In 2018, Moriah Rodriguez was in a car accident that left her with a traumatic brain injury, unable to work. A few years later, she and her four children were on the brink of homelessness when she enrolled in the Denver Basic Income Project.
Rodriguez, who now serves on the Board of Directors for the DBIP, used the unconditional cash transfers provided to her through the program to find a place to live and pay off debt. She believes that, if not for the program, her life would be fundamentally different.
“I don’t believe that the way that the system is set up is giving people the opportunity to be successful,” Rodriguez said.
The Denver Basic Income Project is one of many city- and county-wide guaranteed income pilot programs throughout the country. These initiatives, which gained popularity during the COVID-19 pandemic, are experimental, providing cash payments to specific groups for a limited time to study their effects.
In October, Rep. Bonnie Watson Coleman (D-NJ) introduced federal legislation to establish a federal guaranteed income pilot program. The congresswoman has advocated for the initiative in past legislative sessions, pointing to increasing economic inequality as proof of the program’s necessity.
“The greedy are getting the majority and the needy are becoming even more needy,” Watson Coleman said. “That’s un-American as far as I’m concerned.”
Watson Coleman said that guaranteed income can lessen economic struggle by plainly distributing resources and avoiding government bureaucracy.
Researchers echoed this sentiment. They say cash is flexible, non-paternalistic and efficient.
“People want guaranteed income to do all the things, right? And that’s really because cash can do all the things,” said Misuzu Schexnider, who works at UChicago’s Inclusive Economy Lab. “It’s really one of the few interventions that can help people achieve their goals, regardless of what the goal is.”
However, Schexnider said that this versatility can make the impact of these programs difficult to measure.
Benjamin Henwood, the director of the Center for Homelessness, Housing and Health Equity Research at USC, expressed a similar concern. In a study exploring the impact of cash distribution to people experiencing homelessness in San Francisco and Los Angeles, Henwood found that while recipients of the transfer were more likely to report not being unhoused, there was no dramatic change that would statistically tie this finding to the cash transfer.
Henwood thus described the cash transfers as “incremental, not transformational,” and said the small amount of money transferred and the short duration of the program might have limited the statistical efficacy of the intervention.
Still, the Denver Basic Income Project, which to date has deployed $10.8 million to over 800 families and individuals, found that almost half of participants reported moving into stable independent housing within a year, a decisive success.
And, while the quantitative data from these pilot studies can be a mixed bag, the qualitative stories that these studies gather from participants, like Rodriguez, are “overwhelmingly positive,” Schexnider said.
Both Schexnider and Henwood also emphasized that their findings run counter to the stigma often associated with welfare programs.
Welfare is often mired in a societal belief that equates receiving assistance with personal failure like laziness or irresponsibility. Some assume that participants will spend the additional money on what Henwood calls “temptation goods,” like drugs or alcohol.
The researchers said these beliefs are simply not true. In fact, Henwood said that his study was just as much about proving that basic income did not lead to an increased purchase of temptation goods as it was about demonstrating the success of the intervention.
Meanwhile, in a basic income study conducted by non-profit OpenResearch, Schexnider said recipients worked less, but only by a few hours each week. She said that most spent the additional time on childcare, transportation or much-needed rest.
“For some in our country and globally, it’s a bit of a convenient myth — convenient for some — to paint people with low income as somehow lazy and deficient. And the data doesn’t bear that out,” said Elizabeth Crowe, the coordinator of the Elevate Boulder Guaranteed Income Program.
These researchers all welcomed the idea of a federal program, but highlighted the necessity for concrete, outcome-driven details in the project’s proposal.
In the proposed legislation, the federal pilot program would last three years, and 10,000 participants would receive a cash payment each month equal to the fair market rent for a two-bedroom home in the ZIP Code in which they reside. Watson Coleman said that she would leave the details, like who is eligible for the program, up to “authentic technicians” or experts in the field.
Part of the researchers’ support is rooted in the fact that the program is not novel. Aside from initiatives like the Denver Basic Income Project, cash transfers are considered by many to be the standard of charitable giving. And, Schexnider said there are already successful federal programs that are essentially cash transfers, like the Child Tax Credit.
For Gwen Battis, the project manager for the DBIP, the federal pilot program is an “inevitable need.”
“As AI takes jobs, we’re going to need a way to participate in the economy and pay for things,” she said.
In highlighting the effect of AI on employment, Battis hits upon a key driver in the movement for basic income.
Not only is the country experiencing record income inequality, there are also questions about how artificial intelligence will negatively impact the job market.
Technology executives have indicated that they aspire to create artificial general intelligence, which is essentially a machine capable of performing all of the economically valuable work that humans do on a day-to-day basis.
Dario Amodei, the CEO of AI start-up Anthropic, told Axios that AI could soon wipe out half of all entry-level white-collar jobs.
“Most [lawmakers] are unaware that this is about to happen,” Amodei said. “It sounds crazy, and people just don’t believe it.”
In recent years, Republican lawmakers on the state level have pushed back against guaranteed income pilot programs.
Legislators in states like Arizona, Iowa, South Dakota, Texas and Wisconsin have all introduced bills to ban income programs. They say such programs make participants overly reliant on the government.
State Rep. John Gillette of Arizona told Business Insider last year that guaranteed income programs are “socialist” and a “killer for the economy.”
“Is money a birthright now?” Gillette asked. “Do we just get born and get money from the government? Because I think the Founding Fathers would say that is very contrary to our capitalist system and encouraging people to work.”
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton sued a county in his state to block a basic income program. In the legal filing, he called the initiative a “socialist experiment” that was an “illegal and illegitimate government overreach.”
While their Republican counterparts in the U.S. Congress have yet to directly comment on the federal basic income bill, they have demonstrated a reticence for more expansive welfare policies.
The House resoundingly passed a resolution on Nov. 21 that denounced the “horrors of socialism.” No Republican lawmaker voted against the measure, and 86 Democrats joined Republicans to approve it.
Some are also skeptical about the practical reality of the basic income proposal and other expansive welfare policies.
In his home state, Grady Lowery, a lecturer at the University of Tennessee, said politicians are actively presenting their state as a haven for those escaping the “socialist” New York and its mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani.
“Not only is there not support for Mamdani here, there’s active fear and hostility towards this kind of socialist dictatorial figure that he represents,” Lowery said.
Lowery said the bill might have potential if the legislators could avoid the “socialist pejorative label,” which they have already garnered.
Watson Coleman is undeterred. The bill is now pending in the House Ways and Means Committee.
“I don’t care if we’re in this administration that didn’t want to shelter, didn’t want to feed, and didn’t want to give health care to (people),” Watson-Coleman said. “I’m still going to advance my legislation that I think is legitimate work for the federal government to do.”
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