Title: Basic Income re JK Galbraith
Picking up a book at the local library, my hand was guided to A View from
the Stands by John Kenneth Galbraith. I never really know how to classify
Galbraith whether as an economist, a liberal who happens to be an economist
or a professional writer who recieved training as an economist. Most of the
time when I mention Galbraith in discussions with knowledgeable people, I
get a sort of look down the nose as if he is not quite a first rank kind of
academic. However, I find he makes a lot of sense, says things other
writers don't say and pursues the subject of economics from a very liberal
point of view, which I find a lot of agreement with. In this book, which is
a collection of essays and speech's he has written or presented over the
years, he seems to deal with timeless and timely subject matters within the
same example. This particular essay was published in 1966. The lengthy
quote I am posting is - in my mind - as relevant today as it was in those
heady days of 1966. The title is The Starvation of the Cities
Quote Page 21
Another problem unsolved by economic expansion is that of the people who are
left behind. Increasing national income benefits only those who participate
in the economy and who thus establish a claim on the income it produces, but
a sizable minority cannot or does not so participate, and it thus has no
share in the improving well-being.
Good public services and sound environmental conditions promote such
paricipation. Good health services increase the number of people who are
physically and mentally able to take part in the economy. So does good law
enforcement. And good, well-located housing. And effective action against
racial discrimination. And good urban transportation.
But mostly this is what a good educational system accomplishes. There is no
single cure for poverty, but we should not, in our sophistication, be afraid
of the obvious. President Lyndon Johnson has observed that education will
not cure all the problems of a society ... [but] without it no cure for any
problem is possible. And he is right. A community that provides really
superior schools, starting with youngest children, and that allows the pupil
to go just as far at the public expense as his abilities permit will not
have many citizens who are poor; there are few college graduates and not so
many high school graduates who are in the poverty brackets.
So far, my approach to the problem of poverty has been strongly traditional:
we should help them to help themselves. That is good, whereas merely to
help them has always been considered bad. Now I venture to think the time
has come to re-examine these good Calvinist tenets, which fit so well with
our idea of what saves money. We need to consider the one prompt and
effective solution for poverty, which is to provide everyone with a minimum
income. (Thomas - sounds nice and simple doesn't it!)
The arguments against this proposal are numerous, but most of them are
exuses for not thinking about a solution, even one that is so exceedingly
plausible. It would, it is said, destroy incentive. Yet we now have a
welfare system that could not be better designed to destroy incentive if we
wanted it that way. We give the needy income, and we take away that income
if the recipient gets even the poorest job. Thus we tax the marginal income
of the welfare recipient at rates of 100 percent or more.
A minimum income, it is said, would keep people out of the labor market.
But we do not want all the pople with inadequate income to work. In 1964,
of the 14.8 million children classified by the Department of Health,
Education and Welfare as poor, nearly a third were in families headed by a
woman. And three fifths of the children in families headed by women were so
classified. Most of those women should not be working.
Idleness, we agree, is demoralizing. But even here there is a question:
Why is leisure so uniformly bad for the poor and so uniformly good for the
exceptionally well-to-do?
We can easily afford an income floor. (Thomas: Interesting that in My
Family Basic Income Proposal, I used the metaphor of a Basic Income
providing a floor while at the same time proposing a ceiling on unlimited
wealth as a conceptual model to make a Basic Income financially possible.)
It would cost about $20 billion to bring everyone up to what the Department
of HEW considers a reasonable minimum. This is a third less than the amount
by which personal income rose last year. It is not so much more than we
will spend during the next fiscal year to restore freedom, democracy and
religious liberty, as these are defined by the experts, in Vietnam. And
there is no antidote for poverty that is quite so certain in its effects as
the provision of income.
In recent years we have come to recognize a major defect in the fiscal
system of the United States. Put briefly, it is that, with economic growth
and rising incomes, the federal government, through the income
