Another collaboration with the chicken-fat-mad Mike Lawrence! That trap-filled hopscotch board was entirely Mike’s idea.
This is something I’ve suspected for a while—that the core reason many liberals don’t support a universal basic income (UBI) is that it just sounds too wonderful to happen. Especially when many of us have been conditioned, over the past decade or so, to expect nothing but the worst.
It turns out I’m not the first to have this thought (although I wonder if I’m the first to do a cartoon about it). In 2017, Alyssa Battistoni wrote:
The problem isn’t that basic income doesn’t sound good enough—it’s that it sounds too good to be true.
But James Surowiecki, writing in 2016 in The New Yorker, pointed out that utopian ideas sometimes surprise us by becoming mundane:
The most popular social-welfare programs in the U.S. all seemed utopian at first. Until the nineteen-twenties, no state in the union offered any kind of old-age pension; by 1935, we had Social Security. Guaranteed health care for seniors was attacked as unworkable and socialist; now Medicare is uncontroversial… It’s easy to imagine a basic income going overnight from completely improbable to totally necessary.
If you’re interested in the research on giving people money, a good overview is “A Summary of Existing Research on Guaranteed Income,” published by the University of Chicago Inclusive Economy Lab. The section on employment effects is on pages five and six. Generally, studies find “that cash transfers had either no effect or a positive effect on adult labor force participation,” although one study found a 2 percent-point decrease in labor market participation and a five percent decrease in earned income.
TRANSCRIPT OF CARTOON
This cartoon has four panels. Each panel shows two friends walking through a wooded park. One is a man wearing a baseball cap and an orange T-shirt, so I’ll call him ORANGE. The other is a woman wearing a red plaid shirt, so I’ll call her PLAID.
PANEL 1
Orange smiles as he reads something on his smartphone. Plaid looks interested.
ORANGE: Look at this! Another study found that basic income works!
PLAID: What’s basic income?
PANEL 2
Orange explains while Plaid hops through a hopscotch grid drawn on the path.
ORANGE: It’s the government giving everyone a basic income, so we’re all guaranteed enough to live on.
PLAID: That sounds amazing. But… if we had that, why would anyone work?
PANEL 3
Orange gestures emphatically with his free hand. Plaid walks with one hand thoughtfully against her chin.
ORANGE: That’s been studied so much… Over and over, when people are given basic incomes, they don’t stop working!
PLAID: Hmm… I’m still against it.
PANEL 4
Orange looks baffled. Plaid shrugs.
ORANGE: But why?
PLAID: I just can’t believe anything that good is possible.
CHICKEN FAT WATCH
“Chicken fat” is an obsolete cartoonists’ term for unimportant but fun details slipped into the art.
PANEL 1: A little gray alien is flying a flying-saucer-shaped kite.
PANEL 2: The hopscotch grid is full of traps, including a spider, tacks, a Lego brick, a mouse frantically waving its arms as if to say “Don’t step on me!,” a pile of poop, a whoopee cushion, a mousetrap, and a bear trap. A “wanted” poster for a raccoon with an eyepatch is nailed to a tree.
PANEL 3: A sasquatch and an Ewok are hiding behind trees; the sasquatch signals to the Ewok to be quiet.
PANEL 4: The raccoon from Panel 2’s “wanted” poster is hiding in the bushes.
CLOTHES: Orange’s T-shirt shows a smiley face in Panel 1, an alien smiley in Panel 2, the blood-spattered Watchmen smiley in Panel 3, and the Hitchhiker’s Guide smiley-faced planet in Panel 4.
Plaid’s T-shirt shows an ear of corn in Panel 2 and a human ear in Panel 4.
Orange’s cap has a picture of a fly (insect) in panel 1, and a picture of a fly (pants) in panel 2.
Oooh! Something I unreservedly agree with Barry on.
One of the communities I lived in when I was very young was Dauphin, Manitoba. Back in the 70’s, a version of universal basic income was instituted in the town as an experiment (it was called “mincome”). The project ended before it could be properly reported (there was a government change), but anecdotally, it seemed to have really good outcomes.
And the best part about it was that it really isn’t all that expensive as a program, because it functionally replaces things like welfare, which is already funded. More than that, as opposed to all the dicking around politicians like to do with welfare administration, it was a relatively simple annual calculation on your tax filings. So you’d actually be removing disincentives to work, cutting layers of bureaucracy, and improving quality of life. If explained properly, I think this is something that the left and right could both theoretically get behind.