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When those facing the most systemic barriers receive sufficient income support, then economic security, thriving, and freedom are the result.
I received a 60-year prison sentence for a murder I didn’t commit. After 25 years of fighting this injustice, I was exonerated.
I’ve learned some hard lessons about our criminal justice system. I’ve also learned how simple safety net policies—like a modest guaranteed base income or no-strings-attached child allowance—could have kept millions of struggling young people like me out of trouble.
I had a good childhood in Flint, Michigan, but we were poor and opportunities were few. My parents were loving and supportive, but engaged in illegal activities to make ends meet. It seemed normal to me, but I was in an environment that normalized abnormal things.
I eventually dropped out of high school, moved to Indianapolis, and started a family. But when I got laid off, I turned in desperation to the drug life, trying to do for my family what my parents did for me.
If I’d had a modest child allowance for my own children, I wouldn’t have had to rely on the most accessible path available to me, the drug business.
One fateful night, I heard gunshots near the building where I had my drug business. I didn’t think much of it—shots weren’t unusual in that neighborhood. I finished my business for the day, proud of the money I’d made, and went home to my family.
Later, I learned a young man had been shot—and I was arrested for the murder.
I’d been blamed by someone with a drug-related grudge against me. A bystander had identified a very different man with a different physical description, but the detective buried that evidence. Advocates uncovered this evidence 25 years later, and I was exonerated and released. I’d spent a hellish 11 of those 25 years in solitary confinement.
During my incarceration, I became a teacher and mentor. Now I’m an advocate for people returning to society after incarceration.
I see the systemic barriers they face. Returning citizens are prohibited from hundreds of jobs—from working in education, health, and government to even becoming a barber or Uber driver. They’re barred from public assistance, public housing, and student loans. They face discrimination in housing and employment. They often have significant physical and mental health issues they can’t afford to treat.
These are the very conditions that sometimes lead to offenses and recidivism. Numerous studies have found that when people are securely employed, housed, and allowed to receive an education and meet their health needs, they don’t re-offend.
These people have already been punished and served their time—sometimes for offenses they never committed, like me. We shouldn’t be punished again when reintegrating into our families and societies.
As part of my work, I volunteer with Michigan Liberation, a statewide organization looking to end the criminalization of Black families and communities of color. Recently, they joined a Guaranteed Income Now conference co-hosted by Community Change and the Economic Security Project.
Guaranteed income can take many forms. It can be an expansion of current tax credits like the Child Tax Credit and Earned Income Tax Credit. It can be a no-strings-attached Child Allowance or a monthly payment to qualifying people, families, unpaid caretakers, undocumented immigrants, and returning citizens—all of whom are currently ineligible for assistance.
In Flint, it looks like a new program that offers pregnant people and new parents a monthly check for the first year of the baby’s life.
If my parents had a guaranteed income floor, we wouldn’t have been in danger of falling through into hunger and homelessness. They would have had significantly better chances to pursue well-paying jobs to provide for my security—without relying on illegal activity.
If I’d had a modest child allowance for my own children, I wouldn’t have had to rely on the most accessible path available to me, the drug business. I wouldn’t have been anywhere near the site of that murder—and wouldn’t have lost decades of my life to a false accusation.
It’s worth it to support our families and communities, no matter where we live or what we look like. When those facing the most systemic barriers receive sufficient income support, then economic security, thriving, and freedom are the result.
And I can tell you, there’s nothing sweeter than freedom.
With both millionaires and homelessness on the rise in the U.S., right-wing donors are bankrolling a nationally coordinated move to end experiments in basic income.
America, a new report details, is minting millionaires at a record pace. Some 37% of the world’s millionaires, analysts at the wealth advisory firm Henley & Partners calculate, now call the United States home.
And these analysts are talking real millionaires, not those Americans who rate as “millionaires” only because they’re living in homes that have wildly appreciated in value since their purchase decades ago. Those appreciations have left typical 50-something American homeowners, the latest Federal Reserve stats show, with personal net worths a bit over $1 million.
The researchers from Henley and their partners at New World Wealth don’t count these house-rich homeowners as millionaires. They only rate as millionaires those households with over $1 million in investible assets—and the United States, their research finds, hosts far, far more of these honest-to-goodness millionaires than any other nation on Earth.
In February, lawmakers in Arizona, home to the nation’s fourth-highest homeless rate, passed a bill that bans “any program where persons are provided with regular, periodic cash payments” they can use “for any purpose.”
The numbers: Over 5.5 million Americans now hold liquid assets worth over $1 million. That total has soared 62% over the past decade, “well above,” observes CNBC analyst Robert Frank, the overall global real-millionaire increase of a mere 38%.
Rich people-friendly observers of America’s economic scene, naturally enough, see stats like these as cause for nothing but celebration. The wealthier our wealthiest become, they postulate, the more jobs—and wealth—these rich create for everyone else. A rising tide, as they like to quip, lifts all boats.
But we are, in fact, seeing no significant rising of any sort for America’s working families. We are witnessing instead stunning increases in what America’s rich are spending on themselves. One revealing recent stat: Our U.S. well-to-do, researchers at Art Basel and the banking giant UBS report, now account for 42% of global fine art sales, well above China’s 19% second-place share.
Another reflection of America’s luxury-spending dominance: The world’s top premium luxury brands—think glamorous retailers like Cartier, Bergdorf Goodman, and Gucci—all have flagship stores in Manhattan. Just this past December, the luxury powerhouse Prada announced plans to spend $835 million buying up the building that hosts its current Fifth Avenue flagship and the building next door.
For America’s poorest, meanwhile, “luxury” has come to mean keeping a roof over your head.
The number of Americans chronically homeless, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development reported out this past December, has been climbing since 2016—in what Jeff Olivet, the director of the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness, likens to a “game of really vicious musical chairs.” The United States, he explains, has “an incredible deficit of affordable housing units,” with only one unit available for every three extremely low-income renters.
And “if someone has a medical condition, a mental health disability, a substance use disorder,” Olivet adds, “it makes it all that much more complex for someone to exit homelessness.”
The solution to this growing housing squeeze? America’s most conservative lawmakers have one. Let’s simply do our best, these lawmakers are proposing, to keep our nation’s homeless out of sight.
In Florida, that approach has actually become law. Governor Ron DeSantis, fresh off his go-nowhere campaign for the GOP presidential nomination, has just signed into law legislation that makes it illegal for local municipalities to let homeless people camp or sleep on public property after this October 1.
“Florida,” DeSantis declared upon the bill’s signing, “will not allow homeless encampments to intrude on its citizens or undermine their quality of life like we see in states like New York and California.”
The new Florida law requires local governments without enough bed capacity for unhoused families to set up homeless camps far from parks and other public facilities—and the act also penalizes localities that wink at rough sleeping outside these new hidden-away camps.
Diana Stanley, a top exec in Palm Beach charity circles, considers Florida’s new approach “a statement that we’ve stopped caring about our brothers and sisters.” The main message Stanley takes from the state’s new homelessness legislation: “If we can’t see them, then we don’t have to help them.”
Florida’s latest homeless legislation, Stanley stresses, “does absolutely nothing to address the root cause of homelessness, the lack of affordable housing.” The state’s focus, agrees University of Central Florida sociologist Amy Donley, ought to be on “helping people into housing, not encampments.”
Measures that would help do just that, meanwhile, have come under intense fire from right-wing lawmakers in other states. Those lawmakers are particularly aiming that fire at state and local experiments in providing low-income families with guaranteed, no-strings basic incomes.
In Iowa, one GOP state legislator is calling such basic-income efforts “socialism on steroids.” The sponsor of another move to ban basic incomes, South Dakota’s John Wiik, is charging that basic-income plans amount to “a one-way ticket to government dependency.” In February, lawmakers in Arizona, home to the nation’s fourth-highest homeless rate, passed a bill that bans “any program where persons are provided with regular, periodic cash payments” they can use “for any purpose.”
As of the end of February, lawmakers in some four other states had introduced bills with similar bans.
Who’s driving this nationally coordinated move to end experiments in basic income? Some of America’s most secretive wealthy, charges a recent analysis by Scott Santens, the founder and president of the Income To Support All Foundation.
These wealthy, Santens notes, have been bankrolling an outfit that calls itself the Foundation for Government Accountability, “a lobbying group with a billionaire-fueled junk science record every American should know about.”
Among the Foundation’s prime funders: the hard-right billionaires Richard and Liz Uihlein, the nation’s fourth-largest contributors to political campaigns. The Uihleins have pumped almost $18 million into the machinations of the Foundation for Government Accountability. Almost that much has come from the Donors Trust network, a powerhouse that has become what Mother Jones calls “the dark-money ATM of the right.”
Other major Foundation for Government Accountability funders include assorted deep-pocket entities with a history, notes Climate Investigations Center director Kert Davies, of “hating regulation and trying to stop any progress on things like climate change because they see it as almost a step toward communism.”
The billionaires underwriting all these entities, Income To Support All Foundation.’s Scott Santens believes, share a common fundamental outlook. They fear “a world where things are a bit less unequal,” a world without so many average people “having no power to say anything but yes.”
May those rich see emerge that new world they so fear. Soon.
After Americans received a $1,200 stimulus check earlier this year as part of a broader Covid-19 relief package, the number who said they could afford to cover a $400 emergency expense with cash rose from last year, despite an ongoing economic disaster resulting from the U.S. government's failed response to the pandemic.
Washington Post reporter Jeff Stein highlighted a graphic from a recent Federal Reserve report (pdf) on Twitter Thursday. The Fed found that 70% of surveyed Americans said in July that they could cover such an expense, up from 63% in October 2019.
The greatest increase by income brackets in the table--9%--was among those with an annual family income of less than $40,000, and the responses came in the midst of a national unemployment crisis that economists expect to drag on for months.
\u201c\u201cPoverty is not a lack of character.\n\nPoverty is a lack of cash.\u201d\n\n- @rcbregman\u201d— James Santelli (parody) (@James Santelli (parody)) 1600960914
Stein connected the survey results to the stimulus checks authorized by the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act from March.
That aligns with what Claudia Sahm, a former principal economist at the Fed's Board of Governors and now director of macroeconomic policy at the Washington Center for Equitable Growth, told Yahoo! Money about the report last week.
"In the absence of relief, there is no reason to expect that the extra financial security that people are telling us about in July--there's no reason to think that lasts."
--Claudia Sahm, Washington Center for Equitable Growth
"The relief worked, it was supporting families," Sahm said. "And we see this whether it's with the stimulus [checks], the unemployment [benefits] or the Payroll Protection Program."
However, congressional Republicans are now stalling on another relief package, meaning it's unclear if Americans will see another check or the restoration of the $600 weekly boost to unemployment benefits.
"In the absence of relief," Sahm warned, "there is no reason to expect that the extra financial security that people are telling us about in July--there's no reason to think that lasts."
Politicians, other journalists, and advocates responded to Stein's observation Thursday by pointing to the Fed's findings as evidence that substantive anti-poverty programs are effective and federal lawmakers should be working to provide more direct, recurring relief to Americans during the public health crisis--and beyond.
"Just one check in April increased it overall all the way to July. Even bigger reason to have recurring payments like the #ABCAct and #BoostAct," tweeted Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), referencing legislation she unveiled earlier this year and calling on Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin to "take note."
The Automatic BOOST to Communities (ABC) Act introduced by Tlaib and Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) would immediately provide a $2,000 payment using debit cards to every person in the country followed by $1,000 recurring monthly payments for one year after the pandemic ends. The initiative would be funded by the Treasury minting two $1 trillion coins, and additional coins as needed.
Emphasizing the impact that Covid-19 has had on those with low incomes, Tlaib said in April that "we need to help our neighbors pay their bills, purchase groceries, and other quality of life needs. The ABC Act is designed to help cushion these blows during and after this global health crisis while chipping away at economic inequality in our society during the pandemic."
Sam Bell of Employ America responded to Stein's tweet by sharing another graphic from the Fed report, which shows that the share of people who could pay for a $400 emergency expense out of pocket increased significantly--11%--from October to July among families with an annual income less than $25,000.
\u201c@JStein_WaPo even more dramatic at the lower end\u201d— Jeff Stein (@Jeff Stein) 1600959897
"ANTI-POVERTY PROGRAMS: THEY WORK!!!!" declared Ames Grawert, senior counsel for the Brennan Center's Justice Program.
Seth Miller of Climate Power 2020 wrote: "You mean the government can actually eliminate poverty if they just decide to?? Crazy!"
"Keep coming back to this: if you just give people money, they have rainy day funds AND they spend more," said Inside Business staff writer Trevor Metcalfe. "During a once in a generation pandemic, I might add."
New York City Council candidate Billy Freeland tweeted: "We know how to reduce inequality and combat poverty. The tools are there and the evidence backs it up. Now we just need the political leadership to make this permanent."
Freeland--and others responding to Stein--added #UBI, a reference to universal basic income, programs that involve the government providing each citizen with a set amount of money on a regular basis regardless of their financial circumstances.
As Common Dreams reported in May, "encouraging" results from Finnish UBI experiment sparked calls for other nations around the world to give it a try, particularly given the economic fallout from the pandemic.