A Leftist Take on Universal Basic Income (UBI)

Universal Basic Income (UBI) is a curious idea with a curious history. It enjoys strong support from some parts of the political right, some parts of the political left, and a fair share of the tech sector (the ‘Silicon Valley‘ crowd). It’s entering the mainstream from multiple directions.

On the right, Milton Friedman supported it. In his book Capitalism and Freedom, he advocated for a negative income tax that would establish an income floor.

On the center-left, Guy Standing advocates for it. He’s best known for his 2011 book The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class. For Standing, a universal basic income is the best way to bring stability to the lives of temporary and/or part-time workers.

On the left, David Graeber defends it as a short-term measure. His motivations come from some general themes he lays out in two books, The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy and Bullshit Jobs: A Theory. Graeber thinks a universal basic income will simplify bureaucratic structures and enable people to leave pointless jobs they hate.

But what is UBI, and can it do all these things? Should the left support it, or should leftists be suspicious that so many right-wingers support it?

I’ll take a crack at answering these questions.

Right Wing Support for Universal Basic Income

Most of you aren’t right-wingers. Due to that, I’ll give you a brief snapshot of why right-wingers are into UBI. Whether directly or indirectly, right-wing politics mix with business interests. Libertarians think about this through liberty, i.e., ensuring people have the freedom to pursue economic activity in a capitalist system. By contrast, conservatives think about it in terms of the social order, i.e., maintaining a capitalist state.

Business is particularly concerned with issues of productivity, relative surplus value, and profit rates. It’s also keen to limit the power of organized labor.

Examples

And so, there are several things right-wingers find appealing about UBI. First of all, it’ll likely undercut efforts to turn low wage work into living wage work. The Fight for $15 campaign aims at this. Likewise, so do the IWW Starbucks Union and the UFCW campaign for organizing Walmart and Target workers. A right-wing UBI would undermine these efforts. The thought is that workers who don’t need to work for basic needs will have less motivation to demand a living wage.

Second, a UBI could spur rapid automation and innovation in low wage sectors. Suppose a critical mass of Walmart, McDonald’s, Target, or Starbucks workers drop out of the labor force in favor of living on a universal basic income. And so, the supply of labor decreases, and companies offer higher wages. Due to this, companies invest research funds in ways to replace labor. As a result of this chain of events, we’d see more self-checkout, automated food preparation and stocking of shelves, etc.

Third, a universal basic income puts money directly into people’s hands without offering public options or social services. People would therefore spend that cash in the capitalist marketplace. This would provide obvious benefits to businesses offering the products and services they’d need to buy.

All of these things help businesses increase productivity, lower the cost of labor, extract more relative surplus value from labor, increase profits, and sell more goods and services.

More Sinister Reasons for Right Wing Support

This is all pretty run of the mill so far, but there are less savory reasons why the political right likes UBI. For one, it provides them with a reason to get rid of social welfare programs. They could use UBI to replace Social Security for somewhat obvious reasons, but some want to go further and eliminate SNAP, WIC, Medicaid, Medicare, et al.

Second, UBI would likely encourage certain forms of extremely exploitative, low wage work. Most UBI proposals pay an income well below what’s needed for basic expenses, which is to say they’re not really basic. People drawing a UBI, but unable to find regular work, will need additional funds to make up the difference. As a result, they’ll need to ‘top off’ their wages.

Operations like Amazon Mechanical Turk and ‘sharing economy’ or ‘gig-economy’ companies like Uber, Lyft, and Airbnb exist for exactly this reason. They, for example, classify workers as ‘independent contractors’ in order to pay them less than the minimum wage. UBI breaks down some of the obvious reasons not to work for these companies.

Left Wing Support for Universal Basic Income

There’s a deeper history at play on the political left that I want to briefly address. In the early-mid 20th century, leftist movements began splitting between more pro-work and anti-work camps. Pro-work camps want to create socialism through seizing and running the means of production, while anti-work camps want to create a post-scarcity society where people work only sparingly and pursue other hobbies, interests, and relationships.

Look, everyone. I realize this is an oversimplification. But I’m keeping this post to about 2,000 words. I’m not blowing much of that on deep leftist history. If you want a more thorough account, I’d recommend Class: The Anthology.

The point is that UBI appeals to the anti-work camp. People think it will give us genuine, voluntary control over whether and how we work. We’ll have the freedom to pursue non-work habits, care-based relationships, new business ventures, non-profit foundations, and so on. It’ll allow us to come together to invent new forms of work and play.

And it might even lead to a voluntary mass exodus from the workforce that drastically limits the reach of the capitalist system.

Or so leftist defenders of UBI believe.

So, Who’s Correct? The Right Wing or Left Wing UBI Defenders?

This is where things start to look pretty bad. Right-wingers are correct about what a real universal basic income would look like. It would look like a right-wing, Silicon Valley dystopian fantasy.

Let’s talk about why.

To get the social benefits leftists want, a universal basic income must be exactly that: universal and basic. ‘Universal’ means everyone enjoys the income. ‘Basic’ means that the income covers necessary living expenses, e.g., housing, food, utilities, transportation.

David Graeber, a credible leftist defender of UBI, openly acknowledges these facts. He knows UBI only works if it pays enough to live and is accompanied by generous public services, especially health care.

A universal basic income that is universal and basic is almost certainly impossible. Here’s what would happen if a UBI proposal got off the ground in the United States: it would get turned into the right-wing version. It wouldn’t apply to everyone, it wouldn’t pay enough to live, it would gut social programs, or possibly all three of these things.

We Have Met the Enemy, and It Is Math

The reason there won’t be a leftist universal basic income is that it’s mathematically impossible in anything like the current US system.

How much would it cost?

The average American household spends about $65,000 per year and has 2.5 members. Not all of that counts as ‘basic expenses.’ There are some extras in there. If you cut it down to only housing, food, and transportation, that gets you to $35,000 for 2.5 people.

Therefore, you end up with a cost of about $14,000 per year to each American.

Alternative Math?

This isn’t the only way to run the calculation, and you can use a different method if you’d like. Screw around with the numbers all day. You’ll end up in the same place: to be both universal and basic, a universal basic income needs to pay each American about $12,000 to $15,000 per year. The US population is about 325 million people. The total cost of a UBI, therefore, is $3.9 trillion to $4.9 trillion.

Per year. Every year.

The entire US federal budget in 2018 was $4 trillion.

A leftist UBI would cost the entire federal budget, and it doesn’t even include health care, the EPA, education, scientific research, national defense, community and development programs, home ownership programs, climate change mitigation, the IRS, benefits for disabled veterans, et al.

No amount of mathematical wizardry is going to change this. Want to cut a bunch of social programs? OK, then you’ll need to raise the amount of the universal basic income. Why? Because cutting social programs raises the amount households need to spend on basic necessities.

Not Even Possible?

I mean, look. I cautioned against claims of impossibility in a post on Ibram X. Kendi, and I stand by that. You’d better have a damn good reason to claim something is impossible. I have one here. The leftist version of UBI is, under anything like our present system, impossible.

It won’t happen, no matter how hard you work for it.

Let me also note that I’m trying pretty hard to give universal basic income a fair hearing. $12,000-$15,000 is stingy. I suspect the actual costs of a left-wing UBI, one that provides sufficient motivation to people to leave the employment market if they so choose, would be more like $6-7 trillion per year.

Let’s get serious here. On Graeber’s account, many ‘bullshit jobs’ are middle- and upper-middle income paper pusher jobs, HR skullduggery, and administrative nonsense. Do you really think people are going to leave these jobs to subsist on $1k/month in shabby apartments in the middle of nowhere?

Please.

Should the Left Support UBI?

There’s no reason to be subtle here:

No. For fuck’s sake, no. No.

No.

Just ask Lawrence.

I mean, I get why a few leftists like it. It sounds nice. We’re in a difficult situation, and it offers an answer. But it’s a policy nightmare and a political dead end. And so, I obviously can’t endorse it, and I don’t think you should, either.

At a deeper level, leftist support for UBI comes from the dire situation we’re in. People need an income, and they’re not finding it. We have a lack of basic political education, and we have many ways to express our (lack of) ideas on social media. UBI sounds fresh. It’s easy to explain. It seems to get benefits to people who need them, and seems to do it quickly and efficiently. We can package the idea, Facebook it, and Tweet it. Working class organizations are breaking down, and direct action is somewhat on the retreat. As a result, leftists fall back to social media and electoral politics, often because they’re unaware of alternatives.

Put that shit in a blender, and out comes ideas like UBI all ready to go and Twitter-friendly. We need better political education, better organizing, and better ideas.

But What Should We Do Instead?

If we’re talking policy, I prefer basic services over basic income.

On health care, we know that Medicare for All saves money and saves lives. On housing, we know that housing assistance and even public housing save money and save lives. Food programs probably wouldn’t save money in quite this way, granted. But good food programs would save lives, help people thrive, and would cost a tiny, tiny fraction of UBI. Free college would cost a lot more, but, yet again, not even in the same universe of cost as UBI.

If people are secure in their health care, food, and housing, that goes a long way toward taking care of needs. Add to that a free education system, and most people will have the basic tools they need. And we can do all these things at a small fraction of the cost of UBI.

Income and Unemployment

Also, we don’t need to ignore income. We have an unemployment insurance system in the United States. Why not drop eligibility requirements, stop using it to invade people’s personal lives, and eliminate all cutoff dates for benefits? In practice, it would be a lot like a basic income. The difference is that it’d only go to people who are out of work, and so it wouldn’t totally ruin the federal budget.

Pair it with an increase in the minimum wage. $15 now, and maybe $20 in 5 years. Tie it to inflation, and let the minimum wage increase each year. Would this eliminate jobs? Probably. But the remaining jobs would be living wage jobs, and people out of work would be secure in their health care, food, housing, and income.

Restricting Capitalism

Unlike universal basic income, a basic services model might actually help us restrict the reach of capitalism. Medicare for All would restrict the reach of health insurance companies and reduce health care bureaucracy. Public housing would help fight spiraling costs and predatory landlords, and a public foods program, especially if it were linked to local and/or organic farmers, could help fight Walmart. And so on.

In contrast, UBI puts money into people’s hands, which they put into the hands of companies. That’s one of the reasons the political right is into it in the first place.

Postscript on Universal Basic Income Costs and Political Futures

I get that some leftists want to keep fighting on the cost issue. Some of these people simply ignore the evidence, and so I’m not too worried about them.

But others have reasons for thinking we can pay for UBI. Elizaveta Fouksman argues that the true cost of UBI is much lower than common estimates. The reasoning is…sophistic. But what it amounts to is that we could drastically raise taxes on the rich, and that this would pay for UBI.

The problem, again, is that it wouldn’t be enough. Raising the federal estate tax would raise only a pittance. Raising income taxes on the wealthy would get us, in optimistic scenarios, about $300 billion per year. It wouldn’t be enough to pay for UBI, and adding deep cuts to defense spending won’t be enough, either.

Raising taxes enough to cover UBI would require a dramatic shift in power relations. If we really had that much power, we’d be better off using it to just create full communism.

Why even bother fucking around with UBI in that scenario?

“What should I read next?”

Now that you’ve read an overview of UBI, why not take a look directly at Andrew Yang’s UBI proposal?