News and views from SA Canada Looking the Basic Income Gift Horse in the Mouth B Ottawa and the Kathleen Wynne

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Both the Justin Trudeau Liberals in Government at Queen’s Park in Toronto have been making noises of late on the subject of Basic Income. The last Ontar­ io budget, in fact, declared an intention to carry out a pilot project in a com­ munity still to be announced. While no clear details are yet available, it is very likely that we will soon be dealing with a practical initiative that we will have to respond to. We will have to consider how we view the possibility of the Lib­ erals moving in the direction of a Basic Income system.

After decades of intensifying austerity and the erosion of systems of income support, with social assistance in On­ tario now providing such wretchedly inadequate benefits that people are un­ able to feed themselves properly and retain their housing, the notion of a ba­ sic level of income that all are entitled to can’t fail to generate a level of inter­ est and raise some hopes.

However, I am convinced that a good hard look in the mouth of this particu­ lar gift horse is well advised. What are the different notions of how a Basic Income system might work? Why are governments now considering it more seriously? What form would it be likely to take in the present economic and po­ litical context?

Looking deeper into the gift horse As soon as you start to look into the question of Basic Income or, as it was often called in the past, Guaranteed Annual Income (GAI), you are immedi­ ately struck by the ease and enthusiasm with which free-market thinkers and warriors of the neoliberal order have embraced the concept. From Milton Friedman to Charles Murray, the idea has found warm support on the politi­ cal right.

There are some clear and obvious rea­ sons why this is so. Firstly, the very idea of a basic level of income is about estab­ lishing a floor—and right-wing propo­ nents are confident they can locate it in the basement. A low and inadequate social minimum seems to them a great way of folding in existing, relatively adequate programs so as to, precisely, drive people into deeper poverty.

Another attraction offered by a low universal payment to those who take the side of the capitalists is the poten­ tial role it could play in depressing wag­ es. In a recent contribution to the Union Research blog on the issue of Basic Income, Toby Sanger draws attention to the Spleenhamland System, a wagesupplement arrangement put in place under the English Poor Laws between 1795-1834, and the role it played in driving down wages. Low-wage-paying employers could rely on the tax base to pay their workers’ wages, and employ­ ers who had been paying higher wages were under an incentive to lower them in order to obtain the same benefit.

In the present context of vastly ex­ panding low-wage precarious work, this danger is one that should not be underestimated.

The right-wing Basic Income agenda, however, sets its sights on more than cutting benefit levels for people in poverty and depressing the wages of the lowest paid workers. Potentially, it is a means to gut social programs and to decimate the workforce that deliv­ ers them. The notion is to use the basic payment to advance the pace of priva­ tization enormously. This kind of pay­ ment would replace public services and all who received it would become cus­ tomers shopping for their social needs in the private market. Not just income support systems, but public housing, health care, education, and transporta­ tion are threatened by the parsimoni­ ous universal payment envisaged by free-market Basic Income.

A different kind of Basic Income?

Of course, the political right’s version of a system of basic social payments is countered by those with more progres­ sive concepts. There is a notion of Basic Income that stresses income adequacy, the need to advance full employment, and the importance of preserving and strengthening a range of other ele­ ments of the social infrastructure.