The coronavirus crisis may mean that the time has come for universal basic income's closeup.
The most important effect the coronavirus crisis may have on public opinion of UBI is the prevailing rationale. In the past, UBI has been seen largely as a remedy for automation-related job losses. “This is sometimes presented as ‘The Robots Are Coming,’” Jesse Rothstein, a former chief economist at the U.
S. Department of Labor now at UC Berkeley,The coronavirus crisis has shifted the thinking more toward the idea as a response to the inadequacy of America’s economic safety net. “The U.S. has a social welfare system that is pretty limited,” says Pennsylvania’s Marinescu. “All the rescue packages that have already been passed are a demonstration of that. They had to enact a whole bunch of new bills in order to deal with the fallout because the system we have wasn’t able to deal with it.”The stimulus cash payment of $1,200 per adult incorporated in last month’s CARES Act “could be seen as a very short-run UBI, which 90% of Americans got without any conditions,” Marinescu says. The pandemic might change the perception of UBI as a program chiefly aimed at the poor or long-term unemployed. “One concern that many people have about UBI is that it goes to people who don’t need it or don’t deserve it,” Marinescu says. “But this crisis has been so visible for everybody and has affected so many people that that’s far less of a concern.” Indeed, the crisis turned political leaders who in other contexts were skeptics of cash handouts into believers in universal assistance. Every American adult should immediately receive a one-time check for $1,000 to help ensure families and workers can meet their short-term obligations and increase spending in the economy.One is Sen. Mitt Romney , who decried public assistance benefits as a presidential candidate in 2012 but tweeted in March, as the pandemic was gaining steam, that “every American adult should immediately receive a one-time check for $1,000.” Whether COVID-19 will give the idea of universal basic income staying power after the crisis passes is hard to gauge. “There are reasons why we might want to use something that resembles UBI as part of a portfolio of responses to the coronavirus crisis,” says Rothstein. “The CARES was right to think that it was more important to get money out quickly than to get it perfectly targeted” to people most in need. Rothstein says it may be better to think about “the insight of UBI — that the movement over the last 25 years to tie all of our safety net to work means that we’re leaving out people who really need the help. A movement towards having aid that’s available to people who are unable to work or who are not working is a good move.”He’s right about that: The coronavirus crisis has shown the folly of tying health benefits to employment at a time when access to healthcare is of paramount importance and jobs are disappearing. The crisis also has inspired more thinking about how to redress the longer term economic woes of millions of Americans. That’s reflected in a proliferation of proposals from Democrats on Capitol Hill for regular assistance payments at least through the crisis, and in broad public support for continuing the assistance. “COVID-19 has created a rare policy window where so many people are now tangibly feeling the economic insecurity we’ve been talking about,” says Sukhi Samra, director of the Stockton project. “It has given us a unique opportunity to act and to re-create our system.”
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