Simple, Effective and Forbidden


Let's take a break from the campaign trail and talk about something that is apparently too radical even for Ralph Nader.

A big issue this year that is likely to get bigger is jobs. The U.S. economy has not been creating jobs at the rate of people entering the job market. In fact it has been losing jobs, so even modest job creation will not undo the damage for a long time. There will be people who need to make a living, who can't get jobs.

That's behind a lot of the anti-NAFTA rhetoric, and the furor over out-sourcing: American companies firing or failing to hire U.S. workers in favor of workers in other countries who are paid less, sometimes a small fraction of what U.S. workers would get.

It's also reflected in today's announcement that consumer confidence dropped significantly last month.

G.W. Bush's trickle down economics isn't working, which is hardly a surprise. The Democratic candidates have a number of proposals to encourage job creation, reduce outsourcing and reform trade agreements to build in fair wages as well as environmental standards, which would as a byproduct make some outsourcing economically less enticing.

John Kerry has proposed combining the meeting of environmental and even national security needs by jump-starting a larger scale alternative energy industry, to reduce pollution and greenhouse gases, lessen dependence on foreign oil and create jobs. He estimates half a million jobs. That in itself is not a lot, but a new industry can have a synergistic effect. It's a good idea.

So is attacking the problem from another direction. Kerry believes that creating a better health care insurance system that takes great financial burdens off both workers and employers is part of the solution. He talks about this in terms of cutting costs, and he's right.

But this approach suggests something else-a much simpler and, in our current politics, much too radical solution, that some thirty-five years ago was talked about as just about inevitable.

Even more than thirty-five or forty years ago, people who thought about economic and social trends, and thought about the future, saw a major problem emerging in the rapid development of technology, especially that part of it which at the time was often called automation.

It was clear that although new technology would create many new jobs, it would also destroy many jobs. It would at the very least redistribute jobs and wealth. There would be winners and there would be losers.

What should be done about the losers? That was the question. Future-oriented thinkers looked at how much wealth was being created and would be created, and the trend towards expanding the purview of social justice, and they concluded: because the losers weren't themselves responsible for their plight, since they were victims of technology and global economics, society owed them the living they were going to be denied.

From this sprang the idea of the Guaranteed Annual Income. In most scenarios, it was very simple: everybody would be guaranteed an income sufficient to meet their basic needs. It was so clear that society would be able to afford to do this that the debate moved on to consider long-term social and cultural ramifications. But by the late 1960s, many influential economists and even some politicians assumed it was going to be necessary.

Besides the social responsibility to those who lost out through no fault of their own, there was a second reason for the GAI. This was an idea that crossed political, economic and social lines, as evidenced by the two men who did the most to put it into practice: Henry Ford and Franklin D. Roosevelt. The idea is simply that if people can't afford to buy things, the economy collapses. Henry Ford paid his workers better wages than he needed to, and said quite clearly that this was the reason: he wanted people to be able to afford to buy his cars. FDR was persuaded to enact those New Deal programs that directly paid millions of individuals for various kinds of work that became defined as being in the public good, because people can't spend what they don't have.

Since World War II, the U.S. has fostered a predominately consumer economy. The high consumption lifestyle is spreading with globalization. As it is now developing, that economy is unsustainable simply on environmental grounds. And not even a Guaranteed Annual Income will work until the economic addiction to manufacturing need and greed is dealt with, probably by being diverted. But even so, it's quite clear that an economy that is based on consumption, but concentrates wealth in the hands of a few, is headed for disaster.

So the GAI seemed like a sensible way to both guarantee that people weren't penalized for job losses that weren't their fault, and to guarantee that money for consumption would still flow. Guess what? It still is.

It works for those who lose their jobs because of outsourcing, which is in its way a byproduct of technology. It works to ease the economy through periods of transition. And it can have numerous other benefits, such as freeing people to do work for the public good. We're still living off of some of those "make work" programs of the 1930s that supplied us with so much public infrastructure, began conservation and left us a legacy in the arts that's as close to a golden age as America has seen since Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville and Whitman were chums.

There are a few proposals currently making the rounds that go about this in a piecemeal or partial fashion. There's the proposal that companies that outsource devote a percentage of the profits they derive by doing so to support workers they displace. There are proposals for various forms of national service that guarantee an income in exchange for public works. Even these health insurance proposals, if they in fact cut health care costs for all citizens, wind up being guaranteed additions to income.

But of course you never hear political figures propose a Guaranteed Annual Income anymore. It's just one of those sixties fantasies of the future now. The kind of thing you'd expect from Marshall McLuhan, say, or Buckminster Fuller, who proposed that the government pay people (like him, for example) just to think. (And he was pretty persuasive that the government would end up making a profit on it.)

On a day that the current president proposes a Constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage, it's not hard to figure out why. In many ways things are changing way too fast, but in other ways, change is much slower and more fitful than anyone would have believed a generation ago. They not only expected we'd have the equivalent of universal healthcare and the GAI by now, but we'd have colonies on the moon and spaceships headed for Jupiter.

So we torture ourselves with complicated half-solutions to problems, admittedly more complex than they appeared in the sixties, but still subject to much simpler solutions. The Guaranteed Annual Income is such an idea. In terms of need, its time has come. But we are so far from it that to even mention it is politically suicidal, and intellectually forbidden.