This article appears in the May/June 2021 issue of The American Prospect magazine. Subscribe here.
As anyone who has ever covered or worked on a political campaign or encouraged you to buy cut-rate insurance, tax filing advice, or the newest Subway sandwich can attest, standing on a street corner handing out leaflets is an exercise in rejection and disinterest. Just getting someone to take a flyer, even if they escort it straight to the nearest trash can without breaking stride, constitutes a victory; getting them to buy your product, sign your petition, or perhaps most difficult, commit to voting for your candidate, is nearly impossible. Even when what you’re offering them is free money.
JOHN P. DESSEREAU
I’m standing with four volunteer members of the Andrew Yang for Mayor campaign, on the corner of Nostrand Avenue and Fulton Street in Brooklyn, New York, on a too-hot Sunday afternoon in early May, and that is effectively what’s happening. This local faction of the Yang Gang is on the lookout for possible supporters of the man who, according to almost all available polling, is likely to be the next mayor of New York City. I am here to observe the political phenomenon that is universal basic income (UBI), Yang’s signature policy, which has quickly become so popular and persuasive in American politics that by merely prominently embracing it on television in a different political contest nearly two years prior, a man with no public-sector experience and precious little private-sector success is poised to become the top executive of the largest city in America. So though most passersby are showing little interest, this shared street corner also happens to be the momentary epicenter of a sensation.
Despite Yang’s front-runner status and significant fundraising, this is not an overweening outfit. The four volunteers, all of them younger than 35, stand in front of a small folding table with clipboards and pens. Against the wall behind them sits a banner featuring a black-and-white portrait of Martin Luther King Jr., in profile, and the text “The solution to poverty: guaranteed income—Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. ... Yang for New York.” The double attribution hearkens, not purposefully, to a certain Wayne Gretzky quote attributed to Michael Scott from the television show The Office, made immortal as a meme.
Yang has other policies of course; on housing, climate, education (“He’s running on reopening the schools,” offers one volunteer, as a pedestrian quickly scurries off, disappointed). But guaranteed income is the reason we’re all here, and in fact how all four of these volunteers found out about Yang in the first place, after he embraced the suggestion of giving $1,000 a month to all American adults, in the midst of an improbable and arguably indefensible run for president in 2020. The embrace of that policy alone—and I mean alone, because the strength of his credentials working on Venture for America, or doing test prep, certainly weren’t what got Yang on the debate stage—yielded stunning success. He quickly became the silly face of a serious proposal. He didn’t win any delegates, but he outlasted early favorites like Cory Booker and eventual vice president Kamala Harris. Guaranteed income clearly made Yang a political phenomenon, propelled him to the top of the mayoral polls, and if we’re being honest, will be the best bet of convincing any of these passersby to vote him across the finish line.
To illustrate the political potency of UBI further, consider: These are novices. They have some light phone-banking experience, and some mutual-aid work, but this is the first campaign anyone here has ever canvassed for. “I loved the policy from the get-go, I just fangirled him so hard,” says Marissa, a special-education teacher and this group’s de facto leader. “I don’t know if he ever got it, but after he dropped out I messaged him on Instagram and said, ‘Please run for mayor.’”
IT’S NOT OFTEN THAT a new policy idea gets so many people excited. It’s even less often that a new idea involving a major expansion of unfettered public-welfare spending is embraced in the post–welfare reform era. All of which makes universal income a rather stunning development, one that’s having an explosive moment.
For those not keeping active tabs: There are currently basic income proposals being seriously considered by the mayor of Los Angeles and the likely mayor of New York, the country’s two biggest cities. The state of California is deliberating over a statewide basic income proposal of its own, just months after the legislature finalized its own COVID relief package that resulted in one $600 cash payment to its poorest and undocumented residents, with another $600 in the works. In just the last several weeks, basic income programs, at some level of development, have been announced in Marin County, California, and St. Paul, Minnesota, joining over 40 cities looking at versions of the program.
Meanwhile, the hotly debated $2,000 (or at least $1,400 on top of $600) stimulus checks pledged to Georgia voters are credited primarily with delivering Democratic victories in two improbable Senate special elections in January, which delivered a Democratic majority that allowed those checks to be sent, as well as the expansion of the Child Tax Credit that functionally serves as basic income payments for poor American families. The passage of those checks is also widely credited for the fact that Congress, long and rightfully a deeply reviled entity in the eyes of the American public, currently enjoys its highest approval rating in a decade. Even Pope Francis, who has a direct line to the man upstairs, has said that “this may be the time to consider a universal basic wage.”
It’s no wonder that “give people money” has become both a rallying cry and the political commonsense slogan of the early 2020s. Early returns on these programs show that they’re not just politically popular, but effective at curtailing poverty. The no-strings-attached cash payments of the CARES Act, though not universal and not recurring, combined with enhanced federal unemployment benefits of $600 a week, caused the poverty rate to drop during the first three months of the pandemic, as millions lost jobs and earnings and health insurance. Basic income has rapidly become a political phenomenon so potent it has some Democrats reconsidering what’s been a 30-year commitment to running, first and foremost, on health care. Why labor over convoluted policy negotiations with industry stakeholders when you can just cut people checks? In a uniquely polarized political environment, money seems to be effortlessly cutting through the partisan tension.
So UBI is having a moment. But that begs the question: What is UBI? Is it a drastic expansion of the welfare state? Or is it a reboot of neoliberal policy, an expansion of marketization, the realization of Silicon Valley’s libertarian future? Is it the new world of welfare, or the frontier of its decline?
Is basic income a drastic expansion of the welfare state, or is it a reboot of neoliberal policy?
The policy has its share of skeptics. Josh Bivens, director of research at the left-wing Economic Policy Institute, recently told Marketplace that it was a “poorly targeted” use of resources whose triumph over simply expanding unemployment insurance “would be a bit of a shame.” As Adam Tooze, economic history professor at Columbia University, put it on a Bloomberg podcast, UBI can be seen as the result of “the weakness of American social institutions which required the distribution of checks … it still has a slightly Reaganesque feel to it. It isn’t really the government that’s showing up, it’s just the check.” Or, per Prospect contributor Bryce Covert in a recent column in The New York Times, UBI done wrong can be “a Trojan horse for dismantling public assistance altogether.” And of course, it’s expensive: The three rounds of stimulus checks this year, which amounted to $3,200 a person, cost $850 billion, on par with the cost of the whole Medicare program over the same period of time. And nobody is living decently on $3,200 a year.
Just as important as whether it is actually good policy; is it actually good politics?
YANG IS NOT THE ONLY mayoral candidate whose path out of obscurity was forged by UBI. Far from the Big Apple, 26-year-old Michael Tubbs ran for mayor of Stockton, California, in 2017 and won. He became the city’s youngest and first Black mayor.
This position has not been a fast track to a national profile. Stockton had not unrecently been named America’s “most miserable” city; four years before Tubbs’s swearing in, it had earned the dubious distinction of being the largest U.S. municipality to declare bankruptcy in decades. Stockton had been bled out by the financial crisis, which was only the most recent in a series of bad economic fortunes dating back literally to the end of the Gold Rush. Poverty was entrenched, corruption rampant, and the murder rate was triple the national average. None of this was news to Tubbs, who grew up in the poorest part of Stockton, with a teenage mother and a dad in prison.
Tubbs didn’t run on universal basic income. But when he convened his advisers to find ways to mollify Stockton’s most intractable woes, that suggestion continued to surface. “What can a city do to end poverty?” Tubbs asked. “Give me a policy. And they came back with basic income.”
Tubbs went to Stanford, where he first encountered both UBI and, importantly, Big Tech. Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel (“Evan,” as Tubbs calls him, “one of my best friends”) was in his graduating class and at one point even lived across the hall. That also got him close to Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s monastically styled CEO, and Chris Hughes, the Facebook co-founder turned Facebook detractor and anti-inequality crusader, in whom Tubbs found a kindred spirit for a number of his anti-poverty measures.
After a fortuitous seating chart brought Tubbs shoulder to shoulder with Natalie Foster at the Economic Security Project, a think tank funded by Hughes to redress economic ills, a project took flight. Hughes’s money, via ESP, would fund a pilot program, where 125 Stocktonites living below the city’s median household income would receive $500 a month via debit card, no strings attached.
By January 2019, Stockton was the first American city with a universal basic income program, set to run for two years, with randomly chosen recipients reporting back regularly what they’d spent the money on, to get a sense of the program’s impact. That wasn’t all Tubbs did; he enacted programs on education, housing, and more. But the UBI pilot brought him and Stockton unlikely attention. In the words of Rep. Ilhan Omar, he was “the UBI mayor.”
YICHUAN CAO/SIPA USA VIA AP
Mainly by embracing UBI, Andrew Yang, a man with no public-sector experience, may well become the mayor of New York City.
BEFORE TUBBS, THERE was Thomas Paine, in 1797. Or, if you’re being generous, before Paine there was the Holy Roman Empire, where, according to journalist Annie Lowrey in her book Give People Money, universal basic income was floating around as a policy idea. Sir Thomas More argued for it in Utopia, circa 1516; John Kenneth Galbraith was in on it too.
Perhaps more important is UBI’s inclusion in the social movements and Black radical tradition in the United States in the 1960s and 1970s. For the better part of those two decades, the female-led National Welfare Rights Organization argued for loosening restrictions on welfare, and on cash payments in particular. In 1972, they even got eventual presidential candidate George McGovern to introduce a bill that would have guaranteed a $6,500 annual base income nationwide. Farther from the halls of Congress, “guaranteed jobs or a guaranteed income” was a pillar of the Black Panther Party’s ten-point platform, articulated in 1966.
The prominent backer you’re most likely to hear about today is MLK, whose embrace of universal basic income came from the work of one of his closest advisers and chief lieutenant, Bayard Rustin. Just two months after the August 1963 March on Washington, Rustin wrote an essay on the effect of automation on Black workers. “He basically says: There’s automation and deindustrialization happening. It’s happened to Black workers first; it’s going to happen to white workers. If the civil rights movement can’t solve the political economy question around the future of work, we’re not going to get equal rights,” said Dorian Warren, president of Community Change and co-founder of the Economic Security Project. “Therefore, he landed on guaranteed income.”
Rustin’s embrace likely put it on the radar of King, who made guaranteed income one plank of his platform for economic justice in his famous 1967 book Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?. And it had staying power within that Black radical tradition. “There was like a moment of probably five or six years where this was grounded in poor, Black, particularly Southern women who were like: guaranteed income,” said Warren. “Because the welfare system sucks, it’s dehumanizing.”
Despite the gradual kicking out of welfare supports in the 1990s, we’ve been living with basic income plans in various guises all around us for decades. Social Security is a universal cash payment program for Americans of retirement age that’s both wildly popular and extremely effective at mollifying poverty among the elderly. The Alaska Permanent Fund, which pays a dividend out of assets built up through incoming oil-drilling revenues to every state resident, was enacted in 1976 and continues today. Last year, the dividend was $992; it has been as high as $2,072 in the past. Outside of the U.S., basic income proposals have been the basis for successful left-wing programs in Brazil, Kenya, Finland, and elsewhere. Even Ontario, Canada, recently trialed one.
It’s worth articulating, however, exactly what Dr. King’s vision looked like. He argued for a basic income worth as much as the country’s median income, more than $68,000 per household in today’s numbers. Not a single proposal today approaches that level of generosity.
Furthermore, in the years after King’s assassination, basic income has also resonated with a very different set of enthusiasts, who used it to their own ends. Charles Murray, author of the infamous, eugenics-inflected The Bell Curve, backed a $10,000 annual UBI for all adults, with the condition that it replace all other government benefits entirely, Social Security and Medicaid included. Milton Friedman, the patron saint of neoliberalism, championed basic income as an alternative to the social safety net in his 1962 book Capitalism and Freedom, and again in his 1980 book Free to Choose. Friedman’s plan, funneled through the tax code, would also replace a suite of existing welfare programs.
During his presidency, Richard Nixon considered a form of guaranteed income, a negative income tax that would pay out $1,600 for a family of four; it was a proposal lifted directly from Friedman. Friedrich Hayek, another member of the laissez-faire pantheon, boosted basic income in his 1973 book Law, Legislation and Liberty. Basic income as cash payments in lieu of social services became the design favored by pro-business, small-government types.
Cash payments in lieu of social services became the design favored by pro-business, small-government types.
It’s a short scooter ride from there to Silicon Valley, where the idea has found a home with a chorus of tech CEOs (including Dorsey and Spiegel) in the last ten years, hailed as a simple, nongovernmental offset to the damage to the labor market that their own innovation is sure to bring. That’s no happy accident, as techno-libertarian thinking clearly holds Friedman and Hayek as its progenitors of economic thought. In 2015, it was even referred to, perhaps ominously, in Valley circles as “the social vaccine of the 21st century.” Warren told me, “I get really nervous about the tech libertarian versions of UBI. Because I do think it can be won, I just think it’s not politically useful.”
The libertarian UBI enthusiasm builds upon its deep mistrust of government, the idea being that the only thing government can do competently is reroute tax revenue back to people. As liberal commentator Matt Zeitlin notes, “a welfare state designed around the lowest possible expectations for what the government is capable of doing is unlikely to be one that will be more generous.”
WHILE TUBBS COUNTS himself among the tradition that sees UBI as additive rather than zero-sum, you can see how he, at the very least, could be perceived to be straddling the line. “I’ve been privileged to kind of sit between these two worlds, you have conversations with folks, on both sides, particularly a lot of the funding comes from the tech sector, at least for these pilots,” was how he put it to me, diplomatically.
If Tubbs has one foot in the latter camp, Andrew Yang, despite putting MLK on the campaign poster, almost certainly has both. In fact, the UBI mayor did not endorse the would-be UBI president. Far from it: Tubbs upbraided Yang for his suggestion that he would fund his national UBI by forcing recipients to choose between social services and cash payments. “I support the conversation we’re having about basic income, but I don’t support any proposal that would gut the social safety net,” Tubbs said in The Sacramento Bee.
“I got swarmed by a bunch of the Yang Gang people,” he told me. “But me and Andrew are friends, that’s the thing. We text.” Tubbs even consulted on policy for Yang’s New York City mayoral campaign. (For those wondering, Tubbs endorsed Kamala Harris, whose LIFT Act proposal, which she ran on very quietly, actually sported some basic income features: $500 a month in cash payments for all families earning less than $100,000 a year. And after that, he endorsed Michael Bloomberg.)
Tubbs’s program, the Stockton Economic Empowerment Demonstration (SEED), was a huge success. For two years, households receiving even the relatively paltry $500 a month saw their month-to-month income volatility decline. Recipients spent the money overwhelmingly on essentials, including food, utilities, and gas. Households experienced a 100 percent increase in their ability to pay unexpected bills; many of them enjoyed a newfound ability to pay down lingering debts. In a swift and decisive blow to the most popular anti-welfare hysteria narratives of the 1990s, less than 1 percent of the money went to cigarettes and alcohol. People were healthier, reported improved mental states, lived better—and crucially, they actually worked more.
Take Falaviena, a mother of two preteens. With the $500, “I was able to pay for my license, I was able to put food on the table towards the end of the month, because that was a struggle for me, especially before … and just keeping up with my bills, paying it on time and not having to pay late fees,” she responded in an exit interview. It even changed her relationship with her children. “Before, they would ask me to get them stuff for school or they needed school supplies, and I couldn’t tell them, ‘Yes, we can go get it.’” Now, “[i]t feels great. You feel like a proud mom, that I’m able to provide for my kids when they need it.”
The anecdotal stuff is even more moving than the data, and the stories almost categorically go like this. Right away, the pilot showed that “guaranteed income is the kind of idea that can stabilize a family’s finances for any crisis, including the one that we’re currently in,” said Natalie Foster. “It was true years ago, it’s doubly true now.”
Tubbs knew that long before the final data came in, in tales both heartrending and charming. “We’d get so many thank-yous randomly from people,” he told me. “I was at the Men’s Wearhouse one time, and some woman came up to me and said, ‘Thank you, I’m buying our wedding outfits, the guaranteed income is paying for our wedding outfits.’”
Meanwhile, Tubbs began to scale up the ambition of the program, leaning even harder on his Silicon Valley connections to fund it and other social welfare initiatives. He recruited mayors nationwide to consider UBI-style pilots throughout 2020, an alliance that now counts 50 in total. He got Jack Dorsey to contribute $3 million, and then another $15 million, to fund basic income pilots; he got Snapchat’s Evan Spiegel to kick in $20 million for a Stockton college scholarship program. Mayors in Compton, California; Columbia, South Carolina; and Gainesville, Florida, are all adopting their own versions of the program.
Stockton’s pilot ended in January of 2021, which just so happened to be the very same month that Kevin Lincoln, a Republican pastor, was sworn in as mayor of Stockton. The race wasn’t especially close: Lincoln drubbed Tubbs by 12.3 points.
RICH PEDRONCELLI/AP PHOTO
Michael Tubbs, the former mayor of Stockton, was nationally revered for instituting a basic income program. Then he lost re-election by 12 points.
ONE REASON FOR THE LOSS: As fast as Tubbs could build new social welfare programs, Stockton’s old institutions were crumbling. Even nongovernmental social services, stuff far beyond his remit, were falling apart. In 2017, the year Tubbs was first sworn in, The Record, literally Stockton’s paper of record, laid off a third of its reporting staff. A year later, it closed its production facility.
Just as tech barons leapt into the void to fill the funding gaps for Tubbs’s crucial social services, it was tech that filled the void left by the newspaper, but in a much more malevolent way.
With the reputable media landscape clear-cut, a local blogger with a site called the 209 Times, named for Stockton’s area code, set out to take down Tubbs. Its author, Motecuzoma Patrick Sanchez, said as much. “We always admit and acknowledge our bias … We are one hundred percent responsible for him not getting re-elected.”
The 209 Times, according to Tubbs and nearly all reporting about its coverage, was more than a little loose with the facts. It ran things that were untrue, flagrantly untrue, and borderline defamatory, accusing him of everything from embezzlement to secretly working a full-time job in New York City. It posted racist cartoons, and laid every instance of crime, arson, and homelessness at Tubbs’s feet.
More important than what Sanchez wrote was how the 209 Times disseminated it. And with over 100,000 followers on both Facebook and Instagram, more people than voted in the mayoral election by a lot, its reach was huge. It put the full power of Facebook’s targeting tools to work, and hammered voters. “These lies were broadcast every day, three times a day using social media targeting, micro-targeting people and feeding them that poison each and every day,” said Tubbs, who is now an adviser to California Gov. Gavin Newson on anti-poverty and cash assistance policies. “In exit interviews in some of the polling, what we found was that people were repeating things that were from this page, saying things like ‘We like Mayor Tubbs, but he steals money from us.’” Tubbs might have had Silicon Valley money, but it was no match for Silicon Valley advertising.
Sure, Tubbs made some enemies. Ending the public subsidy for golf courses didn’t endear him to Stockton’s business elite. His proximity to big-city business magnates on the other side of the state’s major freeways probably made him an easier target. But is it possible that, despite enacting what is now seen as the winningest political proposal of this political era, one lowly blogger armed with Facebook’s targeted advertising was able to turn Tubbs from a 41-point victor into a 12-point loser in four years flat? Or was there a kernel of truth, that a high-profile project for a tiny sliver of Stockton’s poorest didn’t align with a public desire to fix much broader and deep-seated problems?
“What we saw playing out was really, I think, a canary in the coal mine for what will happen if we don’t figure out investment in local media,” Foster told me. If Tubbs had allocated public money for local news, alongside all these other initiatives, might that have saved him? I asked him that question; he demurred. But he agreed that it painted a clear picture of the limitations of UBI, which can do immense good while being simultaneously unable to deliver what services do. That so many mayors are following Tubbs’s lead to build their own UBI pilots suggests that they see only political upside. After all, people like free money. But they may not be fully incorporating the potential pitfalls into their analysis.
UBI can do immense good while being simultaneously unable to deliver what services do.
At this point, I wanted to speak with some recipients of Magnolia Mother’s Trust, arguably the country’s flagship basic income program, located in Jackson, Mississippi. Since 2018, it has granted low-income Black mothers $1,000 a month for a year, also funded by Hughes’s Economic Security Project and administered privately. But when I tried to reach out to residents in Jackson to see how the program was working, the city was mired in crisis. A fire at an aging municipal water plant had cut service to the city, and resulted in a boil notice that lasted for multiple days. Two weeks prior, the plant had also lost power, causing a similar problem. And for three weeks in late February and March, the city was again without water, in the wake of a winter storm. An extra $1,000 a month seems secondary when you can’t get water to your house because the mechanisms providing it are so antiquated.
“We don’t believe UBI is a silver bullet. And it’s often talked about like it is,” said Foster. “It has to sit alongside housing, health care. All of the big expenses that make life unaffordable for most people in this country.”
If UBI is going to be successful, then, it seems crucial that it not give with one hand and with the other take away. And there’s a risk with cash payments that its distribution, which is cheered for its lack of administrative obstacles, also means that it’s easier than almost any other social program to simply nix. Cutting Medicare is a political impossibility, even with a GOP government, in part because its administrative existence is a bulwark. But when Doug Ford and Ontario’s conservative government decided to cancel their UBI pilot two years before its due date, it was gone in a second. Its participants, promised three years of checks, were reduced instead to a class action lawsuit.
Still, there may also be other upsides to UBI. “There’s an untested hypothesis with the idea of guaranteed income, and that is, could it actually enhance worker power in this country?” asked Warren. “So if you think of UBI, could it work like the equivalent of a universal strike fund?” It would be a rich irony if Silicon Valley’s favored policy prescription became a conduit to the thing it fears most: the return of union density.
ANDREW YANG, IT MUST be noted, is not running his New York City mayoral campaign on universal basic income. It’s certainly not universal, and it’s much smaller of a stipend than what he promoted in his presidential run. His proposal features an average of $2,000 per year for 500,000 of the city’s lowest-income residents. Even that pared-back version, which Tubbs considers “a major improvement” over Yang’s presidential concept, comes with a $1 billion-plus price tag, and the proposed funding has been controversial. In Yang’s envisioning, the city would come up with a billion dollars via a combination of (ever-evolving) progressive changes to the tax code, and a stripping back of “inefficiencies” in the social safety net, reallocating money from things like homeless services deemed to be redundant. The rest of the money would come in the form of private philanthropy, given by the city’s very rich.
Both the reliance on private philanthropy and the de facto cutting of social services have the city’s progressives skeptical. On the ground in Brooklyn, group leader Marissa tells me that she and her fellow volunteers are on high alert against accusations of neoliberalism from hecklers, which they’ve encountered in the past. “People don’t understand this is the opposite of that,” she tells me. “And they misunderstand his past work with startups,” chimes in Chris, another volunteer wearing Yang’s signature MATH baseball cap.
Because of those caveats, the canvassers can’t just lead by pledging free money in exchange for a vote, which might make this leafleting session, which has yielded very few even verbal commitments, more successful, if not more exciting. “Maybe down the line [it will be money for everyone], but right now he’s just focused on helping the poor,” says Marissa. But it’s notable that, when applying what is supposed to be a slam-dunk policy to the real world of implementation, Yang is pulling his punches a bit, as if the politics don’t totally cohere.
Still, as the afternoon wears on, the gang is getting some positive feedback. More than a couple of amblers have flashed a thumbs-up, which could be a reference to one of Yang’s favored emojis, which he tweets with regularity, though it’s admittedly hard to gauge the enthusiasm. Finally, 90 minutes in, the gang hooks its most promising prospect.
After an extended back-and-forth, a likely nonvoter with extreme skepticism of both political parties agrees, at the very least, to listen to Andrew Yang’s podcast. “Politicians never do anything for us, they only look out for themselves,” he finishes the conversation by saying, a sentiment that could conceivably be issued by both UBI zealots and cynics who think it’s merely a cheap ploy to buy votes.
“You missed it,” says Gideon, a product manager at a tech startup and Stanford grad who’s at his first Yang outreach event, his first leafleting ever. “I got him with the UBI. He said he liked the sound of it, and asked how you’d pay for it. And I said, ‘By taxing the rich.’ He liked that, too.”
