Back in the 1990s, scholars at Duke were studying the mental health of Cherokee children in the region then the casino was built, creating the conditions for a natural experiment. But the Cherokee example is among the most researched. The Eastern Band of Cherokee isn’t the only group whose members get unconditional cash: The Alaska Permanent Fund has been giving $1,000 to $2,000 a year to its citizens for decades, and other Native American tribes have also divided up casino revenues. And the mayor of Stockton, California, recently announced that beginning in August 2018, the city plans to give some of its 300,000 citizens $500 a month, an experiment being funded by Hughes’s organization, the Economic Security Project.
In September, Silicon Valley congressperson Ro Khanna introduced a bill calling for a $1.4 trillion expansion of the earned income tax credit, which would effectively create a small basic income for low-income working people via tax credits.
In her new book, What Happened, Hillary Clinton writes that she considered rolling out a basic income policy during her 2016 campaign.
Sign that reads land of the free because of the brave how to#
What then? In the aftermath of Donald Trump’s election, which some have attributed to this very tension, questions about how to support the so-called working class have only grown. If robots and offshoring take all the jobs, or at the very least displace the low-skilled ones, the thinking goes, there may come a time when there simply aren’t enough jobs to go around.
Lately, however, tech leaders, including Facebook founders Mark Zuckerberg and Chris Hughes, Tesla’s Elon Musk, and Y Combinator president Sam Altman, have begun pushing the concept as a potential solution to the economic anxiety brought on by automation and globalization-anxiety the tech industry has played its own role in creating. The idea is not exactly new-Thomas Paine proposed a form of basic income back in 1797-but in this country, aside from Social Security and Medicare, most government payouts are based on individual need rather than simply citizenship.