UBI unpopular

For as long as America has had a poverty problem — which is to say, for its entire history — a small group of dreamers has proposed guaranteed income as a solution. The idea dates to the year the country was founded: Thomas Paine proposed a type of basic income in his 1776 pamphlet “Common Sense.” In the mid-20th century, it gained traction among Black American thinkers: In 1966, the Black Panthers’ Ten-Point Program demanded “employment or a guaranteed income” for everyone. A year later, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. wrote in his last book — “Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?” — that government aid programs all have a “common failing: they are indirect. Each seeks to solve poverty by first solving something else. I am now convinced that the simplest approach will prove to be the most effective — the solution to poverty is to abolish it directly by a now widely discussed measure: the guaranteed income.” The first official proposal for a federal basic income program, though, came not from a paragon of progressivism, but from Richard Nixon. In 1969, Nixon introduced the Family Assistance Plan, which would have provided additional cash to poor families through a negative income tax — cutting checks to the poorest Americans instead of them paying the government — of $1,600 (about $13,000 today) for a family of four. The proposal was motivated by Nixon’s desire to replace the welfare system, which was unpopular with White blue-collar voters, but it never made it out of the Senate Finance Committee. Many skeptical politicians and voters feared that giving people cash would allow them to quit their jobs, stop looking for work or work less. Around the same time, a series of negative-income-tax experiments benefiting about 7,500 people in six states appeared to confirm those concerns: In Seattle and Denver, where the two largest programs took place, married men worked an average of 7 percent fewer hours after three years of the program, while married and single women worked 17 percent fewer hours. And while researchers didn’t look at any other measures of stability — whether participants were more likely to seek medical care, for example, or whether their children missed fewer days of school — they did observe a modest increase in the divorce rate. Those two factors were enough to destroy widespread interest in guaranteed-income experiments for several decades.