Guaranteed Income
Alternative to Armies of Bureaucracies
In Martin Luther King, Jr’s last speech to Southern Christian Leadership Conference, he presented an interesting policy alternative to the armies of bureaucracies, poverty and likely suboptimal education and other outcomes we now enjoy. He advocated making people consumers either via guaranteed jobs, or guaranteed incomes, “when the decisions concerning his life are in his own hands” King theorized it would be transformative for interpersonal conflicts as well as public policy.
Stephen Colbert asserted $5.5 trillion had been spent on Covid interventions. Congressperson Thomas Massie asserted US government’s $6 trillion intervention could have been $17k per citizen.
But moving beyond just Covid funds, when looking at recent poverty guidelines and federal budgets, we could provide a direct payment of $10k per person for 330 million persons—not just adults—not just citizens, for $3.3 trillion per year, less than total governmental revenues and significantly less than federal governmental expenditures. Perhaps not enough for abolishing poverty for all single person households, but more than enough for dyadic or higher sized households, also it could be above the poverty line if accompanied with other deregulation to increase free markets which might bring the costs of various goods down if artificially high due to state interventions.
It is interesting federal government interventions are large enough to abolish poverty, yet it does so many other things (like incarcerating adults for victimless non violent drug crimes post failed alcohol prohibition) instead of ensuring all can consume a dignified life. If much or all of the federal government were replaced by a payment to all persons of all ages in the country, people could still have local and state government to interfere in peoples’ lives. It is interesting perhaps the most simple alternative to the status quo, and one so embraced by thought leaders like MLK, Elon Musk, Milton Friedman is generally ignored in the public sphere.
So long as society forces people into monopolies based on coercion, there is a total cost to these interventions. SilencedCities hopes to explore what if these governmental interventions were used to enable all to consume, not just insiders like Nancy Pelosi and Richard Burr and all the other slime getting rich in DC somehow. Perhaps there could still be other public services like those of a night watchmen state, in the vein if Robert Nozick, for policing, courts, environmental protection, military, national security, and maybe additional interventions like basic transportation infrastructure funding and still have a federal budget within the actual revenue of the federal government—but the news refuses to discuss this basic simple alternative to what we get now.
Since the Coleman Report found a significant impact of economic purchasing power on educational outcomes of children, it is interesting, despite the large sums spent on interventions every year, in the nearly 60 years since, abolishing poverty, at least for children has not been accomplished by the self-proclaimed do-gooders in government using the money they took from the public under threat of force.
https://www.cbo.gov/publication/58268
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=population+of+us
https://aspe.hhs.gov/topics/poverty-economic-mobility/poverty-guidelines/prior-hhs-poverty-guidelines-federal-register-references/2020-poverty-guidelines
https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2021/demo/p60-273.html