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Hamilton ’18 (Leah Hamilton, Assistant Professor of Social Work at Appalachian State University, received a BSW from Metropolitan State University of Denver, an MSW from the University of Denver and a PhD in Public Policy at the University of Arkansas. “Why Welfare Doesn’t Work: And What We Should Do Instead” 06/29/18 ), dani

Democrats and Republicans don’t see eye to eye very often, but they can safely agree on one point: welfare doesn’t work. Liberals are concerned that an ever-shrinking social safety net reaches fewer and fewer families in need. Republicans worry that welfare benefits create dependence. They are both right.

Ayanna Pressley 21 [Congresswoman (MA-07), 2/18/21, “Federal Job Guarantee Resolution,” ] //mh

Job Guarantee Projects

Greenstein 19, was Administrator of the Food and Nutrition Service at the U.S. Department of Agriculture under President Carter, where he directed the agency that operates the federal food assistance programs, such as the food stamp and school lunch programs, and helped design the landmark Food Stamp Act of 1977, generally regarded as the Carter Administration’s principal anti-poverty achievement. He was appointed by President Clinton in 1994 to serve on the Bipartisan Commission on Entitlement and Tax Reform and headed the federal budget policy component of the transition team for President Obama. He is a graduate of Harvard College and has received honorary doctorates from Tufts University, Occidental College, and Haverford College (Rob, “Commentary: Universal Basic Income May Sound Attractive But, If It Occurred, Would Likelier Increase Poverty Than Reduce It,” CBPP, ) dmr

Universal vs. Means-Tested Programs

Hemel and Fleischer 17, * Professor of Law, University of San Diego School of Law, **Assistant Professor of Law, University of Chicago Law School (“Atlas Nods: The Libertarian Case for a Basic Income,” Chicago Unbound, https://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=13519&context=journal_articles)

Moreover, by evaluating a UBI on libertarian grounds while writing for an audience of both libertarians and non-libertarians, we respond to a demand from non-libertarian UBI supporters for a fuller understanding of the libertarian basis for a UBI. Currently, many nonlibertarian supporters of a UBI are hesitant to ally with their libertarian fellow travelers. They fear that a UBI could be a “Trojan horse” offered by libertarians and capitalists seeking ultimately to dismantle the welfare state.11 Here, we look inside the horse to see whether it is indeed hollow, and conclude that it is not. Libertarianism offers normative support for pursuing a UBI as a permanent policy objective. Of course, whether or not we think a UBI is consistent with libertarian principles does not reveal the motives of other UBI supporters. We do think, though, that our examination of the libertarian bases for a UBI will help non-libertarians evaluate the sincerity of their potential coalition partners, and will give them greater confidence that committed libertarians can support a UBI as an end in itself rather than a mere waystation on the road toward the evisceration of the welfare state.

Selena Simmons-Duffin 23 [Simmons-Duffin reports on health policy for NPR, 5/24/23, “In some states, hundreds of thousands dropped from Medicaid,” ] //mh

States have begun to remove people from Medicaid, something they could not do for three years during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Meredith Lee Hill and Garrett Downs, 3/13/2023, food and agriculture policy reporters for POLITICO. "Republicans launch opening salvo against food aid," POLITICO, https://www.politico.com/news/2023/03/13/republicans-snap-benefits-cuts-00086638

House Republicans are taking their first shot at slashing federal spending on nutrition programs for low-income Americans. It won’t be their last.

Chris Shirley 2/22/2023, marketing and public relations specialist, "SNAP Benefits Will Decrease For Millions," Navigate Housing, https://www.navigatehousing.com/snap-benefits-will-decrease-for-millions/

SNAP benefits will decrease for millions of low-income households this Spring. The program, formerly known as food stamps, received a significant boost during the beginning of the COVID-19 Pandemic. Those protections will soon expire as lawmakers discuss the program’s future in Farm Bill discussions. The decrease also goes against the Biden Administration’s plan to expand SNAP benefits and end hunger by 2030. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities found more than 38 million people benefited from SNAP before to the pandemic in 2019. As COVID-19 swept across America, Congress raised all benefits by 15% and boosted each household to the maximum benefit for the size. The USDA approximates at least a $95 increase for every household. While the pandemic boosts to SNAP benefits will expire, the future of the program’s funding is uncertain. Lawmakers in Washington, D.C. are working on a new, multi-year Farm Bill. Nutrition programs, like SNAP, accounted for 76% of the last Farm Bill passed in 2018. SNAP Benefits is the largest Anti-Hunger program in the nation, according to the USDA. The program has bipartisan support. However, several leaders voiced concern over the program during a recent Senate agriculture committee hearing. Sen. John Boozman is a ranking committee member sharing his concern. Boozman calls the pandemic boost to SNAP Benefits “unsustainable.” Moreover, he points to SNAP costs increasing 94% since the last Farm Bill passed five years ago. “When one program constitutes more than 80% of the spending in the next farm bill, and thereby effectively crowds out the ability to make crucial investments in every other title, is there really any room left for farmers in the traditional farm bill coalition?” Boozman said during the hearing. What’s Next for SNAP Benefits and The Farm Bill? Sen. John Boozman joins other Lawmakers on Capitol Hill, calling for more strict work requirements for SNAP benefits. Before COVID-19, 20 hours of work per week, or job training was required to be in the program. However, those requirements were paused because of the pandemic. The Food Research and Action Center estimates the average recipient will lose $82 starting in March 2023. The decrease comes as record inflation continues to fuel the increase of food costs Nationwide. As Farm Bill discussions continue, more lawmakers are targeting SNAP benefits spending as discussions about decreasing the national debt continue. Lawmakers have until October 1, 2023, to pass an extension or a new Farm Bill. Otherwise, millions who rely on ‘food stamps’ face even further economic uncertainty this Fall.

Jim Tankersley and Alan Rappeport, 5/29/2023, White House correspondent for The New York Times with a focus on economic policy and over a decade of experience covering politics and economics in Washington, economic policy reporter at The New York Times based in Washington who covers the Treasury Department and other fiscal matters, “New Details in Debt Limit Deal: Where $136 Billion in Cuts Will Come From,” The New York Times, https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/29/us/politics/debt-ceiling-agreement.html

Caps and cuts spending

A third strand of IPE involves a broadening of focus to include systems of human activities and social relations (Haagh 1999, 2019a, b; Pagano 1991, 2017). In human IPE, the notion of hybrid property is extended to encompass mechanisms that protect human development processes, thus generating property rights in stability through a combination of developmental protective institutions and policies (Haagh 2012). This permits a wider measure of freedom as a state of well-being that is informed by stability in place and activities (Haagh 2019a). It also points to wider measures of how such a state is protected. To illustrate: human IPE suggests that we should distinguish between four senses of property. Firstly, we need to distinguish between material and nonmaterial property, or owning a particular thing or resource, and enjoying a state. Secondly, we need to distinguish between legal and institutional meanings of owning. For Basic Income, the important point concerns the way in which the substance and impacts on freedom of legal titles are shaped by the development of hybrid property in human development.

Hybridity represents higher levels of formalisation of economic life, and higher levels of resource sharing, and transparency in the form that this sharing takes. Hybridity is therefore a condition for the flourishing of social and economic rights, and Basic Income is no exception. As a relevant example, Ugo Colombino (2009) have shown that tax neutral financing of Basic Income is most plausible in societies with high levels of formal female inclusion. Human IPE also ofers a frame for understanding why public support for occupational life—the development of a dimension of occupational citizenship (Haagh 1999, 2002a)—relies on a composite number of social rights. In all, human IPE enables a deeper, multi-level, analytical filter that enables us to consider and compare Basic Income claims and debate across time and space. We can assume that the form and extent of the formalisation of the human economy shape the form of feasibility—and the views prevailing concerning—potential effects and trade-offs connected with reform in the direction of Basic Income. This formalisation is central to enabling substantive social equality.

A fourth strand of IPE linked with interpreting the expansion of financial economies in the context of global marketisation is helpful in further illuminating the consequences for Basic Income narrative of changing global conditions. In formal vernacular, Financialised Capitalism (FC) refers to a global-level transformation in the logic of capitalism beginning in the 1970s with the breakdown of the Bretton Woods managed financial system, and evolving over time through successive stages. For example, Lapavitsas (2009: 1) refers to financialisation as ‘a structural transformation of core capitalist economies that has gathered momentum since the crisis of 1973–4’. Formally, financialisation can be measured by the level of commercialisation of assets. For example, Krippner (2005: 174–175) describes fnancialisation as ‘a pattern of accumulation in which profits accrue primarily through financial channels rather than through trade and commodity production’. However, many scholars argue that the process of financialisation cannot be separated from structural inequalities (Stockhammer 2013: 944). This is important to bear in mind when considering how far Basic Income can offer a response. Financialised uprooting creates not only a personalisation of responsibility, but also inability to support this responsibility, individually or publicly.

As many development economists have argued (Minsky 1993: 18–24; see Sen 2015; Stockhammer 2013: 945), the central problem in development is not levels of debt in terms of GDP, but rather whether productive systems are in place to stabilise and sustain debt, and insulate individuals and firms. For example, average household debt in terms of GDP is higher in some of the wealthier and more equal countries in Europe compared with some of the most fnancially unstable and unequal economies in Latin America. Denmark’s ratio was 131.7 in 2017, and in the same year the ratio was 127.8 in Switzerland, and 93.7 in the UK, compared with 7.1 in Argentina, 37.0 in Chile, and 50.1 in the EU as a whole (CEIC 2018). At the same time, there is significant, and on some measures growing, inequality between mature economies in terms of the ability of average and low-income households’ to service debt (Grant and Padula 2018), which similarly relates to differences in structural inequalities and regulatory capacities. In Nordic countries such as Sweden, Denmark and the Netherlands, the percentage of arrears was 3.5, 2.2 and 1.0% respectively, whereas in Mediterranean Europe it ranged from 14.2% in Greece, to 2.9% in Italy. Ability to repay is greater among higher earners, the better educated, older people, and among couples. Households in arrears are more likely to have seen earnings fall. Unsecured debt has risen faster in countries with weaker regulation, even after the crisis. For example, the level and rise of unsecured debt were much higher in the UK compared with other OECD states in the 2010s (Stockhammer 2013: 29–31). In contrast, the rate of unsecured and debt arrears are much lower in Denmark, despite higher indebtedness compared with both the UK and South and Eastern Europe, regions which face greater risk as a result of inability to service debt (Civic Consulting 2013: 3–5), linked with relatively lower take-home income, rooted in higher inequality.

To surmise, the cases examined bear out how contexts of economic liberalisation forefront the Inequality Paradox, whereby Basic Income presumes and sets forth equality of standing, yet it relies on, whilst being unable to create, substantive equality (Haagh 2019d). In a context of unstable public development fnance, the scope for a genuinely life-long Basic Income, and hence the permanent sense of security rightly envisaged as key to the emancipatory efects of a Basic Income, are hard to conceive. Neo-liberalisation threatens to disrupt the reality or intended effect of some of the core features of Basic Income in practice.

Te frst feature is permanence. Te idea of a Basic Income for life is implicit in classic texts, as far back as Spence. Envisaging Basic Income as permanent is not only a feature of its universality, but is an essential component part of Basic Income as advocates view it. It is a form of property. Yet, in debates about Basic Income since 2016, particularly but not only in developing countries, the permanent character of Basic Income has all but vanished from view. Although much of the scholarly literature on Basic Income assumes that Basic Income has internal integrity as a life-long structure of individual security sufcient to live on, a range of usage-meanings have the implication that a Basic Income scheme might be time-delimited. Te public attractiveness of a time delimited grant is that it introduces some elements of Basic Income (like universality or unconditionality) but without going the whole way to permanency. In private pilots where universality is tested within a small community there is often not the money to test over a longer period. In developing countries, the connection with public reform and fnance is often tenuous. Te private experiment in Kenya—Give Directly—which is set to test over a period of 12 years, is a case in point.

In developed welfare states where public experiments in lifting conditionalities have been dubiously titled ‘Basic Income’ experiments, the political pressure to seize this apparent opportunity to push Basic Income is great. The perceived need to test Basic Income, or even just elements of it, to demonstrate its efects, has led in practice to a decoupling of the elements. This may be a devil’s deal if a strategic accommodation simply leaves something like a Basic Income stuck without a real political understanding of how a real Basic Income might be reached, and why it matters. Relatedly, the idea of Basic Income as a form of simplifcation of mature welfare systems is a devil’s deal in a context of neo-liberal public austerity defined by the use of cuts and new public management methods to shrink the size of the state. Within national debates, the idea of simplifcation can mean removal of cumbersome behavioural checks, but there is also the risk that simplifcation can be understood as an extension of a drive to generate a single low level of income security. Opportunity for Basic Income could become a curse.

Tis juxtaposition also holds at the European level. For example, initiatives for a European Union-wide Basic Income come up against the reality of a fracturing European free movement project under the aegis of a panEuropean free market and public austerity reforms. Te prospect that a Euro-dividend might support frictionless and secure movement across European borders might be illusory, as the fexible regional labour market has coincided with rising intra-state inequality (Stiglitz 2012: 220). Te 2016 Brexit vote in Britain, combined with the rising infuence of protest parties across the continent, suggests that the legitimacy of European Union institutions is crumbling.

The fourth global wave or spike in public interest in Basic Income emerges after the global financial crisis of 2007, and the deepening of public austerity policies, and growing poverty and inequality in core capitalist states, that followed. Te globalisation of Basic Income discourse coincides with growing interest in piloting or experimenting with features of Basic Income in the real world. A relevant question in this context is this: Is crisis the most conducive context for Basic Income, and, if so, what kind of crisis? Or more precisely: what dose and form of crisis? Te recognition within the institutional literature that signifcant change often takes the form of a ‘cumulation of seemingly small adjustments’ (Telen 2009: 475) is highly applicable. A plausible hypothesis here is that more developed public systems are less likely to experience major structural crises, and that they are better able to recognise and respond to smaller crises (as in recent experiments that address the dysfunction of income assistance sanctions systems in Denmark, Finland and Holland) (Haagh 2019c). In hybrid cases such as Scotland or Canada, debate about or experiments in Basic Income, or mechanisms with characteristics similar to Basic Income, are more likely to be focussed on poverty.

Te globalisation of Basic Income narrative changed the debate in several ways. In the altered global context, a long-standing tendency to draw out the centrality of Basic Income might turn out to be illusory in so far as a Basic Income’s impacts are created by other policies. Relatedly, the global Basic Income narrative has also been reshaped by the emergence of new actors in the debate. In a context of global dis-embedding of economic life, a singular form of Basic Income narrative has become a shared language among financial institutions and actors, and globalisation protestors. The double-sided nature of the Basic Income defence in the contemporary setting— its moral justifcation in response to rising inequality, yet a tendency towards singularity—generates a series of devil’s deals and common analytical traps.

Having conditions in view also enables a broader view of opposition to and endorsement of Basic Income under changing conditions, such as liberalisation processes today, which deepen informality and threaten equality. In conditions of higher social equality, opposition is more likely to be ‘constructive’. ‘Constructive’ critique is characterised by being in principle more convertible, under certain conditions. An example of convertibility in the context of more universal systems is Svallfors’ (2011) fnding that groups (self-employed) in Sweden previously resistant to universalism were converted to it after the 2008 crisis. Universalism had to be in place and effective for conversion to occur. Conversely, in conditions of higher informality, support for Basic Income among elites is more likely to be ‘oligarchic’, that is, preservative of systems of high inequality. Finally, in conditions of liberalisation, advocacy for Basic Income is, as said at the outset, prone to an Opportunity Paradox. Where opportunity coincides with liberalisation, advocacy is more likely to become opportunistic. In all, both populism and oligarchy are more likely in conditions of high informality and inequality, which generate a convergence of forces pushing for compensation and seeking legitimation.

In sum, against the background of global economic changes, and of public visibility, Basic Income narrative changed. Political opportunity in a constrained environment exposed a discourse and a debate linked by self-contained ideals and projects to new discursive risks. Below I discuss the emergence of a diferently accented form of advocacy for Basic Income, linked more explicitly with improving anti-poverty policy, as a redistributive focus within development accompanied the attempt to give a ‘human face’ (World Bank 2000) to economic liberalisation programmes pursued frst, and with the deepest efect, in developing countries. The focus on Basis Income as a right to economic security emerged as a discourse contesting the remnants of punitive Victorian paternalism, thus resonating with a wider liberal humanist discourse. However, the dismantling of proactive development policy further isolated Basic Income advocacy from more broad-based and proactive visions of development, public provision of welfare, and the role of the state, as I examine next, for frst developing and then developed countries.

A second strand of IPE looks at the forms of, and levels at which, institutions interact within a society, and at the consequences for political agency. A relevant claim is that thoroughgoing institutional change is more likely to take a top-down than a bottom-up form (Hodgson 2005). National governance systems shape the structure and quality of employment: more ‘liberal’ labour markets, like that in the US, systematically generate more ‘guard’ labour’ (Bowles and Jayadev 2006) and junk jobs (Esping-Andersen 1990: 206–208). Given the emphasis on how formal and informal institutions are connected, societal IPE also guards against the ‘cardboard cot fallacy’ in policy learning, or the illusion of direct effect. For instance, when it was discovered that Finland, a country with low-cot-death, had been distributing cardboard boxes to mothers since the 1930s, countries with higher cot death, for instance Britain, attempted to reduce cot death by distributing cardboard boxes, until it was pointed out that other Nordic countries with similar social traits to Finland, and which also had low cot death, had not distributed card board boxes (Packham 2018). Similarly, a Basic Income having a positive effect on outcomes such as freedom as control, or democratic participation, must be considered contingent on the whole make-up of civil society.

In this chapter, I survey core narrative claims about Basic Income in historical global development and regional contexts. As a toolkit to place Basic Income in context, I propose asking how two sets of complementarities hold up in specific political settings. Tese concern, frstly, external complementarities, being conducive conditions, for instance, public fnance and services capacity, and wider forces which shape these; and, secondly, internal complementarities between the elements of Basic Income (universality, individuality, unconditionality, permanence and sufciency). Where one or both complementarities are weaker, feasibility of Basic Income is in greater doubt, whilst conversely claims may be more overdrawn, and both more contentious and less plausible. Having the internal and external complementarities in mind helps us to navigate the Basic Income debate, considering both world time and regional development contexts. I argue that the changed global context brings to the fore three paradoxes, which are linked with a disconnect between underlying conditions and contemporary opportunities for reform in the direction of Basic Income. Involved, frst, is a claim that the feasibility and a range of positive efects of Basic Income are governed by a deeper condition, which is the attainment of substantive equality in society (Haagh 2019a). Tis gives rise to an analytical paradox—the Equality Paradox—because whilst Basic Income is commonly set out as an egalitarian basis for society, it is in fact dependent on prior and more complex conditions of social equality. In addition, secondly, whilst Basic Income is set out as a foundation for equal freedom, this efect too is in fact dependent on wider conditions of social equality. On the other hand, Basic Income debate is also governed by two linked Crisis and Opportunity Paradoxes, as Basic Income is more likely to gain visibility in the context of major crises, conditions which generate opportunity, yet which also compromise Basic Income in practice. Te Crisis Paradox is a corollary of the Equality Paradox: e.g., it refers to the distance between a moral case generated by inequality, and feasibility and effects, generated by equality. On the other hand, the Opportunity Paradox refers to the greater risks of political deception in crisis conditions, for instance, the seemingly greater plausibility of a singular case for Basic Income in crisis conditions generates discursive risks, connected with overstating a Basic Income’s efects precisely at the time when doing so is more likely to seem morally persuasive, whilst being factually wrong.

In sum, I claim that the Equality Paradox creates a difficult discursive scenario, whilst—at an analytical level—highlighting a need to set Basic Income in the context of the political development of society. Even if one is persuaded that a simple egalitarian resource distribution—possibly combined with basic universal public services—ought to dominate, the Equality Paradox entails that approximating this state is bound up with a longer, more complex process of democratisation of a range of resources and social relations. In sum, the Equality Paradox refers to the fact that Basic Income is not a condition for equality or freedom in itself, but is an outcome of forms of politics that support freedom and equality: yet advocacy tends to hold that Basic Income is a source of equal freedom in society and/or a form of social equality. Tis generates political and discursive dilemmas, in so far as setting up Basic Income as a singular foundation draws attention away from conditions that might bring Basic Income about and make it effective.

Devil’s Deals and World Time in Development Te notion of World Time refers to a shared global framework for debate across even very structurally dissimilar countries. One of the uses of the concept is in pinpointing the prevalence of certain policy paradigms and programmes of structural change in the face of divergence. Te contemporary World Time of deregulation, rising inequality, and public austerity generates the context for devils’ deals in the context of global Basic Income debate. A changed global development context pushes Basic Income discourse towards accommodation, including by making Basic Income common cause with a portrayal of neo-liberal reform as a response to—and resolution of— inadequacies within post-war welfare provision.

i. Neo-liberalisation Friedman’s advocacy of the Negative Income Tax was tied to his association of economic and political freedom with breaking down the state in favour of the market. Neo-liberalisation of the Basic Income debate can refer in this context to the reduction of ideas of personal control to the basic linear premise of Friedman’s argument (Friedman 1962, 1970, 1990). Neo-liberalisation is a devil’s deal because it distorts perception of the wider conditions for reform in the direction of Basic Income.

A flat tax imposes a single tax rate for all taxpayers. A value added tax, or VAT, taxes consumption rather than income.

The argument against both these taxation systems is that they are not sufficiently progressive to tax high-income earners enough, and they overly burden low-income earners. Yet, this is exactly the effect of the current tax code.

As House GOP leaders worked to build support for the debt ceiling increase measure they ultimately passed by a razor-thin margin last week, speculation grew that it might violate a long-standing pledge not to raise taxes.

Grover Norquist is president and founder of Americans for Tax Reform and author of the “Taxpayer Protection Pledge” that has been a fixture of GOP tax policymaking for decades.

Here’s one more indicator, if anyone needs one, that House Republicans’ newfound fiscal responsibility isn’t all it’s cracked up to be: Their debt ceiling demands include a proposal that will balloon the debt — and by much more than previously understood.

A key provision of the GOP’s proposed Limit, Save, Grow Act would rescind most of the $80 billion in additional funding the IRS received in the Inflation Reduction Act to tackle high-end tax evasion. The Congressional Budget Office calculates this move would increase the deficit by more than $100 billion over the course of the next decade.