Hughes's "Fair Shot": What a UBI looks like when a Liberal looks at a UBI

I’m skeptical about Hughes writing for a guaranteed income. 

Mainly it was because he’s been so lucky. Though he fought up from class position, he did end up as a white kid at Harvard. Then he became even luckier by having Mark Zuckerberg as a roommate. That’s given him millions of dollars to play with. First, he bought a magazine then he’s been doing this advocacy work.

The book is short and functions as a bit of biography and a bit of a policy proposal. The meat is the proposal, and as meat, it’s kind of gristly. His proposal is for a $500 monthly disbursement for everyone making less than $50K a year. It’s small, but even then, he wants a slow roll out. Significantly, it is tied to work – very broadly drawn.

For me, if we as a society are going to move towards a UBI, this kind of thing is the last sort of proposal we need. I complained to my friends as I was reading it that Hughes had reinvented the EITC. I was a little shocked when I was reading later that this is the model he has in mind. The only real difference is that he wants payouts monthly instead of yearly.

I’m personally on the edge about what a UBI might mean socially. However, the way Hughes draws it creates all the problems of administering another social program. It is not basic, nor universal. My concern when reading was that the 50K level is a huge drop-off. You make 49.5 and you get the payment, but one dollar over gets nothing (this is addressed many pages after the basic proposal is laid out, in one line). He also wants to have an adjustment based on cost of living.

So, his proposal is for a new program of a smaller sum (not to downplay how much an extra 500 bucks a month would play in my life) targeted towards the poor with a huge bureaucratic element thrown in. I’m really not sure how Hughes sees this being implemented, but in a political environment where even broader-based government programs are under attack, I can’t see this having a chance of being implemented.

The size and work requirements are what really get me. Dude hit the lottery and understands the power of receiving cash grants (he looks at similar income schemes in developing countries) but he’s still fetishizing work. The grant he proposes isn’t enough to live on and you to have worked the year before to qualify, so we’re still using an 18^th century model of relief for the 21^st century, with loads of uncertainty of what work will look like for the next generation. 

The very point of a UBI is that within a capitalist framework it can be emancipatory since it is enough for basic subsistence and that is universal. If you do well enough, we can tax it away on the back end. There’s still bureaucracy in place, but if everyone gets a check, there’s less chance for those fun racially coded republican arguments against it. (And what’s really galling is that Hughes uses handwaving about his failure at the New Republic as a justification against a larger grant – UBI is literally a safety net for everyone, just like he had with his Facebook Money. Oh, and also that in a couple places he says he wants the book to “start a conversation” when the conversation has been going on for decades. Sigh. 

So, it’s good that the Facebook bro writes a book for a basic income and gets blurbbed on the back by Bill Gates and Arianna Huffington. But the problem is that he’s doing that weird liberal thing where you pre-concede your position and ask for less than what’s really needed. (So we don’t see a whole program here of state-provided health care or schooling through the bachelor’s level to address other structural inequities.) I guess it’s a start.