The rise and fall of guaranteed income
What role for government?
Marisa Chappell, an associate professor of history at Oregon State University, said that one of the differences between the social climate from which the arguments for a GAI arose in the 1960s and 1970s and the dominant ethos today is that there used to be a widespread belief that the government had a role to play in solving problems.
“Poverty was seen as a social problem, not an individual problem,” she said, “and so it demanded a government solution.”
The 1969 report of the President’s Commission on Income Maintenance Programs, which recommended that the United States adopt a GAI, argued that a central federal role was necessary and would be effective: “the Commission feels strongly that the problem of poverty must be dealt with by the Federal Government. It is possible to assure basic economic security for all Americans within the framework of existing political and economic institutions. It is time to construct a system which will provide that security.”
By the 1980s and 1990s, however, belief in both the need to assure the welfare of markets and in the ability of unfettered markets to secure the welfare of the nation was strongly ascendant.
Whereas the market previously had been seen as being under the control of the government and in service to citizens said Martha McCluskey of SUNY Buffalo, the increasing influence of market-centric thinking yielded the subordination of the role of the state.
“Nobody ever says this explicitly, but the underlying assumption of the vision of the free market society is that the purpose of government is to serve these ‘market forces,’” she said. “Instead of being accountable to its citizens, it becomes accountable to the market.”
During the Clinton Administration, for example, U.S. policy regarding globalization was frequently framed in terms of making citizens adapt to that phenomenon and not vice versa.
In his famous “New Covenant” speeches given at Georgetown University in 1991 while he was laying the groundwork for the run for the presidency, Clinton expressed an idea that would remain central to his governing philosophy: that because globalization was, in his mind, an inevitable process, the only choice for the United States was to “organize to compete and win” in the new global economy. “Protectionism,” Clinton said, was “just a fancy word for giving up.”
In a speech in 1994, a year after signing the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), Clinton again invoked the supposed inevitability of globalization and the necessity of adaptation. “Even as we speak and meet here, powerful forces are shaking and remaking the world,” Clinton said. “That is the central fact of our time. It is up to us to understand those forces and respond in the proper way so that every man and woman within our reach, every boy and girl, can live to the fullest of their God-given capacities.”
As an illustration of the continuing desire to serve market forces, McCluskey pointed to Obama-era calls for austerity, appeals that are frequently justified by reference to what would please the bond market.
When the credit rating agency Standard and Poor’s (S&P) downgraded the rating of U.S. Treasury bonds in 2011, there were widespread efforts to “reassure the markets” that the government would cut spending. In the response of one Treasury Department official at the time, it was taken as a given that policy makers would respond to the pressures of the market.
“S.& P.’s negative outlook underestimates the ability of America’s leaders to come together to address the difficult fiscal challenges facing the nation,” the official said.
Alice O’Connor of UCSB explained that when the primary goal of elected officials is seen as serving the interests of the market instead of the interests of citizens, arguments for policies such as a GAI that appeal to the broader social good carry less weight.
Additionally, O’Connor said, as the perception has grown that the market provides for the public good, more policy makers appear to believe that the role for government should shrink. That, too, makes it more difficult to justify policies — like a guaranteed income — that would require a central role for the federal government, she said.
“If you’ve bought into the notion that the market is the only thing that is going to produce welfare, what role is there for the government?” O’Connor said.
That ideology was clearly on display in 2002 when President George W. Bush gave a speech honoring the conservative economist Milton Friedman. What Bush had learned from Friedman, he said, was that “[i]n contrast to the free market’s invisible hand, which improves the lives of people, the government’s invisible foot tramples on people’s hopes and destroys their dreams.”
Invisible benefits
One reason for this shift in ideology, according to Linda Gordon of New York University, is that while the benefits that people received from the government were very visible during the New Deal era, they became increasingly opaque over time, in part by implementing an increasing amount of social policy through the tax code. The result, she said, is that “much of the so-called welfare state is invisible to the people that receive its benefits. When we have a harder time saying, ‘Look, this is what the government does,’ we have a harder time asking, ‘What else should it do?’”
According to Chappell, another result of the invisibility of government benefits, is that instead of being understood as a collective enterprise of citizens, the government has increasingly been seen as something “foreign” or “separate” from citizens.“There’s not a general feeling that the government is us and is here to serve us,” she said.