Many companies and businesses looking to increase profit have turned to technology. Factory machinery has slowly been replacing human work ever since the industrial revolution, and now there are even cars that can drive themselves. Humans have advanced enough to make themselves obsolete. Many of America’s average workers will lose their jobs to a machine. A universal basic income is a possible solution to the problem that will soon be faced. Many jobs are being automated away leaving a gap between the amount of people and the amount of jobs. Giving every American citizen a share of the profit will provide people with the means to evade poverty.
Automation can happen quickly. According to McKinsey, a corporate management advisory company, “…our new research estimates that between almost zero and 30 percent of the hours worked globally could be automated by 2030, depending on the speed of adoption.” (Manyika, p.2). Blue collar jobs are more vulnerable to automation than most. Certain white-collar jobs, especially those “Collecting and processing data”, could be automated away as well as machines are able to compute quicker than humans (Manyika, p.2). According to Forbes, “Over 2% of Americans – 7 million people – lost their jobs in mass layoffs between 2004-2009.” (Sterling, p.3). Ellen Shell writing for Newsweek points out, “Technology has advanced at a breathtaking pace, while the policy designed to help workers deal with these changes has lagged far behind” (p.2). Technology continues to progress, and workers will continue to feel the effects. McKinsey estimates that somewhere between 16 to 54 million American workers could have their jobs displaced by 2030 (Manyika, p.6). Automation is a real risk for American workers. Losing a job is a big deal for many, and because of the nature of automation could be devastating to some. This is true for extremely specialized jobs and even more general ones. Certification dependent jobs such as truck driving and forklift operation are at risk for automation. Self-driving cars are on the rise and trucks are only the natural progression. Forklift operation has already begun shifting to driverless operation. An article written by Ed Brown for techbriefs.com states, “The adoption of automation is on the rise for mobile, autonomous material handling” (p.2). While this particular article is mainly an explanation of the technology this seemingly innocuous quote is representative of a shift in the way many companies operate now.
A solution to this would be to implement a universal basic income for United States citizens. The amount is up for debate but if it is enough than it would supplement an American’s income or allow people to survive when they were replaced by mechanization. Because people would have a passive income, they would be free to take time to retrain and reskill if they lose their job to robots. Chris Hughes, one of the cofounders of Facebook states, “The further you get from subsistence, the easier it is to ask fundamental questions like: What do I want, and how do I get it?”. Hughes also suggests a basic income of $500 a month (Nathan Heller p.3). Another appraisal comes from presidential candidate Andrew Yang, who suggests an income of $1000 a month (Clifford p.6). It is hard to arrive at a number that could solve a person’s problems. Many people have dependents and others are single. Some people have roommates and others don’t. The poverty index from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services website states that a single person living in poverty in the United States would make less than $12,060 a year. That line increases by $4,180 per additional person in the household (p.1). A person who survives on this amount yearly would no doubt be participating in subsistence living. Paychecks go towards necessities and not much else. There is no opportunity for betterment as University prices are high and earlier education is lacking in the low-income areas people have to live. People who are not near this poverty line are still at risk of living in poverty because of automation replacing their job in the near future. For many people at or around the poverty line a basic, straightforward income would be a godsend. And in the case of Yang’s $1000 a month would double the income of a person at the poverty line. The ideal universal income would be unhindered by criteria such as existing welfare options. Some current welfare options require recipients to search for a job within an allotted time frame. This creates a unique problem where jobs they are able to find only pay minimum wage or are part time, which is less than the welfare, and not enough to live on. An Atlantic article by Alana Samuels uses the example of a Wisconsin woman in this predicament, “Most of the jobs that she is qualified for pay around the minimum wage, which, at $7.25 an hour in Wisconsin” (p.1). Additionally, it is difficult for the woman to educate herself to obtain qualifications because, “Saving up to go back to college is out of the question, and she’s not allowed to go back to school while she’s receiving W-2” (p.2). A basic income unencumbered by criteria would help people such as her who are stuck between unemployment and poverty. An income of $1000 a month is a clean number but could be even higher pushing the edge of $2000 a month. This would help those replaced by automation as it would allow them to live without fear of falling to poverty and allow them to find new jobs that match their wants and needs. A universal income would not go away once they find a job, allowing the person to climb above the poverty line.
One argument against basic income in the U.S. is the cost. According to Clifford, “Hillary Clinton seriously considered running her 2016 campaign for president on a platform built with UBI. But she couldn’t figure out a reasonable way to pay for it” (p.6). A basic income of $1000 a month is estimated to cost around 3 trillion dollars a year. There are many theories on how to pay for this most of which involve either taxes on the wealthy or their companies. A New Yorker article mentions that Chris Hughes, cofounder of Facebook, believes that the money could come from the ultra-wealthy, “He sees it as a boost to the current system, and argues that the money can be found by closing tax exemptions for the ultra-wealthy—‘people like me’ ” (p.4). Another proponent of basic income, Presidential Candidate Andrew Yang, claims that a VAT tax or value added tax of 10% of the goods and services a company produces would produce, “$700 and $800 billion in revenue” (Clifford p.5). However, opponents of basic income do not believe that the country could produce the money needed to pay for it, Hillary Clinton states, “To provide a meaningful dividend each year to every citizen, you’d have to raise enormous sums of money, and that would either mean a lot of new taxes or cannibalizing other important programs.” (Clifford p.6). However, many of these programs are not as beneficial as we think, especially in the case of the Wisconsin woman mentioned in the Atlantic article. In the current structure she became dependent on welfare in a system that seems to discourage work. Maybe programs such as that one should be cannibalized to make way for an indiscriminate system such as universal income.
Automation is replacing the backbone of the American economy, the worker, with machines and quick production that humans cannot replicate. Many of these people are forced to find a new job, but during that time they must live at or around the poverty line until they can work. Universal, or guaranteed income solves this issue while also addressing the larger issue of poverty at large. Putting money back into the hands of the people will allow them to remove themselves from poverty and reenter the workforce the way they want to, doing the jobs they want to do.
References
2017 Poverty Guidelines. (2018, January 12). Retrieved from https://aspe.hhs.gov/2017-poverty-
guidelines#threshholds.
Brown, E. (2019, March 13). Driverless Forklifts. Retrieved November 25, 2019, from
Clifford, C. (2019, August 22). Why everyone is talking about free cash handouts-an explainer
on universal basic income. Retrieved from https://www.cnbc.com/2019/06/27/free-cash-handouts-what-is-universal-basic-income-or-ubi.html.
Manyika, J. (2017, November) Jobs lost, jobs gained: What the future of work will mean for
jobs, skills, and wages. Retrieved from https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/future-of-work/jobs-lost-jobs-gained-what-the-future-of-work-will-mean-for-jobs-skills-and-wages..
Heller, N. (2019, July 9). Who Really Stands to Win from Universal Basic Income? Retrieved
Semuels, A. (2016, July 11). The Near Impossibility of Moving Up After Welfare. Retrieved
from https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/07/life-after-welfare/490586/.
Shell, E. R. (2018, November 26). AI will replace most human workers because it doesn’t have
to be perfect-just better than you. Retrieved from https://www.newsweek.com/2018/11/30/ai-and-automation-will-replace-most-human-workers-because-they-dont-have-be-1225552.html.
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