A UBI solves for welfare stigma because it is automatic and universal – current programs have degrading criteria and label people as undeserving

There are two main reasons why basic income undercuts social stigma. First, it is automatic: instead of the often degrading and invasive caseworker discretion that characterizes social assistance, a basic income is not unlike the unstigmatizing benefits that come at tax time. To participate you need not stand up and self-identify as poor.∂ Second, basic income treats typically separated people in a similar manner. It blurs the lines of demarcation between low-wage workers, the disabled, unemployed workers, and social assistance recipients. It blurs the lines between those who cannot find paid employment and those who choose to commit to other activities, education, care-work, or even leisure. As more people are folded into a program, quality improves and austerity becomes harder to pull off. Medicare, a program that is both well liked and near-impossible to dismantle, illustrates the case. Social assistance is the opposite: without a powerful political constituency, unfriendly politicians have been able to make eligibility increasingly difficult. This is the logic behind the maxim, “programs for the poor become poor programs.”∂ Swedish sociologist Walter Korpi called this the paradox of redistribution. Targeting appears to leave more room for generous redistribution, but it in fact makes for frail, and ultimately less redistributive programs. Conversely, the more universal a program, the more resilient it becomes. This is one of the difficulties with a pilot, as is being proposed in Canada. It won’t benefit from the popularity effect. If we managed to implement a generous basic income its popularity could lock it in place. All the pilot will have on its side is mere scientific evidence. Had we experimented with Medicare before implementing it, it might have never developed the base of political support that made it robust. A social policy that destigmatizes, one that erases the bright lines between the “deserving” and “undeserving” poor is an end in its own right. The added benefit is that erasing those lines makes for popular and robust programs.