Basic income momentum has waned – CTC expiration proves

Megan, The Washington Post, “Universal Basic Income Has Been Tested Repeatedly. It Works. Will America Ever Embrace It?,” October 24, 2022 https://www.washingtonpost.com/magazine/2022/10/24/universal-basic-income/dmr

Now, though, as the country emerges from the pandemic, the guaranteed income movement sits at a crossroads. The pilot programs have created scores of stories like Everett’s about how a small amount of money led to massive change in a recipient’s life. And a growing body of research based on the experiments shows that guaranteed income works — that it pulls people out of poverty, improves health outcomes, and makes it easier for people to find jobs and take care of their children. If empirical evidence ruled the world, guaranteed income would be available to every poor person in America, and many of those people would no longer be poor.

But empirical evidence does not rule the world, and it is far from clear that there is a political path forward for guaranteed income on a large scale. The city-level experiments cannot last forever: Stockton’s lapsed in early 2021, a few months after Tubbs lost his reelection bid to a Republican successor who showed no interest in trying to keep SEED going. On Capitol Hill, too, political momentum for handing out cash has waned. At the end of 2021, an extension of the expanded child tax credit — which was seen by many advocates as a key steppingstone to guaranteed income — was blocked by a Democrat representing the state with the sixth-highest poverty rate in the country.

Early in the pandemic, some in the guaranteed-income movement had begun to whisper about accelerating the timeline for taking their efforts nationwide. America’s most progressive social policies have always grown out of economic crises, so maybe covid would bring about a guaranteed-income policy in the next few years. But the failure of the expanded federal child tax credit diminished some of that optimism; many of those same advocates are now looking toward the long game. “You have to be willing to fight for something to the end,” says Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott, who recently launched a guaranteed-income experiment, “even if it doesn’t happen, even if you only push it a few feet further, even if it means that you die doing it.”