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universal basic income
Want to Help Mothers This Mother's Day? Back a Guaranteed Income
If we are serious about supporting families, then we need to stop romanticizing hardship and start investing in mothers in real, tangible ways.
May 10, 2026
Happy Mother’s Day—because that’s what you’re supposed to say, right?
Motherhood is always dressed up in soft language like community, support, and…“it takes a village.” But I have learned in real time that not all of us actually have one.
I am raising my sons without consistent help, without a built-in break, without the kind of support people assume is just there. Everything falls on me emotionally, financially, and physically, and I still have to show up every single day like I am not carrying all of it alone. And when I do pull back, when I protect my energy or go quiet, it is not because I am distant. It is because I am overwhelmed.
There is this unspoken expectation that mothers, especially single mothers, are just supposed to figure it out, hold it together, and do it gracefully. But the truth is, a lot of us are doing the work of an entire village by ourselves, and nobody wants to say that part out loud.
In Baltimore's guaranteed income pilot, of which I was a part, data shows that I'm not alone: Young parents reported less stress and more stability, and those improvements lasted even after the payments stopped.
And this is where the conversation needs to shift, because how I feel about motherhood and how motherhood is structured in this country are two very different things.
I love being a mother. My children are everything to me. They are the reason I keep going when I am tired, when I am stretched thin, when I feel like there is nothing left to give. But love does not remove the weight. It does not pay bills. It does not create time, energy, or support where there is none. Loving my children deeply does not make the system around me any less difficult to navigate.
When people talk about motherhood like it is just a personal experience, like it begins and ends with love and sacrifice, they miss something critical.
Because motherhood is also structural. It is economic. It is shaped by whether or not you have resources, support, and stability. And when those things are missing, love alone is not enough to carry the load.
That is exactly why I stand behind guaranteed income strongly.
Because when there is no village, money becomes the closest thing to stability, something that's within our control.
It is about investing in the people who hold families together.
It is about acknowledging reality.
Caregiving is labor. Raising children is labor. Holding a household together on your own is labor.
Guaranteed income gives mothers breathing room. It gives us the ability to make decisions from a place of stability instead of survival.
It means not having to choose between rest and responsibility, between being present with our children or being consumed by stress.
In Baltimore's guaranteed income pilot, of which I was a part, data shows that I'm not alone: Young parents reported less stress and more stability, and those improvements lasted even after the payments stopped.
Right now, too many mothers are forced into impossible trade-offs. Work more and lose time with your kids. Stay present and fall behind financially. Ask for help and risk being judged. Stay silent and carry it alone. These are not personal failures. These are policy failures.
People love to celebrate strong mothers, but strength should not have to come from constant struggle. Strength should not be built on exhaustion. And survival should not be the standard we measure good parenting by.
If we are serious about supporting families, then we need to stop romanticizing hardship and start investing in mothers in real, tangible ways. Guaranteed income is one of those ways. It is not a cure-all, but it is a foundation. It is a recognition that mothers should not have to break themselves just to keep their households afloat.
Because the truth is, many of us are not asking for a village anymore…
We are building without one.
We are showing up every day, making a way out of no way, holding everything together with very little support and even less margin for error.
And still, we keep going.
So yes—Happy Mother’s Day.
Not the polished version. Not the performative one. But the real one.
Happy Mother’s Day to the mothers who carry what no one sees, who love without limit, who build without a village, and who keep showing up anyway. You are not invisible. You are powerful. And you are worthy of more than survival.
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The GOP Wants to Put Workers Under AI's Thumb: A Shorter Work Week Is a Better Answer
Just because Donald Trump and Republicans in Congress have no grasp of economics doesn’t mean the rest of us shouldn’t.
May 07, 2026
Productivity growth is an old concept; we’ve been seeing it at a substantial pace for more than 200 years. Nonetheless, many elite intellectual types like to claim they know nothing about it when they talk about AI.
It’s far from clear how much of a productivity boom we will see with AI. For people who are lost with my reference to productivity growth, the story that AI will take all the jobs is a story of a massive productivity boom. If that happens, it will mean that the people who are still working will be hugely more productive, since we will be producing the same or more goods and services as we do at present, with many fewer people working.
FWIW, virtually no major forecaster or forecasting agency is projecting anything like this productivity boom. For example, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projects that productivity growth will average 1.5 percent over the next decade.
That’s a healthy rate of productivity growth, but nothing extraordinary. It’s a bit better than the 1.3 percent rate from 2005 to 2025, but less than the 2.0 percent rate we saw in the 1990s and much less than the 2.4 percent pace the country had from 1947 to 1973. There is no story of AI creating mass unemployment here.
CBO is not God, but they are pretty much in the center of professional forecasters by design. They try to make sure that their forecasts do not vary hugely from what other public and private sector forecasters are projecting.
It is also worth noting that if CBO is seriously wrong on the low side, then some other things logically follow. Most importantly, if productivity growth proves to be far more rapid than what they have projected, GDP growth will also be far more rapid than projected. This would mean, among other things, that the debt-to-GDP ratios will be much lower in the future than is currently projected.
In other words, the people yelling about unsustainable debts and deficits need to STFU. You can’t both be expecting a massive AI productivity boom and think the US has a huge debt problem. That is not a matter of opinion; it is a matter of logic.
But let’s assume for a moment that we do get a huge productivity boom from AI. We don’t need to run around like chickens with our heads cut off when we ask what to do about it. Because productivity growth is in fact a very very old phenomenon. We have long known how to deal with it; we shorten work hours.
Workers in Germany, France, and other wealthy countries work on average 20-25 percent fewer hours a year than Americans.
That is why we got the 40-hour work week with the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) in 1937. The Act doesn’t actually prohibit employers from having longer work weeks; it simply requires them to pay a 50 percent premium for overtime hours. This was supposed to encourage them to hire more workers instead of working their existing workforce more hours. (Contrary to the way it is discussed in the media, the decision to put in overtime is almost always the employer’s, not the worker’s. Unless a union contract specifies otherwise, an employer has the option to fire a worker who refuses overtime.)
This is why it was truly incredible that Trump eliminated the income tax on the overtime premium. This is effectively encouraging employers to have longer workweeks, 180 degrees opposite of the intention of the FLSA.
But just because Donald Trump and Republicans in Congress have no grasp of economics doesn’t mean the rest of us shouldn’t. If we really are seeing an AI-driven productivity boom, the most obvious way to deal with it is to shorten the workweek and work year. The United States is an outlier here. While we were originally a leader in implementing a 40-hour workweek, we have done little to reduce work time in the 90 years since then.
As a result, workers in Germany, France, and other wealthy countries work on average 20-25 percent fewer hours a year than Americans. As a crude approximation, if workers put in 20 percent fewer hours on average, it will mean 20 percent more jobs. Things in the real world are never quite that simple, but the basic logic that shorter work years means more jobs does hold.
It’s also not rocket science to get to shorter work years. We can amend the FLSA so that the overtime wage premium kicks in at 34 or 36 hours. Also, instead of removing taxes on the premium (having taxpayers subsidize long workweeks), we can raise the premium from 50 percent to 75 percent, as the Congressional Progressive Caucus recently proposed. We can also mandate 2 weeks or more vacation, along with paid sick days and family leave, as many states have already done. All this is old-fashioned stuff that other wealthy countries have been doing for decades, and we have done in the United States nationally in the distant past and more recently at the state level.
The immediate prompt for this diatribe was a New York Times article that asked how we will deal with a collapse of employment from AI. In fairness, the piece does note that an AI-driven productivity boom is far from certain, but it then suggests that if it does happen, a universal basic income, or a universal high income might be ways to deal with it. The piece notes that Elon Musk is supposedly an advocate of the latter.
While any pro-worker legislation will face an enormous uphill battle in the current political environment, a variation of policies that people have seen for a century might have a better shot than something that seems completely new.
While these proposals are, in principle, fine, they ignore the reality of US politics. Just four years ago, when the Democrats had a trifecta, they could not get a modest increase in the child tax credit approved in the Senate. Get out your yard stick and try to measure the distance between a modest boost to the child tax credit and a universal basic income, much less a universal high-income.
It’s probably also worth mentioning that Elon Musk has done everything he can to keep his workers at Tesla from forming a union, where they would be better able to secure their share of the company’s profits. That may lead reasonable people to question his commitment to workers’ well-being in an era of AI-driven mass unemployment.
While any pro-worker legislation will face an enormous uphill battle in the current political environment, a variation of policies that people have seen for a century might have a better shot than something that seems completely new. It is also worth pointing out that the tools for dealing with a surge in productivity growth are well-known and tested. Whether or not a universal basic income is a better way to go, our toolbox is already far from empty when it comes to dealing with this situation. This is not a new story, and it is wrong to portray it as one.
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Blueprint For Solidarity: Community Organizations Build the Public Good
In the shadow of federal failure, there’s a hopeful truth emerging in cities and states across our country: When communities act in solidarity, they can reclaim government and transform it to serve the people.
Feb 27, 2026
Our government should make life better for all people. Local and federal elected leaders should ensure we all have enough to eat, a roof over our heads, the opportunity to learn and grow, and access to care when needed.
Instead, Congress cut nearly $1 trillion from Medicaid and nearly $200 billion from food assistance programs like the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), while committing a staggering $85 billion to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). This administration has chosen to fund fear over food, detention over dignity, and the interests of billionaires over the well-being of working people.
In the shadow of this federal failure, there’s a hopeful truth emerging in cities and states across our country: When communities act in solidarity, they can reclaim government and transform it to serve the people.
This is evident in the work of countless community organizations, including Chicago-based Equity and Transformation (EAT). EAT creates space for working people across race and language to take action to advance collective worker safety and justice.
Housing, public transportation, public schools, healthcare, and food are the foundations of a dignified life, and must be guaranteed for all.
Thanks in large part to EAT’s community organizing, Cook County has established permanent funding for guaranteed income. This vital work can serve as a protective non-carceral form of community support that addresses some of the economic harm and exclusion EAT’s members face. Especially for communities disproportionately harmed by the violence of policing, a basic guaranteed income can provide material stability that helps ensure essential needs, healthcare, housing, and food are not trade-offs, and that acts as a buffer against criminalization and the trauma of overpolicing.
Now, EAT is scaling its Cook County win, leading a statewide campaign for a permanent guaranteed income program that would support all SNAP-eligible households. The Illinois Future Fund Act would direct 25% of cannabis tax revenue toward direct cash assistance of $500 per month to SNAP-eligible residents in communities disproportionately impacted by decades of drug war policing. If passed, this legislation would be a step toward progress and show Illinois's commitment to using public resources to make people’s lives better.
A Blueprint for a Government That Works for All of Us
We are clear about what's at stake at this moment and what leaders are being asked to do. Leaders of community organizing groups are being asked to meet the pressing needs of their members as services and benefits are cut, fight government overreach as police and ICE target their neighbors, and continue demonstrating that solidarity is central to building the country we want.
Marguerite Casey Foundation is committed to staying in lockstep with grant recipients like EAT and remaining clear about the role of funders supporting grassroots leadership as their communities create a new blueprint for how the government should work.
So, how can we scale this solidarity through the work of community organizing groups and ensure policy choices improve the lives of residents?
1. Create a universe of public goods that belong to all of us. Housing, public transportation, public schools, healthcare, and food are the foundations of a dignified life, and must be guaranteed for all. We have seen global proof that access to public goods reduces poverty and precarity. It’s time our public dollars are used for the public good across our country.
2. Hold corporations and lawmakers that are exploiting our communities accountable. Those who make policies that starve our schools, close our hospitals, and detain our loved ones always find another billion dollars for corporate subsidies and surveillance giveaways. We must create penalties for those who are stealing from the poorest and whose fortunes are built on systems of harm.
3. Continuously practice a politics of solidarity. For Marguerite Casey Foundation, acting in solidarity means using our endowment to surge funds to frontline groups like EAT. Philanthropy’s resources are meant for moments like this. For EAT, it means organizing not just for services but for the power to define and deliver on solutions.
How to Help Build Solidarity Through Community Organizing
If you are a funder, building real solidarity means moving beyond transactional grantmaking. Funders must support bold and creative actions, not only by funding larger efforts but by standing with our partners when they take risks to protect their communities. Solidarity also requires us to bring more than money to the table. We should leverage all of our resources, from our extensive networks to our role as institutional investors, and be intentional about activating those assets in ways that generate momentum to meet the urgency of this moment.
If you are a nonprofit leader, ask for what you need and refuse to settle. Urge funders to meet this moment with courage and capital to fuel the bold experimentation needed. Can they give more, commit to multiyear grants, frontload payments, reduce reporting hurdles, provide no-interest loans, or organize pooled funds with their colleagues in philanthropy to raise the resources needed to fully fund your initiatives?
And if you’re not a funder or nonprofit leader, find an organization to support with your money, time, and talent.
Local organizations building community power are mapping a new way forward in these dark times. They are proving that the government can and must keep its promise to improve people’s lives—to be a means to collective thriving. Nonprofits, funders, and community members, acting in solidarity, can make this promise real.
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