DDI: A Minimum Income that Performs Like a Right
The idea of a UBI, a universal basic income, has been gaining a lot of traction lately, at least here in our Medium world. Almost every day sees at least one new post relating to it. Beyond our little realm, Andrew Yang is running for president with a UBI as the centerpiece of his campaign.
At their most enthusiastic, proponents of a UBI proclaim a minimum income as a right. Based on that moral claim, they call on society to do what it takes to make a minimum income a reality —with varying specific proposals.
I have taken a different approach to a minimum income. Armed with three undergraduate courses in economics and a lot of further reading in the subject (including much of K. Marx’s writings, though my rejection of his approach is what prompted my genetical question), I asked myself what a really just economy could be. Given that political democracy is considered by so many people to be a just social system, I looked to it — specifically, political rights — as a possible template.
I came up with a minimum income that would perform like a political right: a “democratically distributed income” (DDI). Like, say, the right to vote, it would not accrue to everyone but would be available for an unlimited number of people. Like all rights, it would be free of cost.
That would be achieved by creating the money for the minimum income as needed. The total of that income would form the supply of money (as currency) for the economy. The amount of the DDI would be based on the current median income — so today in the U.S., say $15/hr.; $600/wk. Like the right to vote, it could be legitimately restricted to citizens of the nation.
As strictly a matter of economics, the DDI is ‘only’ a different way of supplying the economy with money. It turns out that doing that this way happens to produce astonishing results: it provides the means to make the existing economy stable and self-regulating (with built-in safeguards against inflation), while eliminating unemployment (at no cost to anyone) and poverty (without having to redistribute anything). The entity that administered the DDI could also directly fund (all) government (at the current per capita rate of total government spending, forever), which would eliminate the need for taxes of any kind and public debt at any level of government. The DDI would even help with sustainability, as total output would be governed, passively but effectively, by demographics — and only that.
To be clear, there would still be no limit on income or property/wealth and no changes in economic behaviors would be required. It can also be noted that this proposal does not ‘punish the rich’. It does wrest control of the economy from the powers that be — keeping that control from any other hands. That and eliminating taxes would increase liberty.
I asked that fateful (for me at least) question of myself in the fall of 1982. I have spent the decades since then developing and fine-tuning the idea of a DDI while trying to get it into the domain of our public discourse. My — to this point — lack of success is self-evident. Along the way I did earn an M.A. in economics (Atlanta University, 1988) to be certain of my ability to evaluate the idea. [I also had to ‘prove’ that political democracy — and therefore this approach to a really just economy — really is just, but that is another topic.]
I do understand that hearing of an idea directly from its author this way does somehow diminish its credibility, undermine any authority it might have. I can’t do anything about that. The list of editors, political parties, think tanks, NGO’s, other organizations, and individuals that have been apprised of and disregarded this idea is as diverse as it is long.
For anyone interested enough, I do have a Web site, www.ajustsolution.com (though I’ve been informed that the link doesn’t work). I have also published other relevant essays here on medium.com, including “Extending Democracy to Our Capitalist Economy to Transform Our Society” and “A Cure for the Ills of Capitalism.” (Those links definitely work.) I acknowledge that I am a better thinker than I am a writer — or a Web site designer/manager.