Universal basic income in the United States
Arguably the first to propose a system with great similarities to a national basic income in the United States was Thomas Paine, in Agrarian Justice, 1796/1797.
In 1968, James Tobin, Paul Samuelson, John Kenneth Galbraith and another 1,200 economists signed a document calling for the US Congress to introduce in that year a system of income guarantees and supplements.
[4] The Reverend Martin Luther King, a famous civil rights activist and politician, also gave his support for the idea in his book Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?, published in 1967.
[5][6] In 1969, US President Richard Nixon proposed a "Family Assistance Program" which resembled guaranteed income, in that benefits did not rapidly taper with additional earnings by the beneficiaries.
[10] The four experiments were:[11] In general they found that workers would decrease labor supply (employment) by two to four weeks per year because of the guarantee of income equal to the poverty threshold.
He was the Republican Governor of Alaska in the 1970s and as such was concerned that the huge wealth generated by oil mining in Prudhoe Bay, the largest oilfield in North America, would only benefit the current population of the state.
[15] The Green Party of the United States since its 2010 platform advocates for a universal basic income to "every adult regardless of health, employment, or marital status, in order to minimize government bureaucracy and intrusiveness into people's lives.
"[21] Yang has said that he became a UBI advocate after reading American futurist Martin Ford's book Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future, which deals with the impact of automation and artificial intelligence on the job market and economy.
With a flood of federal COVID-19 recovery money going to local governments, over 150 municipalities and counties in the United States ran guaranteed income programs,[26][27] including one that supported all new mothers in Flint, Michigan.
[28] Local government cash aid without any work requirement was subsequently banned in Arkansas, Idaho, Iowa, and South Dakota, and considered in several other conservative states.
