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- AOC in Munich, Basic Income
AOC was a speaker at a round table at the Munich Security Conference. She only answered a couple of questions, but I thought this was interesting:
[…] I was first elected um when I was uh in in 2018 and I was a waitress in New York City. I had no health insurance. I could not pay my rent. And I consistently saw a party that championed special interests, the elite, um, and a Democratic party that was very much kind of telling working people that everything was fine when it in fact wasn't. And after I was elected, I remember I was crossing this threshold and there was this closed-d dooror meeting of many high-ranking Democratic Party officials, people that you see in the news and all of that. And they uh they derided behind closed doors at that time, a long time ago, they derided many of the populist demands that I had run my campaign on. and I had defeated a 20-year Democratic incumbent that was part of Democratic Party leadership. And um and they said $15 minimum wage at that time way too high, too severe. The idea of tuition free public colleges and universities, um too far, expanding health insurance and Medicare too extreme. And these are all the things that I, as a waitress, had campaigned on and had been major pain points in my life.
And then they said we have to listen to working class people more. And I think that that encapsulates much of the betrayal that the working class in the United States had felt.
Here’s the video of the whole thing. Another way of making her point is that the insiders she’s referencing were only interested in the prejudices of the working class, not their needs. For example: do they want to crack down on immigrants? Well, we need to be for that, it’s too dangerous to do anything else.
I’ve had this story in my tabs forever, so I’m going to leave it here:
Two years ago, when Evans Buntley entered Rochester’s Guaranteed Basic Income pilot program, he was struggling to get by, burdened by low income and the high cost of rent.
The program offered $500 per month for a year for extremely low-income Rochesterians, no strings attached. For Buntley, it ended in mid-2024. His life did not change radically as a result of the pilot, but he does feel it has given a stronger footing. He’s currently saving to buy a house and feels he’s made some steps toward financial stability.
“I can't tell you how blessed I was to have that money on hand, knowing that it was helping families that were in need, including myself, to move forward in my gains financially,” Buntley said. “It even helped me to basically get my credit going right and just get on the right track.
“I was going through some changes at first, before I got into the program,” Buntley continued. “And it was kind of difficult trying to pay everything at one time, trying to get this done. And the GBI program just came along, and it just helped me build where I needed to be, where I needed to go.”
[…]
The 351 GBI recipients spent the money on fairly utilitarian things, like food and transportation. For example, compared to the control group, recipients were 25% more likely to drive a car at the close of the program.
Meanwhile, the core issues the recipients faced heading into the program were related to food and housing. Nearly 90% reported struggling to afford food, and 42% had reported not fully paying their rent or mortgage.
The GBI participants experienced improvement in all of those categories. The study also sought to test directly on how GBI recipients improved their financial planning skills, by offering a choice of taking immediate financial gain or a larger gain long term.
This seems a little related to AOC’s comment, because a lot of libertarian types who still care about helping the poor (a small group, I’ll grant you) want to just turn welfare into some kind of universal basic income (UBI) program. I think that’s a cop out, since a lot of poor people would have a hard time budgeting their current assistance as a cash payment. It also leaves the poor extremely vulnerable to cuts in the basic income program that will inevitably come when it’s clear that the program isn’t a panacea.
There is no panacea to help the poor. But a modest basic income program that adds to, but does not replace, our current welfare system looks like it can make a modest difference in people’s lives. This is probably not an exciting outcome for UBI proponents, so I’m guessing we’ll see more little pilot programs instead of real action.
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