Public Policy and Governance – Page 133

Rats And Sinking Ships

Well, there’s good news and bad news, and it’s the same news.

Daily Kos quotes Politico for the following:

The exodus of top Defense officials under Team Trump continues. In the weeks before Christmas, five senior Pentagon officials resigned their posts for unclear reasons. Now Defense Secretary Mark Esper’s chief of staff, former Army intelligence officer Eric Chewning, has delivered his own resignation.

As the article notes, these multiple departures–especially the most recent one, coming after the Iranian assassination–don’t usually occur during periods in which the nation appears to be gearing up for a military crisis.

Behind the scenes, though, Esper’s office appears to be in turmoil. A Foreign Policy report on Sunday revealed that Trump Defense Secretary Esper had cut senior Pentagon leaders out of the loop on the Suleimani assassination, and that the Joint Chiefs of Staff were not consulted or briefed on the operation ahead of time. “The usual approval process, the decision-making process, did not occur,” an anonymous defense official told FP.

The motivations for these departures are unclear: people may be leaving for reasons ranging from simple frustration with the chaos in Trump’s Defense Department to unwillingness to be part of an administration that is morally and functionally defective–the latter motive suggesting the old phrase “rats leaving a sinking ship.”

According to Merriam-Webster, that idiom is used in reference to people abandoning an enterprise once it seems likely to fail. The phrase has shown what the reference book calls “great linguistic tenacity,” having been in regular use for over four hundred years. Its persistence is probably attributable to the consistency of the human impulse to “bail out” when a ship–or enterprise–is going down.

In this case, the likelihood that career public servants are departing an administration with which they don’t want to be associated is a sign that a number of career people in the so-called “deep state” have scruples. The resignations send a message (not that the Trump cabal is capable of receiving or interpreting such messages) that they disagree with the decisions–and the decision-making process– of the current regime. (And what we are discovering about that process is terrifying. An Iran expert formerly with the State Department tweeted out what he is being told by those who remain in the agencies.)

These principled departures are the good news.

The bad news is that the consistent stream of resignations by sane, moral and experienced officials during Trump’s tenure–resignations that have not been limited to the Department of Defense– means that there are even fewer adults left to moderate an unhinged President and counter the assortment of religious zealots and criminals that make up his administration.

According to the Brookings Institution, as of January of 2020, turnover in the administration’s so-called “A Team”–senior positions just under cabinet secretaries–has been 80%. The Brookings article includes several charts describing the positions and identifying the individuals who left; interestingly, they count each position on the “A Team” only once. So “if multiple people hold and depart from the same position (e.g., communications director), only the initial departure is tracked/affects the turnover rate.”

In other words, turnover has actually exceeded that 80%. (The report also includes a chart showing the serial departures.)

And that turnover is calculated, obviously, for positions that have been filled. As of January 6th, Trump hadn’t even bothered to nominate candidates for 168 of the 741 key administrative positions that require Senate confirmation,

Ask anyone who runs an organization–for-profit, nonprofit or governmental–how constant staff turnover and the attendant loss of institutional memory not only hobbles the organization’s ability to perform, but hinders its ability to recruit competent replacements.

When the people who are left to run the government are ill-equipped to do so–when they are inexperienced, ignorant, delusional or beholden to special interests–all bets are off.

We are in uncharted–and very dangerous–territory.

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This Is What Rational People Feared

Yesterday, we awoke to find that Trump had ordered an airstrike that killed an Iranian general. The general’s position was equivalent to that of our Joint Chiefs of Staff, or even Vice-President, and he was evidently revered in Iran.

Critics don’t dispute the administration’s contention that General Suleimani posed a threat to Americans (although absolutely no evidence supports claims that an attack was “imminent”). Both George W. Bush and Barack Obama had decided against efforts to target Suleimani, because they were convinced that such an action had a high probability of triggering a war.

They were correct. The assassination is being reported in both the U.S. and Iran as an Act of War.

Of course, both Bush and Obama listened to their diplomatic and military experts, and consulted with Congressional leaders–none of which Trump did. The strike violated a longstanding executive order forbidding U.S. involvement in the assassination of foreign officials, as well as the requirement that a President seek Congressional approval under the Authorization for the Use of Military Force Act. Of course, this is an administration that routinely ignores compliance with laws it dislikes.

I don’t think it is a coincidence that a military strike that allows Trump to brag about a “show of strength” comes at a time when his bungled and inept forays into foreign policy are being widely criticized.

Despite his much-hyped meetings with Kim Jon Un (meetings which gifted Un with an unearned but long-desired legitimacy), North Korea has announced its intent to resume nuclear tests. Trump’s approach to Iran–actually, his approach to the entire Middle East–has been wildly contradictory, as spurts of belligerence have alternated with troop pullouts and inexplicable decisions have been “justified” by Trump’s usual word-salad tweets and statements.

North Korea’s announcement, coming as the 2020 election campaign begins heating up, and the Iranian-backed attacks on the U.S. Embassy in Iraq, increased public attention to those failures, and triggered renewed allegations that Trump doesn’t understand foreign policy and is incapable of developing a coherent strategy. Those criticisms have been leveled throughout his term in office, but they have become louder and more frequent in the wake of recent events.

So, like the child he is, Trump blindly struck out.

Since 2016, it has become abundantly clear that the Oval Office is occupied by a profoundly ignorant, mentally-unstable man-child who is utterly incapable of understanding the likely consequences of his actions. The damage he has done domestically is enormous; the threat he poses to world peace and hundreds of thousands of American lives is terrifying.

Yesterday’s media was full of analyses by Middle East and foreign policy experts; most of the people who read this blog have undoubtedly seen many of them. I don’t have any additional insights to offer.

I’ll just conclude by quoting from an article in Vox.

A deadly opening attack. Nearly untraceable, ruthless proxies spreading chaos on multiple continents. Costly miscalculations. And thousands — perhaps hundreds of thousands — killed in a conflict that would dwarf the war in Iraq.

Welcome to the US-Iran war, which has the potential to be one of the worst conflicts in history.

The Thursday night killing of Maj. Gen. Qassem Suleimani, who led Iranian covert operations and intelligence and was one of the country’s most senior leaders, brought Washington and Tehran closer to fighting that war. Iran has every incentive to retaliate, experts says, using its proxies to target US commercial interests in the Middle East, American allies, or even American troops and diplomats hunkered down in regional bases and embassies.

It’s partly why the Eurasia Group, a prominent international consulting firm, now puts the chance of “a limited or major military confrontation” at 40 percent.

This is what happens when self-described “patriots” cast their votes for an unhinged buffoon with limited intellect and a monumental ignorance of the ways of the world. Those voters weren’t a majority, but there were enough of them to elect the candidate whose only “qualification” was a pathetic eagerness to validate their bigotries.

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Path Dependency And Political Naiviete

One of the lessons we should–but don’t–learn from history is that revolutions almost never succeed in replacing the systems being rejected with those that are more to the liking of the revolutionaries.

Revolutions can and do change the identity of the people in charge. The American Revolution got rid of King George and English authority, for example–but it didn’t change fundamental attitudes about individual rights, or a legal system based on common law, or accepted ways of doing business.

Short of revolution, efforts to effect big changes in the way a society functions inevitably come up against social inertia and stubborn resistance to changes in habitual ways of seeing and doing. Paul Krugman–no apologist for neoliberalism–was recently interviewed by Ezra Klein, and explained why he supports the more incremental, less radical proposals on health care.

A lot of things we think of as being very left-wing are actually extremely popular — like higher taxes on rich people. But other things requiring ordinary middle class people to change aren’t ever easy to do.

Systems that are very different from our own on health care all have deep historical roots. There is enormous path dependence in policy. The systems that countries have on health care, retirement, and most other stuff has a lot to do with decisions that were made generations ago. And it’s very hard to shift to a radically different path. So incrementalism tends to rule everywhere.

Krugman points to polling that says that a public buy-in to Medicare is very popular, but a replacement of private insurance that is not voluntary is not.

The international evidence is that it’s just very hard for to make radical changes in social programs. The shape of them tends to be fixed for a really long time. US Social Security is widely held up as a role model of doing it right because we got it right at a time when things were still pretty amorphous and uninformed. On the other hand, our health care system is a mess because of decisions we made around the same time that left us with bad stuff entrenched in the system.

The operative word is “entrenched.”

Wikipedia begins its discussion of “path dependency” thusly: “Path dependence explains how the set of decisions people face for any given circumstance is limited by the decisions they have made in the past or by the events that they experienced, even though past circumstances may no longer be relevant.”

Multiple studies of path dependence confirm that previous policy decisions that have since become “the way we do things” generate enormous inertia. Studies of welfare policies, especially, have concluded that significant changes can be made only in exceptional situations. (It isn’t only politics. Studies of how technologies become path-dependent demonstrate that so-called “externalities”–habits, really– resulting from established supplier and customer preferences can lead to the dominance of one technology over another, even if the technology that “loses” is clearly superior.)

It is one thing to compare the mess that is America’s health system with the far better systems elsewhere and acknowledge that we got it wrong. In an ideal world, we would start from scratch and devise something very different. But we don’t live in an ideal world; we live in a world and country where most people fear and resist change– even change to something that is clearly superior.

No president can wave a magic wand and effect overnight transformation. FDR and Truman both pushed for forms of national health insurance and failed. Nixon also favored it. President Kennedy supported Medicare and Johnson finally got that done in 1965–after the trauma of an assassination. All other efforts failed until 2010, when Obama and Pelosi (barely) managed to get the Affordable Care Act passed. Even that compromised legislation triggered ferocious opposition, including bills that weaken it and litigation that aims to overturn it.

People who think we just have to elect a candidate who recognizes what a better system would look like, and empower that person to wave his or her magic wand and give us a “do-over,” aren’t simply naive. They’re delusional.

The question–as always–isn’t just what. It’s how.

All of the Democrats running for President know we need single-payer. Not all of them are willing to acknowledge that we face enormous barriers to getting it done. And only one, to my knowledge, has outlined a plan to overcome path-dependency and get us from here to there.

That isn’t being “moderate.” It’s being realistic.

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Affording My Brave New World

An even longer one. Sorry.

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Even if you found yesterday’s post persuasive, a UBI seems politically impossible and cost prohibitive.

Politically, shifting from a paternalistic and judgmental “welfare” system to one awarding benefits based upon membership in the polity would not only require a significant culture change, but would be vigorously opposed by the large number of companies and individuals whose interests are served by America’s current patchwork of programs, subsidies and policies.

Then there’s the issue of cost.

Although Americans’ deeply-ingrained belief that people are poor because they made bad choices or didn’t work hard enough continues to be a barrier to a more generous and equitable social safety net, the most significant impediment to passage of a Universal Basic Income is the argument that has consistently been made to thwart universal healthcare– that America, rich as the country is, simply cannot afford such a Brave New World. This argument flies in the face of evidence from counties with far more robust safety nets: In 2012, the U.S. spent an estimated 19.4% of GDP on social expenditures, according to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development. Denmark spent 30.5%, Sweden 28.2% and Germany 26.3%. All of these countries have a lower central government debt to GDP ratio than the United States.

While specific economic recommendations aren’t possible in the absence of concrete, “fleshed out” policy proposals, it’s possible to identify ways in which universal programs might be financed, and how they might affect economic growth. The short answer is that both the UBI and some version of Medicare-for-All could be funded by a combination of higher taxes, savings through cost containment, economies of scale, reduction of welfare bureaucracy, the elimination or reform of existing subsidies, and meaningful reductions in America’s bloated defense budget.

Debates over taxes rarely if ever consider the extent to which individual taxpayers actually save money when government relieves them of the expense of a service. Even now, requiring citizens to make out-of-pocket payments for such things as scavenger services (in lieu of municipal garbage collection), or private police and fire protection or schooling, would vastly exceed the amounts individual households pay in taxes for those services. Low-income citizens, of course, would be unable to afford them.

The American public is positively allergic to taxes, even when a majority financially benefits from them. If low-and-middle income American families did not have to pay out-of-pocket for health insurance, and could count on a stipend of $1000/month, most would personally be much better off, even if they experienced increases in their tax rates. They would likely see other savings as well: for example, if the U.S. had national health care, auto and homeowners’ insurance rates could be expected to decline, because insurance companies wouldn’t have to include the costs of medical care in the event of an accident or injury in their actuarial calculations. Research also predicts the country would see a decline in crime, child and spousal abuse and similar behaviors that have been found to increase under the stresses associated with poverty. (The extent of such reductions and the cost savings attributable to them is speculative, but a substantial level of abatement seems likely.)

Most tax increases, obviously, would be levied against those capable of paying them. Americans used to believe in progressive taxation, and not simply to raise revenue. Taxes on the very wealthy were originally conceived as correctives, like tobacco taxes, that should be judged by their social impact as well as their ability to generate revenue. High tax rates on the rich were intended to reduce the vast accumulations of money that serve to give a handful of people a level of power deemed incompatible with democracy.

A recent report from the Guardian calculated the results of (relatively modest) increases in taxes on the very rich.

Right now they pay about 30% of their income in taxes. Increasing their overall average tax rate by about 10 percentage points would generate roughly $3tn in revenue over the next 10 years, while still leaving the 1% with an average post-tax annual income of more than $1.4m. (That new tax rate, by the way, would be about the same as the overall rate the richest 1% paid back in the 1940s and 1950s.)

As indicated, in addition to reducing inequality, progressive taxation does raise money, and there is widespread agreement that the very rich aren’t paying their share. At the 2019 Davos World Economic Forum, Dutch historian Rutger Bregman caused a mini-sensation by telling the uber-wealthy assembled there than the “real issue” in the battle for equality is tax avoidance and the failure of rich people to pay what they should. Momentum is clearly building for more progressive tax rates than the United States currently imposes.

There is also growing anger directed at the generosity of various tax credits and deductions, aka “loopholes,” that allow immensely profitable corporations to reduce their tax liabilities (or escape them completely). The use of offshore tax havens and other creative methods of eluding payment devised by sophisticated tax lawyers employed by the uber-wealthy is an ongoing scandal.

Real-world experiments like Governor Sam Brownback’s tax cuts in Kansas confirm that, contrary to the ideological arguments against imposing higher taxes on wealthy “makers,” high marginal rates don’t depress economic growth and cutting taxes doesn’t trigger an increase in either job creation or economic growth. In 1947, the top tax rate was 86.45% on income over $200,000; in 2015, it was 39.60% on income over $466,950. During that time span, researchers have found very little correlation between economic growth and higher or lower marginal rates. In 2012, the Congressional Research Service published a research study that rebutted the presumed inverse correlation between tax rates and economic growth.

Climate change is affecting America’s weather, increasing the urgency of efforts to reduce carbon emissions and increase the development and use of clean energy sources. Yet the United States spends twenty billion dollars a year subsidizing fossil fuels, including 2.5 billion per year specifically earmarked for searching out new fossil fuel resources, at a time in human history when the development of those resources is contraindicated. According to Oil Change International, permanent tax breaks to the US fossil fuel industry are seven times larger than those for renewable energy. At current prices, the production of nearly half of all U.S. oil would not be economically viable but for federal and state subsidies.

During the 2015-2016 election cycle oil, gas, and coal companies spent $354 million in campaign contributions and lobbying, and received $29.4 billion in federal subsidies in total over those same years – an 8,200% return on investment. The OCI report concluded that: “Removing these highly inefficient [fossil fuel] subsidies – which waste billions of dollars propping up an industry incompatible with safe climate limits – should be the first priority of fiscally responsible climate, energy, and tax reform policies.” Not incidentally, eliminating these subsidies would free up funds for other uses, including the social safety net.

Then there are farm subsidies– another 20 Billion dollars annually. Arguments for and against terminating these subsidies are more complicated than for fossil fuel subsidies, but the case for means-testing them is strong. In 2017, the USDA released a report showing that approximately half the money went to farmers with household incomes over $150,000. As Tamar Haspel wrote in the Washington Post, “That means billions of dollars, every year, go to households with income nearly three times higher than the median U.S. household income, which was $55,775 that year.”

Farm subsidies were created during the Depression in order to keep family farms afloat and ensure a stable national food supply. Since 2008, however, the top 10 farm subsidy recipients have each received an average of $18.2 million – that’s $1.8 million annually, $150,000 per month, or $35,000 a week. These farmers received more than 30 times the average yearly income of U.S. families. Millionaires are benefitting from a program originally established to protect family farms during times of economic distress.

Most citizens understand why government should not be providing billions of dollars to support companies that make climate change worse, or adding to the bottom lines of already-profitable corporate farms. Efforts to cut the military budget encounter genuine anxieties about endangering national security, as well as more parochial concerns from lawmakers representing districts with economies heavily dependent upon military bases or contractors. Those concerns may explain why U.S. military spending in 2017 was over 30% higher in real terms than it was in 2000.

The United States will spend $716 billion in 2019, and annually spends more than twice what Russia, China, Iran and North Korea spend collectively.

Critics of the military budget make three basic arguments: the budget is much bigger than threats to U.S. security require; very little of the money appropriated supports efforts to fight terrorist groups that pose the real threat in today’s world; and the countries that might threaten America militarily are historically few and weak. (Russia, for example, has an energy-dependent economy roughly the size of Italy’s. According to America’s intelligence community, its efforts to destabilize the U.S. are made through social media, assaults by “bots,” and hacks into vulnerable data repositories, not military action.)

The massive amounts that America spends on its military are used to support bases and troops that are ill-suited to the conduct of modern-day defense. (Even the Pentagon has estimated that base capacity exceeds need by 20%) The existence of this enormous military capacity also creates an incentive to substitute military intervention for the exercise of diplomacy and soft power (as the Japanese proverb warns, when the tool you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.)

An argument can also be made that we are supporting a military establishment that is prepared to fight the last war, not the next one.

As one military expert has written, “counterterrorism is poorly served by manpower-intensive occupational wars, which rarely produce stability, let alone democracy.” He argues the U.S. could safely cut the military budget by 25%; even if he is wrong about the size of the savings that could be realized, knowledgable observers suggest that modernizing military operations, restraining America’s all-too-frequent interventions into the affairs of other countries, and focusing on actual threats would translate into very significant savings.

The elimination of fossil fuel subsidies, and the reduction of farm subsidies and military expenditures would allow lawmakers to achieve substantial savings while pursuing important policy goals. The government ought not be abetting climate change or further enriching wealthy Americans, and it is past time to reconfigure national defense to meet the challenges of the 21st Century.

Andy Stern lists a number of ways a UBI might be funded, including “cashing out” all or most of the existing 126 welfare programs that currently cost taxpayers $1 trillion a year. The UBI would make many if not most of these programs unnecessary.

Stein also lists a number of targeted tax proposals, including a Value Added Tax (VAT), that have been suggested by economists supportive of a UBI. As he points out, these and other proposals constitute a “menu” of possibilities. (Another example: If the UBI allows workers to cover basic essentials, taxpayers would be relieved of the need to supplement the wages of McDonalds and Walmart workers, saving government some ten billion dollars annually.) If and when America has a Congress that is serious about reforming both our democratic decision-making structures and our social infrastructure, that menu provides a number of options from which to choose.

America’s problem is a lack of political will to confront the special interest groups that currently feed at the government trough, not a lack of realistic funding mechanisms.

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Why I Came To Support A UBI

As regular readers of this blog know, I recently published a book titled Living Together. After a survey of various elements of our society that I identified as “broken,” I drew on a variety of research to propose an expanded social contract. An important part of that new social contract was a Universal Basic Income.

The book was an exercise in utopianism–most of my proposals won’t be adopted in my lifetime, if ever. But a girl can dream…

Be warned: Even the following, abbreviated explanation will make this post longer than usual. (But hey–it’s a holiday…)

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Social scientists point to the ways in which America’s obsessive focus on individual responsibility and achievement obscures recognition of the equally important role played by the broader community within which we are embedded. A much-cited remark made by Elizabeth Warren during her first Senate campaign reminded listeners that communal infrastructure makes individual success and market economies possible:

“There is nobody in this country who got rich on their own. Nobody. You built a factory out there – good for you. But I want to be clear. You moved your goods to market on roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn’t have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory… Now look. You built a factory and it turned into something terrific or a great idea – God bless! Keep a hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along.”

The fact that Warren’s observation garnered so much attention suggests that Americans rarely see individual success stories as dependent upon the government’s ability to provide a physical and legal environment within which that success can occur.

The importance of hard work and individual talent should not be minimized, but neither should it be exaggerated. When the focus is entirely upon the individual, when successes of any sort are attributed solely to individual effort, the importance of that infrastructure–and the effects of social and legal structures that privilege certain groups and impede others– become less visible.

Policies intended to help less fortunate citizens can be delivered in ways that stoke resentments, or in ways that encourage national cohesion. Consider public attitudes toward welfare programs aimed at impoverished communities, and contrast those attitudes with the overwhelming majorities that approve of Social Security and Medicare.

Social Security and Medicare are universal programs; virtually everyone contributes to them and everyone who lives long enough participates in their benefits. Just as we don’t generally hear accusations that “those people are driving on roads paid for by my taxes,” or sentiments begrudging a poor neighbor’s garbage pickup, beneficiaries of programs that include everyone (or almost everyone) are much more likely to escape stigma. In addition to the usual questions of efficacy and cost-effectiveness, policymakers in our diverse country should evaluate proposed programs by considering whether they are likely to unify or further divide Americans. Universal policies are far more likely to unify, an important and often overlooked argument favoring a Universal Basic Income.

What if the United States embraced a new social contract, beginning with the premise that all citizens are valued members of the American polity, and that (as the advertisement says) membership has its privileges?

Contracts are by definition mutual undertakings in which both sides offer consideration. In my imagined “Brave New World,” government would create an environment within which humans could flourish, an environment within which members would be guaranteed a basic livelihood, a substantive, excellent education, and an equal place at the civic table. In return, members (aka citizens) would pay their “dues:” taxes, a stint of public/civic service, and the consistent discharge of civic duties like voting and jury service.

In my Brave New World, government would provide both physical and social infrastructure.

We know the elements of physical infrastructure: streets, roads, bridges, utilities, parks, museums, public transportation, and the like; we might expand the definition to include common municipal services like police and fire protection, garbage collection and similar necessities and amenities of community life. Local governments across the country understand the importance of these assets and services, and struggle to provide them with the generally inadequate tax dollars collected from grudging but compliant citizens.

There is far less agreement on what the social infrastructure should look like and how it should be funded. The most consequential element of a new social infrastructure, and by far the most difficult to implement, would require significant changes to the deep-seated cultural assumptions on which the current economy rests. Its goals are to ease economic insecurities, reduce the gap between rich and poor, restore workers’ bargaining power and (not so incidentally) rescue market capitalism from its descent into corporatism and plutocracy. The two major pillars of that ambitious effort are a Universal Basic Income and single-payer health insurance.

The defects of existing American welfare policies are well-known. The nation has a patchwork of state and federal efforts and programs, with bureaucratic barriers and means tests that are expensive to administer and that operate to exclude most of the working poor. Those who do get welfare are routinely stigmatized by moralizing lawmakers pursuing punitive measures aimed at imagined “takers” and “Welfare Queens.” Current anti-poverty policies have not made an appreciable impact on poverty, but they have grown the bureaucracy and contributed significantly to stereotyping and socio-economic polarization; as a result, a number of economists and political thinkers now advocate replacing the existing patchwork with a Universal Basic Income.

A Universal Basic Income (UBI) is a stipend sent to every U.S. adult citizen, with no strings attached– no requirement to work, or to spend the money on certain items and not others. It’s a cash grant sufficient to insure basic sustenance; a number of proponents advocate $1000 per month. As Andy Stern, former President of the Service Employee’s International Union has written,

“A basic income is simple to administer, treats all people equally, rewards hard work and entrepreneurship, and trusts the poor to make their own decisions about what to do with their money. Because it only offers a floor, people are encouraged to make additional income through their own efforts… Welfare, on the other hand, discourages people from working because, if your income increases, you lose benefits,”

With a UBI, in contrast to welfare, there’s no phase-out, no marriage penalties, no people falsifying information–and no costly bureaucracy. Support for the concept is not limited to liberals and progressives. Milton Friedman famously proposed a “negative income tax,” and F.A. Hayek, the libertarian economist, wrote “There is no reason why in a free society government should not assure to all, protection against severe deprivation in the form of an assured minimum income, or a floor below which nobody need descend.” In 2016, Samuel Hammond of the libertarian Niskanen Center, noted the “ideal” features of a UBI: its unconditional structure avoids creating poverty traps; it sets a minimum income floor, raising worker bargaining power without wage or price controls; it decouples benefits from a particular workplace or jurisdiction; since it’s cash, it respects a diversity of needs and values; and it simplifies and streamlines a complex web of bureaucracy, eliminating rent seeking and other sources of inefficiency.

Hammond’s point about worker bargaining power is especially important. In today’s work
environment, characterized by dramatically-diminished unions and the growth of the “gig economy,” the erosion of employee bargaining power is confirmed by data showing that wages have been effectively stagnant for years, despite significant growth in productivity. With a UBI and single payer health coverage, workers would have the freedom to leave abusive employers, unsafe work conditions, and uncompetitive pay scales. A UBI wouldn’t level the playing field, but it would dramatically reduce the tilt. And if the robots do come—if the predictions of jobs that will be lost to automation are even close to accurate—a UBI could act as a national safety-net, helping the country avoid massive civil turmoil.

It is also worth noting that a UBI would have much the same positive effect on economic growth as a higher minimum wage. When poor people get money, they spend it, increasing demand.

There have been several pilot projects meant to assess the pros and cons of UBIs. The Washington Post reported on an extensive experiment in Africa, which found positive results not just for those receiving the money, but for their communities. The Guardian recently reported equally positive results from an American pilot project in Stockton, California. As with earlier experiments, skeptical predictions were not borne out; the money was primarily spent on food, medicine and education. Studies have also reported a significant positive spillover on female empowerment, and large increases in psychological well-being of recipients.

An economist quoted in Forbes noted that when Native Americans opened casinos along the Rio Grande, they used the proceeds to deliver basic incomes to the tribal poor.

“Child abuse dropped drastically, crime dropped. Simply handing money to poor people was salutary. It really helped them. Being trapped in poverty, with the stress and insecurities associated with that, is progressively debilitating. Sometimes even the simplest kind of transfers can break the cycle.”

Counter-intuitive as it may seem, a significant body of research supports the
importance of a robust social safety net to market economies. As Will Wilkinson, vice-president for policy at the libertarian Niskanen Center, has put it:

“A sound and generous system of social insurance offers a certain peace of mind that makes the very real risks of increased economic dynamism seem tolerable to the democratic public, opening up the political possibility of stabilizing a big-government welfare state with growth-promoting economic liberalization.”

As Wilkinson argued in an article for the conservative National Review, contemporary arguments between self-defined capitalists and socialists misunderstand economic reality. The left fails to appreciate the role of capitalism and markets in producing abundance, and the right refuses to acknowledge the indispensable role safety nets play in placating the human, deeply-seated distaste for feelings of uncertainty and insecurity.

If we were a country that truly valued all citizens, these would be compelling arguments.

Tomorrow: how to pay for it.

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