“A Universal Basic Income”

Labor Day  “A Universal Basic Income”   Sept. 2, 2018   Dr. Roger Ray, pastor

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By DAVID Z. MORRIS in Fortune September 3, 2017

A team of economists from the left-leaning Roosevelt Institute conclude in a new research study that implementing a guaranteed income of $1,000 a month for all Americans would accelerate U.S. economic growth by an additional 12.56% over eight years if it were financed by increased federal debt.

If the same program were financed by increased redistributive taxes, the growth impact would be smaller, producing an additional 2.62% of GDP growth over 8 years. But the federal deficit would also, according to the model, shrink by 1.39%. In both scenarios, unemployment would also decrease.

A universal basic income, or UBI, is a once-fringe policy proposal that has gained increasing public support in the U.S., including from many tech business leaders including Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg. In part, the idea is appealing because it would help insulate workers against labor market shockslikely to be produced by innovations like self-driving cars and artificial intelligence.

To paraphrase the popular Buddhist philosopher, Alan Watts, money does not exist. Just as you would not have a carpenter walking off an incomplete job saying that he had “run out of inches,” it is always absurd to say that there is not enough money to do something. Inches are not made of wood, they are just a tool of measuring. Money has no inherent value, it is just a way of measuring resources. I can give you a hundred dollars’ worth of beef and you have something, but if I give you a $100 bill then I have only given you something if everyone around you agrees that this piece of paper has $100 of value.

We come up with very convoluted rules about who owns or controls natural resources. In America, you can own land but you can’t own a river. We own the land where our church sits but we could not start an oil change business in the front yard and just pour used oil on the ground. 

It is our land but when we wanted to add some classrooms to our building, the county planning and zoning commission told us that we couldn’t. It is our land but we are a part of a community that has rules that protect the ground water and the surrounding environment. So do we really own it? 

In our capitalist society, currency, land ownership, taxes, and social services form a complex web of rules that work only to the degree that we all agree to buy into the notion that holding a title to your house means that no one else can move in with you without your consent and that your currency is acceptable tender for any transaction you want to make in the market place. 

But, in reality, money does not exist. Land titles do not exist. Governments do not exist. These are all social constructs that exist only when the people agree to pretend that they exist and follow a certain set of rules. Grow up around currency, land ownership, and a certain government, you can start to believe that they are real and so you get conversations like this:

The former Sex and the City star, Cynthia Nixon, challenged incumbent, Andrew Cuomo for the Democratic nomination for this fall’s governor’s race in New York. She lost that bid by a landslide though she promises to launch a grassroots campaign to get on the ballot anyway. 

Nixon has campaigned wanting to make major investments in New York’s mass transit and education systems which she insists have been woefully neglected during Cuomo’s time in office. 

During a brief appearance on Morning Joe, Mika Brezenski asked the question that is always asked of social progressives: How are you going to pay for the things your propose?

It is not, on the face of it, an unfair question. What I find to be hypocritical about this is that no one questioned Cuomo when he was lowering corporate taxes about how he was going to pay for it. When he eliminated taxes on manufacturers, no one asked him how he was going to pay for it. When he moved the bar on estate taxes from protecting the first million dollars of an estate from taxes to five million dollars, no one asked him how he was going to pay for it. But when someone suggests that they fix their crumbling subway system, used by the poor to get to work and school, then the multi-millionaire host of an allegedly left leaning news show, needs to know how on earth that could be paid for.

Earlier this week Andrew Gillum shocked political pundits by winning the Democratic nomination for governor of Florida. He was immediately portrayed as being too liberal to be elected in Florida because he was pledging to help curb the school to prison pipeline in Florida by increasing school funding and teacher pay which is currently near the absolute bottom in the United States. 

And, now, this is going to be a little shocking so please fasten your seat belts: He went on Morning Joe and was questioned by multi-millionaire on-air personality, Mike Barnacle who wanted to know how he was going to pay for this: 

While Gov. Rick Scott cut hundreds of millions of dollars from the taxes paid by Floridians, no one asked him how he was going to pay for it. This is the insane overarching lie in America. Tax cuts for the rich, government spending on programs that make rich people richer, are rarely questioned. Anything proposed to help the poor to have access to education, health care, or transportation, is portrayed as being ridiculous because we can’t afford it.

The cost of housing prisoners in some states has risen to $75,000 per prisoner per year. Who pays for the two million people in prison in America, especially for the million who have no rational reason for being in prison?

In the January 1, 2015 edition of Time Magazine, Mark Thompson looked at the total dollar cost of our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. He said, A truer measure of the wars’ total costs pegs them at between $4 trillion and $6 trillion. This fuller accounting includes “long-term medical care and disability compensation for service members, veterans and families, military replenishment and social and economic costs,” Harvard economist Linda Bilmes calculated in 2013.

What I find to be ironic, no, what I find to be completely hypocritical about our news media is that we can go into wars, mass incarceration, a massive tax cut for the super wealthy, and propose something as totally insane as building a wall all along the American border with Mexico out of tax dollars and the corporate media says next to nothing about it. 

Folks, when it comes to protecting the super wealthy, there is not a nickel’s worth of difference between Fox and MSNBC. They literally laugh at political candidates who talk about tuition free higher education but that could be accomplished for about $45 billion a year and universal healthcare could replace our current for-profit insurance system and we would save money, over $2 trillion in the first ten years.

Let me remind you of where we began a few minutes ago. Money doesn’t exist. Money is just like a ruler that measures the length of a board. Our currency is how we move wealth around, but it is not, inherently wealth. Wealth resides in land, natural resources, housing, buildings, machinery, agricultural products, labor and energy. Money is just a yard stick we use to distribute things of real value.

We are rapidly moving into an economy that science fiction writers talked about for the past 100 years. Manufacturing and agriculture are becoming mechanized. The family farm is now almost extinct as huge corporate farms have taken the place. Giant combines do the work of hundreds of farmers with small tractors and in the workplace, every year, more of our refrigerators, cars, computers, and clothing are made by robotic machinery that keeps reducing our need for labor. Very soon, we will see self-driving trucks, cars, trains, and even airplanes. 

Automation can mean that we will become a more civilized society in which we work less, retire sooner, and have more leisure time to become artists, poets, writers, and actors: or, for that matter, we can return to growing our own food, and making by hand some of our personal items such as clothing and furniture . . . not because we have to but because we can. But the way our current economy is set up, we are going the other way, asking people to work longer, for less, and without basic benefits. 

This is alarmingly inhumane and economically entirely unnecessary. This is the one time you are going to hear me agreeing with a Fox News host, but Tucker Carlson recently pointed out that the owner of Amazon, Jeff Bezos, is now the richest man in the world. He will shortly be the world’s first trillionaire. But he is holding down salaries so low that the rest of us are subsidizing his payroll by paying welfare benefits to his employees.

And here is a point that so many people miss:  The stock market is not the economy. Amazon stock has more than doubled in value in the past year, it is one of the fastest rising stocks in history, but it is becoming valuable, not because the economy is good but because he is keeping salaries low. A thriving stock market is good for people who own stock but when it is this good, what you are seeing is wealthy people getting rich due to the crushing poverty of low wage workers at the bottom of the economy. 

In the face of a shrinking demand for labor, the idea of a basic universal income for every adult citizen is growing in popularity and feasibility. Let’s say we do away with all food stamp programs, disability, public housing, welfare of all sorts, and we just give every adult American $2000 a month. Not enough to get you out of poverty but a base income from which you can earn more or figure out how to gather roommates and pool resources to make it work. Maybe you cut out people who are rich or who have higher incomes but you are creating one single social security program that would cost about $4 trillion dollars per year.  Now, here is the question everyone wants to ask:

Well, let me tell you:  You start off by saving over $500 billion by eliminating all other welfare programs. Then, you reverse the Trump tax giveaway to the super rich, and we are half way there already. 

We spend about $800 billion on incarcerating 2 million Americans every year. That should be cut in half. I would not start any more stupid, illegal, and unnecessary wars and we are already saving a ton of money but just for good measure I would decrease military spending by about half, focusing instead on infrastructure spending and investments in science, technology, health, and environment. 

So, call me crazy, but this would wipe out hunger, allow everyone who can do college work to go to college, end homelessness and poverty, provide healthcare to everyone, save the planet, while dramatically increasing the number of musicians, sculptors, actors, and poets in our society.  Let me ask you, how crazy is that?

Here is the deal, the economic system that ushered in the industrial revolution and has led to great innovations in agriculture and in our digital technology now threatens to choke us by creating trillionaires on one end of the economy and hundreds of millions of poor people at the other end of the economy. My modest suggestion is that we create a civilization that is safe for human habitation. 

Corporations, the government, our currency, and the ownership of property are all illusions and we can restructure our lives in a way that reflects our morals. For the first time in human history, it is possible to wipe out poverty and if we can do but choose not to do it then we deserve whatever dystopian future that may come our way at the hands of trillionaires!