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"Guaranteed annual income United States."
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The failed welfare revolution
Today the United States has one of the highest poverty rates among the world's rich industrial democracies. The Failed Welfare Revolution shows us that things might have turned out differently. During the 1960s and 1970s, policymakers in three presidential administrations tried to replace the nation's existing welfare system with a revolutionary program to guarantee Americans basic economic security. Surprisingly from today's vantage point, guaranteed income plans received broad bipartisan support in the 1960s. One proposal, President Nixon's Family Assistance Plan, nearly passed into law in the 1970s, and President Carter advanced a similar bill a few years later. The failure of these proposals marked the federal government's last direct effort to alleviate poverty among the least advantaged and, ironically, sowed the seeds of conservative welfare reform strategies under President Reagan and beyond.
eBook
In our hands
Imagine that the United States were to scrap all its income transfer programs—including Social Security, Medicare, and all forms of welfare—and give every American age twenty-one and older $10, 000 a year for life.This is the Plan, a radical new approach to social policy that defies any partisan label. First laid out by Charles Murray a decade ago, the updated edition reflects economic developments since that time. Murray, who previous books include Losing Ground and The Bell Curve, demonstrates that the Plan is financially feasible and the uses detailed analysis to argue that many goals of the welfare state—elimination of poverty, comfortable retirement for everyone, universal access to healthcare—would be better served under the Plan than under the current system. Murray's goal, shared by Left and Right, is a society in which everyone, including the unluckiest among us, has the opportunity and means to construct a satisfying life. In Our Hands offers a rich and startling new way to think about how that goal
eBook
COVID-19 and welfare state support: the case of universal basic income
The COVID-19 pandemic has revived discussions about universal basic income (UBI) as a potential crisis response. Yet despite favorable circumstances, little actual policy change in this area was observed. This article seeks to explain this absence of policy change and to reflect on the prospects for introducing UBI schemes after the pandemic in European democracies. I argue that public opinion on UBI provides few electoral incentives to push for social policy change. Using prepandemic data from 21 European democracies and pandemic data from the UK, I show that political support for UBI has been divided between different groups who advocate conflicting policy goals and who hold divergent views about existing welfare state arrangements. While support for UBI might have increased during the pandemic, the underlying political dividing lines are likely to have remained intact. Due to these enduring divisions and the stable support for existing social policy arrangements over an untested policy, the prospects for introducing UBI schemes in the post-pandemic world remain uncertain.
Journal Article
Property Rights, Coercion, and the Welfare State: The Libertarian Case for a Basic Income for All
The US welfare system is a disaster. The federal government alone spends well more than $600 billion each year on more than 120 different antipoverty programs. Add in another $284 billion of welfare spending at the state and local levels, and you have almost $1 trillion of government spending on welfare -- more than $20,000 for every poor person in America (Tanner 2012). That's a lot of money and a lot of bureaucracy. All of which might be excusable if the welfare state were effective at doing what it was supposed to do -- helping the poor escape poverty. But it isn't. In this essay, the author wants to defend a more ambitious claim. Though he still believe that libertarians should regard the basic-income guarantee (BIG) as a sound political compromise, he does not think that they should regard it merely as a compromise. Instead, they should see the BIG as an essential part of an ideally just libertarian system.
Journal Article
A Philosophical Economist's Case against a Government-Guaranteed Basic Income
To argue about a policy, it helps to know the specifics of the policy being considered. In an Aug 21, 2014, email, Matt Zwolinski told the author that although he can't stand too firmly behind any particular dollar value for a basic-income guarantee, he had in mind $10,000 annually for every US citizen age twenty-one or older. That is the proposal he discusses throughout this essay, unless he specify otherwise.
Journal Article
Skeptical Thoughts on a Taxpayer-Funded Basic Income Guarantee
In this issue Matt Zwolinski and Michael Munger have collectively given a basic-income guarantee (BIG) four and a half cheers. The author is less cheerful and more skeptical. This skepticism begins with David Henderson's (2015) point that the BIGs they propose are extraordinarily expensive and might undermine the already frail fiscal health of the US government, which is currently staggering down the road toward default (Henderson and Hummel 2014). Echoing Henderson's point, many practical time-tested ideas that are less drastic than adopting a BIG can be implemented to reduce injustice in the US. Many of them might be (and are being) adopted as public policies. But these changes will probably have minor impacts in comparison with deeper cultural reforms -- especially those that will renew traditional advocacy for the ideal that men must support and nurture their families.
Journal Article
How the Financial Crisis Affects Pensions and Insurance and Why the Impacts Matter
This paper discusses the key sources of vulnerabilities for pension plans and insurance companies in light of the global financial crisis of 2008. It also discusses how these institutional investors transit shocks to the rest of the financial sector and economy. The crisis has re-ignited the policy debate on key issues such as: 1) the need for countercyclical funding and solvency rules; 2) the tradeoffs implied in marked based valuation rules; 3) the need to protect contributors towards retirement from excessive market volatility; 4) the need to strengthen group supervision for large complex financial institutions including insurance and pensions; and 5) the need to revisit the resolution and crisis management framework for insurance and pensions.
eBook
Can Permanent-Income Theory Explain Cross-Sectional Consumption Patterns?
The prediction that consumption-income ratios should decline as income rises in cross-sectional data is a feature of Friedman's (1957) permanent income hypothesis and other consumption-smoothing models. The theory thus provides a link between longitudinal income data and cross-sectional expenditure data: given measured income variability and a functional relationship between consumption and permanent income, we predict cross-sectional expenditure patterns and compare those predictions to actual values. Our approach cannot explain the actual skewness in consumption-income ratios under even the strictest consumption-smoothing model, which implies that income measurement error or other anomalies are affecting the data.
Journal Article