“I am now convinced that the simplest approach will prove to be the most effective — the solution to poverty is to abolish it directly by a now widely discussed measure: the guaranteed income.”
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
It isn’t just in January that we should celebrate the life of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., along with a three-day winter weekend and sales using his name in vain. Is it too much to hope that we should all try to honor his legacy daily, by revisiting his words and actions and taking them forward to help solve today’s racial and economic injustices?
A friend and reader of Crime and Punishment sent me and article (which I can no longer access), published a few days ago in Market Watch, that discusses a lesser known area of Dr. King’s peaceful quest for social and economic justice: eradicating the debilitating poverty that had always been a part of our national heritage and was hitting our Black population particularly hard in the 1960’s. In 1967, Dr. King wrote what was to be his final book, Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?, in which he laid out his plan for a guaranteed income for all citizens, and reiterated this idea later that year as part of his address to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference convention.
Just about 55 years later, I offered my take on our country’s need to implement a “Guaranteed Basic Income” to help ease our country’s morbid, economic inequality, taking my cue from former Presidential Candidate Andrew Yang and Dutch historian and author, Rutger Bregman, who both eloquently advocate for UBI. If our government provided enough money each month to cover the basics for those below a certain income level, it would perhaps ease the gnawing fear that those with limited resources suffer daily, and give millions of our citizens a small break—allow them to take a breath and spend a few minutes dreaming of better things for their future.
Dr. King knew this breathing room to be a necessity for the poor when he said:
“The dignity of the individual will flourish when the decisions concerning his life are in his own hands…When he has the assurance that his income is stable and certain, and when he knows that he has the means to seek self-improvement.”
Last year on Dr. King’s birthday, NPR hosted an interview with Michael Tubbs, the former mayor of Stockton, California, who started a basic income program for Stockton’s poor when he was mayor, and since has founded, “Mayors for a Guaranteed Income”, now 62 cities strong. Tubbs cites Dr. King as inspiration for his guaranteed income program as mayor and the foundation he started:
“I think anyone who studies Dr. King realizes that he saw that racial justice and economic justice were intertwined.”
And Tubbs is specific about the reasoning behind simply giving people a minimum income;
“…when we talk about how the most productive times in our country and the way the middle class was built, it was built by giving things to people, by giving land to people, by giving education to people. And I think guaranteed income's in that same vein.”
And over half a century after Dr. King laid out his guaranteed income plan, our country is still struggling with racial and economic injustice, and in some respects it has gotten worse, given the widening gulf between the ultra wealthy and everyone else. The last two years of the pandemic have exposed our system’s injustices to an extent not seen before, and the short-lived stimulus payments combined with the child care tax credits statistically demonstrated that government relief reduces poverty. In one of the richest nations on Earth, isn’t it finally time to abandon the failed “wars on poverty” of the past and simply eliminate poverty by giving, yes giving, those below a certain income level a guaranteed minimum income?
Let me know what you think of a guaranteed basic income in the comments below. I’d love to hear your ideas!
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Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.