Capitol Hill Blue Forums Political Issues Finance, the economy & Economics Universal Basic Income? Guaranteed Job?

A GATHERING MONDAY in Washington, D.C., featured a bipartisan group of former government officials agreeing on the benefits of slashing the nation’s safety net.

This week marks the 20th anniversary of “welfare reform,” the 1996 law passed by Congress and administered by President Bill Clinton that strictly limited the amount of federal cash assistance that the poorest Americans can receive — transforming the Aid for Families with Dependent Children program into the more restrictive Temporary Aid for Needy Families.

One of the main impacts of the law was to help double the number of American households living in extreme poverty in America – defined as living on less than $2 a day.

I've lived in apartments in cities, in a condo, in houses within walking distance of major shopping centers, and I am very reluctant to give up our current rural setting.

Community is a big issue- at least among the folks I know

Many people move to cities because there is more to do there, because there is a concentration of their particular minority there, etc

And in the world of neoliberal horseshyte:

20 Years Later, Poverty Is Up, But Architects of “Welfare Reform” Have No Regrets


The Intercept

....Consider how much more likely it is to make connections with your neighbors when you have less concern about "getting by"...

Bill Clinton built that.

It’s possible that you think $13,000 a year isn’t enough. It’s certainly not going to be a plush lifestyle by American standards, not when someone decides to do no work at all to top it up. But it’s also true that $13,000 a year puts you in the top 12% of all global income earners. It would be nicer if there was some more significant digit there, like $13k puts you into the global 10% or something, but that does seem a fair enough guarantee to get purely through the privilege of having been born an American.

Everything Bill Clinton said Thursday to defend his 1996 welfare reform law was false.

Clinton claimed that he left the program with plenty of money for poor people, suggested that it helped reduce black poverty and that it was only the mean, nasty Republicans from the George W. Bush era who gutted it and hurt the poor. Clinton’s distortions of economic history and his own record are so outrageous that — you will be shocked — it is difficult to believe he was being honest.

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This is not true. Poverty dropped during the Clinton years not because of welfare reform, but because the entire American economy was being juiced by a massive stock market bubble. No credible economist even disputes this. The Clinton bubble was fueled by the aggressive financial deregulatory policies of Clinton and his Federal Reserve chairman, Alan Greenspan. When the stock market bubble burst, millions of people who previously would have received welfare fell into poverty.

Welfare reform was an intentional effort to curb financial assistance to poor people, on the grounds that many were simply too lazy to get a job. Clinton turned over a federal program to states, which were effectively allowed to slash welfare funding and impose new work requirements on people who received assistance. Even Republican co-architects of welfare reform concede that the program ended up hurting the poor.

Many modern families face scarcity of time, scarcity of money, scarcity of affordable housing, and scarcity of jobs. With all of these things to worry about, it follows that families with few resources face compounding barriers that limit their already stretched cognitive capacity. And while California and New York’s minimum wage increases mitigate the negative psychological impacts of scarcity, more can be done to strengthen American families who face a tough labor market and scarce resources. A universal basic income (UBI) that provides a monthly cash benefit to all adults and a smaller monthly benefit to children will allow for a decent minimum standard of living for all people, regardless of work status.

Whereas the minimum wage increase has benefits largely for low-income employees, a UBI would be advantageous for all members of the population, an important point considering that middle-class American families are increasingly coming into contact with scarcity. Despite gains in economic productivity, largely due to technological advances and a globalized economy, the labor force in the United States has not seen these gains in their paychecks; wages have largely remained stagnant since the 1970s.