Thompson 1

Ashley Thompson
DeBock
English 4 Honors
19 October 2016
Universal Basic Income
Universal basic income (UBI) can lead the way to a declining lower class and provide
help to the disabled, pregnant, or otherwise unable to work, despite the fact that people claim it
leads to diminished work ethic. UBI would provide the proper backbone to help lift those in
poverty up to a secure level of living. A major obstacle in the way of UBI is welfare, but that
system is majorly damaged and is in need of repair. There exist examples of this system that have
succeeded in different countries that could be implemented in the US. UBI could be a secure
system if proper thinking and planning is put behind it.
Before UBI is implemented, however, the current welfare system needs to be retired. An
example on how welfare harms those who are supposed to be benefiting from it is that it
shoulders poor people with burdens of control and humiliation to go along with their financial
hardships (Griffith "Libertarians Rightly Support Basic Income for All"). Welfare dictates how
much and on what a persons salary is spent. It does not give people much choice to what they
are able to purchase. Another fault in the system is that, If you worked at all but still couldn't
pay your bills you were taken off the welfare roles so many people who could not find suitable
work just stayed on welfare (Radulich "A Basic Income Guarantee Can and Should Replace
Welfare"). The system alone is not able to pay bills, fund a house, and provide food, and neither
can a low paying job. Welfare works on an all-or-nothing system and it harms the citizens it is
supposed to be helping. This program is too big, with Nearly one in six people rely on some

Thompson 2

form of public assistance, a larger share than ... the government started measuring two decades
ago (Radulich "A Basic Income Guarantee Can and Should Replace Welfare") for it to be
slacking in the way that it has been. The people of the United States need a system that will help
everyone unconditionally. They need a system that will allow them to work in addition to
government help. The people of the United States need UBI so that they can live rather than just
survive.
A major argument on UBI is who should and should not be able to benefit from it. The
argument, however, is shown pointless in the article About Basic Income when it says that,
The right to a basic income is then of a piece with the whole package of rights and duties
associated with full citizenship. This statement simply means that, rather than just letting any
person residing in the US to benefit from UBI, it takes a full citizenship to be able to receive it.
Another argument for who should be able to benefit also falls under what age the citizen should
be. Some restrict basic income, by definition, to adult members of the population...Others
conceive of basic income as an entitlement from the first to the last breath...Some also want it to
be the same as for adults, and hence independent of age (About Basic Income). Many
different options are presented about how UBI should be able to benefit children, ranging from
giving them an equal salary to adults to giving the benefits to only adults in a nation. Some
believe, however, that if an adult is a jail inmate, they should not receive anything from UBI.
Jails are funded by the communities taxes and has all utilities, foods, and shelter paid for in
advance so it is therefore obvious that prison inmates should lose the benefit of their basic
income for the duration of their imprisonment (About Basic Income). Inmates should lose
their share of UBI while under custody. This would ease the amount of taxes needed, and make
working citizens feel as though their tax money is going to waste on troubled people. UBI has

Thompson 3

multiple different regulations on who should receive basic income and who should not based on
where the program is being based and the conditions with which the program is being built
around.
One example of success with UBI is the case of Dauphin, Manitoba, Canada in the
1970s, though they addressed it as Mincome. In this town, citizens were given basic income
checks and when the numbers were uncovered, they showed a rather favorable outcome. The
numbers behind the attempt showed that life in Dauphin improved markedly. Hospitalization
rates fell. More teen-agers stayed in school. And researchers who looked at Mincomes impact on
work rates discovered that they had barely dropped at all. The program had worked about as well
as anyone could have hoped(Surowiecki The Case of Free Money). In this example, even
after Mincome was placed, people continued working earning extra money that would benefit
them and the government as well. This program, though it was tragically dropped, inspired many
others to entertain the idea. Supporters of the program included Martin Luther King ... the rightwing economist Milton Friedman, [and] the Nixon Administration even tried to get a basicincome guarantee through Congress (Surowiecki The Case of Free Money). UBI as a whole
is proven to be a rather successful, the only thing standing in the way of it is government
resistance.
There are people, however, who also pose as a threat the the idea of UBI. Journalist
Eduardo Porter describes the proposal as a poor decision that has weak foundations behind it and
would not help those in poverty in the slightest. Porter states that a check of $10,000 to each of
300 million Americans would cost more than $3 trillion a year, and that that, amounts to
nearly all the tax revenue collected by the federal government (A Universal Basic Income Is a
Poor Tool to Fight Poverty). He also goes to state that even cutting the 10,000 in half would not

Thompson 4

even meet the poverty line, so funding behind this program is skewed. Though to dispute this,
proposals have been made to even out the field in economics. Change where the government
uses their funds and get rid of some systems that would not be needed under UBI and decrease
superfluous spendings on others. Porter also goes to say that receiving a monthly check would
create a non-negligible disincentive to work (A Universal Basic Income Is a Poor Tool to
Fight Poverty). He says that the working class would lose its interest to keep working and
would eventually run employment to the ground. However, it is shown in the successful
examples, such as Dauphin, that this is not the case. People continue to work to receive extra
money for instances of celebrations or extra items or just back up funds. Porter describes many
flaws in UBI and how many of the plans to fix these flaws are outrageous throughout his article.
There are two major types of UBI that were proposed in Quebec, Canada in 1994 to help
improve social security. The first type is Negative Income Tax (NIT) which gives its income in
correspondence to family size and income other than NIT. The second type is a Universal
Demogrant (UD) which gives a check to all adults with no reduction rate. Both of the proposals
are directed to the working-age population [and] do not change the system of benefits directed
to persons 65 and over(Guaranteed Annual Income). The programs are designed to work with
current programs set in Canada to help those in poverty and replace ones that do not quite work.
In the article, UD and NIT are described as simple trade offs to current programs that could
better help the poor. These programs are proposed so that they would[encourage] rather than
[dampen] incentives to become more self-sufficient through earnings(Guaranteed Annual
Income). They are made to, rather than ripping the crutch from the cripple, add stronger support
so people can overcome poverty in a more stable way.

Thompson 5

UBI is a rather complex system that is in need of much planning behind it. It allows those
struggling with funds a chance at a stable life without needing to put forth superfluous working
hours. The program, however, needs to replace failing programs rather than just be added in the
mix, so that it can receive proper funding. The money behind it would take some time to adjust
and may only be small amounts at first but could become a strong backbone of any country.
Universal Basic Income is a path to helping anyone and everyone who struggles with money in
the US, which would lift the country to great economic feats.

Works Cited
"About Basic Income." About Basic Income. N.p., n.d. Web. 20 Sept. 2016.

Category, By Income. "Guaranteed Annual Income." Guaranteed Annual Income. N.p.,

n.d. Web. 20 Sept. 2016.

Thompson 6

Griffith, Jeremy. "Libertarians Rightly Support Basic Income for All." The US Libertarian
Movement. Ed. Michael Ruth. Farmington Hills, MI: Greenhaven Press, 2016. Opposing
Viewpoints. Rpt. from "The Libertarian Case for the Universal Basic Income."
OpedSpace.com. 2015. Opposing Viewpoints in Context. Web. 22 Sept. 2016

Porter, Eduardo. "A Universal Basic Income Is a Poor Tool to Fight Poverty."The New York
Times. The New York Times, 31 May 2016. Web. 23 Sept. 2016.

Radulich, Mark. "A Basic Income Guarantee Can and Should Replace Welfare." Welfare. Ed.
Margaret Haerens. Detroit: Greenhaven Press, 2012. Opposing Viewpoints. Rpt. from
"On Welfare and the Alternatives." 411mania.com. 2007. Opposing Viewpoints in
Context. Web. 21 Sept. 2016.

Surowiecki, James. "The Case for Free Money." The New Yorker. N.p., 13 June 2016. Web. 23
Sept. 2016.