What is it?

Guaranteed income is the idea that the government would provide a basic level of health and wellbeing to every citizen of the country, guaranteed. It wouldn’t be welfare, because everyone would get it. It would provide a basic safety net for everyone, period. And it would let anyone who was working on something that wasn’t directly or immediately profitable (education, art, theoretical ideas with no practical purpose yet) be supported without stressing about money. And it wouldn’t stop anyone who wanted to earn more from working a normal job. People can still be as consumerist as ever - just no one will be in abject poverty.

Why is it important?

1. We are losing millions of good ideas and productive hours to poverty, and everything that goes along with it (drugs, crime, etc). This is just plain stupid.

2. We are losing many brilliant contributions from creative people who just can’t figure out how to make a decent living that still gives them time and mental energy to spend on their creativity. While it’s possible to figure out how to make a living without working 8 hours a day (passive income), it takes effort and mindset changes (here’s my blog on that). Many people compromise by working part-time at menial jobs so they can keep their brain juice for their real work - or they work at jobs that take all their brain power and just give up developing original thoughts. With guaranteed income, people would at least have the option to devote themselves to developing their gifts. We’d all benefit.

3. A fundamental shift in conscicousness becomes possible if you are not always worrying about your material survival. Think of Maslow’s hierarchy: safety and food are on the bottom. They form the foundation. You just can’t really relax and spend all your brain on higher things if you are worried about survival. Almost every person in this country has a small part of their brain that is devoted to worrying about the possibility that they might end up homeless someday, because there just isn’t a safety net. How many man-hours are spent thinking about, comparing, shopping for insurance? Or worrying that somehow, someway, something might happen and insurance wouldn’t cover it and then bam. How secure do you really feel? How would it change your mind if you really had the safety of knowing that no matter what happened, you would always be able to take care of your basic needs? Even if your family was gone, and you got hit by a bus?

4. How would it change our national mindset if we all felt that we take care of our own people no matter what? I think it hurts all of us in ways we don’t realize to walk by homeless people every day and become inured to it. It takes away a little bit of our humanity every day.

5. We are going towards more and more automation. We don’t need everyone to be working all the time. How much of what people are doing is pointless busywork anyway? What if you had them quit and go home and do a better job raising their kids? Everyone would benefit.

6. This is not just a hippie idea. Many Nobel-winning economists support it.

Here are some links to learn more:

• Freedom, not Full Employment - well worded concise arguments
• Basic Income Earth Network definition of Basic Income
• What is the Basic Income Guarantee? - more technical; discusses implementation strategies
• Wikipedia entry