Basic Income Fosters Healthy Communities
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harvest is the largest food bank in the
province of manitoba a couple of years
ago i was having lunch with a group of
women who were volunteers and also
clients of the food bank
one woman began to tell a story and the
story got longer and more complicated in
the telling and finally she stopped
herself and laughed and blamed her
confusion on a change in her medication
what happened next shouldn’t have
surprised me but it did
people began comparing their experiences
with pharmaceuticals some were reaching
into knapsacks and bags and pulling out
pill bottles to compare
and i looked around and i soon realized
that i was the only person at that table
without a prescription for an
antidepressant
that shouldn’t have surprised me because
we medicate poverty
we medicate the anger
and despair
of parents who can’t feed their kids
without recourse to a food bank
and we can do better
basic income is a guarantee that
everybody will have the resources they
need to lead a modest but dignified life
it doesn’t replace necessary social
services like additional supports for
people with disabilities or health care
but it does ensure that everybody has
enough cash to put food on the table a
roof over their heads and clothes on
their back
now you might be asking yourself why we
need a new program like basic income
after all every province in canada has a
program in place that’s designed
specifically to ensure that people with
no other source of income have enough
money to meet their basic needs
depending on where you live it might be
called welfare or social assistance or
income assistance why isn’t that good
enough
if you’ve never applied to such a
program you may imagine that application
is a straightforward
process in fact every one of these
programs is a complex collection of
different benefits and allowances that
makes it very difficult to determine how
much you’re entitled to receive
these programs can also be something of
a trap
in many provinces
extended health care things like dental
care and pharmacare are tied to the
receipt of
income assistance
if you have children or if you have a
disability
it can be a very risky proposition to
accept a job fraternity that comes along
if it means that you have to give up
access to these other programs
these are also programs of last resort
what that means in practice is that if
for example your own child support
you’ll be required to pursue that
through the courts whether you want any
contact with a former partner or not
if you receive a gift from a family
member even something as small as a gift
of groceries or a few dollars to help
with the rent your benefit will be cut
on a dollar for dollar basis
if you’ve worked in the past and you
expect one day to get a pension from the
canada pension plan you’ll be required
to apply for that pension at age 60
even though the financial penalty of
applying at age 60 is such that it
virtually guarantees that you’ll be
living in poverty for the rest of your
life
if after all of that
you qualify for support under these
provincial programs
you’ll receive a benefit that’s well
below the poverty line anywhere in the
country
the greatest limitation of these
programs though is that none of them are
intended to be stand-alone programs
they’re part of a vast web of different
programs and policies put in place by
different levels of government
every one of them intending to send cash
to families with low
incomes some of them are offered by the
federal government by the provincial
government by municipalities all have
different application processes
eligibility requirements and regulations
we force people at the very worst times
in their lives to navigate a complex
bureaucracy in order to access the
benefits they need to live
we can do better
the labor markets changed dramatically
over the past two decades young people
entering the workforce today have very
different opportunities than their
parents and their grandparents had
even before the pandemic 30 of working
canadians were in precarious jobs that
is jobs with low pay volatile earnings
and no security
and yet all of the programs we put in
place to assist low-wage workers are
based on the kinds of jobs that used to
exist
if you lose a precarious job and apply
for employment insurance you’ll very
often find you haven’t worked enough
hours to qualify
or if you do qualify you’ll receive a
benefit that’s too low to meet your
basic needs
we can do better
a basic income can fill the gaps between
temporary programs it can act as a
supplement to low wages
it can it can do what employment
insurance can’t do basic income supports
healthy families and healthy communities
the pandemic showed us how quickly an
infectious disease can move through a
neighborhood that’s characterized by
overcrowded housing and too many workers
in front-line low-wage jobs
the mental health effects of living with
poverty in a high-income country like
canada are fairly obvious
but
our health is determined in so many ways
by the circumstances within which we
live
my first serious introduction to basic
income happened when i was working at
the health sciences center in winnipeg
this is an inner city teaching hospital
and it doesn’t take very long in that
kind of a setting to recognize that
we’re using our emergency departments
our operating theaters and our clinics
to treat the consequences of poverty
i went in search of data associated with
an old experiment that i knew took place
in manitoba in the mid 1970s called
mincom
i wondered whether people who received a
basic income were healthier than their
counterparts who didn’t
for a period of three years a group of
families in manitoba received a basic
income
and the data showed
that people who received a basic income
were eight and a half percent less
likely to be hospitalized than similar
people with similar incomes living in
similar kinds of families and
communities who did not receive a basic
income
eight and a half percent
our health care system isn’t the only
social program we have that deals with
the consequences of poverty
eighty percent of women who are
incarcerated are imprisoned for poverty
related crimes
eighty percent
how different would this world be if we
spent a little bit of money on
prevention rather than waiting for
crises to occur and using social
programs to deal with the consequences
of those crises
some people worried about the unintended
consequences
of a basic income after all why would
anybody work if they can receive money
for nothing
from a basic income
we have experimental evidence from all
over the world that suggests that basic
income doesn’t discourage work during
the income project
most people who were working when the
project was introduced continued to work
after basic income was put in place it
made no difference to their work effort
two groups of people did wear class the
first were new mothers
new mothers in the mid 70s could
anticipate a maternity leave of four
weeks when they gave birth and many new
mothers decided to use some of them
income stipend in order to buy
themselves longer parental leaves
we’ve subsequently learned that babies
benefit families benefit mother’s
benefit all of society benefits when
parents spend longer with newborn
infants
the other group of people who work less
are precisely the people that everybody
worries about young single men
young single men cut their work hours
really dramatically
so i went in search of some of those
young single men a few years ago men
like eric whose widowed mother received
income support while he was in high
school
and eric told me that boys from families
like his were under a fair amount of
family pressure to become
self-supporting as soon as they could
the norm was that they would turn 16
they’d leave high school they get a job
sometimes a seasonal job in agriculture
or a job in manufacturing
and the limited family money could go to
support younger brothers and sisters
when men come came along some of the
parents including eric’s mother
encouraged their sons to stay in school
just a little bit longer
and so eric became part of a lucky
cohort of boys who finished high school
who who otherwise wouldn’t have in many
cases they were the first in their
families to have finished high school
eric is now a college professor
the opportunities available to somebody
who might have finished high school
by giving up a few hours working in the
mid-1970s
are dramatic
but given all of this
the um
the question that sits in everybody’s
mind is can we afford it basic income
sounds like a wonderful policy but is
this something our country can afford
when we have so many other demands on
taxpayer dollars
that was precisely the question that was
put to the parliamentary budget office
how much would it cost to offer a basic
income to all canadians who needed it
economists at the parliamentary budget
office crunched the numbers and they
came up with a an eye-watering 85
billion dollars a year it might cost 85
billion dollars a year to offer basic
income but they said
but
we’re already spending 85 billion
dollars a year and more on all these
other programs that are designed to
transfer cash to people with low incomes
provincial income assistance
welfare um provincial social assistance
refundable and non-refundable tax
credits deductions a whole range of
programs that are put in place precisely
to do that
what they said would happen if we took
the money we’re already spending and
spent it smarter
we could cut poverty by 49
now think about that for a minute
we could cut the poverty rate in half
with no increases in taxes no new taxes
no cuts to important social programs
like supports for people with
disabilities
all of these programs stay in place
and poverty falls by half
it’s time for a basic income
we can afford it our friends our
families our neighbors deserve it
and a healthy society demands it
thank you very much
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