Conservatives demand safety net cuts in exchange for a UBI

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

Meanwhile, a few conservatives have advocated a form of basic income for a different set of reasons. The right likes basic income because it would allow for the removal of many overlapping and piecemeal government programs, such as food stamps and unemployment insurance, as well as programs the government directly runs. Charles Murray has advocated a universal basic income of $10,000 for every person, and paying for it by ending Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, virtually all transfer programs and certain tax breaks. Also, if you squint really hard, you could see a libertarian argument that a basic income compensates for the private appropriation of common, natural resources.

Eliminating poverty is an essential part of any egalitarian project, and a universal basic income could finish that in one move. But the question then becomes: What projects would still animate the left? And how would a universal basic income influence those projects?

One project would be to make sure merit goods are sufficiently provided to everyone who needs them. There are certain goods that we owe to each other -- education, health care, a secure retirement -- and it isn’t clear that the private market is capable of providing a basic minimum across society. In addition, the government has unique abilities that allow it to provide these goods more efficiently. Medicare is able to hold down costs better than private insurance, and Social Security is working significantly better than 401(k)s or private pensions in providing income security in old age. These programs work very well, and as Ezra Klein noted, they are part of the solution, rather than the problem, to providing health care and security in old age.

If these programs were removed in a tradeoff to get a universal basic income, it would be a significant step back. So some people, like Barbara Bergmann here, think that we should focus on building a better system of social insurance and public goods with the government’s limited resources, rather than replacing it with a minimum income.