Basic stimulation

I got my federal stimulus payment last week.

It took an extra week or so since I had to submit my banking info to the IRS, but outside of that it was fairly simple. I woke up on Thursday with $1,200 more than I had the day before.

So, is there a reason that can't happen more often?

Universal basic income today is what a public healthcare option was a decade ago. A pie-in-the-sky fantasy from the progressive left that sounds nice on paper, but was too ambitious for the current political climate. I figured we were years before seriously approaching the topic in the United States, but COVID-19 seems to have accelerated the timetable.

Once upon a time, several years ago, I floated the idea of universal basic income to Rep. Linda Upmeyer during one of our occasional hypothetical policy discussions. How much could the government save in unemployment and welfare by simply providing a baseline income for everybody? How many people would be empowered to start their own business once free from the fear of leaving the security of an unfulfilling job? I even joked that you could get Republicans on board with it by calling it a tax credit paid in advance, because while Republicans reflexively oppose "government handouts" they generally love any policy that lowers taxes.

Who would have thought that I was so close to predicting the future?

Republicans have been using socialism as a bogeyman for decades. Any time anybody suggests a policy that would actually provide the average American some value for the taxes they pay, the cries of "That's socialism!" can be heard from coast-to-coast, mostly from wealthy people that end up with the bulk of the wealth generated by the millions of Americans that live paycheck-to-paycheck.

But all that tough talk went out the window when the invisible hand of the free market threatened the Dow Jones. In the face of yet another impending economic collapse, Congress couldn't pass a $2.2 trillion stimulus package fast enough, not just throwing billions of dollars at crumbling industries that didn't use their last trillion dollar tax cut to save for a rainy day, but also at unemployment benefits and a $1,200 per-person boost to every American's income. All it took was one global pandemic for lifelong Republicans to start echoing Andrew Yang.

I even called the delivery mechanism. The $1,200 payment is technically an advance on a $1,200 tax credit that will be applied to next year's tax returns.

While a one-time payment is a far cry from universal income, it is a concession that the underlying principle is correct. That people having money to spend isn't just good for the economy, it's essential.

It is beyond obvious that the United States' decades-long experiment with trickle-down economics has failed. The average American worker is more productive now than they have ever been, yet wages remain stagnant and economic mobility has dropped like a rock. The rich get richer by making the rest of us live on the razor's edge.

If the dangers of that system weren't obvious before, they certainly are now.

The United States is the richest country in the world, home to some of the world's wealthiest people and most profitable corporations. So why are so many people living paycheck-to-paycheck? Why have we given tax cut after tax cut to "job creators" if the people they employ make so little that they can't afford to take a few weeks off work without bringing down the entire economy?

The recent stimulus was a response to an emergency situation, sure. But there wouldn't have been an emergency if the economy wasn't so fragile in the first place. Much like the private healthcare system has utterly failed to provide Americans with affordable healthcare in the event of a health emergency, private industry has likewise failed to provide American workers the economic stability to withstand an economic emergency. When private industry fails, it's up to the state to step-up. We're seeing it in healthcare right now. We'll be seeing it with income soon enough.

A universal basic income program would doubtlessly be expensive. There is a lot of math that would have to be done to justify the cost, but it's time to start taking a serious look at the numbers. Both to determine if we can afford to do it and if we can afford not to do it.

Travis Fischer is a news writer for Mid-America Publishing and wonders how many more newspaper subscriptions and advertisements people could buy if they had an extra $1,000 a month.