Is it Time for Guaranteed Basic Income in America?

John Summers does not fit the stereotype of poverty in America. He’s a white, middle-aged man. He not only has a college degree, he has a PhD and has lectured at Harvard. And yet, when his marriage fell apart and, in 2016, he was left with sole custody of his two children, including his disabled son who has seven diagnoses, including autism, Summers was unable to work, and his family spiraled into economic precarity.

“Just to state the obvious reference point for parents who are not caring for disabled children: There’s no daycare. I need to be here for him. There’s nobody else,” Summers said on this week’s Better Life Lab podcast episode. “In the first year after leaving work, my income dropped by more than $100,000.” Summers calculates that, between paying out of pocket for treatments for his son and his lost wages, the family is out $800,000 over eight years.

Summers, who lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, has the opportunity to have a personal care attendant care for his son, paid for by insurance. “But I can’t find anybody,” he said. “For months and months, I’ve been trying to find somebody so I can work.”

But Summers now has a lifeline, however slim. He’s one of a growing number of Americans living in poverty or on low incomes taking part in Guaranteed Basic Income pilot programs across the country. Summer receives $500 every month in cash, no strings attached, through the Cambridge RISE pilot. The payment not only covers about half his mortgage and gives his family some breathing room, financially, it’s also boosted their morale.

“It says there are other people who care about us, and who want us to be able to live without taking a hit to our self worth, or our value,” Summers told me.

While it doesn’t solve everything - like how to save for his daughter’s college tuition - the monthly payment helps move his family out of the high-stress survival mode of trying to make it through the day that so many in poverty experience. “The guaranteed part about guaranteed income, the most important part really, is that it does enable you to plan,” he said, “it enables you to conceive of a future.”

As newsletter readers and podcast listeners know, this season, we’re exploring work stress and the future of work and wellbeing. And poverty is a major stressor - associated with high blood pressure, cardiovascular disease, sleep disruptions, anxiety and depression - which, as the COVID-19 pandemic showed, can make those in poverty that much more vulnerable to disease, outbreaks and pandemics.

At the heart of what I found through my reporting and research around the future of work and life, is that the real question isn’t so much about robots or automation taking away our jobs. We know from history that technology will destroy some jobs and invariably create others. We know from demographic changes that the demand for care work - which is already so undervalued - will only grow. So the real question is, will we choose to make these new jobs, and these in-demand care jobs “big enough” to support human life? And if we don’t, what kind of safety net will we weave? And if there isn’t enough work to go around, how will we live, support our families or find meaning in our income and work-defined society? 

To tackle that question this episode, we open with a conversation with Michael Tubbs and Natalie Foster. Tubbs is the former mayor of Stockton, California, who ran the first city-led pilot in Guaranteed Basic Income. Foster, co-founder of the Economic Security Project, collaborated with Tubbs on the pilot.

To Tubbs, who himself grew up in poverty, it’s all about data. And the data from the pilot he ran - as well as a number of pilots on guaranteed basic income that were run in the 1960s, and were lauded by then-president Richard M. Nixon - shows that when families in need receive an infusion of cash, it helps them cover basics like food and rent and car repairs, improves health and wellbeing, creates more time for family, and actually helps people find better jobs. It’s a virtual upward spiral.

Foster said what struck her most about the Stockton pilot is that, not only did families have more economic stability, they had more time. “And that is the type of agency and life that everyone in the richest nation on earth deserves,” she said.

To Tubbs, just as the future of work and wellbeing isn’t predetermined and is very much a choice, so, too, is poverty.

“We know that poverty is not just experienced by Black people and people of color, but it’s disproportionately experienced by those groups. And that’s not by accident, that’s by design. So we know we can’t have a conversation about any safety net program in this country without dealing with race,” Tubbs said. “We saw it with the New Deal, where so many of the New Deal programs excluded women, Black people, Latinos, Asians, by design, to get them passed … so part of the narrative work we have to do is really deal with racism and white supremacy.

“Poverty is very expensive for all of us because we solve for poverty with hospitals, jails and police. And we spend so much money on those functions because we really haven’t done the job to think about [the roots of] poverty,” he continued. “So I think a narrative, bringing up the history that the president of the United States, a Republican, was actively trying to figure out how to make this work. That Sarah Palin became popular as governor because she gave people more free money from the Alaska Permanent Dividend Fund. Let’s get to the point where we all have consensus that we want to get this done, that we want some form of a guaranteed income. We’ve been really close before. I think our job is to get us back to that place. And then finally across the finish line.”

When pilot participant John Summers thinks about Guaranteed Basic Income, he thinks not only of himself and his current circumstances, but of his son. “My son is not going to be able to work, to make his own way. But he would be able to with a universal basic income,” Summers said.  He worries that, in a society that equates income with value, his son could be seen not only as ‘superfluous,” but “a burden.” “When I look to see what his future would be like, to have that lifeline, that’s not means tested or extractive, would be so important.”

We’ve got work to do. I hope you’ll join us next time on Better Life Lab.

I hope you'll listen in and join the conversation! 

The podcast is a co-production of New America and Slate and sponsored by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. You can find the podcast — and transcripts and additional resources —on our Better Life Lab website, on Slate, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts. Leave a review on Apple podcasts if you like the show. And email me with ideas and stories: schulte@newamerica.org