[Karl Widerquist] Allan “Al” Sheahen was an author, an athlete, a disc jockey, a promoter, a publisher, and a long-time campaigner for the basic income guarantee (BIG). He died at his home in Sherman Oaks, California on October 29, 2013 […]
The Basic Income Guarantee (BIG) recently became a part of a flurry of discussion on the internet and in the media, when Jesse A. Myerson, of Rolling Stone Magazine, included it in a list of “Five Economic Reforms Millennials Should Be Fighting For.” This ensuing discussion reveals a lot about the many different ways people see BIG.
In July 2013, Cypriot President Nicos Anastasiades announced the implementation of a “guaranteed minimum income,” but the president’s language was self-contradictory. The program was supposed to be a “guaranteed minimum income,” assuring “a dignified living, irrespective of age, class or […]
A randomized field study recently conducted in Uganda found that giving money to people without conditions actually increases both how much they work and how much they earn per hour. The study gave a $400 one-time grant to 20 young people, chosen randomly out of a group of rural Ugandans who applied to be a part of the study. Essentially, this grant amount is a one-time basic income, sometimes called a basic capital grant.
The Alaska Permanent Fund (APF) has reached an all-time in a year in which Alaska’s Permanent Fund Dividend (PFD) will probably reach its lowest level since 1987. The PDF is Alaska’s small, variable, yearly basic income. It’s financed by the returns of the APF. You’d think, then, that the fund and the dividend financed by it would move up and down together. And they do—on average, over the long-run, with a time-lag. But they don’t necessarily move together in any particular year, and this year the difference is extreme.
Basic income is a regular unconditional cash grant paid to all citizens without any means test or work requirement. It’s often dismissed as a utopian idea. However, a basic income, or something very close to it, exists today in Alaska. It’s called the Permanent Fund Dividend (PFD) or sometimes “the Alaska Dividend.” The PFD has been paying annual dividends to Alaskans since 1982 with no conditions except citizenship, residency, and the willingness to fill out a form. After following the Alaska Dividend since 1999, and I want to share six lessons that supporters of progressive economic policy should learn from what I call “the Alaska model,” but first some basic background.
While voters of the United States were loudly debating gun control, the deficit, the debt, taxes, immigrant rights, the filibuster law, health care, and a host of other issues, the Obama administration quietly did something that would have been unthinkable a few decades ago. It ordered the military to allow women to serve routinely in combat units. Other changes that would have been unthinkable a few decades ago also seem to be underway.
Book review of Irrweg Grundeinkommen: Die große Umverteilung von unten nach oben muss beendet werden [The Basic Income Aberration: The Great Redistribution from Bottom to Top Must be Ended] by Heiner Flassbeck, Friederike Spiecker, Volker Meinhardt and Dieter Vesper (2012), […]
My new book, Independence, Propertylessness, and Basic Income: A Theory Of Freedom as the Power to Say No, now has a release date of February 28, 2013. Although I have edited or coauthored six other books, this is the first […]
You reach a milestone the first time you or your organization is named the mastermind behind a vast government conspiracy that goes all the way up to the President of the United States. This happened to the U.S. Basic Income […]