It seems like everything changed during the pandemic and its aftermath, and yet in very important ways, what really needed to change didn’t. It’s time to finally take the next logical step in the evolution of our human society and implement a Basic Income investment in the lifelong economic security of people in this world.
Millions of people starved or visited food banks for the first time in their lives in 2020, while local grocery stores went without customers and food was wasted. Millions of people faced eviction and still do, while at the same time there are vacant homes sitting unused. Millions of people filed for unemployment assistance or simply went without any income at all for the first time in their lives, adding to all the unemployment and poverty that existed before the pandemic. With food going unbought, housing going unutilized, and land sitting undeveloped, we clearly have enough global resources to meet everyone’s basic needs in good times or bad. Yet those resources are not available to everyone. As a civilization we are increasingly worse by the year when it comes to sharing and distributing resources. The richest 1% owned 45% of all the resources just 5 years ago, and now they own 50% of everything. The economic system itself encourages centralization of resources among a few, while the rest have less and less.
The coronavirus has thus revealed something extremely important that billions across the globe are starting to realize: We don’t really have a safety net. We never did. Sure, there are programs in some countries meant to help in times of need, like unemployment insurance, disability insurance, housing assistance, food stamps, etc. But those programs – because they are targeted – always exclude many of those in need. Even the most effective welfare programs don't reach everyone living in poverty, and many countries don't even have any welfare programs at all. Or if they do, they only target certain groups while excluding others in need. Because they are almost always income tested, they also create "welfare traps". That's when people can't afford to get a new job, because as soon as they do they lose their welfare checks.
A net by definition is full of holes. The coronavirus crisis has made abundantly clear that when it comes to our safety net, the holes are large enough for billions of people to fall through. What is needed is a fully universal and unconditional basic income floor for everyone, free of holes.
We declare that every individual on this planet should have the right to an unconditional cash stipend, one that represents an equal share of our economy we together comprise. It is our inheritance. It is our dividend. It is our tax rebate. It is our right as global citizens. It is a payback for allowing others to buy and fence off land. It is a return on the investment that we all have contributed to when building factories, when inventing new robots and automation, and when bringing the next generation of entrepreneurs into this world.
We should receive UBI in recognition that in a capitalistic society we are indeed no longer free. Because - do we have freedom if we no longer have unconditional access to roam the earth. Do we have freedom if what we need to live can be withheld from us? Do we have freedom if we lack the power to say no to exploitation and abuse? Do we have freedom if all we can do is fight for survival? Without unconditional access to the basic needs of existence we are not free.
We are all human beings whose lives have intrinsic worth. We are all equally worthy of existing. That is what we now recognize and must fully realize together.
UBI is not a new idea nor a call for charity. This is a centuries-in-the-making. Countless thought leaders have proposed it, time and time again. Supporters of UBI include Bertrand Russel, Virginia Woolf, Stephen Hawking, Pope Francis, Jack Dorsey, Elon Musk, Joe Rogan, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Larry Page, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Pen Jillette. It is also not a new idea. Thomas Paine, one of the founding fathers of the USA wrote in support of his own plan for universal inheritance, “it is a right, and not a charity, that I am pleading for.”
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Milton Friedman may have disagreed on many things, but they both agreed on the direct elimination of poverty through the guaranteeing of income. UBI is not left or right. It’s forward. This is NOT about capitalism vs. socialism, nor conservatism vs. liberalism. It’s about humanism. It’s about living dignified lives with the agency to make our own choices, secure in the knowledge that whatever happens, we are protected from starvation and homelessness, and are free to forge our own paths.
You may ask, “how can we afford to end poverty?” and we ask in return, “how can we afford not to end poverty?” The costs of child poverty alone have been estimated to exceed $1 trillion a year. We spend trillions of dollars annually on healthcare and crime treating the downstream effects of poverty and chronic insecurity. We also suffer from the decreased productivity of people just working whatever job they can find in order to just survive, and our economy suffers from a perpetual GDP gap as a result of there simply not being enough consumers with enough money to purchase all that our economy is capable of producing.
You may ask, “won’t people stop working?” and we ask in return, “how much work is prevented by a lack of money?” How much work is going undone because people can’t afford to create their own job, or relocate or retrain for a job? How many jobs don’t exist due to small businesses failing due to lack of customers? And how much work is being done in homes across the world going unpaid and unrecognized, despite being hugely valuable to all of society?
Additionally, as technology is able to do more of our work for us, at an increasingly affordable price, should we even be fretting about the loss of those jobs? Or should we be welcoming automation in the same way its owners already do? Is the problem the automation of labor? Or is the problem that we require labor in order to obtain survival income? If the wages that robots aren’t earning are shared universally as a technological dividend, and the value of the data we are generating is shared as a data dividend, then automation literally starts working for all of us. We could welcome automation for the productivity increases it brings if we simply shared the resulting prosperity instead of concentrating it in the hands of the few.
It is this decades-long concentration of production assets that needs to be reversed. This concentration seems to have kicked into high gear in 1974 when the Bretton-Woods economic system was created. Before then, blue collar workers in the US earned around $28,000 per year. If income growth for this group had matched the economic growth rate, their income would have risen to $61,000 by 2018, but it actually only rose to only $33,000. So, instead of rising at the economic growth rate of around 120%, these workers' incomes rose about 18 percent. And it's the same around the world. The rich get richer, faster, the working class gets poorer, and the poor increasingly rely on charity. So one argument for UBI could be that it is simply a matter of returning the money that would otherwise have been distributed each year as wages and salaries, had they not stagnated decades ago.
Yes, we will continue working if poverty is ended, just as billionaires continue working without the fear of poverty. A UBI will not be enough to make life comfortable, everyone will want to keep their jobs even with a UBI.
Yes, we can and should choose to issue a dividend to all shareholders in the race of humanity, as a right of citizenship in recognition of the value we all inherently have, and all interdependently create.
Yes, this is rightfully our money to demand. The world's economy needs money to continually exchange hands in order to thrive. We will all benefit from small businesses having more customers with more money to spend. We will all benefit from every individual being "invested in" on a monthly or a daily basis. We will all see returns on that investment in the form of improved health, less crime, better educational outcomes, greater wellbeing, higher trust, increased entrepreneurship, and more resilience to the disasters that can befall any of us at any time.
Consider that last point closely. What if we had already implemented a global UBI before the pandemic hit? What if every human had already been receiving $100 or $1000 each month, not just as a one-time relief payment, but as monthly survival income as their inalienable right? How many more people would have been able to afford to stay home instead of spread Covid? How many fewer people would have had to stand in record-breaking lines at food banks? How many fewer people would have fallen behind on their rent? How much less relief would we have needed if the least income any citizen had was $100 or $1000, each and every month?
If we can create, test, and distribute a vaccine to a novel coronavirus all within one year, we can inoculate ourselves against poverty when we already have the vaccine available — money — and we already know how to best distribute it — unconditionally.
The Procent Foundation is building a solution that has the capability to uniquely reach and pay all people in this world, all they need is access to either a phone or the internet. We are also proposing a way of funding a global UBI through a 1% global tax on all Crypto transactions. This tax would be automatically deducted, no paperwork needed, no government bureaucracy, no delays in distributing it back to the people. With only 1% cost of overhead administration and cyber security, and with only 24h processing time before distributing back as UBI, it would be the most efficient tax collection and the fastest distribution ever conceived of.
The current fractional banking economic system relies on Central Banks to print money and distribute to regular banks, in the hopes that the money will multiply 10x and trickle down to everyone. But instead, why don't we just distribute the money directly to everyone. Cut out the middle men. With modern Crypto money we can build a better, decentralized system. We can give the power to the people to be their own money printer, operate their own money multiplier and have a say in how to run the tax collector. Let's build a better world together, one where we take care of each other and noone get left behind.
Please consider supporting and donating to this cause today!
Adapted from a text originally written by Scott Santens for Fund For Humanity
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