the corporate income tax). The states would have to be persuaded that a federal consumption tax will not cut into their revenue base. Perhaps some portion of federal VAT revenue must be allocated to the states?

Brooks’s column came to mind while reading a Wall Street Journal profile of ChatGPT creator Sam Altman. In the profile Altman professed his support for guaranteed income in the U.S. given his belief that remarkable advances like the one he’s brought to life will erase all sorts of work. Altman is surely right about artificial intelligence powerfully destroying countless sources of income, but that’s why he’s arguably incorrect about the future need for guaranteed income. To see why, it’s important to consider the evolution of work in the age of machines. It’s been all about job destruction, but most certainly without the bread lines. Figure that human beings toiled as farmers for almost all of human existence, only for the tractor and other mechanization of past human effort to destroy the work done by nearly every living human. Was this poverty-inducing? No. The simple truth is that job destruction is a powerful sign of economic growth. That is so because investment is what precedes economic growth, and investment is all about producing more and more goods and services with fewer and fewer labor inputs. The paradoxical reality is that job opportunities are greatest where jobs are most rapidly being destroyed. Yes. Say it over and over again: job creation springs from job destruction. Work emerges from investment that erases old work forms. Which is another way of saying that progress born of investment unearths all new ways to work. The internet, like the tractor before it, had a profound impact on how we work precisely because the internet erased so much of the toil we did before it reared its beautiful head.

For example, prominent social psychologist Jonathan Haidt posits in his book, “The Happiness Hypothesis,” that human happiness and well-being are fundamentally connected to work. According to Haidt, humans have a “basic drive to make things happen,” and most people fulfill this need through work. Alongside a couple of other factors, he argues, work provides a sense of meaning and purpose in people’s lives. And there is reason for optimism about work in our society today. Last month, the economy added 201,000 new jobs while the national unemployment rate continued near a generational low of 3.9 percent. Additionally, the August unemployment rates for African-Americans and Hispanics were the second- and third-lowest rates ever recorded, respectively, for each group. This good economic news should be celebrated by all Americans. But there is still work to be done. A July report from the White House Council of Economic Advisers found that most able-bodied recipients of means-tested government assistance work few hours or not at all. In fact, the majority of work-capable Medicaid and food stamp recipients did not work any hours while receiving assistance in 2013. Of particular concern is the report’s conclusion that “a significant body of evidence generally suggests that welfare programs which do not require work reduce employment among adults.” Given the link between work and human well-being, government programs that seemingly discourage work for able-bodied adults are counterproductive and wrong. Rather, government programs should encourage those who are able to work to do so, because work would enhance their well-being and flourishing. Owens is right: There is dignity in honest work, whatever it may be. Social psychology and public opinion support this idea. Government programs should, too.

Universal basic income is “fool’s gold” for those whose families have been stuck in poverty for generations and want to get a good-paying job and provide a better quality of life for their loved ones. Growing up as a young man in a life of extreme poverty, I know firsthand the false promise of schemes like universal basic income. My family and I lived in rural Texas outside Fort Worth in a single-wide trailer. My grandfather made just enough money to qualify for every government assistance program you can imagine, from food stamps and welfare to free government cheese and Medicaid. If you had given my family an extra $1,000 a month, this would not have done anything to lift us out of poverty. This extra cash would not have moved us up the economic ladder or closed the income gap. It wouldn’t have empowered us to buy a home, move into a neighborhood with better schools, or pay for college. At best, basic income would have provided us with a few extra dollars to pay the overdue bills, or enabled us to eat a little better than the mayonnaise sandwiches we ate at the end of the month when dollars were stretched thin waiting for the next government check to arrive. Yes, an extra $1,000 a month might have made my family a little more comfortable in poverty, but it would have been gradually eaten away by rising costs of living and taxes. And my grandparents would have still died poor, as universal basic income doesn’t give people the economic incentive or skills needed to get a better-paying job and a ticket to a better life. Universal basic income as a program doesn’t try to make our economy and our workers more competitive in the global economy. All it does is pay people so that they don’t even have to try. Basic income continues the trend – as evidenced by the expanded COVID-19 unemployment benefits that pay many Americans more money to stay at home than they would make working - of politicians like Pelosi enacting subsidies rather than solutions. America’s poor will remain poor if they don’t have the proper work skills. And even if they get those skills, they will remain poor if we don’t have a growing economy with plentiful opportunities for them to get hired and a good-paying wage. Rather than enacting another in a long line of government anti-poverty programs that do not work, we must help those in poverty acquire the skills to adapt to a changing economy or create their own job. That means embracing skills-based economics – helping every person learn a skill that produces a decent income through a transformation of K-12 education. By refocusing traditional public education on the end goal of work through expanded skills-based curriculum, apprenticeships/internships to gain work experience, and coursework eligible for college credit, students can graduate from high school with a professional license/certification, an AA degree, or credits to transfer toward a four-year degree. Apart from education, we also need to reform expensive occupational licensing requirements and other regulations that effectively serve as a barrier to poor entrepreneurs earning a living. Instead of warehousing a large part of our workforce to stay poor under a universal basic income system, we need to prepare, engage, and empower America’s poor to succeed.

Daron Acemoğlu, Professor of Economics @ MIT, “Is Basic Income the Safety Net of the Future?” MAY 19TH, 2021 https://pairagraph.com/dialogue/d4ea26042d7e4a0a8f54c40b61fc3c7d/1

So how do we build a better labor market, a fairer economy and a more robust social safety net? Should UBI or what Varoufakis calls a UBD (universal basic dividend) be part of it?

Yameen, Senior analyst at Ernst & Young, “For a Universal Job Guarantee,” American Affairs Winter Volume I, Number 4, 2017 https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2017/11/universal-job-guarantee/

The Politics of a Basic Income

Humans have fought over food and the means of producing it for 20,000 years, as rock art in Australia shows. Food, water and land scarcity are primary drivers in two thirds of modern conflicts today. Indeed, many people seem to have forgotten that the primary German war aim in World War II was to take farmland from the Soviets and put German farmers on it. It is very likely that controlling the Ukraine’s bountiful and reliable food bowl is among Putin’s main aims also. In the short run this is imposing hunger and even starvation on hundreds of millions of people far beyond Europe. 

Spreading hunger in turn snowballs into government failures, civil wars and refugee tsunamis around the world – as it did in 2008 when a shortfall in Ukrainian grain exports led to revolutions in three Arab countries. Already, a third of a billion people – equal to the entire population of Europe – leave their homes each year, either as refugees or economic migrants, to seek better lives in countries which seem more stable and food secure. War will add to the flood.

The impacts of soil and land degradation on agricultural productivity also reveals grim results. According to Otuk and Daniel (2015), estimates for the magnitude of global crop yield reduction caused by soil degradation range from 12.7% (Oldeman, 1998) and 13.4% (Crosson, 1997) to 19% (IIASA, 2000), and even as high as 30% (Pimentel, Allen, and Beer, 1993). A review by Eswaran, Lal, and Reich (2001) found that at the field and plot level, degraded soils reduced harvests by up to 40% in rowcrops in the U.S. Midwest (Fahnestock, et al., 44 1995; Schumacher, et al., 1994); by between 30% and 90% in west Africa (Mbagwu, et al., 1984; Lal, 1987; Charreau, 1972; Kayombo and Lal, 1994); by up to 50% in some parts of Europe (Ericksson, et al., 1974); and by 20% in India, China, Iran, Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Nepal, and Pakistan (Dregne, 1992). Soil erosion causes economic losses to the U.S. agricultural sector of $44 billion per year (Eswaran, Lal, & Reich, 2001). A 100-year analysis of a continuously cropped field in the U.S. Midwest found that, even with fertility management, degraded soils had 60% lower corn yields than at the start of the 100-year period (Gantzer, Anderson, Thompson, & Brown, 1990). The worsening of soil quality threatens global food security and livelihoods in developing nations and exacerbates climate change (Sulaeman & Westoff, 2020).

Increasing SOM through regenerative management represents the reversal of the soil erosion process: adding SOM builds soil structure and aggregate stability and makes soil less vulnerable to erosion by wind and water. Research on the impact of regenerative agriculture implementation on crop yields generally shows that crop yields stabilize or increase, with a smaller number of studies showing yield declines after implementation. It is postulated that the increase in soil fertility and the resilience that allows soil to withstand shocks and stabilize yields is mediated by the increase in SOM (Soil Health Institute, 2018).

Yet many of its advocates refuse to see its shortcomings. Economically unsustainable, politically unviable, and socially corrosive, the BI, at best, fails to solve the root problems of existing social programs and, at worst, amplifies them. True welfare reform would not only consider economics and liberty, but also solidarity and human development in building a program that actualizes the community it serves. Fortunately, there is another option. A universal job guarantee, or JG, can transform the safety net, substituting traditional “means-tested” models in favor of a program that not only helps the needy, but also provides opportunities to build human capital and further strengthen social solidarity. A social program that is both macro- and micro-minded, and cognizant of the demand and supply side, it offers a better approach for tackling the ills of the twenty-first-century economy. Current Context The impulse toward a better, more effective welfare state is understandable given the state of the American economy. Faith that growth alone can improve people’s livelihoods was broken by the Great Recession. The new malaise has taken many forms: greater inequality, stagnant wages, a declining middle class, and diminished labor-force participation among young adults. This decline in labor-force participation is of particular concern because of its destabilizing political effects. For the first time in recent history, parents doubt that their children will enjoy a higher standard of living than their own.1 This is not sustainable. A thriving democratic polity requires a robust network of property owners who have a stake in the system. As seen in recent events such as the Arab Spring, this cannot exist where economic conditions diminish the workforce and the middle class. As globalization increasingly encourages the outsourcing of low-wage labor to foreign countries, so too the malaise grows deeper and more entrenched. The longer the country waits to solve this crisis, the worse it becomes: the short-term unemployed eventually become the long-term unemployed, whose productivity, earnings, and well-being are affected even into retirement age. These trends are not uniform. Because the barriers to foreign exchange apply more to labor than to capital, globalization disproportionately harms working-class Americans. Yes, free trade has raised the overall level of income in the country, but a nation is not an aggregate statistic; it is the individuals that make it up who should be the focal point of any socioeconomic policy. It is through these long-term trends that the share of income to capital—rather than income to labor—has hit an all-time high.2 These problems become more politically malignant as they manifest themselves across time and space, creating regional and intergenerational inequalities through low social mobility.3 While no one denies that the private sector is still the engine of economic growth in America, additional resources must be mobilized to provide for the needs of the broader nation.

Progressives are busy rolling out studies that proport to show guaranteed incomes have little significant effect on people working. Those examine U.S. and Canadian programs like the Stockton experiment, which gave 125 individuals $500 a month for two years, and the Alaska Permanent Fund Dividend. Generally, those benefits are sometimes temporary, not large enough to live on and only marginally impact on employment, but hours worked is quite different from whether someone is employed at all.

Mike Konczal is a fellow at the Roosevelt Institute, where he focuses on financial regulation, inequality and unemployment. He writes a weekly column for Wonkblog. “Thinking Utopian: How about a universal basic income?,” May 11, 2013 https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2013/05/11/thinking-utopian-how-about-a-universal-basic-income/

Another project is to expand the say workers have in their workplaces. This includes not only unionization, but also a more general project of democracy that doesn’t end once you walk through your employer’s door. As Century Foundation Senior Fellow Richard Kahlenberg and labor attorney Moshe Marvit have argued, labor organizing needs to be considered a basic civil right. It seems clear that a universal basic income would help workers by giving them more bargaining power. But others worry that a UBI would encourage workers to leave the labor force rather than voice grievances and demands, and that it would make changing labor practices more difficult. For instance, some feminists argue that a universal basic income would simply reinforce and solidify an unjust gendered division of labor.

Those calling for a government-funded universal basic income are acting as though it’s a hot new idea. It’s not. It’s been tried before—and it didn’t work. In essence, universal basic income—also known as guaranteed minimum income—provides cash payments to all citizens, regardless of need. This has been tried before—and the results weren’t pretty. Advocates range from tech billionaires Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg to libertarian scholar Charles Murray. Some U.S. cities are trying out the idea themselves. The city of Stockton, California, will begin a privately-funded, 18-month pilot program in early 2019. Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel also recently announced a task force that will consider implementing it there. The problem? This has been tried before—and the results weren’t pretty. The Negative Income Tax Experiment The best available evidence about the potential effects of these programs comes from the federal government’s “negative income tax” experiment. The experiment, which ran from 1968 to 1980, consisted of four random, controlled trials across six states designed to test the negative income tax. Similar to the universal basic income, a negative income tax guarantees a minimum income, which phases out as earnings increase. The experiment’s planners hoped that providing a minimum income would encourage work. But the results showed the opposite. facebook sharing buttontwitter sharing buttonflipboard sharing buttonreddit sharing buttonlinkedin sharing buttonemail sharing button In his 1984 book Losing Ground, Murray himself described the negative income tax experiment as “the most ambitious social-science experiment in history.” “No other even comes close to its combination of size, expense, length, and detail of analysis,” he wrote. As Murray recounted, the experiment’s planners hoped that providing a minimum income would encourage work. But their worst fears were realized when the results showed the opposite. Evaluations of the experiment found that the negative income tax reduced “desired hours of work by 9 percent for husbands, by 20 percent for wives, and by 25 percent for single female heads of families.” For single males who were not heads of households throughout the experiment, the reduction in hours worked per week was a staggering 43 percent. If recipients lost their jobs during the experiment, they experienced significantly longer spells of unemployment compared with non-recipients—more than two months longer for husbands, almost a year longer for wives, and longer still for single mothers. Murray concluded that the effect of the negative income tax on reducing work was “unambiguous and strong.” facebook sharing buttontwitter sharing buttonflipboard sharing buttonreddit sharing buttonlinkedin sharing buttonemail sharing button For every $1,000 in additional benefits, there was an average reduction of $660 in earned income, meaning that $3,000 in government benefits were required to increase net income by $1,000. These studies also made clear that it was the receipt of unconditional aid, not the phase-out of benefits, which led to the reduced work effort. In Losing Ground, Murray concluded that the effect of the negative income tax on reducing work was “unambiguous and strong.” The Drawbacks of UBI To his credit, Murray has acknowledged that such disastrous results should be expected if guaranteed income is an add-on to, rather than a wholesale replacement of, the existing system of welfare and social insurance. In fact, he asserts in Losing Ground that the true negative effects in the negative income tax experiment are understated because these effects were “over and above the effect of the work disincentives in the existing system.” Instead, Murray argues that the universal basic income will realize its full potential “only if it replaces all other transfer payments and the bureaucracies that oversee them.” The most apparent flaw with the concept is that it fails to require work or work preparation for its recipients. facebook sharing buttontwitter sharing buttonflipboard sharing buttonreddit sharing buttonlinkedin sharing buttonemail sharing button But while his proposal is respectable in its intent, it presents several new problems. First, Murray proposes eliminating Social Security and Medicare payments to pay for a universal basic income. This would shift resources from the elderly to the non-elderly, including childless adults who are capable of self-support. Second, universal basic income payments would be given to all citizens, including middle- and high-income earners. By not targeting payments to those with low incomes, the proposal would transfer funds away from the vulnerable to the relatively affluent. But the most apparent flaw with the concept is that it fails to require work or work preparation for its recipients. Although the current welfare system does little to encourage self-support, a comprehensive universal basic income policy would remove the idea of personal responsibility entirely. It’s a misguided approach. People Enjoy Working Public opinion and social psychology indicate that adopting policies with a demonstrated track record of discouraging work would be a bad development. A better alternative to a universal basic income would be to expand the earned income tax credit. facebook sharing buttontwitter sharing buttonflipboard sharing buttonreddit sharing buttonlinkedin sharing buttonemail sharing button In the 2016 General Social Survey, for example, 70 percent of Americans agreed that they would enjoy working in a paying job, even if they didn’t need the money. Moreover, prominent social psychologist Jonathan Haidt argues that work is a central pillar of human well-being and happiness. Policy should be designed to reward work rather than replace it. Therefore, a better alternative to a universal basic income would be to expand the earned income tax credit.

In recent weeks, the idea of a "universal basic income" has shown surprising popularity across the political spectrum, from left to right. The only real question is why, since it's such an awful idea. For the left, the superficial case for a universal basic income, also called a guaranteed income, is that not everyone can compete in today's high-tech, advanced economy. With the advent of robots, automation and artificial intelligence and the job losses that will ensue, or so the argument goes, we will need to pay people a basic income, or risk having even worse income inequality than we have now. Meanwhile, some conservatives say a guaranteed income could be used to end welfare as we know it. Just give people a basic amount of money, and do away with all other forms of welfare — one check, that's it. No-fault welfare. These might sound tempting and reasonable, but they are profoundly flawed. Start with the first idea: That automation is going to destroy work as we know it. That's not likely true. Yes, some jobs are vulnerable, especially low-skilled, manual jobs, as a recent study by economists Daron Acemoglu and Pascual Restrepo for the National Bureau of Economic Research noted. And the McKinsey Global Institute earlier this year estimated that as many as half of all jobs could be vulnerable to robots and other forms of automation. True enough. But past experience shows that while investments in new technology cost some workers their jobs, those investments have always led to more jobs overall, not fewer. "When businesses automate to boost productivity, they can cut their prices, thus increasing the demand for their products, which in turn requires more workers," notes Ronald Bailey, in a lengthy piece on automation for Reason.com. The McKinsey report, for instance, notes that productivity from automation over the next 50 years should yield gains of 0.8% to 1.4% a year — roughly twice the gains from the internet revolution. Where productivity rises, jobs follow. As for the welfare reform argument, the real problem is that when you hand a person a check they have less incentive to work. Period. It is an ironclad rule of economics: What you subsidize, you incentivize. Subsidize nonwork through a guaranteed income, and don't be surprised when lots of people stop working — or work a lot less. And someone else will pay for it. Is that the kind of society we seek? The truth is, well-meaning social engineers' ideas notwithstanding, a guaranteed income is a very bad idea. It's utopian, and anti-work. America is based on work, is defined by it. At this point in our history, shouldn't we be looking for ways to encourage work, not discourage it?

There's already an experiment getting under way in deeply troubled Stockton, Calif., once known as the nation's home-foreclosure capital. Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes kickstarted that city's program with a $1 million donation. But it will have no more success than other "experiments" with giving money to people not to work. Why are we so sure? It's already been tried elsewhere. Indeed, in April, impeccably progressive Finland decided to end its limited experiment with a UBI that paid 2,000 nonworking people roughly $685 a month. The idea was that it would free up people to look for work, or be creative. It didn't happen. "There is a problem with young people lacking secondary education, and reports of those guys not seeking work," said Heikki Hiilamo, a University of Helskinki professor of social policy. "There is a fear that with basic income they would just stay home and play computer games." Far closer to home, as we've noted before, the U.S. has already tested a closely-related idea, the so-called "negative income tax." Essentially, it's a guaranteed income by another name. And it failed abysmally. "In the 1970s, the government ran four random control experiments across six states to try the negative income tax, a similar policy proposal that was popular at the time," wrote Mimi Teixeira in The Daily Signal earlier this year. "In each text, the work disincentive effect was disastrous. For every $1,000 in added benefits to a family, there was an average reduction in $660 of wages from work." So people who got checks stopped working or worked far less. What a surprise. That's the socialist dynamic: Pay people to do nothing, and they'll do nothing. This doesn't require a Ph.D. in economics. It's simple common sense. Yet, this is the level of thinking among our nation's mostly far-left elites. In truth, they're not overly concerned with people working less. Those who get checks will soon depend on them. And they will reliably vote for those who give them money, the leftist political elites. It's one of the most cynical political ploys imaginable, but that's what it is. Conservatives who support such an idea naively think it will shrink the welfare state. But all it would take is one election with a Democratic president and Congress, and the welfare state would be even larger — taking more money from those who work and giving it to those who choose not to. It's hard to imagine a more anti-work policy. Rather than empowering the poor, it turns them into wards of the state. And work is important to people, part of creating a meaningful life, a bedrock of civilization. A universal basic income would destroy any incentive people have for bettering themselves through further education, training, relocating to a better area to find a job, or even just getting up from the couch to look for work down the street. Why bother? Check's in the mail.

The idea of a government-provided income for all citizens is gaining currency. While today universal guaranteed income is mostly pressed by the left, Milton Friedman once argued for it as well. But the proposal is blind to the predictable costs of an unprecedented social engineering experiment that would separate citizens from one of the most important sources of human flourishing. Work Isn't Just About Work Freeing people from the necessity to work may sound like the last word in progressive altruism or in the efficient rationalization of social welfare, but it would undermine a pillar of our personal and social order. Work has benefits beyond earning income. It provides the satisfaction of achievement, the discipline of focusing on the desires of others, and the social bonds that our fellow workers provide. The breadth of the human need for employment can be measured in the great unhappiness unemployment causes even in most generous European welfare states. The left today often dismisses the virtues of work. Former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich is typical in saying that most jobs today do not provide “fulfillment or creativity.” But this claim just shows his impoverished imagination and empathy. One does not need to write an article to exercise creativity. Any job with any discretion allows people the opportunity to think about how to serve strangers better. And even jobs without much discretion can give a sense of fulfillment by being done well. The breadth of the human need for employment can be measured in the great unhappiness unemployment causes even in most generous European welfare states. Moreover, work promotes the self-discipline required by a society that is not disciplined by pervasive authority. Bourgeois virtues, like responsibility, accountability, and self-control that have long been acknowledged to spring from work help build the social norms that substitute for coercion. And habits of punctuality, thrift, and fair exchange do not stop at the workplace door but spill into personal life. There is more than a touch of Rousseauean romanticism in the de-valorization of work, as if paid labor forges chains that keep us from realizing our perfect natural state rather than provides guide ropes for better behavior. People Need Other People Our social welfare system should reinforce the norm that a good life is a productive one. For many people, work also provides a crucial social network: colleagues on the job are sounding boards, role models, and advisers in times of need. At a time when loneliness has been called a social crisis, it is the height of folly to undertake a program that will make it easier for people to drop out into lives of social isolation. One response might be that if work is so good, people will do it even if the incentives are reduced. Some surely will, but it is better to rely on work to provide the discipline to refine judgment rather than rely on unrefined judgment to appreciate the value of work. Young people in particular have been known to fritter away their lives until the need to earn a paycheck shocks them into responsibility. And of course, the huge cost of the program will drive up taxes, getting on the employment ladder less attractive. Samuel Johnson declared that a decent provision for the poor is a hallmark of civilization but so is centrality of work. We would be much better off using any additional government subsidies for programs, like the earned income tax credit, that encourage work rather than create a new program that discourages it. Our social welfare system should reinforce the norm that a good life is a productive one.

One notable aspect of the Planetary Boundaries Project is that—at least for the moment—climate change is not the planetary boundary that we are at most risk of having already crossed. Instead, there are two other boundaries currently far more worrisome than climate change itself— biosphere integrity, or the global loss of biodiversity, and biogeochemical flows, or nutrient pollution. U.S. ocean law can both feasibly and profitably focus on these two issues—couched in terms of food security and public health, respectively—to reduce existing stressors to its marine ecosystems while simultaneously improving the well-being of its residents.

1. Seize the moment regarding marine food security.

The Job Guarantee matches unmet needs with available resources. Because it aims to address the social deprivations of people, communities, and the environment, it is not only a green policy, but can be viewed more broadly as a care policy. Large swaths of the population, even in developed countries, face shortages of vital goods and services. Food deserts, where millions of people lack access to healthy and affordable food, blanket the US. So do medical deserts – nearly a quarter of all residential areas lack acute-care hospitals and 80% of rural areas are designated as medically underserved. [20]

All the while, the planet is burning. Perennial fires, floods, hurricanes, droughts are intensifying. Air, soil and water pollution are preconditions for the accelerating and at an unprecedented rate of species extinction, according to a recent UN report. [21]