BY POLLY MANN
The Business Section of The New York Times of March 3, 2016, carried a front page article about “universal basic income,” UBI, in which each eligible adult would receive $1,000 a month. Richard Nixon first proposed a program he called a “negative income tax,” NIT, but little was done about it. It would have created a single system that would pay those eligible a monthly stipend, insuring a minimum level of income for all. It was believed that, with NIT, the need for minimum wage, food stamps, welfare, social security programs and other government assistance programs could be eliminated, thus reducing the administrative effort and cost a fraction of the current system.
The UBI program has been endorsed by libertarians, conservatives and even venture capitalists. Sam Altman, president of the tech incubator Y Combinator, has proposed to fund research concerning some of the most basic questions being asked about the UBI program. Altman says, “People have been predicting that jobs would go away for a long time and usually what happens is they just change … during those periods of change things can be quite disruptive.”
Andrew L. Stern, a former president of the Service Employees International Union, who is working on a book about UBI, discusses the current anxiety around jobs. “We’re entering a universal white-collar, middle-class anxiety, which drives political change faster than poor people tend to drive change.” One thing is certain: Workers and their families who live on limited incomes would welcome such a program.
