{"id":255,"date":"2015-12-01T15:45:15","date_gmt":"2015-12-01T23:45:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.annefocke.net\/?p=255"},"modified":"2016-12-22T14:16:45","modified_gmt":"2016-12-22T22:16:45","slug":"a-minimum-basic-income","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.annefocke.net\/?p=255","title":{"rendered":"A minimum basic income?"},"content":{"rendered":"

A discussion at Penny U<\/span><\/h3>\n

7:00 pm, Friday, December 4, 2015<\/strong><\/span>
\n Town Hall Seattle, downstairs cafe<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

Late last year (11\/30\/14), a video was posted on Penny U\u2019s blog<\/a> telling of a Swiss proposal to guarantee every citizen a minimum yearly income, regardless of other wealth or employment. A similar idea came up again at the end of Robert Reich\u2019s talk at Town Hall earlier this fall.\u00a0A\u00a0short piece posted here earlier, \u201cGuaranteed Income and Unrigging the System<\/a>,\u201d highlighted this aspect of Reich\u2019s talk.<\/p>\n

Reich proposes it as a way to counteract the widening gap between those with extreme wealth and power and those without, a condition that threatens, he says, not only our economy but our democracy. He suggests that this minimum might be funded through a \u201ccitizen\u2019s bequest,\u201d that would, in his words, \u201cdistribute the gains from technological advances in such a way that nearly everyone would have the means to benefit from them.\u201d<\/p>\n

Variations on this idea are not new. In the final chapters of his book, Reich mentions both Thomas Paine in Agrarian Justice<\/em>, 1797 and conservative economist F.A. Hayek in 1979 as precedents. The last question posed to Reich at Town Hall quoted Martin Luther King, who, in the last years of his life, advocated for a guaranteed income as the solution to poverty. But the debate is far from settled.<\/p>\n

We will discuss aspects of this debate at Penny U beginning with these questions:<\/p>\n