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An
ongoing study conducted in Stockton, California, examines how the
lives of low-income Americans can improve if they are simply given
money - a modest, but reliable source of income with no strings
attached. The Stockton
Economic Empowerment Demonstration
(SEED) randomly chose 125 participants from poverty-stricken
residential areas and gave them $500 per month to simply use for
whatever they wanted over the last two years. The majority
of the participants
were women (69 percent) and people of color (53 percent).
Preliminary
results from the first year are tantalizing for anyone interested in
solutions to address rising
inequality
in the United States, especially as they manifest along racial and
gender lines. Within the first year, the study’s participants
obtained jobs at twice the rate of the control group. At the
beginning of the study, 28 percent of the participants had full-time
employment, and after the first year, that
number rose to 40 percent.
Sukhi
Samra, the director of SEED, explained to me in an interview
that although Andrew
Yang,
the former presidential candidate now running for mayor of New York
City, helped popularize the idea of a universal basic income (UBI),
the Stockton study of a “guaranteed basic income” (GBI)
is subtly different from Yang’s proposal. “Where
guaranteed income differs,” said Samra, “is that it’s
usually targeted along income lines,” rather than given to
everyone. “It’s more often touted as a tool for equity,
especially racial and gender equity,” she added.
Samra
said it was important to frame the idea of GBI within the “racial
justice and social justice movements of the 1960s when you had Dr.
Martin Luther King Jr., the National Welfare Rights Organization and
the Black Panthers all advocating for a guaranteed income as the
simplest and most effective way to abolish poverty.” Indeed,
Dr.
King wrote in his last book,
Where
Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?,
that he was “convinced that the simplest approach will prove to
be the most effective - the solution to poverty is to abolish it
directly by a now widely discussed measure: the guaranteed income.”
Stockton
is a fitting location for an experiment such as this. Known as
“America’s
most diverse city,”
Stockton was economically devastated by market forces more than a
decade ago during the national housing crisis and declared bankruptcy
in 2012. Race-based inequality is rampant, with the city’s
white minority enjoying a median income that is roughly twice that of
Black incomes. This microcosm of larger American cities also suffers
from ill-health, crime, and over-policing, so much so that it earned
another nickname, as one of “America’s
most miserable cities.”
Then in 2016, the city elected its first Black mayor, Michael Tubbs,
who happened to also be the youngest person ever elected to that
office.
The
idea for the Stockton demonstration of a guaranteed income was Tubbs’
brainchild,
and he funded the SEED study with private donations in order to
demonstrate that equity can be reached by direct means such as
unconditional cash payments to those who need it the most. It is no
coincidence that a majority of the Stockton study’s
participants were women and people of color. This is precisely
the demographic
that has been left behind by national economic trends.
Samra
explained that for those who were able to transition from part-time
to full-time work, the cash payments enabled them to do basic things
like go to a job interview, “not because they were lazy before
but because they were wage workers who just could not afford to lose
one shift to go interview for something else, as that meant they
would have to cut something from their household budget for that
month.” Others were able to pay for childcare so they could
pursue better job opportunities.
Another
critically important outcome of cash payments was a marked
improvement in mental health and overall well-being. A 2020 paper
published by the National Bureau of Economic Research found that
“negative economic shocks cause mental illness, and
anti-poverty programs, such as cash transfers, improve mental
health.” Samra explained that at the beginning of the study,
almost all of its participants could be classified as “clinically
depressed,” but after one year, there was a significant
reduction in anxiety and depression compared to levels seen in the
control group, so much so that “$500 a month can be as
effective as other forms of medication.”
The
study’s preliminary results cover the year just before the
coronavirus pandemic was declared. The study’s second year will
help answer a question that Samra expressed as, “How exactly
can a guaranteed income act as a financial vaccine?” Anecdotal
evidence from some of the study’s participants revealed that
the $500-a-month stipend became even more important during the
pandemic, as it enabled them to adhere to “shelter-in-place”
and other safety measures and stock up on food because they could
financially afford it.
Of
course, the idea of giving poor people of color money to survive is
utterly antithetical to Republican and even some Democratic
lawmakers. Since the assault on government welfare launched by
President Ronald Reagan and accelerated by Bill Clinton, financial
support to the poor has become perversely demonized as a disincentive
to work. People of color and women have been particularly demonized
and cast as parasites taking advantage of the system. Poverty is seen
as a moral failing, and therefore assistance is seen as an immoral
reward for such a failing. According to Samra, the Stockton study was
criticized on the basis that giving people money would stop them from
working. But so far it has proven the opposite: that a guaranteed
income can actually help struggling Americans get jobs.
The
logic of poverty as a moral failing persists today as various pieces
of legislation to counter the economic devastation of the pandemic
have included direct aid in the form of one-time checks and monthly
unemployment checks. Republican Senator Tom Cotton denounced the
latest bill, the American
Rescue Plan
that just passed under President Joe Biden, by asking,
“How will sending stimulus checks to murderers and rapists in
prison help solve the pandemic?” Conflating poor Americans with
“murderers and rapists” is a common conservative
dog-whistle tactic.
Financial
help aimed at poor people of color has never been popular with
richer, whiter Americans, and in November 2020, Stockton Mayor Tubbs
was defeated
in his reelection bid.
His opponent, a Republican named Kevin
Lincoln,
denounced Tubbs’ gun violence intervention program as “cash
for criminals,” and claimed that, “All this funding that
the mayor has brought in, it’s been brought in to serve him.”
One analysis
of his defeat also pointed out that, “some residents of the
city’s wealthier North Side feel that they’re being
ignored.” Tubbs was also the target of a vicious right-wing
social media operation
in the form of a popular blog that relied on racist tropes, lies,
exaggeration and fake news to topple the young progressive leader.
A
critical lesson from the Stockton experiment that wasn’t cited
among the official results of the study is that while a guaranteed
income can actually work to address the ills it sets out to fix,
American politics remains mired in conservative racist notions of who
deserves help. And therein lies the problem at the heart of our
inequality crisis. Despite the Stockton study’s positive
results, the political loss of its architect, Mayor Tubbs, reaffirmed
the city as a symbolic microcosm of the broader American landscape
and the ongoing challenges to addressing race and gender-based
poverty.
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