Guaranteed income helps parents in Baltimore, New York and Mississippi – Reuters

They appear place after place. Baltimore. New York City. Jackson, Mississippi.

I’m talking about guaranteed income programs that give money, unconditionally, to a specific group of people: low-income parents.

Guaranteed Income (IG) is similar, but not quite identical, to Universal Basic Income (UBI). While UBI aims to provide enough money for basic subsistence to every adult, guaranteed income could provide a more modest amount – less than enough to live on – to a more targeted group of people.

The time seems right for a series of GI programs that target low-income parents. With the end of the Biden administration’s expanded child tax credit and rising inflation, America’s poorest families are finding it harder to make ends meet.

Starting May 2, Baltimore parents ages 18 to 24 who meet the income criteria can apply for the city’s new GI pilot. By summer, 200 randomly selected applicants will begin receiving unconditional cash payments of $1,000 per month for 24 months. In a city marked by a history of redlining, the pilot project aims to alleviate poverty in predominantly black and Latino working-class communities.

It also has a second purpose: to add to the growing body of evidence on the effectiveness of cash programs. Experts will therefore conduct a randomized controlled trial to assess how money affects physical and mental health, employment, food security, and more. They will track those who receive money as well as a control group that does not receive money but may get other incentives.

Meanwhile, New York City operates its own GI program. Payments to an initial cohort of 100 low-income mothers began in July 2021, with plans to give them $500 or $1,000 a month for three years. So far, the money has helped these mothers better pay for rent, childcare, food and nappies. This month, the program accepted applications from a new cohort of 500 mothers.

And in Jackson, Mississippi, the Magnolia Mother’s Trust — the first GI program to specifically target very low-income families headed by Black mothers in the United States — has just enrolled its fourth cohort: 100 mothers who will receive $1,000 per months for a year. . Results from previous cohorts showed positive effects on health and education, with recipients 27% more likely to go to a doctor if they were ill and 20% more likely to have above-performing children. of the school level.

“It’s not a long-term solution”

The expansion of the Child Tax Credit (CTC) has made a major positive difference for millions of parents and children. When it expired, they were left behind. Child poverty has increased by 41%.

“It helped me a lot to ease my burden when I started taking the monthly child tax credits last year. Not receiving payments has definitely put a strain on my budget,” a single mother from Mississippi told Mme magazine. Fortunately, attending a GI program helped ease that strain again. “Being part of the Magnolia Mother’s Trust made me realize that things can change for the better,” she added.

Yet Aisha Nyandoro, who leads this program, told me that what the United States ultimately needs is guaranteed income enacted as federal policy, not a patchwork of small income programs. ‘IG scattered in a few cities.

“I am delighted that the organization I lead is up to the task,” she said. “But it’s not a long-term solution. … We need a scale that we can only get at the national level.

Michael Tubbs agrees with her. As former mayor of Stockton, Calif., he led a successful pilot program in 2017 offering $500, no strings attached, to select residents, and in 2020 he created Mayors for Guaranteed Income.

“Pilots are important, but they don’t replace a federal policy,” Tubbs told me.

Where should guaranteed income go from here?

The purpose of pilot projects is to gather evidence that an intervention works so that you can then make a convincing case for it becoming policy. In a sense, the GI pilots targeting parents are all trials for an idea that we have already implemented as federal policy: the expanded CTC.

The CTC has proven to be extremely effective. In July 2021, when the first checks were sent to parents, the child poverty rate fell from 15.8% to 11.9%, the lowest rate on record. And yet, this evidence was not enough to make the CTC permanent. Although polls found a bipartisan majority of voters wanted it permanent, Congress let it lapse – with opposition from Sen. Joe Manchin delivering the final blow.

So you might wonder if it’s really worth continuing to run pilot projects aimed at amassing more evidence. Perhaps the lack of evidence is not the constraining factor. Should the GI movement focus its efforts on something else, such as building political will?

“I think it’s both/and,” Nyandoro told me. “We can get data on the benefits of guaranteed income through the pilot projects, and we can simultaneously build political will, advocacy and education so we can put in place the politicians who will champion the innovative solutions we need. .”

She explained that it is useful to have GI pilots distributed in different cities because, in addition to directly helping the beneficiaries, these pilots educate the communities in which they are integrated on what GI is and why it is. is a good idea. This can help counter pernicious and persistent myths about the poor, such as the misconception that they cannot be trusted to use money rationally and will instead spend it on medicine. Some reports have suggested that Manchin opposed a permanent CTC in part because he believed beneficiaries would spend the money on drugs.

“I think the CTC is not permanent is a perfect example of what happens when we hold a false narrative about people living in poverty and the harm that these false narratives can do,” Nyandoro told me. Changing the narrative is a long game, she said, so people should expect it to be two steps forward, one step back — and keep taking those steps.

Tubbs further explained the rationale for running more pilots. “Our ultimate goal is not just a CTC,” he told me. “This is a guaranteed federal income for anyone who needs it. To do this, we need to be able to prove that the policy works on a variety of groups in various geographies.

“We also need to work with our federal leaders to understand the importance of such policies, which again most of them do,” he added. “So I don’t know if it’s so much about mustering the political will, but more about making sure that voters know who is serving their best interests and who is failing them. If the will does not currently exist in Congress, then we must change Congress.

More than a third of Senate seats are up for election at midterm, and Tubbs hopes losing several hundred dollars a month will be something voters think about at the polls.

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