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Today, as we tackle the fundamental crises facing our country—income inequality and climate change—members of Congress have looked back to FDR’s approach and proposed the Green New Deal. Like Roosevelt, the Green New Deal focuses on what historians call the “three Rs”: 1) relief for the unemployed and the poor; 2) recovery of the economy; and 3) reform of the financial system.

Within the next 10 years, the Green New Deal aims to provide everyone in the country with:

Emergency warnings and other important messages may not be designed with accessibility in mind. This can make it difficult for people with disabilities (such as those with low vision or blindness, hearing loss, or mobility issues) to plan for extreme weather events.

They may need ongoing medical care, which can be disrupted before, during, and after a natural disaster or extreme weather event.

Climate change threatens all of us. But for those of us living with a disability — an estimated 15% of the global population — the threat, compounded by discrimination, marginalization, and other pre-existing inequalities, is even greater.

Master’s student David Liebmann, a HGSE Sustainability Fellow, wants to bring awareness to this threat, especially in the world of education — a world where people with disabilities often lack access and face discrimination.

In the United States, there is health care, a supportive income, and an array of social services to support people with disabilities, especially those who cannot work. However, all people with disabilities, including those with college degrees, simply do not have the same economic opportunities afforded to the rest of society. This is true even of those who may be quite capable of participating in the workplace. Historical, legal, financial, and social realities dictate the boundaries of participation in society. Today, there are a number of metrics in this research which will demonstrate the inequality in our society, but the income and wealth gaps are persistent.

This research project addresses the economic policies, especially public employment programs, that affect people with disabilities. As the existing literature exposes the economic and employment disparities experienced by the disability community, it also considers additional policies might advance their ability to do meaningful work. What makes work meaningful, and access to employment opportunities so vital, spans from the individual fulfillment of people with disabilities, to the potential for positive systems change when the disability community holds the positions of power to make changes that will increase accessibility and decrease discrimination in all levels of society. Moreover, through this research, it has become clear that society loses so much when our economy fundamentally discriminates against and excludes people with disabilities. What are the additional remarkable contributions they could make if they were not systematically oppressed and marginalized? Paid work is an essential part of social integration in a capitalist society like the U.S., and people’s independence, identity, and self-esteem are linked directly to their careers.

While America provides some income support to its citizens with disabilities through Supplemental Security Income (SSI) and Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI), these programs inevitably leave many out. Today, 22% of households with people with disabilities do not receive any federal government assistance. Further, just 14% of households of families where someone is disabled collected SSI, a program “designed to help aged, blind, and , who have little or no income.” Unemployment insurance was the only program in our analysis that was more likely to go to families without people with disabilities. Universal payments would ensure that all households receive government assistance. The remainder of this paper examines how universal payments can alleviate poverty for Americans with disabilities.

Background

At the same time, Warren argues that a UBI's benefits could be too narrow because of its typical focus on citizenship rights. As he points out, many UBI models propose that the income goes to all of a country's citizens. However, what happens to immigrants who are not citizens, including immigrants who face racial discrimination? And what about incarcerated populations, who are frequently deprived of some citizenship benefits (such as voting rights)? Yet while Warren is correct that many UBI proposals have traditionally focused on citizens, this has recently shifted. James Ferguson's work on rightful shares has made the case that a universal payment should be disbursed not on the basis of citizenship, but rather on presence (or, to put it more practically, residence) within a nation state (Ferguson, 2021).

However, the issue of targeting on the basis of race in order to repair the damage done by slavery and post-slavery racial discrimination still remains. Warren's proposed solution is to establish what he terms U+BI (universal plus basic income). This is a form of targeted universalism, where a basic income is both universal, and there is an additional top up which is targeted towards racial minorities, and explicitly framed as reparations for slavery and racism. Warren's proposal for a U+BI as reparations, and his explicit tying together of UBI and reparations, raises a number of questions. Why adopt an explicitly universal policy such as UBI as part of the case for reparations, which are meant to explicitly target communities damaged by specific historical occurrences? Warren never directly addresses this question, but perhaps the inclusion (with modifications) of UBI within the Movement for Black Lives agenda points to unstated support for other advantages of a universal rightful share, in particular the justice-based arguments for universal ownership of collective wealth (see for instance Birnbaum, 2016; Sloman, 2018; Van Parijs, 1992). The proposal of U+BI also raises the question of whether this would be a true UBI, and if the ‘plus’ would undermine some of the advantages of universalism. In particular, if historically benefits targeted at disadvantaged groups have frequently been inferior to universal benefits and enjoyed lower levels of support, a U+BI might have the same disadvantage, which a UBI would avoid. Ultimately, this case asks: can a distributory policy framed as a rightful share be both reparative and universal at the same time?

45 years ago yesterday, it was a Sunday afternoon — the 3rd of April, 1977. It was a rather chilly day as far as spring days go in London, but inside the hall of the City of London Polytechnic, it was warm; not just because the hall was packed full of people, but also because of their enthusiasm. Thousands of women across the U. K. gathered for the ninth National Women’s Liberation Conference. The conference began on Saturday 2nd April, with numerous workshops and social events, and was already approaching its finale, the plenary session, when a resolution was raised proposing the right to what we now know as ‘Universal Basic Income’ — an adequate income paid to every person without any conditions. The resolution was passed with a majority vote. Universal Basic Income was one of the democratically and officially endorsed demands of the British Women’s Liberation Movement. But unfortunately this fact has become steeped in collective amnesia. An amnesia that may have started at the very moment of the resolution’s passing. Spare Rib magazine, the British women’s liberation periodical reported the resolution passed, but in a lopsided way. The report lacked vital information, such as who raised the resolution, what exactly the proposed income scheme was, and why it was raised as a demand. Instead, Spare Rib reported who opposed it and why. In this article, I shall provide a supplement for this unreported side of the information and discuss the contemporary, global resonance of this demand. Between Women’s Liberation and the Welfare Rights Movement The first Claimants Union was founded in Birmingham at the end of 1968 by those receiving state benefits that were means-tested, meaning they were conditional on how much people earned. Similar initiatives spontaneously sprung up all over Britain, and the National Federation of Claimants Unions was founded in March 1970. While ‘the right to an adequate income without means test for all people’ had been on their banner from the start, it was in 1972 that the demand was clearly voiced for an unconditional, individual income. The spring of 1972 saw the launch of a national campaign for ‘guaranteed adequate income’. The campaigners’ formulation of guaranteed income as unconditional was rooted in their daily struggle against sexism within the social security system. This spring marks the 50th-year anniversary of Universal Basic Income as a feminist demand and 45 years since it become an official demand of the British Women’s Liberation Movement. The Claimants Unions were, in principle, open to claimants (and ex-claimants) only. The majority of the membership consisted of women. They were particularly angered by the British welfare system’s ‘cohabitation rule’. The cohabitation rule treated men and women who lived together as ‘husband and wife’ and presumed that women were supported by men. In practice, this meant that women would have their benefits docked or cut completely if the state thought they were being supported by a man, or were married but were claiming individual benefits. In order to enforce this rule, welfare officers known as ‘sex snoopers’ conducted spot checks late at night on women. If a woman claimant had a sexual relationship with a man, it was assumed she would be supported by him. Sometimes just friendly, neighbourly activities, such as a male neighbour coming in to help fix a tap or a lightbulb, would be used as evidence of a partner or boyfriend and a woman would find that the next week her benefit was suspended. The women of the Claimants Union didn’t take this personally, rather they detected the structural and institutionalised sexism behind the practice. In order to put an end this, they formulated the idea of Universal Basic Income, where no means test was involved and no spies nor humiliation either. For them, the campaign against the cohabitation rule and for Universal Basic Income were two sides of the same coin. However brutal and humiliating the cohabitation rule was, it was an inevitable component of making a means-tested benefit ‘fair’. While claimants women’s struggles against the cohabitation rule were almost unanimously supported by the Women’s Liberation Movement, their demands for Universal Basic Income were not vociferously accepted, except by the silent majority who voted in favour on two occasions at National Women’s Liberation Conferences. The resolution was initially raised by women in the Claimants Union movement at a Women’s Liberation conference earlier than 1977, likely 1975 or 1976. Jane Downey, born to a working-class family in Yorkshire was active in the Claimants Union in East London recalled her nervousness when speaking to this motion: I was supposed to be the second speaker. And I can remember standing on the stage thinking I can’t do this, I was absolutely terrified. I was just I was. I just, I mean, I wouldn’t have been able to say a word. I mean, it was just masses of people and like me, kind of, you know, I mean, I was like, Oh God. I never had an experience to speak in front of such a huge audience. In fact, Downey didn’t end up having to speak, and was relieved. According to Julia Mainwaring, who was born to a working-class family in a small Welsh mining village and was one of the founders of the first Claimants Union, the resolution had been raised at the earlier Women’s Liberation Conference and passed with a majority vote, but was erased by the chair of the plenary session.* She reflected in an oral history interview in April, 2014: Middle class women didn’t understand what the hell goes on it [the idea of Universal Basic Income] …. Quite a few women in the Women’s Liberation Movement, who had a lot of qualifications, and high significant jobs, didn’t agree with this. She [the chair] was a solicitor. She thought it ridiculous … Two times we did this. Both it got passed. Both. …. She stoned that demand. She was so incensed by that discussion … She didn’t want me to speak. She tried to block us speaking. She tried to stop us putting the resolution … The next year [1977] we went back made the resolution typed … We gave everybody the resolution beforehand….We knew, before we went, that we will have majority support. … She just thought we were scum, I suppose … She didn’t see us as a part of the working class, so, below the working class.** Unconditional solidarity Claimants Unions were not professional campaigners or policy advocates. They were neighbourhood community organisations. Lyn Boyd and Annette Mckay, both of whom were born to working-class families and were active at the Newcastle Claimants Union, recalled in an interview in 2009: It taught us how to work together with other people to support without prejudice… It’s about actually thinking about other people as well as yourself and actually trying to develop the community which is good for your kids. Supporting each other without prejudice wasn’t something that came easily — especially taking into consideration the diverse and intersectional composition of Claimants Unions: single mothers, the disabled, old-age pensioners, strikers, unemployed; women and men; transgender and cisgender; working-class and middle class; Black, Asian, and White. But they tried their best. The minutes of the East London Claimants Union record Julia Mainwaring’s warning against welfare officers’ tactics to divide the claimants: ‘We reiterate that we support all claimants without condition’. Demanding an unconditional income echoes the unconditional solidarity these claimants collectively tried to seek. The Claimants Union movement also problematised the gendered division of labour, and the nature of ‘work’ itself. People saw their demand for Universal Basic Income as a transitional demand, one that would lead to a better society free from the impositions of gendered labour and from harmful ‘work’, such as in the military, or meaningless work; what the anthropologist David Graeber would later call ‘bullshit jobs’. Global and contemporary context The same sexism existed in many parts of the world where there were means-tested benefits. It still continues, even if its overt brutality has changed when compared to the 1970s. If after watching the video below, produced by the U.K. Department of Work and Pensions, we were to detect nothing wrong, we would be partaking in the same sexist assumption shared by the British Government, that, a woman accommodating her boyfriend and ironing his clothes, must be financially supported by him. Fighting this type of sexism has been global, too. ‘Guaranteed Minimum Income’ was demanded by the welfare rights movement and by the Black rights movement in North America, though their articulation of it was not unconditional. Through his involvement in the Newton Abbot Claimants Union, Bill Jordan took on the idea of Universal Basic Income and became one of the founders of the Basic Income European Network (now the Basic Income Earth Network). In 2010s, the Self Employed Women’s Association in India conducted a pilot project of Universal Basic Income. The Claimants Unions’ interrogation of the gendered division of labour and of the nature of ‘work’ has a heightened relevance, now more than ever. During the current pandemic, feminists have reclaimed the feminist tradition of Universal Basic Income. In April 2020, The Hawaii State Commission on the Status of Women made the first feminist economic recovery plan for Covid-19, where one of the policy proposals was Universal Basic Income. Khara Jabola-Carolus of the Commission notes: Some of the key elements are full economic self sufficiency regardless of work. And that sounds really neutral at first. But if you think about it, many of us, especially women, women with disabilities, women who are caregiving and don’t have the same ability to access employment, and will never have that same value as workers. And so making sure that universal basic income, which has been a long intergenerational rallying cry of feminists is at the center was really important. Several weeks later, the International Association for Feminist Economics made a statement calling for ‘the immediate and urgent implementation of a gender-equitable universal basic income’. Yet despite the centrality of women’s activism- then and now-written history and research on Universal Basic Income has been white and male-dominated. One initiative challenging this dominance – a research group on Universal Basic Income and Gender – was recently established. It is my hope that this brief exposé, which sought to reclaim an erased history, constitutes a small contribution to what the Hawaiians who collectively composed the feminist recovery plan have called ‘a transnational feminist future.’

Once treated as a pointlessly utopian fantasy, the demand for a guaranteed basic income is now being debated across multiple forums, from mainstream and alternative media sites to more academic venues. There are many different proposals that travel under this label. The version I want to defend is a minimal liveable income regularly remitted as a social wage, paid unconditionally to residents regardless of citizenship status, regardless of their family or household membership, and regardless of past, present, or future employment status. Waged work would not be replaced by such a social wage, but the link between work and income would be relaxed. I support this form of basic income because of its feminist potential to loosen the constraints our current system places on all of us but particularly on women. It is a tool that, if deployed correctly, would enable waged work, marriage contracts, and childrearing to be more a matter of choice than they are at present, where all three are subjected to a relentless, strict, and miserly economic calculus. My case in favour of the basic income demand is deeply informed by the Wages for Housework movement in the 1970s, which advocated for a social wage to be paid to women for the uncompensated reproductive labour they perform. Many lessons for the basic income movement can be found in this earlier campaign, two of which I want to focus on here. The first lesson is that the wage system is wholly inadequate as a method for distributing income. The second is that because the wage system is inadequate, many people and especially women have little choice but to enter into families in precarious positions of inequality. Basic income has a chance to ameliorate, but will not in itself correct, both these wrongs. The blind spots of the wage system The thinkers behind the Wages for Housework campaign insisted that we needed a broader understanding of the economy and of what counts as an economic relation in order to account for all of the productive effort involved in the creation of value. Their main focus was on showing how unpaid reproductive work acts as a subsidy for companies that boosts their profit margins. A capitalist society needs reproductive work to happen so that workers are fed and dressed, so that new workers replace old ones, and so that products are bought and consumed. They argued that since reproduction is not separate from the system of economic production but an indispensable part of it, those reproductive contributions should be recognised and remunerated. But this is not how the wage economy currently functions. Wages, capitalism’s primary mechanism for transferring wealth back down the chain, are only given to a narrow subset of all those people engaged in maintaining a capitalist society: those who are employed. The wage system doesn’t come close to compensating all the people working for all the value they are producing; its blind spots are legion. We can make a strong case for basic income if we update this argument to include other areas of activity from which a capitalist society derives value yet the wage system fails to reward. For example, employers make use of but do not remunerate the educational efforts that develop a worker’s general skills and aptitudes. Neither do they compensate for all the time a worker dedicates to developing communicative capacities, aesthetic embodiments, and even social networks. This is no small matter in the present moment. The employment system is currently being restructured around the ideal of the independent, entrepreneurial worker who has invested heavily in their own human capital and future employability, often through the accrual of household debt. This would-be worker is expected to assume all the risk and costs of rendering themselves employable and for landing a series of job contracts while employers are largely off the hook for these expenses. The fear that there will be free riders who will receive a basic income is laughable given the truly massive levels of unremunerated labour, stolen property, and privatised commons for which companies are given a free pass. Employers also make use of social infrastructures produced through collective efforts over generations, commons reclassified as ‘natural resources’, assets accumulated through slavery and colonialism, and technologies first developed by governments. They appropriate the materials that create and add value to goods and services, including forms of scientific, communicative, technical, and social knowledge. Then, of course, there is prison labour, various forms of unwaged digital labour used to create data and algorithms, as well as old-fashioned wage theft. Neither wages nor taxes come close to compensating for all of this. The fear that there will be free riders who will receive a basic income is laughable given the truly massive levels of free riding on unremunerated labour, stolen property, and privatised commons for which companies are given a free pass. In addition to all these types of unremunerated value creation, we must also remember that large, arguably enormous, numbers of people are excluded from or marginalised within the wage system because they do not conform to the model of the ideal waged worker. How many of us really possess the full list of capacities needed to devote 40 hours to intensively focused effort over the course of a five-day week? What about those of us with cognitive, emotional, neurological, or physical differences that mean we cannot always, or sometimes ever, work in the ways or for the durations that are expected? How can we be expected to work a lifetime without more than – and this is of course the best-case scenario – a little vacation time and a few sick days? The family is supposed to be our safety net, but for many it’s a last resort rather than a first option. Too many of us have nothing or little in the way of support when our bodies or our minds are rendered disabled by the standard forms of waged work. A fundamental lesson of the Wages for Housework campaign is that that wage system does not account for all our contributions to economic production and excludes too many of us to function as a credible mechanism of income allocation. The already rather spectacular mis-accounting of productive activity they identified in the 1970s is arguably much more dramatic today, and the exclusions enacted by the wage system possibly even more damning. Basic income, as a universal and unconditional social wage, offers a more rational and more equitable way to distribute income and reward forms of productivity. Freedom to choose a family A second key insight from the Wages for Housework movement regards the way the wage system interacts with the institution of the family to trap many, especially women, into dangerous situations and also benefits from the unwaged labour that takes place under its auspices. The heteropatriarchal family may function as a haven in a heartless world for some; for others it is a sad and dangerous site. A 2018 UN report, which found that more than half of female homicides around the world were committed by intimate partners or relatives, was released with a headline that named the home as “the most dangerous place for women.” The statistics on domestic violence, including intimate partner violence, together with child and elder abuse are by any metric staggering. Without adequate means to support oneself and one’s dependents it can be difficult and sometimes impossible to leave such a situation. The family is also where the majority of the labour necessary to reproduce workers on a daily and generational basis takes place. It is an institution that distributes income earned from waged work to others in a household and that allocates domestic tasks to its members along gendered lines. Enormous amount of time, skill, and energy are devoted to childcare, eldercare, the care of the ill, the care of the disabled, self-care, and community care. Without this work whatever you want to delimit as the economic system would not exist, and it is provided disproportionally by women, free of charge, regardless of whether they also work for wages. A basic income would better enable individuals to make choices about whether to enter into a particular household division of domestic labour and serve as a resource for exiting an abusive household relationship. Wages for Housework advocates extended their critical examination of the family as a satellite of the system of production to the question of childbearing as well. They demanded wages so that they could, among other things, “decide if, when and under what conditions to have children”. Deciding not to have children because one does not have the money or time to raise them does not count as true reproductive choice: “As long as we have no money of our own because we work for nothing at home and for crumbs outside the home, none of us can choose whether or not to have children, and all of us face sterilization even if our tubes are not cut”. A basic income, like wages for housework, cannot in itself create the conditions for truly meaningful choices about whether to raise children or not, or whether or not to enter into a household or form a family. It would, however, better enable individuals to make choices about whether to enter into a particular household division of domestic labour, as well as serve as a resource for exiting a physically or otherwise abusive household relationship. It would also give people a greater measure of economic freedom to either engage in or opt out of childrearing as they choose. As such, it is material support for the possibility of cultivating more sustaining and sustainable relationships of caring and sharing.

The extensive social science research on women and welfare rarely offers feminist and women political arguments in favor of guaranteed basic income or citizens wage. This is surprising in view of the convincing arguments that large groups of women would benefit from a basic income scheme, which would: (1) lead to equal treatment of the genders on the labour market and in the social sphere; (2) express recognition of unpaid work; (3) guarantee income outside the labour market and thus strengthen family life; (4) give many people more incentive to work; (5) ensure economic independence within the family; and (6) might encourage a more equal division of labour in families (McKay and Vanevery, 2000; McKay 2001). Women’s research generally agrees that the current Scandinavian welfare states are among the most “women friendly” societies, but that gender-related injustice still exists. “There are still fundamental contrasts between work life and family life, and women earn less than men at the same level. In addition, women rank lower than men in the job hierarchy, and they have less power and influence in society than men” (Borchorst, 1998: 127). It therefore seems odd that basic income has not attracted more attention in women’s research. Considering that some feminists (Siim, 2001) call for new equality and solidarity visions that include women as well as marginalized social groups in the welfare state, it seems obvious to ask why it is so hard for many feminists to see and accept basic income as a long-term, ideal solution to ongoing gender inequality and injustice. With reference to the debate in Denmark, I will argue that: ß One reason for the modest feminist interest in basic income is that women’s research and the women’s movement have been locked into a Wollstonecraft’s dilemma (Pateman, 1989: 195-204, Christensen and Siim, 2001: 19-20). The dilemma is named after Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797), the pioneer of the British women’s movement, and has been discussed in different versions in the women’s movement ever since. 2 As a social movement, the women’s movement has worked, on the one hand, for equality and a gender-neutral society, and, on the other hand, for recognition of women’s difference from men, their special abilities and needs. In other words, there seem to be two different paths to gender equity, which appear to be contradictory or incompatible; hence the talk of a dilemma. In modern society, the dilemma is often formulated as follows: If you follow the path of equality, the women’s movement will tend to join the dominant, male wage work norm. If you follow the path of difference by prioritizing women’s care work over wage work, you will continue to be marginalized in relation to the men on the labour market. ß Wollstonecraft’s equality/difference dilemma is not a real logical conceptual dilemma, but rather an impossible choice that resembles a “double bind” defined by the dominant, patriarchal power structure. Like other gender - political dilemmas - commodification/decommodification, dependence/independence and wage work/care – this dilemma can be broken down by a critical, deconstructive analysis. ß The dilemma of adapting to the wage work norm and thus deprioritizing the care norm, or prioritize the care norm and risk marginalization in relation to wage work can be solved or softened theoretically by adding conceptual nuance to the equality and difference concepts like American philosopher Nancy Fraser has done. Nancy Fraser proposes that a universal basic income or citizens’ wage will fulfill the wish for equality and difference, combine decommodification and commodification, and create a new type of economic independence that could be a basis for new dependence relations. ß The modest interest in the basic income concept both in Danish and international women’s research is a result of a greater focus on 3 increasing women’s participation on the labour market (commodification) than on securing economic independence in relation to the labour market (decommodification). In addition, attempts to accommodate care needs have been met with skepticism because they might retain women in the traditional gendered division of labour. Unconditional basic income was either seen as utopian or as dangerous in the short term because it might keep some women from entering the labour market. ß Despite the modest attention from women’s researchers and the women’s movement, Danish feminists have developed theoretic understandings of the relation between wage work and care that open up for new arguments in favor of the basic income concept.

The case for a basic income, a policy that would give all citizens cash payments at regular intervals throughout their lives, is gaining traction. Prominent tech entrepreneurs like Elon Musk, academics across the ideological spectrum from Philippe Van Parijs to Charles Murray, labor organizers like Andy Stern, and policymakers such as Michael Tubbs, the 27-year-old mayor of Stockton, California, support basic income policies as a way of reducing poverty and mitigating the negative impact of unemployment due to automation. But they understate the feminist case for giving people cash. Proponents of the UBI would do well to acknowledge the gender implications of the policy, and feminists, in turn, should throw their support behind the movement. Here are the top three reasons UBI is a feminist cause: Women Are More Likely to Be Poor Globally, women are more likely to live in extreme poverty than men. In the United States, women as a group are poorer than men due to the economic burdens associated with caregiving and the segregation of women into “pink-collar” industries that typically pay less than male-dominated industries. One of the main benefits of implementing a UBI in the U.S. and elsewhere is that giving people cash is a relatively direct and effective way to fight poverty. The basic income is also a matter of economic justice for women as a whole. While capitalism has been beneficial to women on balance, the current system reflects historical patterns of female exclusion from labor markets and policies that denied property rights to women. For example, throughout the 19th century and into the 20th century, married women lacked legal protections for their property rights under the legal doctrine of coverture. And until the 1980s, husbands retained unilateral control over marital property in some jurisdictions. As I have argued elsewhere, a UBI would make capitalism more just by compensating those who live with the legacy of historical and enduring economic injustices. And because a basic income would make the decision to work more voluntary, women would no longer choose to remain in toxic jobs solely because they can’t afford not to. In this way, a UBI could address gender-based mistreatment in workplaces. By freeing women of their economic dependence on employers, a UBI would also improve women’s bargaining positions, enabling them to negotiate for more flexible hours or better conditions. But a UBI would not discourage work to an extent that would undermine the economy. People would still need to work to afford most consumer goods and luxuries. And unlike minimum wage requirements, touted by Fight for $15 activists, a UBI neither raises the cost of employing low-income workers relative to other workers nor disproportionately burdens employers to provide a decent standard of living for people in their communities. With an even starting ground, the opportunities to move beyond the lowest-paying work could be more readily available to marginalized workers who’ve been left out for too long. 2. Women Could Make Unfettered Decisions About How to Structure Their Families and Lives Child care is extraordinarily expensive, and women, especially single moms, end up shouldering an enormous burden for this cost. Some parents who would prefer to work are unable to because they cannot afford quality child care for their kids. Women are more likely to leave the workforce for this reason than men. A UBI for mothers and children would enable women who want to work to pay for child care. In addition, a UBI (including child benefits) would formally recognize and reward socially valuable labor that people currently perform outside of the paid economy, such as caregiving for children, disabled people, and elderly relatives. The UBI could amount to “wages for housework,” something feminists in the 1970s pushed for. Furthermore, because a UBI aims to pay all individuals and not households, it allows people to make decisions about marriage and cohabitation based their intrinsic desires, not based on tax policies such as the “marriage penalty” that working couples currently face or means-tested welfare programs that withhold benefits from women when their household income increases after marriage. A further benefit for families? With an added, guaranteed boost to their income, women in abusive relationships would have the financial security to leave, even if they lack qualifications or credentials that would enable them to support themselves and their families. UBI would do more than almost any other economic policy imaginable to make women less susceptible to abuse both in the workplace and at home. 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. Most of the arguments against UBI also ring of paternalism. How could we trust that low-income women would use the money to do the things I’ve detailed here? Low-income people, like the rest of their fellow citizens, are generally the best judges of whether a profession or purchase is in their overall interest, and the evidence suggests that recipients of cash transfers generally spend their income on necessities. Trusting women and all people with the right to spend their money how they see fit, as UBI allows, would push back against decades of paternalistic social policy. UBI activists still disagree about whether UBI is a right or a benefit, whether it should be provided in addition to or instead of other benefits, and about how large the UBI should be. But the core case in favor of the UBI—that it has the potential to significantly alleviate poverty and liberate all citizens from many of the injustices associated with the current economic order—is a case that all feminists should get behind.

Thus, we conclude that UBI may be a tool for empowering its recipients, albeit in an established gender-equal welfare state that concerns women and men alike. While UBI is not a universal silver bullet of any kind in enhancing gender equality in a society such as Finland, it may well be that in developing countries or countries with greater gender inequalities. In a highly egalitarian Nordic country, a single change in the benefit system does not affect gender equality. Achieving equality required and still requires decades of development of the benefit-and-service system based on the overarching principle of equality. In sum, the results are sensitive to the context of where the experiment takes place. 4.1. Too Universalising Discussions On the basis of our findings, we argue that the previous academic discussion revolving around UBI is too universalising and does not pay sufficient attention to national contexts. Theoretical reasoning has been universalised in two ways. First, it has often been based on philosophical argumentation without links to any specific social context or welfare state. Second, if it has some links to existing welfare state models, it most often has been Anglo-American, that is, the liberal welfare state [50], which has formed an institutional context wherein the would-be UBI is submersed (however, see [9,21,22,43]). Nevertheless, the results have been, almost without exception, interpreted to apply universally to all welfare states. Each welfare state is a unique institutional entity with its own historical and political background and, consequently, its own institutional context. Thus, we can assume that expected beneficial or detrimental gendered outcomes are different between a country with low gender equality and an established gender-equal welfare state, such as Finland. The institutional context is important, and institutions travel badly. Therefore, the results of the experiments are not directly transferable to other countries. However, we, too, end up with a few universalising comments or, if you like, lessons from the Finnish UBI experiment. In all societies, minimum income protection, either UBI or Finnish residence-based universal basic security, is a necessary condition for fulfilling the grand goals advocated by the protagonists of the basic income concept. However, this is not a sufficient condition to achieve these goals. In addition, we need an amplitude of family policy measures, such as available and affordable childcare, and we need well-functioning healthcare, education, and employment services to support people and societies in their path towards gender equality. Hence, gender equality cannot be achieved by a single social policy measure. The achievement of more equal societies requires several measures that consistently seek to promote that value. A decent level of money is a necessary but insufficient condition for empowering people. As Koslowski and Duvander [39] outline, ‘Money, a floor to stand on, surely helps [to procure freedom], but it will not alone be likely to challenge norms, for example, around parenting practices’. When we want people to change their behaviour to meet shared societal norms, we need different policies that are sufficiently effective to change the practices that produce gender inequality.

“There will not be a magic day when we wake up and it’s now okay to express ourselves publicly. We make that day by doing things publicly until it’s simply the way things are.” US Senator Tammy Baldwin, 2000 This statement of encouraging people to live openly in public, whilst something that has certainly pushed the rights and needs of our community forward, is impossible for many people in the LGBTQ+ community to act upon. Be it for their close family members, or the culture around which they have grown up, living openly is not always a safe option. In fact, according to the UK Government’s LGBT National Survey 2017 (1), 24% of LGBTQ+ people are not open at all with their family, and 29% have experienced an incident with someone they lived with, including but not limited to: verbal harassment, controlling or coercive behaviour, and being outed (having their sexual orientation or gender identity revealed by someone else without consent). This isn’t even to mention the experiences of those in less accepting countries. We may have come a long way legally, and done lots to move public opinion forward, but there is still much to be done. Whilst lowering the number of future incidents, as described above, should be a top priority, it does nothing for the people currently living in these situations. With a Stonewall report (2) finding that 25% of Trans people in Britain had experienced homelessness, and another (3) that 18% had been discriminated against when looking for work because of their orientation and/or identity in the year running up to the report, it is clear that the issue of poverty and discrimination within the LGBTQ+ community is dire and requires drastic solutions. This is where a Universal Basic Income (UBI) comes in. The idea of a UBI isn’t a new one, but it is one which has gained renewed enthusiasm in recent years. The idea is that every person in a country – whether that person is a citizen or simply resident is an issue up for debate – would receive a regular, equal stipend regardless of any and all factors specific to the individual (i.e. race, social class, gender, sexuality, etc.). There are different conceptions of a UBI and no one proposal is universally agreed upon, but the one which I suggest will dramatically reduce the social and economic gap between members and non-members of the LGBTQ+ community is one that, at the very least, supports a minimum standard of living. For reasons I will outline below, it is imperative that members of the LGBTQ+ community are involved in the design process and advocacy of such a policy. For the disproportionate number LGBTQ+ people living in situations such as the ones described above – victims of discrimination, abuse and poverty – a UBI would be a game-changer. Oftentimes, controlling and coercive behaviour involves financial abuse (4), leaving the victim unable to escape their abuser. A UBI that is wired directly to an individual (via their mobile phone or some other source that the victim is more likely to have control over) would provide them with this financial freedom. A UBI that can be accessed before the age of 18 in certain circumstances would provide a safety net for the queer kid that is kicked out of their house or forced to leave because of their gender identity or sexuality. These are just some of the ways in which a UBI policy would need to be designed with the needs of LGBTQ+ in mind, and therefore with LGBTQ+ people involved in the design and implementation process. In addition to the ways in which LGBTQ+ people can, and should, influence UBI advocacy, any version of a UBI that unconditionally provides people with enough of an income to sustain themselves would be a massive help to the LGBTQ+ community, and is one that I recommend our community gets behind. Many transgender people around the world, just as their fellow citizens, have no access to public healthcare. Even those who do can expect to wait extortionately long periods of time to be seen by a publicly funded Gender Identity Clinic, with some people having waited more than 3 years for their first appointments, and the average waiting time in the UK totalling 18 month (5). For those who choose to go for private treatment, they can expect to be met with costs ranging from £10,000 to £100,000 (6). This is, however, a choice they are often forced to make, as those waiting times can be intolerable for a person suffering with severe gender dysphoria. To even get legal recognition of one’s own gender in the UK, in the form of a Gender Recognition Certificate (GRC), requires a fee of £140 (7). In the LGBT National Survey 2017, 34% of those who were aware of GRCs cited them being too expensive as the reason they did not apply for one (8). With this report and Stonewall’s LGBT in Britain Work Report also highlighting the employment and work discrimination faced by queer people in the UK, the need for a basic income – one that can be guaranteed and is given to people regardless of who they are – becomes all too clear. Whilst I am using UK statistics, the core message applies worldwide. Around the world, and even in the UK, not only are LGBTQ+ people facing financial barriers as alluded to above, but some places are a lot less accepting than others, and to even contemplate moving towns or countries is an impossibility for many. A UBI would allow someone to save their money and eventually move to a more accepting place. This is especially important to bear in mind for anyone living somewhere in which LGBTQ+ visibility is non-existent. Advocating for a UBI would be one way in which you could advance your interests and get yourself to a safer location without the need to out yourself, and in a way that might be supported by a much larger proportion of the population than a specifically LGBTQ+ Rights movement. Even for such movements in unaccepting countries, a UBI could indirectly provide funds to organisations where Governments would not, and NGOs might be insufficient or unwelcomed. A person’s attitudes towards queer people often changes the more queer people they know (9). Of course this supports Tammy Baldwin’s view that public visibility will increase public acceptance, but for the many people worldwide who are currently unable to safely do this, a UBI would get them one step closer.

While much research has shed light on the high rate of economic insecurity that LGBTQ people face, the CAP survey presents additional information which shows that LGBTQ people are accessing programs that provide basic living standards at higher rates. This suggests that cuts to benefits such as nutrition assistance, Medicaid, unemployment benefits, and public housing assistance would likely disproportionately harm the LGBTQ community. One of the main ways in which Congress, state governments, and the Trump administration are attempting to cut benefits is by introducing or expanding so-called work requirements, which set strict time limits for a person to receive benefits if they are unable to find work—no matter how hard they are searching—or engaging in a qualifying training program for a certain number of hours per week.36 Research shows that these types of onerous requirements do not help people become stably employed.37 Instead, they hurt struggling workers and exacerbate the barriers they face to gainful employment, since it’s a lot harder to find and keep a job while going hungry or dealing with health issuesThese requirements may be particularly harmful to LGBTQ people.38 Under strict work requirements, LGBTQ people who are fired, laid off, or struggling to find a job due to discrimination may lose the crucial supports they need, such as nutrition assistance or health insurance. Instead of helping reduce barriers to work for LGBTQ people, work requirements would in effect punish them for facing discrimination by taking away their access to nutrition assistance, affordable health insurance, or housing assistance. This is particularly worrisome in the many states that lack a clear law prohibiting anti-LGBTQ employment discrimination, which includes 8 out of the 11 states with approved or pending work requirements for Medicaid.39 Instead of cutting these benefits, Congress and state legislators should be expanding access and providing more funding to ensure that they can better support the people who need them. Even as LGBTQ people and their families reported receiving benefits at a higher rate, there are likely more LGBTQ people who are in need of assistance than are currently receiving it. The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, Medicaid, unemployment benefits, and public programs that provide housing assistance reach only a fraction of the population that needs them and only provide modest benefits. In addition, policies proven to help boost the wages of struggling workers, such as raising the minimum wage and fair scheduling practices, should supplement benefits to ensure that families are better able to put food on the table and keep a roof over their heads.40 Public programs that provide basic living standards should not take the place of employers providing their workers with a living wage and good working conditions. And passing the Equality Act—the federal bill that protects LGBTQ people from discrimination in the workplace, housing, credit, and public accommodations—would help eliminate some of the unique barriers that LGBTQ people face in attaining economic security.41 Lastly, federal agencies collecting data on receipt of benefits should determine whether it’s feasible to collect data on sexual orientation and gender identity. Having more data on the LGBTQ community’s receipt of these benefits would help policymakers make more informed decisions about these programs that take into account the unique needs of the populations they serve. The federal LGBT Data Inclusion Act would ensure that all federal agencies collect sexual orientation and gender identity data as appropriate in data sets and surveys, which would provide information not only on LGBTQ people’s receipt of benefits but also on their economic circumstances and unique needs.42 This would help policymakers combat the disparities that LGBTQ people face and develop solutions to boost their economic well-being. Conclusion LGBTQ people face unique barriers to economic security, and as a result, they face higher rates of poverty, food insecurity, uninsurance, unemployment, and housing insecurity, among other disparities. Unfortunately, since government agencies often do not collect data on sexual orientation and gender identity, limited data exist on the supports that LGBTQ people receive to address some of these disparities. Data from a nationally representative survey conducted by the Center for American Progress in 2017 indicate that LGBTQ people and their families generally receive benefits from programs that provide basic living standards, including the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program and Medicaid, at higher rates than non-LGBTQ people and their families. These findings suggest that ongoing state and federal attacks on these benefits, including the implementation of harsh so-called work requirements, would likely disproportionately harm the LGBTQ community. This underscores the importance of opposing these benefit cuts, fighting to expand these benefits, and implementing other policies that help all people, including those who are LGBTQ, attain economic security.

“Why is welfare policy a gay issue?” In my years as the executive director of Queers for Economic Justice, I was asked this question countless times. For the most part, welfare is not considered “a gay issue.” As I discuss in the introduction to this issue of S&F Online, our national LGBT organizations have a constructed a paradigm of what constitutes “a gay issue” that I find to be too narrow. The same is true for many antipoverty organizations. To assume that the only issues that are queer issues are those that deal exclusively with queer people is to erase the multiplicity of each of our identities. To assume that welfare is not a queer issue is to assume that there are no queer people who are poor or women or people of color or transgender or HIV-positive or immigrants or parents—because all of these groups are directly affected by welfare policy. In addition, to assume that welfare is not a queer issue also assumes that being queer means that we have no connection to what happens to the rest of the world. It assumes that, even if we are well off, we have no interest in what happens to poor people, communities of color, or the labor movement. It also assumes that we will not need their support on “our” issues and thus we can afford to ignore “their” issues. Such myopic thinking has left our political movement isolated and more importantly, it has left the most disenfranchised in our communities without a social safety net. Despite the LGBT movement’s inability to make a connection between welfare rights and gay rights, the right wing of this country definitely sees a connection. Their understanding of the similarities of these two movements can be seen clearly in the strategies with which they have attacked both. There are many similarities between the language and tactics of those fighting against LGBT rights and of those who advocate for the complete end of the social safety net. By understanding the ways the right has used similar methods of oppression against these movements, both movements can be better equipped to fight back collectively. Dismantling the Social Safety Net In 1996, Congress and President Clinton passed and implemented the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRA). With the passing of the PRA, the federal government sharply reduced basic “safety net” programs for low-income individuals, children, families, elderly and disabled people, and immigrants. The bill replaced Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) with Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF). Although it is important to support AFDC, it is also important to recognize that until the 1960s and the rise of the welfare rights movement, AFDC served relatively few single mothers, especially black single mothers; was administered in an arbitrary fashion by local welfare agencies; and highly scrutinized and regulated the lives of women who did receive welfare. The welfare rights movement had made AFDC more of an entitlement in the sense that more people received it and many arbitrary and intrusive practices of local welfare officers were eliminated, at least for a time. As the focus on the PRA was to move people off assistance and into employment, TANF was a block grant program created under the PRA where states received time-limited blocks of money for welfare programs. In order to qualify for these block grant funds, states were required to enact programs aimed at forcing welfare recipients to “work” for their individual or family benefits (without valuing child rearing as work or providing sufficient child care options for those mothers forced to leave their children to go to work). Workfare was a relatively limited program in terms of the numbers of women who formerly would have been eligible for AFDC. The vast majority of low-income single mothers were affected in two ways: 1) by being forced to take low-paying jobs in order to access job-related benefits such as childcare assistance, housing subsidies, transportation vouchers, etc., and; 2) by being sanctioned for not meeting requirements, that is, denied any benefits, including job-related ones. PRA basically allowed states to deny aid to needy families. States are actually prohibited from using block grant money to provide benefits to families receiving aid past a lifetime five-year limit. Welfare changed from a needs-based entitlement program to a short-term aid program. The language of PRA states repeatedly that much of the motivation for this reform is to discourage the irresponsible behavior (code for “laziness,” “unwed motherhood,” etc.) that allegedly leads people to depend on welfare checks. However, the main effect of PRA was not that people had to work for their benefits but that the numbers of single mothers receiving cash assistance plummeted. How did the complete dismemberment of this limited yet important entitlement program come to pass? It happened through years of work by the right wing in this country to demonize the poor, and they did so by using the same tactics they used against LGBT people. For decades the right has been engaged in mounting a moral panic. This moral panic was stimulated by the changing roles of women and queer people; the rise of single motherhood; and changes in economic structures, including deindustrialization in the United States and the expansion of global competition. The right has used hot-button issues like homosexuality and welfare (and abortion and immigration) as a strong rallying cry to draw a complex coalition of people into efforts to stem the tide of change that threatens the historical power and control of rich, white, heterosexual men. The people who are recruited into this coalition, while they tend to be heterosexual, are often those who are not insulated from the consequences of a turbulent and insecure economy. Although they are not the rich, they tend to be invested in their whiteness and marital status as a source of pride and identity. Given these investments in the embodiment of identity, it is not coincidental that these hot-button issues have trafficked in stereotypes and have been based in conservative notions of what families should look like and how much control we can have over our own bodies. Perpetuating Stereotypes In order to justify cutting public assistance and other social welfare programs, the right has been relentless in its use of stereotypes and myths about people receiving welfare. The images of the welfare cheat (who steals for years from taxpayers because he does not want to work), and of the welfare mother (who keeps giving birth to child after child to increase welfare benefits) are two lies that have been successfully seared into the brain of the average American. The idea that welfare has been a strain on the nation’s economy has also become widely accepted. The truth—that even before the Clinton administration’s welfare reform the average adult on welfare was a woman with recent work experience who was caring for children; that the average mother on welfare had only two children; or that even before welfare reform, welfare to the poor amounted to less than 6 percent of the national budget—is apparently completely irrelevant. Similarly, for decades the right has used stereotypes to justify discrimination against LGBT people. Queer people are all too familiar with the long list of stereotypes and myths that have historically been used against us. For example, the myth that we are child molesters, long proven false, still rears its ugly head when conservatives want to challenge our ability to adopt children or to openly serve as teachers. Negative stereotypes such as these about welfare recipients and about LGBT people have been used to control public opinion and to promote specific social policies. By constantly perpetuating these stereotypes in the media, the right has enabled them to become part of the public discourse and embedded them in the public consciousness. This makes it easier for politicians to tap into these public sentiments to create social policy based upon these stereotypes. One of the stereotypes that has been perpetuated about both poor people and queer people is the idea that these groups have made bad lifestyle choices. By depicting poverty and queerness as simple choices that could be easily changed if one truly desired, the right has created an excuse for the American people to ignore (or worsen) the problems faced by those populations. The poor are depicted as lazy or irresponsible people who are choosing not to work. The facts—that they may not have the education or skills needed to find a job; that they may have health problems that prevent them from working; or the reality that there are not jobs available—are ignored. Instead, the right perpetuates a myth that depicts poor people as choosing to take advantage of a society that cannot afford it. Right-wing leaders also seem to love discussing single motherhood as simply a bad choice. They have succeeded in creating in the public the unfounded (and illogical) belief that poor women are casually, lazily, selfishly choosing to have extra children so that they can get an extra three dollars a day in welfare from the government. Queer people are also accustomed to being depicted as having made a bad “lifestyle” choice. Right-wing editorials, position papers, lobbying, ad campaigns, and sermons continue to talk about homosexuality as a destructive choice that can be easily unchosen by those who see the error of their ways. Nowhere in their arguments is there room for the idea that most people (straight or queer) believe that changing their orientations is not an option. And even less acceptable is the idea that people who do actively choose homosexuality have made a perfectly good choice. Both groups are also told that their sexual behavior is a bad choice. Single mothers are accused of irresponsible sexual behavior and left to raise their children without financial support, in the same way that people with AIDS were accused of irresponsible sexual behavior and left to die without support. Having been depicted by the right as guilty of making bad choices, the gay community should be especially skeptical when we see those same tactics being used against poor people. Regulating Behavior A big part of the 1996 welfare reform was directed at lowering the rate of “illegitimate” pregnancies among women on welfare. Through “family caps,” the government denied benefits for additional children born to women on welfare. In addition, the PRA provided 100 million dollars to be divided among the top five states that reduced “out-of-wedlock” births without increasing abortions. Those rules represented legislators’ efforts to tell poor women what they can and cannot do with their bodies, as politicians attempted to impose their morality upon poor citizens by denying them basic safety net survival provisions. The rules imposed by the PRA are not unlike the Hyde Amendment, which banned the use of federal funds for abortions, making it harder for poor women to get abortions, but had no effect on wealthier women who could afford to pay for abortions themselves. Other efforts exist to control the reproductive behavior of poor women, such as the program in Kansas that provided free Norplant (a five year sterilization) to women on welfare. All of these efforts parallel the way the government has used social policy to deny LGBT people control over their own bodies. We live in a country with a history of multiple states outlawing consensual oral or anal sexual intercourse for heterosexual or homosexual couples, and other states applying those laws exclusively to homosexual couples. Throughout our history, penalties for engaging in sodomy have ranged from death to a 500 dollar fine to a 20-year prison sentence. Transgender people are confronted with government control of their bodies every day. In a society where gender is narrowly defined (by mainstream culture, by doctors, by mental health organizations, and, of course, by government) in dichotomous terms, transgender people are constantly being told to use their bodies in ways that are not natural for them. Deviation from cultural and legal norms is severely stigmatized, and the government often fails to protect transgender people from the resulting violence. These examples illustrate how elected officials have imposed very serious consequences for LGBT people and welfare recipients who do not comply with what the government considers appropriate uses of our bodies. It is rare that LGBT organizations publicly make this connection between these two populations. Many (but not all) in the LGBT movement have made the connection between sodomy laws and the anti-abortion movement; many queer people understand the connection between controlling women’s reproductive rights and controlling LGBT people’s sexual activities. However, the connection of LGBT people to welfare reform’s family caps has not often been made explicit. We must fight any attempt to legislate sexuality, regardless of who is being targeted. Promoting “Family Values” “We need a system that can support people who are trying to do the right thing—who choose the right marriage partner, get married and have children.” 1 This quote, from Christian American magazine in 1995, was made by Christian conservative, then presidential candidate Alan Keyes. It summarizes his views on both welfare and gay families. His rhetoric, like that of most on the far right, is so similar when it comes to these two issues that it is impossible to distinguish about which subject he was speaking. (In this case, it was welfare.) The right’s relentless promotion of the “traditional” family is very much connected to (but separate from) the issue of government control of our bodies. The right portrays both welfare recipients and LGBT people as threats to its notion of family. One of the most popular welfare myths conjured by the right is that of the pregnant, unwed, black welfare mother whose constant state of pregnancy and unrepentant laziness are not only a strain on the economy, but also a threat to traditional families everywhere. Despite the fact that this stereotype is not accurate, it is used relentlessly by the right to promote its own agenda, which is symbolized by a very particular family structure. This ideal family is comprised of a heterosexual married couple with children (and this family is usually white and headed by the father). Right-wing leaders have been very upfront and consistent in claiming that one of the goals of welfare reform is to stigmatize single motherhood and to promote two-parent married households. This stereotype of the pregnant, black, unwed welfare mother has been used as a link in portraying all unmarried mothers (across class and racial lines) as dangerous threats to the institution of marriage, contributing to the breakdown of families everywhere. The cries of concern about increased “illegitimacy” rates are voiced by those who describe the breakdown of the “traditional” family as heralding the downfall of the entire society. As right-wing pundit Ann Coulter claims in her 2009 book Guilty, “Countless studies on the subject make [it] clear, look at almost any societal problem, and you’ll find it is really a problem of single mothers.” 2 Similarly, the right also portrays LGBT people as threats to the traditional family unit (and blame them for all of the societal ills that allegedly follow). Gay marriage is depicted by conservative political and religious leaders as capable of undoing centuries of heterosexual marital bliss. (This is despite the fact that many queer people believe that gay marriage is essentially a conservative element of the LGBT movement’s agenda, which, through the emulation of heterosexual rituals actually reinforces the validity of the institution of marriage, instead of challenging or undermining it). Right-wing religious organizations have also lobbied relentlessly against domestic partnership and queer adoption rights. The right clearly has a deep investment in sustaining the patriarchal structure of American society. To maintain its powerful and influential position, the right uses these unfounded warnings about the threats presented to families by welfare illegitimacy and by homosexuality. Any discussion by the right about “illegitimate pregnancies” and family structures immediately has implications for LGBT parents. The LGBT movement must recognize the dangers that exist for us when the Right attacks welfare recipients in order to promote a two-parent heterosexual family. Rewarding ‘Deserving’ Families The right has lobbied hard for tax breaks for some families. For example, around the same time as welfare was being dismantled, right-wing Senator Don Nickels sponsored the bill S.1134 that would provide family tax relief. This bill essentially provided welfare to middle-class families with stay-at-home mothers (but not to working mothers, divorced mothers, single mothers, etc.). As explained earlier, tax breaks are forms of welfare that come without the stigma that accompanies welfare to the poor. Impoverished families and single mothers that rely on TANF are told by our elected officials that they are undeserving of government aid in support of their efforts to raise their children. And yet, those same right-wing politicians then turn around and advocate for that same aid to families with mothers who fit their “traditional” image of family. The poor are not the only ones who do not fit that traditional image. The right (in its battles against LGBT marriage, domestic partnership, and adoption rights) has also lobbied relentlessly against any government recognition of LGBT families. For example, the same Senator Nickels was also the prime sponsor of two other bills that forbade gay marriages (and eventually evolved into and passed as the Defense of Marriage Act). This means that those tax breaks (welfare) that Nickels wanted for middle-class families would only be available to heterosexual middle-class families. The right has been very clear about determining what kind of family is entitled to government aid, and LGBT people must realize that we are placed with poor single mothers on the “undeserving” side in this equation. Blaming the Victims The conservatives in this country have a long history of blaming people for situations beyond their control. Conservative attacks upon poor people and LGBT people are very similar in this way. Poor people on welfare are portrayed as being responsible for their own poverty. Either they are too lazy to work, or they lack employable skills, or they never developed a proper work ethic and habits. As a result, workfare programs (like NYC’s Work Experience Program) were immediately set up after welfare reform, with the goal of teaching employable skills, ethics, and habits to welfare recipients, while punishing those too “lazy” to participate. However, missing from these discussions is the reality of life in the United States: There are not enough jobs. Even when the economy was booming, as it was during the Clinton era, there were still more people than there are available jobs. And there will never be enough jobs. In order to keep wages competitively low, capitalism, by design, will never allow for full employment. While making welfare recipients work has appeal for conservatives as a punitive measure, it requires an answer to the question: Work at what jobs? Perpetuating the idea that the poor are responsible for their own poverty and mandating that they receive job training will not change the fact that there will never be enough jobs available for them once they are trained. This issue is a complicated one, and yet the right does not present it as such. They are content to present it as a simple problem (people on welfare are lazy) with a simple solution (let them get jobs like the rest of us.) Queer people are familiar with the tactic of blaming the victim. The example of AIDS is a clear one. When the epidemic began in this country, gay men who were infected were called “too promiscuous” and blamed for the disease, whereas heterosexual people (particularly those who contracted AIDS through blood transfusions or “cheating” husbands) were presented as “innocent” victims who did not deserve their fate. That reality has not changed sufficiently—a gay man who contracts AIDS through sexual contact will likely be blamed (“well, he should have known better by now”) for his circumstance. Discussions of black gay men on the “down low” continue to be dominated by a public discourse that simplistically vilifies men for not being safe enough to come out. The conservative organization Focus on the Family made this very clear in a 1999 article, “Homosexuals Live Dangerously, Demand Protection.” The article stated that gay men “take sexual risks” and “live dangerously” and “then turn to Health and Human Services to take care of them.” Gay men were worse than other risk takers, according to the article, because “skydivers and balloonists never insist that the government set aside millions of dollars to pay for their accidents.” 3 The appeal of blaming the victim is clear. It abdicates society from responsibility and deflects it onto the individual. Rather than looking for the larger, harder solutions for AIDS (finding a cure or providing access to care for all people with AIDS [PWAs] until a cure is found or establishing universal health care) or for welfare (creating jobs or acknowledging that full employment will never happen and planning accordingly), it is much easier to blame PWAs or the poor for their own problems. The LGBT community must advocate for a government that provides basic survival support for all of our members. We must realize that an injury to one is an injury to all. When we remain silent and allow society to determine who is and who is not deserving of help, we will inevitably be placed in the “undeserving” category.

In an effort to generate critical self- reflexivity on practices of Orientalism and Occidentalism there has been a proliferation of discourses on ‘strategic Orientalism’, ‘techno Orientalism’ and ‘military Orientalism’ as discussed below. Keith Krause and Andrew Latham (1998) argue that practices of ‘strategic orientalism’ constitute the ‘foundation of Western security culture’ (Krause & Latham, 1998, p. 41). They assert that strategic orientalism is premised on the ‘pervasive and axiomatic belief that the West (or occasionally the United States) as a civilization has a special role to play in global security affairs’’ (Krause & Latham, 1998, pp. 41, 37). This is based on ‘a reading of the politico-strategic objectives and purposes of Third World states that is informed more by Western fears and prejudices than by the realities of politics in these states’ (Krause & Latham, 1998, p. 38). The deep-rooted fear of the attacking Asian hordes and their ability to industrialize and develop sophisticated weapons reinforces twenty-first century concerns about the ‘Rising East’. This ‘phenomenon of imagining Asia and Asians in hypo-or hypertechnological terms in cultural productions and political discourse’ is understood as ‘techno-Orientalism’ (Roh et al., 2015, p. 2). Practices of techno-Orientalism driven by ‘imperial aspirations’ and ‘appetites of consumerist societies’ are ‘infused with the languages and codes of the technological and futuristic’ and in ‘digital spaces abound with reinscribed racial tropes and stereotypes; these are sites in which racialization is more likely reinforced than challenged’ (Roh et al., 2015, p. 14). Scholars developing the concept of techno-Orientalism observe its ‘growing prevalence in the Western cultural consciousness’ and suggest that the ‘US techno Orientalist imagination has its roots in the view of Asian body…as a form of expendable technology’ (Roh et al., 2015, pp. 7–11). Nevertheless they insist that the scope of techno-Orientalism is ‘expansive and bi-directional’ and ponder on the ‘danger that Asian and Asian American creators…might internalize techno Orientalist patterns and uncritically replicate the same dehumanizing model’ (Roh et al., 2015, pp. 3, 7). In investigating the intimacy of a relationship it might be possible to glean and ‘retrieve recessive images and practices’ that have been historically constituted through a network of social relations and processes (Naeem & David, 2004, p. 191). These might present creative opportunities to move beyond ‘policing boundaries of self as an exclusive and homogenous space’ and instead ‘appreciate and claim the self that exists as part of the other beyond those boundaries’ (Naeem & David, 2004, p. 204). Porter insists on ‘the interactive and power-political nature of war, which has a culture of its own that can change all parties to a conflict’ (2013, p. 55). Porter claims that, ‘paradoxically, war can drive cultures closer together’ (2013, p. 33). This is because, ‘war…is not simply a clash of Others, made possible by an ignorant horror of difference. The warrior looks out at the enemy and sees men who are, in crucial respects, recognizably like himself’ (Porter, 2013, p. 34). He also argues that an engagement with, ‘the foreign “Other” can be treated as a superior model to inform self-examination’ (2013, p. 108). But this hopeful promise of Military Orientalism has not stemmed the tide of populist discourses deploying the dynamic of difference between ‘The West and the Rest’ in the aftermath of the Cold War to wage and perpetuate a global War on Terror. On the contrary it is possible to argue that there is deliberate and contingent deployment of a ‘decivilizing rhetoric that blends irrational, aggressive, rigid, paranoid and exceptionalist discourses to demonize Other-ness’ and give ‘unwarranted authority and autonomy’ to ‘militarist and imperialist discourses of national security’ (Taylor, 2007, p. 670). There is ‘sustained use of decivilizing imagery’ that ‘represents the United States as a virtuous nation reluctantly but legitimately fulfilling its divine mandate to use civilized reason and superior force’ vis-a vis ‘nuclear capable and aspiring nations in Asia, Africa and the Middle East’ depicted in a ‘racist, sexist language that reproduces colonial ideology. As such it rejects the authority and legitimacy of these nations as potential possessors of nuclear weapons and solidifies continued dominance by the United States of the nuclear strategic environment’ (Taylor, 2007, p. 685). The strength of these populist discourses reinforcing a dynamic of difference and denial is exhibited with the contemporary ‘malpractice’ of the Trump administration to not respect the nuclear deal negotiated with Iran (Kimball, 2018). Nuclear weapons have long been regarded as ‘a new technological deity’ and ‘a divinely offered gift that endorsed American exceptionalism and imbued its creators with God-like power and the mission to restore order and justice in a fallen world.’ (Taylor, 2007, p. 677). Gabrielle Hecht (2012) defines nuclear exceptionalism as ‘insistence on an essential nuclear difference – manifested in political claims, technological systems, cultural forms, institutional infrastructures, and scientific knowledge’ and insists ‘nuclear exceptionalism could be made, unmade, and remade’ as ‘for all efforts at making nuclear things exceptional, there were opposing attempts to render them banal’ (Hecht, pp. 6– 8). It is important to bear this in mind as this pernicious dynamic of difference and exceptionalism becomes even more acute with current US President Donald Trump’s everyday populist declarations. He is on record for stating that the US will be at the ‘top of the pack’ ‘until such time as the world comes to its senses regarding nukes’ (Holland, 2017). In his recent visit to Poland ‘to summon the courage and the will to defend our civilization’ Trump (2017) claims ‘there are dire threats to our security and our way of life’ and argues, ‘the fundamental question of our time is whether the West has the will to survive.’ There is little doubt in his mind of the ‘triumph’ of the West (Holland, 2017). It is therefore helpful to pause in this tumultuous ‘history of the present’ and suggest that ‘every identity owes a debt to alterity’ (Naeem & David, 2004, p. 8). Thus it is interesting to observe how the existing literature on ‘dynamic of difference’ between Orientalism and Occidentalism has expanded its arsenal with a more complex conceptual apparatus of Strategic Orientalism, Techno Orientalism and Military Orientalism to helps us grasp the everyday practices of techno-racial dynamic of differences that cultivate and nurture techno-racial stereotypes. These stereotypes more often than not dictate modes of behavior that make the Other ‘a monster that must not only be defeated but also utterly destroyed…an enemy who no longer must be compelled to retreat into his borders only’ (Schmitt, 2007). It is this ‘dynamic of difference’ with its persistent desire to annihilate the Other, makes one wonder, whether it is not a complementary sub-text for an increasingly alarming and growing superstructure of a ‘dynamic of denial’ in weapons control? A dynamic of denial so petulant that it casts its shadow in celebrating the recent success of a Nuclear Weapons Ban Treaty (2017).

Much of the rest of their introduction attempts to answer common criticisms. First, whereas carbon and other greenhouse gas emissions tend to crowd out many other considerations for a sustainable niche, in degrowth discourses, these are often inadequately addressed. With the focus on decreasing material throughput overall, questions of investment in renewable energy are given relatively scant attention, as Pollin correctly observes. Degrowth advocates don’t seem to want to even countenance the idea that there might indeed be a growth bubble driven by the clearly needed, extreme investment in renewable energy since a simultaneous retirement of fossil fuel energy sources is required if a degrowth trajectory is overall desired. Such investment would generate economic growth, and thus flies in the face of degrowth principles. Yet, a “pure” degrowth program couldn’t possibly achieve emissions targets as quickly.

Second is the question of growth in the Global South. The authors concede that countries in the South will need to grow in standard terms to satisfy basic needs: “Indeed, degrowth in the North will liberate ecological space for growth in the South. Poverty in the South is the outcome of the exploitation of its natural and human resources at low cost by the North. Degrowth will reduce demand for, and the prices of, natural resources and industrial goods, making them more accessible to the developing South.”Footnote115 Here, the internal inconsistencies of the argument show more clearly. On the one hand, degrowth is simply too diffuse a set of ideas to adequately address this question. On the other, degrowth’s origins are interventions in fundamentally liberal policy debates. An idea of the extractive practices of colonization is operative here, but absent is an acknowledgement that this extraction is rooted in the very structure of imperial domination—a structure of unequal distribution of power which is not wholly explicable from the quantitative aspects of the practices of extraction (i.e. those enabling growth). There is no real theory of the political economy of geopolitics (i.e. imperialism) at play. Returning to the extractive circuit, it is not simply a question of supply and demand. A popular sovereign DRC fundamentally alters the ability of capital to recoup profits. A sufficiently strong political force in wealthy states would, far short of a transition to socialism, try to extract funds from existing accumulated wealth to purchase the resources now in higher demand. This is a good thing, as it is the most likely channel for actual redistribution of wealth from North to South. Regional and other forms of alternative cooperative institutional infrastructure is necessary to regulate South-South relations, or to set different prices, or to facilitate the quick development and exchange of vital technologies, etc. Factors of geopolitical power—from the enforcement of intellectual property to the simple continued reality of American military hegemony—are structural questions (that is, regarding the structured distribution of power within the modern world system). The North has far more of a role to play here beyond reducing its overdevelopment. As I’ve noted elsewhere, twenty-first century socioecological conditions mark probably the first time in modern history in which basic self-interests connect majorities in South and North.Footnote116 Whereas it was once rational in a narrow way for majorities in the capitalist core to favor nationalist compromise and imperial domination, political economic shifts, particularly globalization and the structure of the major twenty-first century multinational firms—alongside palpable socioecological realities—have undermined even the limited rank self-interest of such arrangements. Instead, despite the still staggering global differences, the kinds of changes necessary for a sustainable global human ecological niche have the potential to build from the same narrow basic self-interest in ways that converge across many lines, North and South included.

Income inequality is a feature of neoliberalism in theory and in practice. In theory, neoliberal economists have argued that a free and unfet- tered market would make the most efficient use of scarce resources (Friedman, 1962; Hayek, 1944). It purportedly does so by rewarding actors unequally on the basis of the unequal effort and ingenuity they demonstrate in the market. In practice, neoliberalism has grown income and wealth inequality to levels unseen since the gilded age. Thomas Piketty’s (2014) Capital in the Twenty-First Century extensively cata- logues the evidence for this. Piketty also highlights the clear disjunction between how neoliberal theory explains and justifies inequality and how and why inequality typically develops and flourishes under actually existing neoliberal regimes.

The Covid-19 pandemic has given rise to new questions about inequality. One such question concerns whether, or how, neoliberal theory could explain the massive widening of the income gap generated, not by the market ‘doing its job’, so to speak, but by the pandemic necessitating the suspension of certain ways of working, to the detri- ment of portions of society that were already hard done by under actually existing neoliberal economies. And more than how neoliberal theory might explain it, the pressing question is how neoliberal politics would propose to deal with it. This is the central question of this chapter. I seek to explore a solution to the economic inequality that has resulted from lower-earning people losing income and taking on more debt as a result of pandemic, whilst simultaneously, higher-earning people retained a greater portion of their (disposable) income and grew their savings throughout the pandemic. This is a phenomenon I shall call "pandemic inequality".

The time has now come to remember that several of the most famous arguments in favour of socialism have focused on its superior dynamic efficiency, on its greater ability to generate new productive resources, rather than on its being better at using existing ones. For example, the theory of the falling rate of pro fit, when interpreted as a theory of breakdown rather than of crises, aims to show that capitalism is bound to become ever worse at accumulating capital, while the famous assertion, central to historical materialism, that the development of the productive forces tends to become ‘fettered’ under capitalism is most naturally interpreted as a claim about capitalism's systematically suboptimal choice of techniques. One may wonder, however, whether such arguments are relevant at all from a real-libertarian point of view. Accumulation and technical progress increase the productive potential of future generations. By doing so, they can no doubt improve the real freedom of the least-advantaged in those generations. But the saving required for accumulation and the research and development required for technical progress represent a cost to the present generation, a diversion of resources that could have been used to improve the situation of its worst off member. And it would, therefore, be illegitimate to keep this member's real freedom down in order to increase beyond this level the real freedom of the worst off in the next generation.42 If it could be shown that, say, socialism is far better than capitalism in terms of dynamic efficiency thus conceived, it would follow that the real freedom that can be granted to the worst off in the current generation of a society that has been socialist for some generations is greater, ceteris paribus, than had it been capitalist all along. But the question is not whether it is better, from a real-libertarian perspective, that a society should have been socialist rather than capitalist for some generations, but whether it is better, for the sake of the real freedom of its (present or future) worst off member, that it should opt for socialism now.

And yet, from a real-libertarian perspective, dynamic efficiency considerations are of crucial importance. Remember that the unconditional income must be pitched at a level that is sustainable across generations. If there is demographic growth, it is obvious enough that this requires economic growth at the same pace, and hence that a regime which fosters accumulation and technical progress more than others do, for a given current level of basic income, will enjoy an important advantage. In a dynamically less efficient economy, the current level of basic income may prove unsustainable in the next, more numerous, generation, whereas it is not in the dynamically more efficient economy. Even in the absence of demographic growth, and hence in the absence of a (justice-based) need for net growth, dynamic efficiency is still of crucial importance. If, again for a given current level of basic income, one regime has a greater propensity to accumulate and innovate, and hence expand production, it follows that it has more leeway for increasing the basic income now above its current level and hence has the potential for sustaining a higher basic income across generations. Thus, the optimal regime —basic income level included—need not be the one with the highest rate of growth. With a stationary population, it need not even have a positive rate of growth. Yet, having a greater propensity to grow—displaying, subject to the usual constraints, a higher rate of accumulation and/or technical progress at given levels of basic income—provides a socio-economic regime with a highly relevant advantage in terms of real-freedom-for-all.43 As we shall see later (§ 6.7), whether a particular socio-economic regime does better or worse than another in terms of dynamic efficiency so conceived may crucially depend on the level of basic income that features in the background of the comparison. Throughout the present section, however, I shall abstract from this possibility and tacitly assume that a regime's greater dynamic efficiency (its systematically higher rate of capital accumulation and/or technical progress) at, say, a zero level of basic income, means ipso facto that there will be more available for distribution in the form of a basic income.

I begin with a terminological point. The politics of redistribution, as I shall understand it here, encompasses not only classcentered orientations, such as New Deal liberalism, social democracy, and socialism, but also those forms of feminism and anti-racism that look to socioeconomic transformation or reform as the remedy for gender and racial-ethnic injustice. Thus, it is broader than class politics in the conventional sense. The politics of recognition, likewise, encompasses not only movements aiming to revalue unjustly devalued identities, such as cultural feminism, black cultural nationalism, and gay identity politics but also deconstructive tendencies, such as queer politics, critical “race” politics, and deconstructive feminism, which reject the “essentialism” of traditional identity politics. Thus, it is broader than identity politics in the conventional sense.

With these definitions, I mean to contest one widespread misunderstanding of these matters. It is often assumed that the politics of redistribution is exclusively concerned with injustices of class, whereas the politics of recognition, reductively equated with “identity politics,” is exclusively concerned with injustices of gender, sexuality, and “race.” This view is erroneous and misleading. It treats recognition-oriented currents within the feminist, antiheterosexist, and antiracist movements as the whole story, rendering invisible alternative currents dedicated to righting genderspecific, “race”-specific, and sex-specific forms of economic injustice that traditional class movements ignored. The definitions proposed here, in contrast, take account of such currents by treating redistribution and recognition as dimensions of justice that can cut across all social movements.