Arguments for a UBI – The Liberal

This post is part of the sequence Arguments for a Universal Basic Income.

Less Vilification of the Poor

A common attack levied against people at the lower end of the income spectrum, ultimately used to justify cutting state benefits, is that of benefit fraud.  People affording lavish lifestyles funded entirely by the state, or people sneakily augmenting this income by working a few hours cash-in-hand.  This spectre serves to drive wedges between the rich and the poor, and to tarnish all people down on their luck as lazy, scheming and probably criminal to boot.  The argument that your hard-earned taxes are going towards buying a family of nine a second widescreen TV can be both emotive and hard to refute.  Despite the fact that this kind of occurrence is very rare, there will always be someone that manages to do it somehow, and when they are caught, it will spur yet another wave of anti-poor vitriol.

The beauty of the Universal Basic Income concept is that it is not possible to cheat.  Everyone receives it, so it doesn’t matter whether someone is working on the side.  This removes one of the main targets of criticism for low income families, and stops the insinuation of dishonesty amongst the poor.  Furthermore, the fact that it leaves no holes in the safety net, means that as long as it is enough to survive on, there is no justification for theft.  People may currently see someone poor as suspicious, knowing that they may be struggling to get by, and wondering how willing they might be to steal something to ease their desperation.  Anyone stealing in a society with a Universal Basic Income would be doing so purely out of greed, which is not particularly correlated with poverty.  In time this would hopefully reduce the conflation of poor with criminal that is so pervasive in our society. 

Taking it further, people with nothing to lose can be driven to do terrible things. It is small wonder that the majority of people that become radicalised are from neighbourhoods with high levels of poverty.  These people have a difficult existence, and can be exploited by anyone able to promise an improvement, or someone to blame, no matter how intangible or unrealistic this improvement may be.  By giving everyone a Universal Basic Income, their existence becomes less fragile – they are no longer at risk of losing their state income through some bureaucratic confusion or technicality, which is an enormous source of stress for people in this situation.  This gives people a better and less stressful existence, which is something that they would lose by going to prison or dying.   The desire not to lose this more comfortable existence would vastly reduce the ease with which they could be radicalised into throwing their life away to further someone else’s agenda. 

Any argument to reduce the Universal Basic Income would affect the wealthy too, making enthusiasm for reducing it likely to be lukewarm at best.  The universality of the Basic Income plays into the common refrain of equality used to argue against progressive taxes: the question of why the rich should pay a higher percentage of their income, when they already pay more than someone less well off.  Under the proposed system in the “Accountant” section there is a flat tax rate, therefore if everyone, rich and poor, receives the same income from the government and pays the same rate of tax, there can be no accusation of unfairness from influential wealthy people.  The progressive effective tax rate is a natural consequence of the structure of the system, rather than a result of many arbitrary variables that evoke accusations of “class war”.  Universal Basic Income also reduces the stigma associated with claiming state assistance – if everyone receives it, it is no longer a symbol of abject poverty, and is instead just a perk of being a member of the society.  This would give a sense of solidarity between the rich and the poor – changes would benefit both or harm both, rather than being a divisive talking point.

When someone quits their job to write a book, we applaud them, championing their courage and their independent spirit.  When someone is unemployed however, society tends to look down upon them, suggesting that it is almost unthinkable that they could accomplish anything worthwhile.  This imbalance in perception between the worthiness of the “leisure class”, that can afford to spend time exploring their interests, and the hopelessness of the unemployed whose spare time is deemed to be wasted, could be redressed by a Universal Basic Income removing the stigma surrounding the unemployed.  After all, if someone writes a book that is not very good, do we deem them to have wasted their time?  Possibly, but we still applaud their efforts.  Can someone unemployed have ideas and strive to put them into practice?  Yes, but we are disinclined to give them the benefit of the doubt, and if it looks like they might make money from it, we tend to snatch their income away.

Equality of opportunity is a much sought after quality in society, and yet education, which is often the key to opportunity is so frequently out of the reach of people with low incomes.  Attending a university away from the parental home can be prohibitively expensive, even before fees are considered, as accommodation and living costs tend to be significant, and require either debt or parental support.  Without parents that can afford to pay these costs, students must either take on debt, or attend a university closer to home that may not offer the course that they want to do.  By providing a Universal Basic Income to every adult, university students automatically qualify, and can therefore seek out accommodation in whichever city they see fit.  All too often in the past, wealthy parents that have not seen the value of university education have denied their children the opportunity to go, by refusing to help them with these costs.  These students, unlike their less well-off contemporaries, were ineligible for any grants, as the state assumed that their parents would pay.  They were therefore less free to pursue the futures that could have been open to them.  By treating individuals as individuals, and not adjusting state assistance based on the wealth of someone’s parents, it ensures that people do not end up being denied opportunities despite being in a seemingly more privileged position.

More than this however, a Universal Basic Income allows anyone at any time of their life to seek out further training, education or experience.  Because they can be assured that they will have enough money to survive, people can leave their employment, enrol in training, and better themselves without needing to spend years saving up to be able to afford to not work for a few months.  This should drastically improve social mobility, enabling interested and motivated people to gain the skills they need to become successful.